If you think a regular haystack is bad, try a cosmic one. An Amazon reader tells what's going on:

Arthur Ross Carson, an orphaned spaceship wrecker pulls a practical joke that indirectly leads to the death of his girlfriend. He is taken in by members of the Galactic Guards, who suspect (correctly) that he is something more than he seems. He escapes to another planet, forms a symbiosis with a powerful but amiable alien, and sets out to hunt down the villainous members of the Statque ("Status Quo").

Sounds like the action took place in considerably less than a million years.