Project Hail Mary

Chapter 9

I let the model float in the middle of the room. The xenonite is nearly indestructible, so I don’t need to worry about it bumping into anything.

Is this a good idea? I have a planet to save. As awesome as it is to meet up with intelligent aliens, is this risk worth it?

The Eridians clearly understand Astrophage. At least well enough to make engines out of it. And—I think—they’re trying to tell me they’re here for the same reason I am. They might have information I don’t know. They might even have the solution I’m looking for. And they seem friendly enough.

But this is the interstellar equivalent of a stranger offering me candy. I want the candy (information), but I don’t know the stranger.

What’s my alternative? Ignore them?

I could carry on with my mission as if I never saw them at all. They’re probably as spooked to see me as I am to see them. They might continue trying to talk, but they wouldn’t get hostile, I don’t think.

Or would they? I have no way of knowing.

No, this is a no-brainer. I’ve got to at least have a conversation with them. If they have any information about Astrophage at all, no matter how minor, I have to talk to them. It’s a risk, yes, but this whole mission is a risk.

Okay. So what would I do if I were them?

I’m an Eridian. I want to build a tunnel that connects to the weird human ship. But I don’t know what the human ship’s material is made of. How can I guarantee any kind of attachment or seal? My xenonite knowledge is beyond dispute, but how do I connect it to “humanium” or whatever that ship is made of? I’ve sent the human xenonite models. So he knows what I have. But I still don’t know what he has.

They’ll need a sample of my hull. And they’ll need to know it’s a sample of my hull.

“Right,” I say to no one.

I don’t know if this is a good idea or a terrible idea. But I’m going to knock a chunk of my hull off.

I grab a set of EVA tools. They live in the lab in Drawer 17E. I found them a while ago. They’re on a tool belt that can clip onto the EVA suit and everything. Stratt and the gang made sure we had all the equipment we would need for hull repairs if needed. Normally it would be Ilyukhina’s job to fix stuff, but she’s gone.

Huh. Random memory. Ilyukhina was our engineer—our fix-it gal. Okay. Well, now it’s me.

I get back in the EVA suit, and back outside. Again. Bouncing in and out is getting kind of annoying. I hope this tunnel thing works.

I make my way along the hull, one tether adjustment at a time. And I get to thinking…

What good is a tunnel, exactly? I doubt we have compatible environments. We can’t just connect the ships with a tunnel and shake hands. I think there’s a lot of ammonia over there.

And then there’s the temperature. Those cylinders are hot when I get them.

Some back-of-the-napkin math tells me that first cylinder they sent should have lost 100 degrees Celsius or more during that forty-minute trip (depending on what temperature it started at). And it was still hot when I got it. So it was really hot when it left their ship. Like…way higher than the boiling point of water.

I try not to speculate too wildly, but come on. I’m a scientist and these are aliens. I’m going to speculate.

Do Eridians live in an environment hotter than the boiling point of water? If so, it proves I was right! The goldilocks zone is bull-puckey! You don’t need liquid water for life!

I should be more focused on the “first contact with intelligent aliens” thing or the “save all of humanity” thing, but gosh darn it, I can spend a moment to be happy about being right when everyone said I was wrong!

I finally reach a spot of hull that seems right for the job. I’m aft of the entire pressurized portion of the ship, well past the part where it widens out. If I’m right, I’m standing on a big empty tank that used to be full of Astrophage. If I breach the hull here, it shouldn’t matter.

I pull out a hammer and chisel. Not the most elegant way to do this, but I can’t think of anything better. I start by putting one corner of the chisel on the hull and giving it a little tap. There’s a notable dent. It doesn’t take much to get through this outermost layer.

I use the hammer and chisel to separate a 6-inch circle of hull material. There’s a layer of something underneath. I can feel it with the chisel. Probably insulation.

I have to pry the circle out with the chisel. The underlayer holds strong, but then gives way suddenly. The hull sample flies off into space.

“Shoot!”

I leap off the ship. I get a hand on the circle right before my tether snaps tight. I breathe for a second, thinking about how dumb I am, then pull myself back along the tether to the ship. Looking at the circle it seems like there’s a light, foam substance attached to the underside. Styrofoam, maybe. Probably something more complicated than that.

“I hope you guys watched all that,” I say. “Because I’m not doing it again.”

I throw the hull chunk at the Blip-A.

By doing this right in front of them, they’ll know for sure I’m sending them a sample of the hull. I hope it’s enough for what they want to do. I don’t even know if they wanted it or needed it. They might be looking at their screens right now and saying, “What is this idiot doing? Is he poking a hole in his own ship? Why?”

