Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

beautiful thought. And you’re horrid for making fun of it.”
    The smirk on Smeth’s face made Bram throw caution to the winds. He remembered the long discussions with Jun Davd about the wonders of the cosmos, the startling ideas that Jun Davd had stuffed his head with—ideas far beyond the normal curriculum for his age at middle school in the Compound.
    “Maybe you haven’t heard of a little thing called relativity,” he said with a bravado he was not feeling at the moment. He spoke mostly for Mim’s benefit. “The faster an object travels, the more slowly time passes for it. If a spaceship traveled close enough to the speed of light, it could cover any distance in practically no time at all.”
    “Have you worked out the math?” Smeth said.
    “Well, no,” Bram admitted. “Not exactly.”
    Smeth whipped out an inkcap and fitted it over his forefinger. He set his plate of food down on the ground, and from a bulky wallet clipped to his lab frock he produced a note roll and tore off a ragged length.
    “All of the relativistic effects,” he lectured, “depend on something called the gamma factor. It can be expressed as one divided by the square root of one minus the square of velocity divided by the square of the speed of light.” He scribbled rapidly on his knee, using the stray light from the pierced door behind him. “As anyone with even an elementary knowledge of algebra can plainly see, the relativistic effects are insignificant until you get very, very close to the speed of light. At ninety percent of the speed of light—if there were any way of attaining it—the time dilation effect would only be a little more than two to one.” He scribbled some more, then raised a shaggy head. “At ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, the time dilation effect is about seven to one. How far away is this galaxy of yours, Bram, my boy?”
    Bram reddened. “Thirty-seven million light-years.”
    “Congratulations. You’d get there in about five million years of shipboard time.”
    Bram could not look at Mim. “You’d just need a higher speed, that’s all,” he said,
    “Oh, ho, listen to him!” Smeth crowed. “You want a higher speed? Okay.” His long skinny forefinger traced a new set of marks on the scratch scroll. “You’re traveling at ninety-nine and nine-tenths the speed of light. I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you are. And the gamma factor works out to twenty-two point thirty-seven. Which means that you get to your ‘home’ galaxy in a little matter of one million six hundred fifty-four thousand years. But in the meantime, another thirty-seven million years’ve elapsed in this pet galaxy of yours. How long did it take Homo erectus to evolve into Homo sapiens! About a million years? How long did Original Man exist as a species? About one-tenth of a million?”
    “All right,” Mim said. “We get the idea.”
    “I’m not finished yet. Where are we going to get the energy to accelerate Bram here to that close to the speed of light? To say nothing of the rest of the human species. How much do you weigh, Bram?”
    “Knock it off, Smeth,” Bram said, his face burning.
    Smeth was enjoying himself. “And we’d better give you some air to breathe, and some snacks to eat along the way. Call it a million-ton payload. Hmm, we’d better assume that we have a magical space drive that converts matter entirely into energy. And that all that energy goes into moving the ship—no fraction of it wasted for reaction or for cooking the passengers! That’s simple. We’ll just use the energy to push against the universe so that all the energy will appear in the ship.” His finger flew across the page. “At ninety-nine point nine percent the speed of light, figuring the mass ratio at two divided by a factor of one minus the velocity divided by the speed of light, we get a figure of about two thousand times the mass of the payload, and when you convert all that into energy—” He tore off the end of the scroll and raised his head with a friendly sneer. “—you find that Bram’s little excursion would take more than the total amount of energy that the entire Nar civilization has produced in the last thousand years.”
    While Bram shriveled in his seat and wished for the ground to swallow him up, Mim shot a suspicious glance at Smeth and the ribbon of paper he was dangling.
    “Don’t be obnoxious,” she said. “I don’t believe you figured all that out while you were sitting