Project Hail Mary

Chapter 15

It’s been a few hours. But I just have to know. How does he modify the tunnel?

He needs massive atmospheric pressure to stay alive. My hull can’t handle that. And he can’t handle being in a vacuum. So how does he make modifications?

I hear clinks and clanks from the other side of the airlock. This time I’m going to find out!

I enter the airlock and look through the porthole. The Blip-A’s hull robot has removed the old tunnel and is installing a new one.

Oh. Well. That’s anticlimactic.

The old tunnel drifts off into space—its use is at an end, apparently. The robot places the new tunnel in position and administers xenonite glue along the edge of the Blip-A’s hull.

How did Eridians pilot a ship that traveled near the speed of light without using computers? Dead reckoning? They’re pretty good at doing math in their heads. Maybe they never needed to invent computers. But still. No matter how good they are at math, there are limits.

The clunking stops. I peek out the window again. The tunnel has been fully installed.

It looks like the previous tunnel, except it has a much larger airlock section. Pretty much the entire divider wall is a cabinet large enough to hold Rocky with room to spare. It is not, however, large enough to hold me. I guess I won’t be visiting the Blip-A anytime soon.

“Hmph,” I say. I try not to let it bother me, but come on. He gets to see an alien spaceship. How come I don’t get to see one?

Rocky’s side of the tunnel no longer has the network of gripping bars. Instead, there is a metal stripe running along the long axis of the tunnel. It extends into the divider airlock and further into my side of the tunnel. It leads right up to my airlock door.

Opposite the metal stripe is what looks like a pipe. It’s made of the same drab xenonite browns and tans that the tunnel wall is made of. And it’s square. It also runs the long axis of the tunnel.

With a whoosh, Rocky’s side of the tunnel fills with fog. Then a second whoosh fills my side. That’s what the pipe was for, I guess. Delivering the appropriate atmosphere to both sides. I’m glad Rocky has a supply of oxygen to work with.

The Blip-A door opens, and Rocky emerges, encased in his geodesic ball. He wears something like overalls with a bandolier across the bottom of his carapace. The AC unit is on his back. Two of his hands hold metal blocks. The other three are free. One of them waves to me. I wave back.

The spaceball (what else should I call it?) floats into the airlock and then sticks to the metal plate.

“What?” I say. “How…”

Then I see it. The ball didn’t magically move. Those blocks Rocky is holding are magnets. Fairly powerful ones, I guess. And the metal strip is obviously magnetic. Probably iron. He rolls the ball along the metal line and into the divider airlock. He manipulates metal controls through the xenonite shell with his magnets. It’s mesmerizing to watch.

After some hissing and the sound of pumps, he repels a plate away, which opens up the door on my side of the airlock. From there, he rolls along the metal line to my door. I open it.

“Hello!”

“Hello!”

“So…do I carry you around? Is that the plan?”

“Yes. Carry. Thank.”

I gingerly grab the ball, worried it might be hot. But it isn’t. Among other things, xenonite is an excellent insulator. I pull him through and into the ship.

Rocky is heavy. Much heavier than I thought he would be. If there were gravity, I probably wouldn’t be able to lift him at all. As it is, he has a lot of inertia. It takes a lot of oomph to pull him along. It’s like pushing a motorcycle in neutral. Seriously—he’s as heavy as a motorcycle.

I shouldn’t be surprised. He told me all about his biology and how it uses metals. Heck, his blood is mercury. Of course he’s heavy.

“You are very heavy,” I say. I hope he doesn’t take that to mean Hey, fatty! Go on a diet!

“My mass is one hundred sixty-eight kilograms,” he says.

Rocky weighs over 300 pounds!

“Wow,” I say. “You weigh a lot more than me.”

“What is you mass, question?”

“Maybe eighty kilograms.”

“Humans have very small mass!” he says.

“I’m mostly water,” I say. “Anyway. This is the control room. I operate the ship from here.”

“Understand.”

I push him ahead of me down the tunnel to the lab. He skitters around within his ball. He tends to shift around when he’s looking at something new. I think it helps him get a better “view” of things with his sonar. Kind of like a dog tilting its head to get more information about a sound.

“This is my lab,” I say. “All the science happens here.”

“Good good good room!” he squeals. His voice is a full octave higher than normal. “Want to understand all!”

“I’ll answer any questions you have,” I say.

“Later. More rooms!”

“More rooms!” I say dramatically.

I push him along into the dormitory. I give us a very slow velocity so he can take it all in from the center of the room. “I sleep here. Well, I used to. Then you made me sleep in the tunnel.”

“You sleep alone, question?”

“Yes.”

“I also sleep alone many times. Sad sad sad.”

He just doesn’t get it. A fear of sleeping alone is probably hardwired in his brain. Interesting…that might have been the beginning of their pack instinct. And a pack instinct is required for a species to become intelligent. That weird (to me) sleep pattern could be the reason I’m talking to Rocky right now!

Yeah, that was unscientific. There are probably a thousand things that led to them being sapient and stuff. The sleep thing is likely just one part of it. But hey, I’m a scientist. I have to come up with theories!

I open a panel to the storage area and push his ball partially inside. “This is a small room for storage.”