I stay on the hull and watch as the chunk tumbles in the Taulight. The multi-armed robot on the Blip-A’s hull slides along its rails for the reception. Once positioned, it waits for the hull chunk to arrive and makes a perfect catch.

And then, I swear to God, it waves at me! One of its little arms waves at me!

I wave back.

It waves again.

Okay, this could go on all day. I head back toward the airlock.

Your move, guys.

Their move is taking a long time and I’m getting bored.

Wow. I’m sitting here in a spaceship in the Tau Ceti system waiting for the intelligent aliens I just met to continue our conversation…and I’m bored. Human beings have a remarkable ability to accept the abnormal and make it normal.

I look through the controls of the Radar panel to see what other features it has. After some digging through preference dialogs, I find what I’m looking for: the proximity-warning parameters. Currently set to 100 kilometers. Fairly reasonable. You would expect things to be millions of kilometers away. Tens of thousands at the very least. So if some rock is within 100 kilometers of you, that’s a major problem.

I change the setting to 0.26 kilometers. I worry it’ll reject the setting as too low, but it doesn’t.

I stretch my back and float out of the pilot seat. The Blip-A is 271 meters away. If they get closer than 260 meters, or if they send another present that gets within that range, the proximity alert will go off. I don’t have to sit here and stare at the screen anymore. The control room will blare a warning when the Blip-A does anything interesting.

I float down to the dormitory.

“Food,” I say.

The arms pull a box out of their little stash in the ceiling and stick it to my bunk. Someday I should look around in there and see what’s available. For now I kick off the ceiling and float down to the food. The box, labeled DAY 10—MEAL 1, has a Velcro-like strip on the bottom that helps it stay in place on the bedsheet. I open it up and see a burrito.

Not sure what I expected, but okay. Burrito it is.

Turns out it’s a room-temperature burrito. Beans, cheese, some red sauce…all pretty tasty, really. But room temperature. Either the crew doesn’t get hot meals around here or the machine doesn’t trust a recent coma patient not to burn himself on hot food. Probably the latter.

I float up to the lab and put the burrito in the sample furnace. I leave it in there for a few minutes before pulling it out with tongs. The cheese bubbles and a cloud of steam slowly emanates out in all directions.

I leave the burrito to float in the air and cool.

I snicker. If I really wanted a hot burrito, I’d turn on the spin drives, do an EVA, and hold the burrito in the light emitted from it. That’d get it hot really quick. As in: It would get vaporized along with my arm and whatever else was in the blast range, because—

“Welcome to Little Russia!” said Dimitri. He gave a theatrical wave at the aircraft carrier’s lower hangar deck. The whole space had been repurposed into a bunch of labs full of high-tech equipment. Dozens of lab-coated scientists toiled away at their tasks, occasionally speaking Russian to one another. Dimitri’s Denizens, we called them.

We probably put more effort into naming stuff than we should have.

I clutched my little sample container like Scrooge with a bag of coins. “I’m not happy with this.”

“Oh, hush,” said Stratt.

“I’ve only made eight grams of Astrophage so far, and I’m supposed to just give away two grams of it? Two grams may not seem like much, but it’s ninety-five billion Astrophage cells.”

“It is for a good cause, my friend!” said Dimitri. “I promise you will like it. Come, come!”

He led Stratt and me through to the main lab. The center was dominated by a huge cylindrical vacuum chamber. The chamber was open and three technicians mounted something to a table inside.

Dimitri said something in Russian to them. They said something back. He said some other thing and pointed to me. They smiled and made happy Russian sounds.

Then Stratt said something stern in Russian.

“Sorry,” said Dimitri. “English only for now, my friends! For the American!”

“Hello, American!” said one of the technicians. “I am speak of English for you! You have fuel?”

I gripped my sample container tighter. “I have some fuel….”

Stratt looked at me the way I look at stubborn students in my class. “Hand it over, Dr. Grace.”

“You know, my breeder doubles Astrophage population over time, right? Taking away two grams now is like taking away four grams next month.”

She pulled the container out of my hands and handed it to Dimitri.

He held the small metal vial up and admired it. “This is a good day. I have looked forward to this day. Dr. Grace, please let me show you my spin drive!”

He gestured for me to follow and bounced up the stairs into the vacuum chamber. The technicians exited one at a time to make room for us.

“All is attached,” said one of them. “Checklist is done. Ready for test.”

