"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

dred years' advance notice that we were coming, but
Arlene hooted with laughter when I mentioned it.
"What, you think their message travels at infinite
speed? What do you think this is, science fiction?"
I wracked my neurons for several minutes—physics
was never my strong suit, especially not special rela-
tivity. Then I suddenly realized my stupidity: any
message sent by the Fred captain could travel only at
the speed of light.... It would take it two hundred
years to reach Fredworld!
So how much of a head start did it have over us?
"Um ... twenty years?" I guessed.
Arlene shook her head emphatically. "If our time
dilation factor is eight and a half weeks, or, say, sixty
days, to two hundred years passing on Earth and
Fredworld—the planets are barely moving relative to
each other, compared to lightspeed—then we have to
be moving at virtually lightspeed ourselves, relative to
both planets. Hang on . . ." She poked at her watch
calculator. "Fly, we're making about 99.99996 per-
cent of lightspeed relative to Earth or Fredworld. At
that clip, we would travel two hundred light-years and
arrive only thirty-five minutes after the message."
I jumped to my feet. "Arlene, that's fantastic! They
won't have any time at all to prepare, barely half an
hour! Maybe they can mobilize a few security forces,
but nothing like a—"
"Whoa, whoa, loverboy, slow down!" Arlene settled
back, putting her feet up on the table, narrowly
missing her half-eaten plate of blue squares. "If it's
actually sixty-one days subjective time instead of fifty-
eight, or the planets are really two hundred and nine
light-years apart instead of two hundred, that half-an-
hour figure is completely inaccurate. And much more
important, that was assuming we achieved our speed
instantly. But we didn't. ... It took us about three
days to ramp up, and it'll take another three days to
decelerate; during most of that time, we're going slow
enough that there's hardly any time dilation effect at
all."
"So you're saying ... so the Fred should have
what, six days' advance notice we're on our way?"
"Hm. basically, yeah. The biggest factor is the
acceleration-deceleration time, when we're not mov-
ing at relativistic speeds."
"So let's assume they have six days to prepare," I
said. "That's a hard figure?"
"Hard enough, Fly. I mean, Sergeant. Best we can
do, in any event. I'm not entirely sure Sears and
Roebuck is giving us good intel on the Fred units of