Ensign Dexter Gray came rushing into the main living space of the Banshees' cliff dwelling deep in the underground city of Kurnugi. His face was flushed and he was breathing hard. He'd obviously run all the way up the hundreds of stairs from the cavern floor to their level halfway up the towering cavern wall. Once inside, he headed straight for one of the large, semi-comfortable chairs and collapsed into it.
"Dex! What's wrong?" asked Alex Dalton, her normally sunny face darkened by concern.
"Nothing!" huffed Dex. "I just figured out a way home if we can somehow get back outside to the surface and our ships!"
That got everyone's attention.
"What?" demanded Max. "What are you talking about, Poindexter?" She took two steps towards the young Cat's Eye copilot and looked like she was about to literally wring the information out of him.
Luckily for Dexter, Matthew Cross put out a restraining hand and stopped Max in mid-lunge, then turned to Dex and said, "What have you come up with, Ensign?"
"Well," replied the youth slowly, "I've been thinking about it a lot since we got here -- it's not like I have anything else to do I mean, aside from hanging out with Alex... er... I mean Ensign Dalton... it's been pretty boring, you know?"
"Get to the point, Dex," said Cross, growing impatient, "or I'll let Max have her way with you."
Dexter gulped and hurried his story along. "The Scorpion class starfighter and the Cat's Eye class recon ship can sustain a continual sublight thrust of 10 gees for one month before their fuel is exhausted. At 10 gees thrust we would quickly accelerate to within a tiny fraction of the speed of light, and the relativistic time dilation effect would be enormous!"
"Enormous, huh? That's what all men say," said Max straight-faced.
Cross threw Max a dark look and said, "How enormous?"
"We would be able to fly all the way back home to Earth inside of a month, subjective time," replied Dex.
"Dex! You did it! You saved us!" cried Alex, beaming at her boyfriend.
"Not so fast," said Cross. "To us it would seem like only a month had passed because of the time dilation, but how much objective time would pass in the rest of the universe and on Earth?"
"Uh well, since we're 500 million parsecs from earth, that means, uh..." he did a quick mental calculation, "...1.63 billion light years, so the trip would take 1.63 billion years more or less, objectively."
"1.63 billion years.... What will we find 1.63 billion years from now when we finally get home?" asked Cross. "Will there be any humans left on Earth?"
"Uh, well... probably not," replied Dexter, some of his enthusiasm beginning to drain away. "But we'd be home. I'm sure there's be someone there to greet us when we got back."
"In almost 2 billion years, humans will have evolved into something unrecognizable, and Earth, assuming it's even still there and hasn't been burned up or flung out of the solar system by a passing gravity source or some other cosmic catastrophe, will be just as unrecognizable, populated by totally alien creatures we couldn't even begin to imagine. We wouldn't be arriving home and welcomed back as long-lost relatives, we'd be shot down as invading aliens trespassing on someone else's turf."
Cross could see that Dexter hadn't thought his plan all the way through and that these points fairly blew it out of the water. Dexter's countenance fell, his hopes dashed on the rocks of immutable physics and evolution, and Cross felt a pang of sympathy for the young man. He placed a fatherly hand on Dex's shoulder. "Still, it was a good plan, Dex. And if we don't find some other way out of this trap we may have to try it. Even an alien Earth 2 billion years in the future is better than staying in this godforsaken place."
Little did anyone know at the time how prophetic Cross' words would turn out to be.
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