“Good, good,” Dimitri said. “Dr. Grace, Ms. Stratt. Come, come!”

He led Stratt and me into the vacuum chamber. A thick, shiny metal plate leaned against one wall. The middle of the chamber had a round table with some kind of device resting on it.

“This is spin drive.” Dimitri beamed.

It wasn’t much to look at. It was a couple of feet across, mostly circular, but with one side of it cut flat. Sensors and wires came out from apertures all over the place.

Dimitri lifted the top casing off to reveal the innards. Things got more complicated. Inside was a clear triangle on a rotor. Dimitri gave it a little spin. “See? Spin. Spin drive.”

“How’s it work?” I asked.

He pointed to the triangle. “This is the revolver—high-tensile-strength transparent polycarbonate. And this”—he pointed to a nook between the revolver and the outer casing—“is where fuel comes in. IR emitter inside that part of revolver emits small amount of light with 4.26 and 18.31 microns wavelength—that is wavelengths which attract Astrophage. Astrophage go to that revolver face. But not too hard. Astrophage thrust is based on strength of IR light. Dim light make weak thrust. But enough to make Astrophage stick to surface.”

He rotated the triangle and aligned an edge with the flat part of the casing. “Rotate 120 degrees, this face of revolver with Astrophage stuck to it now points out the back of the ship. Increase strength of IR light inside. Astrophage now very excited, push very hard toward IR light! Their thrust—Petrova-frequency light—leaves back of ship. This pushes ship forward. Millions of little Astrophages pushing on back of ship make it go, yes?”

I bent down for a look. “I see…this way no part of the ship has to be in the blast area of the light.”

“Yes, yes!” said Dimitri. “Astrophage force limited only by the brightness of IR light attracting it. I did very much math and decided best is to make Astrophage exhaust all energy in four seconds. Any faster and force will break revolver.”

He rotated the revolver another 120 degrees and pointed to the remaining third of the casing. “This is cleaning area. Squeegee wipes dead Astrophage off revolver.”

He pointed to the cleaning area, then the fueling area, and then the open face. “All three areas active at same time. So while this area cleans dead Astrophage off this face, fueling area adds Astrophage to that face, and other face is pointed out back of ship, providing thrust. This pipelining means the part of triangle pointed out back of ship is always thrusting.”

Dimitri opened my vial of Astrophage and set it in the fueling chamber. I guess since the Astrophage will find their way to the triangle face, no special handling was required. He could just…let the fuel see the IR.

“Come, come,” he said. “Experiment time!”

We left the vacuum chamber and Dimitri sealed it off. He yelled something in Russian, and all the Russians started repeating it. Everyone made their way to the far side of the hangar deck, including us.

They’d set up a folding table. It had a laptop on it with Cyrillic writing on the screen.

“Ms. Stratt. How far is carrier from closest land?” Dimitri asked.

“About three hundred kilometers,” she said.

“This is good.”

“Wait, why?” I said. “Why is that good?”

Dimitri pursed his lips. “It is…good. Time for science!”

He pushed a button. There was a muffled whump from the far side of the bay, followed by a hum, and then nothing.

“Experiment done.” He leaned forward to read the screen. “Sixty thousand Newtons of force!”

He turned to the other Russians. “60,000 ньютонов!”

They all cheered.

Stratt turned to me. “That’s a lot, right?”

I was too busy staring slack-jawed at Dimitri to answer her. “Did you say sixty thousand Newtons?”

He pumped his fist in the air. “Yes! Sixty thousand Newtons! Maintained for one hundred microseconds!”

“Oh my God. From that little thing?!” I started to walk forward. I had to see this for myself.

Dimitri grabbed my arm. “No. You stay here, friend. We all stay here. One point eight billion Joules of light energy was released. This is why we needed vacuum chamber and one thousand kilograms of silicon. No air to ionize. Light goes directly to silicon block. Energy is absorbed by melting the metal. See?”

He turned the laptop toward me. A camera feed from inside the vacuum chamber showed the glowing blob that was once a thick plate of metal.

“Whoa…” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Dimitri said. “That Mr. Einstein with his E = mc². Very powerful stuff. We let the cooling system work on it for a few hours. Uses seawater. Will be fine.”

I just shook my head in awe. In just 100 microseconds—that’s one ten-thousandth of a second—Dimitri’s spin drive melted a metric ton of metal. All that energy had been stored up in my little Astrophages. Slowly harvested from the carrier’s nuclear reactor heat over time by my breeder. I mean, the math all checked out, but to see it actually demonstrated like that was another thing entirely.

