They never knew what it was that suddenly ended their lives and destroyed their galaxy.

Long before the end, they had explored their own solar system, detected extrasolar planets, and measured the distances to nearby galaxies. However, their ideas about the universe ended at the
frontiers of an expanding bubble and they believed that time began with a "Big Bang".

The ancients had viewed the universe was geocentric: the world was flat; after setting in the West, the sun somehow made its way to the East, just in time to rise each morning; most of those points of
light in the night sky were on the inside of a great bowl that arced above it all. There were a few exceptions: the moon, of course, an occasional comet, plus a handful of wandering stars which many
believed were gods.

Long ago, they had realized that the land wasn't as flat as it appeared, and that all of the continents, and even the vast seas, were merely floating on the crust of a huge sphere -- a globe that
orbited the sun (not vice versa), providing light and heat to one side at a time. Most of the stars visible in the nighttime sky were really other suns, but some were wandering planets, nearby but
farther away than the moon. After optical viewing tubes and other devices were invented, they discovered that some of the planets had their own moons,

Eventually, they calculated that, while their planet revolved around the sun after a few hundred daily revolutions, their entire solar system (as well as nearby suns) was located in one of the arms of
a vast galactic spiral, which revolved about its center every quarter-million years.

Only in the past century or so was it discovered that some of the so-called "stars" in the skies were in fact other galaxies, just like theirs. They named the nearest one "Andromeda".

Their own galaxy never had a name. Some called it "Milky Way" because the other stars in the main disk appeared as a milky band across the sky, but most of them associated that name with a candy bar.

Altho some observers and scientists franticly searched for invisible "dark matter" and while others combed the incoming radio waves to find evidence of intelligent life in the cosmos, most of the
visible objects were known and had been measured, as were most of the others that were detectable. To them, nothing existed beyond the boundaries of the "Big Bang" at the beginning of time.

Suddenly, without any warning, their entire known universe was totally destroyed by events far beyond their own imagination.


Jove Chronson stood there, with one bare foot upon the rim, staring fascinatedly at the swirling of the cigarette ash he had flicked into the bowl after finishing his business.

He wondered, "was it coriolis force, or merely the trickle from the tank, that caused the ash to form such a beautiful, rotating spiral?" Most of the ash was contained in the central pinwheel on the
yellowish surface, but some smaller swirls bobbed nearby and there were even a few submerged clumps lingering beneath. He tried to imagine how those outliers would look if he actually stood on one of
the particles in the swirling display.

Resting his hand on the silver handle, he took a last puff, then dropped the butt into the middle of largest swirl as he simultaneously pulled down to flush.