Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

better than we can.”
    He turned to listen for a moment to the speakers, which were pouring out a torrent of dragonfly clicks and snaps from whatever lumps of rock were in orbit around Aldebaran and its companion. When he spoke again, it was half to himself.
    “There’s no place we can go in the entire universe where we’d be safe from them. No place at all.”
    Both of them listened to the clicks for a while. Then Trist spoke. “You’d better call a ship’s meeting.”
    “I’m not year-captain.”
    Trist showed rare exasperation. “Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, by the time we get Smeth to do it and wait for him to sort out all the ifs, buts, and maybes, the dragonfly sphere will be another fifty light-years across!”
    “I’ll post a notice in the datanet,” Bram said.
     
    “I say we go back!” the man on the holo stage bleated. “Go back and sterilize all their worlds with our engine exhaust! All of them, down to the smallest asteroid! That’s the only way we’ll ever be safe!”
    He was a narrow-faced man with an incongruously thick and muscular neck sticking up out of protective coveralls, and his voice was shrill with fear.
    “Who is he?” Bram whispered to Trist in the seat next to him.
    “Name’s Perc. He’s one of Smeth’s technicians. Fusion specialist, I think. Big talker—always trying to organize the black gang, whatever that means. He’s always at loggerheads with Smeth.”
    “The way to do it,” Perc blathered on, “is to start back far enough to build up a tremendous gamma factor. Build up enough relativistic mass so that we devastate them by gravitational effects, too, just to make sure. But the main thing about going in at relativistic speeds is that we can flash by in fractions of a second, before they have time to react. They might not even realize we were there, in fact. To them it would just seem as if the surface of their planets just sizzled and went up in flame.”
    “Ferocious, isn’t he?” Bram said.
    “He’s just frightened,” Mim said. “We all are.”
    “He’s one of the post-Milky Way generation,” Nen said, leaning across Trist. “Have you noticed how all of the really bloodcurdling comments tonight came from the new people?”
    Mim nodded agreement. “It’s hard for those of us who were raised among the Nar to think of a life form— any life form—as being a threat.”
    “We’re learning,” Bram said grimly.
    “Oh, my dear, yes,” Mim said, reaching blindly for Bram’s hand. She seemed on the verge of bursting into tears; she might have been remembering the long vigil when Bram had failed to return to the tree with the evacuees. But it took her only a moment to recover her usual spunk. “That was another time, another universe.”
    Perc’s outside holo image was waving its mammoth arms around. “Just one quick pass over each planet,” Perc said earnestly and reasonably. “We needn’t go into a polar orbit that would cover the entire surface—and we couldn’t, anyway, with the kinetic energy of relativistic speeds. Our exhaust would boil away the crust—melt a channel of slag from pole to pole. Split the planet like a rotten fruit. Turn the oceans to steam and strip away the atmosphere. Nothing could survive—not anywhere. And think of Yggdrasil’s mass at seventy—or seven hundred—gamma. We’d rip them apart! I move that we start back at once. Burn them out. Descend on them like an avenging angel. Bring them their time of fire.”
    The holo lurched off the stage, and the little man who had cast it seated himself again. Smeth thanked Perc for his views as if it hurt his teeth, then gaveled down the uproar that started.
    “Jun Davd, I think you wanted to make a comment,” he said.
    Jun Davd’s holo rose, courteous and grave, and looked down at the audience. “There’s no doubt that we could wipe out planets if we had a mind to do so,” he said. “But I’m afraid that for us to exterminate the entire dragonfly race is a mathematical impossibility. You can’t make U-turns in space, and by the time we backed up far enough for a second run—decelerated and built up gamma again— years would have passed. We’d have to do that for every single planetary body … divided, perhaps, by a factor of three or four for those we could align, of course. In Sol system, there are thirty-five inhabited bodies of fair size, plus an unknown number of asteroids, cometary nuclei, and possibly space habitats. We could not be sure of