and, of course, decelerated it by the same amount. If Garrard
were to attempt to impart to a two-pound weight, which was
keeping ship-time, an acceleration of 14,440 ft/sec’ in his
time, he’d have to exert a force of 900 pounds on it.
The point was not that it couldn’t be donebut that it
would take as much effort as pushing a stalled jeep. He’d
never be able to lift that pencil with his forearm muscles
alone; he’d have to put his back into the task.
And the human body wasn’t engineered to maintain
stresses of that magnitude indefinitely. Not even the most
powerful professional weight-lifter is forced to show his
prowess throughout every minute of every day.
Pock.
That was the calendar again; another second had gone by.
Or another two hours. It had certainly seemed longer than a
second, but less than two hours, too. Evidently subjective
time was an intensively recomplicated measure. Even in this
world of micro-timein which Garrard’s mind, at least,
seemed to be operatinghe could make the lapses between
calendar ticks seem a little shorter by becoming actively in-
terested in some problem or other. That would help, during
the waking hours, but it would help only if the rest of hia
body were not keeping the same time as his mind. If it were
not, then he would lead an incredibly active, but perhaps not
intolerable, mental life during the many centuries of his
awake-time, and would be mercifully asleep for nearly as
long.
Both problemsthat of how much force he could exert
with his body, and how long he could hope to be asleep in