Unless, of course, he found life anywhere.
FINDING LIFE WAS one of the main purposes of the journey. Soon it had become the Gillettes’ purpose in life as well. They had set out as enthusiastic explorers: Dr. Leslie Gillette, thirty-five years old, already an influential writer and lecturer in theoretical exobiology, and his wife, Jessica Reid Gillette, who had been the chairman of the biochemistry department at a large middle-western state university. They had been married for eleven years, and had made the decision to go into field exploration after the death of their only child.
Now they were traveling through space toward the distant limits of the galaxy. Long, long ago the Earth’s sun had disappeared from view. The exobiology about which both Gillettes had thought and written and argued back home remained just what it had been then—mere theory. After visiting hundreds and hundreds of stellar systems, upon thousands of potential life-sustaining planets, they had yet to see or detect any form of life, no matter how primitive. The lab facilities on the landing craft returned the same frustrating answer with soul-deadening frequency: no life. Dead. Sterile. Year after year, the galaxy became to the Gillettes a vast and terrifying immensity of insensible rock and blazing gas.
“Do you remember,” asked Jessica one day, “what old man Hayden used to tell us?”
Gillette smiled. “I used to love to get that guy into an argument,” he said.
“He told me once that we might find life, but there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of finding intelligent life.”
Gillette recalled that discussion with pleasure. “And you called him a Terran chauvinist. I loved it. You made up a whole new category of bigotry, right on the spot. We thought he was such a conservative old codger. Now it looks like even he was too optimistic.”
Jessica stood behind her husband’s chair, reading what he was writing. “What would Hayden say, do you think, if he knew we haven’t found a goddamn thing?”
Gillette turned around and looked up at her. “I think even he would be disappointed,” he said. “Surprised, too.”
“This isn’t what I anticipated,” she said.
The complete absence of even the simplest of lifeforms was at first irritating, then puzzling, then ominous. Soon even Leslie Gillette, who always labored to keep separate his emotional thoughts and his logical ones, was compelled to realize that his empirical conclusions were shaping up in defiance of all the mathematical predictions man or machine had ever made. In the control room was a framed piece of vellum, on which was copied, in fine italic letters and numerals:
N = R*fpneflfifcL
This was a formula devised decades before to determine the approximate number of advanced technological civilizations man might expect to find elsewhere in his galaxy. The variables in the formula are given realistic values, according to the scientific wisdom of the time. N is determined by seven factors:
R* or the mean rate of star formation in the galaxy (with an assigned value of
ten per year)
fp or the percentage of stars with planets (close to one hundred percent)
ne or the average number of planets in each star system with environments suitable for life (with an assigned value of one)
f1 or the percentage of those planets on which life does, in fact, develop (close to one hundred percent)
fi or the percentage of those planets on which intelligent life develops (ten percent) fc or the percentage of those planets on which advanced technical civilization develops (ten percent)
L or the lifetime of the technical civilization (with an estimated value of ten million years).
These figures produced a predictive result stating that N—the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy—equals ten to the sixth power. A million. The Gillettes had cherished that formula through all the early years of disappointment. But they were not looking for an advanced civilization, they were looking for life. Any kind of life. Some six years after leaving Earth, Leslie and Jessica were wandering across the dry, sandy surface of a cool world circling a small, cool sun. “I don’t see any advanced civilizations,” said Jessica, stooping to stir the dust with the heavy gauntlet of her pressure suit.
“Nope,” said her husband, “not a hamburger stand in sight.” The sky was a kind of reddish purple, and he didn’t like looking into it very often. He stared down at the ground, watching Jessica trail her fingers in the lifeless dirt.
“You know,” she said, “that formula says that every system ought to have at least one planet suitable for life.”
Gillette shrugged. “A lot of them do,” he said. “But it also says that every planet that could sustain life, will sustain life, eventually.
“Maybe they were a little too enthusiastic when they picked the values for their variables.”
Jessica laughed. “Maybe.” She dug a shallow hole in the surface. “I keep hoping I’ll run across some ants or a worm or something.”
“Not here, honey,” said Gillette. “Come on, let’s go back.” She sighed and stood. Together they returned to the landing craft.
“What a waste,” said Jessica, as they prepared to lift off. “I’ve given my imagination all this freedom. I’m prepared to see anything down there, the garden variety of life or something more bizarre. You know, dancing crystals or thinking clouds. But I never prepared myself for so much nothing.”
The landing craft shot up through the thin atmosphere, toward the orbiting command ship. “A scientist has to be ready for this kind of thing,” said Gillette wistfully. “But I agree with you. Experience seems to be defying the predictions in a kind of scary way.”
Jessica loosened her safety belt and took a deep breath. “Mathematically unlikely, I’d call it. I’m going to look at the formula tonight and see which of those variables is the one screwing everything up.”
Gillette shook his head. “I’ve done that time and time again,” he said. “It won’t get you very far. Whatever you decided, the result will still be a lot different from what we’ve found.” On the myriad worlds they had visited, they never found anything as simple as algae or protozoans, let alone intelligent life. Their biochemical sensors had never detected anything that even pointed in that direction, like a complex protein. Only rock and dust and empty winds and lifeless pools.
IN THE MORNING, just as he had predicted, the planets were still there. There were five of them, circling a modest star, type G3, not very different from Earth’s Sun. He spoke to the ship’s computer: “I name the star Hannibal. Beginning with the nearest to Hannibal, I name the planets: Huck, Tom, Jim, Becky, and Aunt Polly. We will proceed with the examinations.” The ship’s instruments could take all the necessary readings, but Gillette wouldn’t trust its word on the existence of life. That question was so important that he felt he had to make the final determination himself.