Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

hadronic photons aimed along the probe’s axis through the focus of the sheltering ramscoop fields, the scene rushing toward him was actually beneath his feet.
    Jao was taking some good-natured heckling from the crowd of onlookers. “Forty years is a long time to wait,” someone said.
    “We could do it faster,” Jao said. “The limiting factor is the number of g’s we want to take over an extended period of time.”
    “I don’t understand how we’ll be able to brake at all,” somebody else said, “when we’re not approaching edge-on through the spiral arms.”
    “We’ve already shed some velocity diving through the globular clusters,” Jao said. “And there’s plenty of mass in the central bulge, even though it’s not as concentrated as the one that sent us on our way.” His hands sketched the glowing egg in the holo behind him. “We dive straight down through the nice, nourishing H-II regions we’re going to find in there, we make a tight demiorbit around the central three parsecs, a safe distance outside the core that contains the black hole, the central star cluster, and the rotating inner ring of ionized gas. The normal orbit at that radius—if we wanted to stay there—takes ten thousand years, so we apply vector to turn it into a powered orbit. Nevertheless, we start to spiral out in spite of ourselves, in flatter and flatter spirals that bring us into the plane of the galaxy. And the spirals are retrograde, of course, so we’re using the magnetic brake of the nucleus itself. Nothing to it! It’s as easy as tomato pie! Isn’t that so, Bram?”
    Bram, startled out of his reverie, said, “Uh, certainly. The Milky Way turns out to have a very strong magnetic field at the center from what certain of our observations seem to indicate, and we ought to be able to use its rotation to slow us down considerably—just the opposite of the magnetic assist we got at departure.”
    He glanced at the peculiar arc that could be seen growing out of the center of the galaxy’s golden yolk like a spray caused by a pinprick. It wasn’t a very large scale feature—only a few thousand light-years in extent—and its meaning was still being debated by the astronomy department; there was no need to go further into it at this moment.
    “The galaxy’s made a quarter rotation in the last seventy-four million years,” Jun Davd interposed smoothly. “Or, rather, Original Man’s neighborhood in one of the spiral arms has. We had to allow for that, too. I hope everyone appreciates the brilliant job of orbital plotting that Jao’s department did.”
    Jun Davd was as imposing as a young man as he had been when he was old. He’d become even taller with the reversal of calcium loss in his spine and carried his slim, smooth-muscled body with an easy grace that his older incarnation had only hinted at. Bram could never quite get used to seeing him without white hair, though.
    “Well, I suppose if we’ve come this far, we can wait another forty years,” Jao’s heckler conceded grudgingly. Bram recognized him as one of the younger passengers who had been born on the trip. He was probably under a century old, and forty years would seem like forever to him.
    “Oho, hold on minute,” Jao said with a malicious glint in his eye. “After we get to the volume of space we think Original Man’s message came from seventy-four million years ago, we still have to find the suns he used. That could take us another century or two if we don’t get lucky right away. We can do some preliminary sifting from a distance, but every time we want to stop and examine a G-type star firsthand, we’ve got to spend a year boosting down from relativistic speeds, a year boosting up to get to the next one, and at the low gamma we build up for these short hops, at least a couple of years in between. Unless you don’t mind gaining a lot of weight, that is!”
    “Why do we have to find one of Original Man’s worlds at all?” grumbled the slender youth who had once been Doc Pol. Young he had become, but he hadn’t lost his grumpiness. “We’re here, we’re safe in a galaxy that isn’t exploding—why not settle down in the first G-type system we find? Put down roots. Let our descendants go gallivanting around looking for Original Man’s world if they’ve a mind to.”
    There was a chorus of opposition to squelch that idea. Nobody wanted to give up on the search now that they were so close. Doc Pol hunched his faunlike head