Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

weighing more than twenty pounds survived. The little furry creatures who were humankind’s ancestors were among them.”
    The great spoked mill continued to revolve. It had begun to subdivide again so that tenuous threads were trapped between some of the major arms, beginning their own growth.
    “The extinctions come regularly now—about every twenty-six million years,” Jao’s floating head said somberly. “Some large, some small. And now we have some minor extinctions caused by these trailing arms, at intervals of from twelve to fifteen million years. The new arms haven’t quite settled into place yet.”
    A thin orange wire passed across Sol like a wand.
    “Twelve million years before the heyday of Original Man,” Jao said. “Followed by the return of that first, powerful arm that wiped out half of all animal families on earth. Only this time, Original Man was the dominant species.”
    The audience sat stunned. In the silence, someone shouted, “I don’t believe it. A technical civilization could have found some way to protect itself!”
    Jao waited it out. “The rats survived in their burrows,” he finally said. “They were small, prolific. They took mankind’s place. And twenty-six million years later, it was their turn.”
    A thick orange arm, grown in intensity since its last circuit, came around and swatted the sun.
    “There was no place for them to run, even if they’d known what was coming,” Jao said. “The arms sweep the edge of the galaxy, now. They’re thousands of light-years thick. An individual ship, shielded against radiation and traveling very close to the speed of light, might have been able to choose an orbit that would keep it between the advancing arm and the retreating arm till it got out of the galaxy entirely. But the rat-people weren’t that advanced technologically.”
    The man who had previously interrupted Jao stood up and tried to speak again. Smeth nodded, and a monitor got to him with a portable pickup. His image sprang up on the holo stage in a double exposure that made the galaxy shine through him.
    “But Original Man must have been advanced enough,” he said. “Couldn’t he have moved his whole population out and fled to another galaxy, leaving his beacon behind? Maybe that’s the reason why the Message stopped—not man’s extinction.” His eyes, magnified against the swirling stars, pleaded at them.
    “I don’t know,” Jao said. “With a population in the billions—maybe tens of billions … And anyway, he might not have known what was coming. We know, because we came to Sol straight out of the galactic core. Even if they had a ramjet like ours and sent a scout to the center of the galaxy, the round trip would have been better than sixty thousand years in objective time, and by that time it might have been too late—just as it was for the Nar.”
    Jun Davd stepped quickly into the holo frame and said, “Perhaps it is possible. The universe hasn’t heard from Original Man since the Message was cut off, but perhaps that’s because he hasn’t reached refuge yet. He might have targeted a galaxy more than seventy-four million light-years away—in the Virgo cluster, for instance.”
    The man thanked him with grateful eyes and sat down.
    Jun Davd said, with mild rebuke, “You’d better get on with it, Jao. “These people can’t stand much more suspense.”
    Jao’s holographic lips widened in a grin that was bigger than the entire central bulge of the galaxy.
    “It’s been twenty-six million years since the rat-people became extinct.”
    It took a moment for the impact of that to sink in, and then the entire hall erupted into a vast rumbling chaos. People leaped to their feet, shouting unintelligible questions at the rostrum.
    Jao held up a hand that appeared in giant size beside the holo of his face and got partial silence.
    “I wanted to be sure of my data before I came to this meeting. With twenty-six million years to play with, a five percent margin of leeway could have the dragonflies spilling out of this galaxy and halfway to Andromeda before the charged arm took its swipe. But that’s not the case.”
    He grinned more broadly. “The leading edge of the next spoke is already brushing the dragonfly sector of space. We’re getting radio noise from it now. It will meet the expanding dragonfly shell in less than ten thousand years. At this radius of the galaxy, it’s only about eleven thousand light-years between charged arms. The