Gillette didn’t have anyone with whom to debate the matter. He could not consult scientists on Earth; even Jessica was lost to him. All he had was his patient gray cat, who couldn’t be looked to for many subtle contributions. “Have you noticed,” asked the man, “that the farther we get from Earth, the more homogeneous the universe looks?” If Benny didn’t understand the word homogeneous, he didn’t show it. “The only really unnatural thing we’ve seen in all these years has been Earth itself. Life on Earth is the only truly anomalous factor we’ve witnessed in twenty years of exploration. What does that mean to you?”
At that point, it didn’t mean anything to Benny, but it began to mean something to Gillette. He shrugged. “None of my friends were willing to consider even the possibility that Earth might be alone in the universe, that there might not be anything else alive anywhere in all the infinite reaches of space. Of course, we haven’t looked at much of those infinite reaches, but going zero for twenty-three thousand means that something unusual is happening.” When the Gillettes had left Earth two decades before, prevailing scientific opinion insisted that life had to be out there somewhere, even though there was no proof, either directly or indirectly. There had to be life; it was only a matter of stumbling on it. Gillette looked at the old formula, still hanging where it had been throughout the whole voyage. “If one of those factors is zero,” he thought, “then the whole product is zero. Which factor could it be?” There was no hint of an answer, but that particular question was becoming less important to Gillette all the time.
AND SO IT had come down to this: Year 30 and still outward bound. The end of Gillette’s life was somewhere out there in the black stillness. Earth was a pale memory, less real now than last night’s dreams. Benny was an old cat, and soon he would die as Jessica had died, and Gillette would be absolutely alone. He didn’t like to think about that, but the notion intruded on his consciousness again and again.
Another thought arose just as often. It was an irrational thought, he knew, something he had scoffed at thirty years before. His scientific training led him to examine ideas by the steady, cold light of reason, but this new concept would not hold still for such a mechanical inspection.
He began to think that perhaps Earth was alone in the universe, the only planet among billions to be blessed with life. “I have to admit again that I haven’t searched through a significant fraction of all the worlds in the galaxy,” he said, as if he were defending his feelings to Jessica. “But I’d be a fool if I ignored thirty years of experience. What does it mean, if I say that Earth is the only planet with life? It isn’t a scientific or mathematical notion. Statistics alone demand other worlds with some form of life. But what can overrule such a biological imperative?” He waited for a guess from Benny; none seemed to be forthcoming. “Only an act of faith,” murmured Gillette. He paused, thinking that he might hear a trill of dubious laughter from Jessica’s spirit, but there was only the humming, ticking silence of the spacecraft.
“A single act of creation, on Earth,” said Gillette. “Can you imagine what any of the people at the university would have said to that? I wouldn’t have been able to show my face around there again. They would have revoked every credential I had. My subscription to Science would have been canceled. The local PBS channel would have refused my membership.
“But what else can I think? If any of those people had spent the last thirty years the way we have, they’d have arrived at the same conclusion. I didn’t come to this answer easily, Jessica, you know that. You know how I was. I never had any faith in anything I hadn’t witnessed myself. I didn’t even believe in the existence of George Washington, let alone first principles. But there comes a time when a scientist must accept the most unappealing explanation, if it is the only one left that fits the facts.”
It made no difference to Gillette whether or not he was correct, whether he had investigated a significant number of worlds to substantiate his conclusion. He had had to abandon, one by one, all of his prejudices, and made at last a leap of faith. He knew what seemed to him to be the truth, not through laboratory experiments but by an impulse he had never felt before.
For a few days he felt comfortable with the idea. Life had been created on Earth for whatever reasons, and nowhere else. Each planet devoid of life that Gillette discovered became from then on a confirming instance of this hypothesis. But then, one night, it occurred to him how horribly he had cursed himself. If Earth were the only home of life, why was Gillette hurtling farther and farther from that place, farther from where he too had been made, farther from where he was supposed to be?
What had he done to himself—and to Jessica?
“My impartiality failed me, sweetheart,” he said to her disconsolately. “If I could have stayed cold and objective, at least I would have had peace of mind. I would never have known how I damned both of us. But I couldn’t; the impartiality was a lie, from the very beginning. As soon as we went to measure something, our humanity got in the way. We couldn’t be passive observers of the universe, because we’re alive and we’re people and we think and feel. And so we were doomed to learn the truth eventually, and we were doomed to suffer because of it.” He wished Jessica were still alive, to comfort him as she had so many other times. He had felt isolated before, but it had never been so bad. Now he understood the ultimate meaning of alienation—a separation from his world and the force that had created it. He wasn’t supposed to be here, wherever it was. He belonged on Earth, in the midst of life. He stared out through the port, and the infinite blackness seemed to enter into him, merging with his mind and spirit. He felt the awful coldness in his soul.
For a while Gillette was incapacitated by his emotions. When Jessica died, he had bottled up his grief; he had never really permitted himself the luxury of mourning her. Now, with the added weight of his new convictions, her loss struck him again, harder than ever before. He allowed the machines around him to take complete control of the mission in addition to his well-being. He watched the stars shine in the darkness as the ship fell on through real space. He stroked Benny’s thick gray fur and remembered everything he had so foolishly abandoned.
In the end it was Benny that pulled Gillette through. Between strokes the man’s hand stopped in mid-air; Gillette experienced a flash of insight, what the oriental philosophers call satori, a moment of diamond-like clarity. He knew intuitively that he had made a mistake that had led him into self-pity. If life had been created on Earth, then all living things were a part of that creation, wherever they might be. Benny, the gray-haired cat, was a part of it, even locked into this tin can between the stars. Gillette himself was a part, wherever he traveled. That creation was just as present in the spacecraft as on Earth itself: it had been foolish for Gillette to think that he ever could separate himself from it—which was just what Jessica had always told him.
“Benny!” said Gillette, a tear streaking his wrinkled cheek. The cat observed him benevolently. Gillette felt a pleasant warmth overwhelm him as he was released at last from his loneliness. “It was all just a fear of death,” he whispered. “I was just afraid to die. I wouldn’t have believed it! I thought I was beyond all that. It feels good to be free of it.”
And when he looked out again at the wheeling stars, the galaxy no longer seemed empty and black, but vibrant and thrilling with a creative energy. He knew that what he felt could not be shaken, even if the next world he visited was a lush garden of life—that would not change a thing, because his belief was no longer based on numbers and facts, but on a stronger sense within him.