had jumped to escape punishment (deserved and otherwise), some (like the Dasguptas) thought that stepping out of time for a couple of centuries while their investments multiplied would make them rich. On the whole, their initial jumps had been short-into the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth centuries.
But somewhere in the twenty-third, the rest of humanity disappeared. The travelers coming out just after the Extinction found ruins. Some-the most frivolous, and the most hurried of the criminals-had brought nothing with them. These starved, or lived a few pitiful years in the decaying mausoleum that was Earth. The better-equipped ones-the New Mexicans, for example-had the means to return to stasis. They bobbled forward through the third millennium, praying to find civilization revived. All they found was a world sinking back to nature, Man's works vanishing beneath jungle and forest and sea.
Even these travelers could survive only a few years in realtime. They had no medical support, no way to maintain their machines or produce food. Their equipment would soon fail, leaving them stranded in the wilderness.
But a few, a very few, had left at the close of the twenty-second century-when technology gave individuals greater wealth than whole twentieth-century nations. These few could maintain and reproduce all but the most advanced of their tools. Most departed civilization with a deliberate spirit of adventure. They had the resources to save the less fortunate scattered through the centuries, the millennia, and finally the megayears that passed.
Except for the Robinsons, no one had children. That was something reserved for the future, when humankind's ghosts made one last try at reclaiming the race's existence. So the kids who played raucous tag across the dance floor were a greater wonder than any high-tech magic. When the Robinson daughters gathered up their younger siblings for bed, there was a moment of strange, sad silence.
Wil drifted through the buffet room, stopping here and there to talk with his new acquaintances. He was determined to know everyone eventually. Quite a goal: if successful, he would know every living member of the human race. The largest group-and for Wil the most difficult to know-were the New Mexicans Fraley himself was nowhere in sight, but most of his people were here. He spotted the corporals who had helped with the shoveling, and they introduced him to some others. Things were friendly till an NM officer joined the group.
Wil excused himself and moved slowly toward the dance floor. Most of the advanced travelers were at the party, and they were mingling. A crowd surrounded Juan Chanson. The archeologist was arguing his theory of the Extinction. 'Invasion. Extermination. That's the beginning and the end of it.' He spoke a clipped, rattling dialect of English that made his opinions seem even more impressive.
'But, Professor,' someone-Rohan Dasgupta-objected, 'my brother and I came out of stasis in 2465. That couldn't have been more than two centuries after the Extinction. Newer Delhi was in ruins. Many of the buildings had completely fallen in. But we saw no evidence of nuking or lasing.'
'Sure. I agree. Not around Delhi. But you must realize, my boy, you saw a very small part of the picture, indeed. It's a great misfortune that most of those who returned right after the Extinction didn't have the means to study what they saw. I can show you pictures... LA a fifty-kilometer crater, Beijing a large lake. Even now, with the right equipment, you can find evidence of those blasts.
'I've spent centuries tracking down and interviewing the travelers who were alive in the late third millennium. Why, I even interviewed you.' Chanson's eyes unfocused for a fraction of a second. Like most of the high-techs, he wore an interface band around his temples. A moment's thought could bring a flood of memory. 'You and your brother. That was around 10000 AD, after the Korolevs rescued you —'
Dasgupta nodded eagerly. For him, it had been just weeks before. 'Yes, they had moved us to Canada. I still don't know why-°.
'Safety, my boy, safety. The Laurentian Shield is a stable place for long-term storage, almost as good as a cometary orbit.' He waved his hand dismissingly. 'The point is, I and a few other investigators have pieced together these separate bits of evidence. It is tricky; twenty-third-century civilization maintained vast databases, but the media had decayed to uselessness within a few decades of the Extinction. We have fewer contemporary records from the era than we do from the Mayans'. But there are enough... I can show you: my reconstruction of the Norcross invasion graffiti, the punched vanadium tape that W. W. Sanchez found on Charon. These are the death screams of the human race.
'Looking at the evidence, any reasonable person must agree the Extinction was the result of wholesale violence directed against populations that were somehow defenseless.
'Now, there are
The woman next to Rohan gave a little gasp. 'But these
.. these aliens. What became of them? Why, if they return -we're sitting ducks here!'
Wil stepped back from the fringes of the group and continued toward the dance floor. Behind him, he heard Juan Chanson's triumphant 'Exactly! That is the practical point of my investigations. We must mount guard on the solar frontiers —' His words were lost in the background chatter. Wil shrugged to himself. Juan was one of the most approachable of the high-techs, and Wil had heard his spiel before. There was no question the Extinction was the central mystery of their lives. But rehashing the issue in casual conversation was like arguing theology-and depressing, to boot.
A dozen couples danced. On the stage, Alice Robinson and daughter Amy were running the music. Amy played something that looked like a guitar. Alice's instrument was a more conventional console. They improvised on a base of automatic music
