Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

signal. And even if you suspect that it is, you scan and you get other thin slices that you can’t put together.”
    Jao gave Bram a disgruntled look. “Any advanced civilization doing a sky search would run a continuous survey if they’re worth their salt. They’d sweep up and down the spectrum and run a computer program to put it all together.”
    “Maybe,” Trist said.
    Jao brightened. “Look at it this way. Two percent of the stars in this galaxy comes to—what?—four billion stars. Say two percent of those have planets with conditions that support life—”
    “Don’t get reckless,” Trist said.
    “Two percent,” Jao said firmly. “All right, that’s eighty million target stars. And say that one-tenth of one percent of them have advanced societies with a little genetic engineering capability and a normal amount of curiosity.”
    “How about one one-thousandth of one percent?” Trist suggested mildly.
    “Sure. Why not? I won’t quibble. I’m a very unimaginative guy. That makes eight hundred little Nar factories. Hell, make it one ten -thousandth of one percent! We’re still in business!”
    “It only has to happen once,” Bram said. “Once out of those four billion stars we’ve touched. Those are the odds the Nar were willing to settle for. They knew it could happen. It happened once with Original Man.”
    “More than once, maybe,” Trist suggested.
    “That’s a thought!” Bram laughed.
    “On the way out of the galaxy,” Trist said, “how about using the phased array in eavesdropping mode for a few thousand years between Message cycles? See what may have developed.”
    “It’s all right with me,” Bram said. “But you’d better take it up with the next year-captain.”
    “That might be Smeth. He’s campaigning already. He’s concentrating on the new crop of voters this time. He’s got them hornswoggled. The young ones flock around him to listen to his tales of the good old days, when a small band of dedicated humans under his guidance as chairman of the physics department ran the Father World and decided to initiate a grand project to return humankind to its home in the Milky Way.”
    “He asked for my vote,” Bram said.
    “What did you tell him?”
    “I said he could have it.”
    Jao, impatient at the digression, had perked up his ears at the mention of eavesdropping mode.
    “Yah,” he said. “Good idea. See what intelligent transmissions we pick up. Plug in a program to look for the patterns of touch-reader transmissions. That way we know they’re Nar. You know, even if there’s no other intelligent life in the galaxy and this whole errand was a flop, the Nar must’ve spread over a sphere of a couple of thousand light-years by now, anyway. Hey, in the last fifty thousand years, maybe they sent more message probes after us. Maybe one with a second human crew. If they’ve developed a better drive and were willing to boost at slightly over one gravity, maybe they’re ahead of us. Maybe we’ll find them waiting for us in the Milky Way with a million years of civilization behind them. Or maybe the Nar have been spreading themselves at the edge of lightspeed! Why not? A few thousand years of developing the hadronic photon drive and it might be cheap enough for colony ships. Who needs probes? Who needs errandpersons? At one and a tenth g’s, they could already have settled an arc of space with its leading edge ahead of us.” He looked around wildly. “They could be all around us right now!”
    “Don’t get carried away,” Trist said. “Next you’ll have them traveling faster than light.”
    “Faster than light? Why not? Einstein is as Einstein does. The Nar arrived at their relativity by a different route. Maybe we humans missed something. You know, for the Nar, mathematics is a sensory experience. They count with the surface of their bodies. Whole digital operations, faster than you can whistle. They can plug as many Nar into a problem as they want—subunits, everything—and feel their way to a solution. Who’s to say they haven’t tackled the faster-than-light problem?”
    “Here’s where he drags out the tachyons,” Trist said with a tolerant smile at Bram.
    “Go ahead, laugh, but they could’ve reached the other side of the galaxy by now,” Jao insisted.
    “If you’re still beating the dead carcass of your Klein universe with its inside-out tachyons, I thought we settled that thirty years ago when we ran it through the computer and kept