“Wait…how much Astrophage did you use there?”

Dimitri smiled. “I can only estimate based on thrust generated. But was close to twenty micrograms.”

“I gave you two entire grams! Can I have the rest back, please?”

“Don’t be greedy,” Stratt said. “Dimitri needs it for further experimentation.”

She turned to him. “Good work. How big will the real drive be?”

Dimitri pointed to the video feed. “That big. That is real drive.”

“No, I mean the one on the ship.”

“That,” he said, pointing again. “You want redundancy, safety, reliability, yes? So we don’t make just one big engine. We make thousand little ones. One thousand and nine, actually. Enough for all thrust needed and much to spare. Some malfunction during trip? Not a problem. More thrust from the others to compensate.”

“Ah.” Stratt nodded. “Tons of little spin drives. I like it. Keep up the good work.”

She headed to the stairwell.

I stared at Dimitri. “If you’d set off all two grams of that sample at once…”

He shrugged. “Fwoosh! We are vapor. All of us. Carrier too. Explosion would make small tsunami. But three hundred kilometers away from land, so is okay.”

He slapped me on the back. “And I would owe you drink in afterlife, yes?! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“Huh,” I say to myself. “So that’s how the spin drive works.”

I munch on my burrito.

So I guess I have a thousand of those (“A thousand and nine!” I hear Dimitri’s voice in my head). At least—that’s how many I started with. Some probably went kaput during the trip. There’s probably a panel on the Spin Drive console that’ll tell me the status of each little one.

The proximity alert interrupts my thoughts.

“Finally!”

I “drop” the burrito (it floats where I leave it) and launch myself up to the control room. The hatch from the dormitory to the lab doesn’t line up with the hatch from the lab to the control room, but there’s a diagonal line of travel that will send me through both if I do it just right.

I don’t get it right this time. I have to push off a lab wall en route. Still, I’m getting better at it.

I check the Radar panel and, sure enough, the Blip-A is approaching! Not a cylinder this time. The whole ship is coming my way. Nice and slow. Maybe they’re going for a nonthreatening kind of approach? In any event, it’s almost here.

Looks like its hull has a new addition. In that diamond part that’s as big as the whole Hail Mary, there’s a cylindrical tube sticking straight up. The hull robot is sitting next to it, looking proud of itself. I may be anthropomorphizing a tad.

The tube looks like xenonite. Patchy gray and tan with grainlike lines running its length. Hard to tell from this angle, but it also looks to be hollow.

I think I know what comes next. If they follow the plan they indicated with the model, they’ll be putting the other end of it against my airlock.

How will they attach their tunnel? My airlock does have docking capability—probably for whatever ship brought me and my crewmates to the Hail Mary—but I can’t expect Eridians to know the intricacies of a universal airlock.

The Blip-A edges ever closer. What if there’s a mistake? What if they miscalculate? What if they accidentally poke a hole in my hull? I’m all that stands between humanity and extinction. Will an alien math error doom my entire species?

I hustle to the airlock and pull on the EVA suit. I’m in there in record time. Better safe than sorry.

The Blip-A is so close now, the Telescope screen just shows a patch of mottled hull. I switch to the external cameras. My hull is littered with them. They’re all controlled from a window on the EVA panel. Always good to know where your astronaut is when giving them EVA instructions, I guess.

The tunnel is about 20 feet long. Or 7 meters. Man, being an American scientist sucks sometimes. You think in random, unpredictable units based on what situation you’re in.

The hull robot reaches out with some seriously telescoping arms. I had no idea it could do that. It extends well beyond the tunnel toward my airlock. Not creepy at all. Five ever-growing alien robot arms reaching for my front door. No cause for alarm.

Each arm’s three-fingered “hand” is holding…something. A curved bar with a flat plate attached on the ends. Like a coffee-mug handle. Three of the arms reach the Hail Mary and stick the flat parts of their devices to the hull. Shortly after, the other two arms do the same. Then, all five retract, pulling the Hail Mary toward the tunnel.

Okay. So those flat things are handles. How are they attached? Good question! My hull is smooth and made of nonmagnetic aluminum (why do I remember that all of a sudden?). The handles certainly aren’t connected by any mechanical means. Must be an adhesive.

And it all starts to make sense.

Of course they aren’t going to work out how the docking mechanism works. They’re going to glue one end of the tunnel to my ship. Why not? Much simpler.

My ship groans. It’s a 100,000-kilogram piece of equipment that was definitely not designed to be pulled along by its airlock. Will the hull put up with this?

I double-check the seals on my EVA suit.

The control room moves around me. It’s not fast—just a few centimeters per second. Hey, for small spaceship velocities I think in metric! Much better than “cubits per fortnight” or whatever.

I let the wall catch up to me. At some lizard-brain level, I like being a little farther from the airlock. Some scary stuff is going on over there.

Clunk.

The Eridian tunnel has hit the hull. Clicks and scrapes follow. I watch the hull camera feeds.

The mouth of the tunnel, now firmly held to the airlock aperture, is larger than the entire airlock door. I guess that’s that. Presuming the glue will hold pressure. They don’t even know what my atmospheric pressure is. What’s the glue made of? So many questions.

I can’t operate the control-room panels with my EVA suit gloves. I wish I could zoom in or something. I squint at one of the feeds showing the tunnel. It sure looks tight against the hull to me. There’s some curvature to the hull around that spot. Kind of a complicated shape to make, but the Eridians duplicated it perfectly.

After another minute, the robot arms let go of their handles, leaving them on the hull.

A muffled sound comes from the airlock. It’s a whooshing sound. Is that airflow? They’re pressurizing the tunnel!

My heart races. Can my hull handle this? What if their air dissolves aluminum? What if aluminum is highly toxic to Eridians and one whiff of it kills them instantly? This is a terrible idea!

The whooshing stops.

I gulp.

They’re done. Nothing dissolved yet. I float over to the airlock for a look-see.

I had both airlock doors sealed, of course. More protection in case of a breach. I open the inner door and float inside. I peek out the porthole window.

The blackness of space gone, replaced with the blackness of a dark tunnel. I turn on the helmet lamps and angle my head to shine light through the porthole.

The end of the tunnel is too close. I don’t mean I’m bothered by it. I mean the end of it is not 20 feet away. It’s more like 10 feet. And while the rest of the tunnel is made of gray and tan blotchy xenonite, the wall at the end is a hexagonal pattern of random colors.

They didn’t just connect a tunnel. They connected my airlock to theirs, with a wall in the middle.

Clever.

I close the inner airlock door with me inside and depressurize it. I spin the outer door’s hatch handle and push. It opens without resistance. The tunnel is a vacuum—at least, it is on my side of the divider.

I think I see. This is a test. They had all the same concerns I had. Attach it, let me pressurize my half with my air, and see what happens. Either it works or it doesn’t. If it works, great! If not, they’ll try something else. Or maybe ask me to try something.

Okay. Let’s see.

I tell the airlock to repressurize. It refuses—the outer door is open. Nice to know that safety interlock is there, but I’ll have to work around it.

It’s not hard—there’s a manual relief valve that will just let air from the ship into the airlock. It bypasses all computer controls. You don’t want someone to die because of a software malfunction, right?

I open the relief valve. Air rushes in from the Hail Mary and, with the airlock wide open, into the tunnel. Within three minutes, the airflow slows and then stops. My suit readings tell me there’s 400 hectopascals of pressure outside. The Hail Mary has equalized with my part of the tunnel.

I close the relief valve and wait. I watch the external pressure gauge on my EVA suit. The pressure stays put at 400 hectopascals. We have a good seal.

Eridians know how to glue xenonite to aluminum. Of course they do. Aluminum’s an element, and any species that could invent xenonite in the first place must know their way around the periodic table a thousand times better than we do.

Time for a leap of faith. I pop the seals of the EVA suit and climb out the back. The strong smell of ammonia permeates the air but it’s otherwise breathable. It’s my own air supply, after all. I push the EVA suit back toward the airlock. The helmet lamps are my only source of light, so I finagle the suit so the lights stay pointed down the tunnel.

I float over to the mystery wall and reach out to touch it, but stop short. I can feel the heat even from a few inches away. Eridians like it hot.

In fact, I’m starting to sweat. The tunnel walls are heating up my air. It’s uncomfortable, but not too bad. I can open the Hail Mary’s inner airlock door if I want my climate control to take over. Then our life-support systems can fight it out. They’ll keep the hot side hot and I’ll keep the cold side cold.

Even with the sweat forming on my brow and the strong ammonia odor making my eyes water, I press on. I’m just too curious not to. Could anyone blame me?

There are at least twenty little hexagons on this wall. They’re all different colors and textures and I think a couple of them might be translucent. I should catalog each one and figure out if I can identify what they’re made of. Looking closer, I see there’s a definite seam running along the edges of the hexes.

That’s when I hear a sound come from the other side:

Knock, knock, knock.