“Understand.”

I pull him back out. “That’s all the rooms. My ship is much smaller than yours.”

“You ship has much science!” he says. “Show me things in science room, question?”

“Sure.”

I take him back up to the lab. He shifts around in the ball, taking it all in. I float us to the center of the room and grab the edge of the table.

I push the ball against the lab table. I think it’s steel, but I’m not sure. Most lab tables are. Let’s find out.

“Use your magnets,” I say.

He pushes one of his magnets against the pentagon face touching the table. With a clunk the magnet takes hold. He’s now anchored in place.

“Good!” he says. He uses his magnets on one face after another to roll across the table and back. It’s not graceful, but it gets the job done. At least I don’t have to hold him in place.

I nudge away from the table and float to the edge of the room. “There’s a lot here. What do you want to know about first?”

He starts to point in one direction, then stops. Then he picks a new thing, but stops there too. Like a kid in a candy shop. Finally, he settles on the 3-D printer. “That. What is that, question?”

“It makes small things. I tell the computer a shape, and it tells this machine how to make it.”

“I can see it make small thing, question?”

“It needs gravity.”

“That is why your ship rotates, question?”

“Yes!” I say. Wow, he’s quick. “The rotation makes gravity for science things.”

“You ship no can rotate with tunnel attached.”

“Right.”

He thinks it over.

“You ship has more science than my ship. Better science. I bring my things into you ship. Release tunnel. You make you ship spin for science. You and me science how to kill Astrophage together. Save Earth. Save Erid. This is good plan, question?”

“Uh…yes! Good plan! But what about your ship?” I tap his xenonite bubble. “Human science can’t make xenonite. Xenonite is stronger than anything humans have.”

“I bring materials to make xenonite. Can make any shape.”

“Understand,” I say. “You want to get your things now?”

“Yes!”

I’ve gone from “sole-surviving space explorer” to “guy with wacky new roommate.” It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

“Have you met Dr. Lamai?” Stratt asked.

I shrugged. “I meet so many people these days I honestly don’t know.”

The carrier had a sick bay, but that was for the crew. This was a special medical center set up on the second hangar bay.

Dr. Lamai pressed her hands together and bowed her head slightly. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Grace.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Um, you too.”

“I’ve put Dr. Lamai in charge of all things medical for the Hail Mary,” Stratt said. “She was the lead scientist for the company that developed the coma technology we’re going to use.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “So you’re from Thailand, I assume?”

“Yes,” she said. “The company did not survive, unfortunately. Because the technology only works on one in every seven thousand people and thus has limited commercial potential. I am very happy that my research may yet help humanity.”

“Understatement,” said Stratt. “Your technology might save humanity.”

Lamai averted her eyes. “You compliment me too much.”

She led us into her lab. A dozen bays were each full of slightly different apparatus experiments, each connected to an unconscious monkey.

I looked away. “Do I have to be here?”

“You’ll have to excuse Dr. Grace,” Stratt said. “He’s a bit…tender on certain topics.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I know animal testing is necessary. I just don’t like to stare at it.”

Lamai said nothing.

“Dr. Grace,” Stratt said. “Stop being an asshole. Dr. Lamai, please bring us up to speed.”

Lamai pointed to a set of metal arms over the nearest test monkey. “We developed these automated coma-monitoring and care stations when we believed we would have tens of thousands of patients. It never came to pass.”

“Do they work?” Stratt asked.

“Our original design was not intended to be fully independent. It would handle everything routine, but if it encountered a problem it could not solve, a human doctor would be alerted.”

She walked along the line of unconscious monkeys. “We are making significant progress on the fully automated version. This armature is run by extremely high-end software being developed in Bangkok. It will care for a subject in a coma. It watches their vitals, applies whatever medical care is needed, feeds them, monitors their fluids, and so on. It would still be better to have an actual doctor present. But this is a close second.”

“Are they artificial intelligence of some kind?” Stratt asked.

“No,” said Lamai. “We do not have time to develop a complicated neural network. This is a strictly procedural algorithm. Very complex, but not AI at all. We have to be able to test it in thousands of ways and know exactly how it responds and why. We can’t do that with a neural network.”

“I see.”

She pointed to some diagrams on the wall. “Our most important breakthrough was, unfortunately, the undoing of our company. We successfully isolated the genetic markers that indicate long-term coma resistance. We can run a simple blood test to find out. And, as you know, once we tested this on the general population, we learned that very, very few people actually have those genes.”

“Couldn’t you still help those people, though?” I asked. “I mean, sure it’s only one in seven thousand people, but it’s a start, right?”

Lamai shook her head. “Unfortunately, no. This is an elective procedure. There is no pressing medical need to be unconscious throughout chemotherapy. In fact, it adds a small amount of risk. So there just would not be enough customers to sustain a company.”

Stratt rolled up her sleeve. “Test my blood for the genes. I’m curious.”

Lamai was briefly taken aback. “V-Very well, Ms. Stratt.” She walked over to a rolling supply cart and got a blood-draw kit. Someone this important wasn’t used to doing actual medical grunt work. But Stratt was Stratt.

Still, Lamai was no slouch. She got the needle into Stratt without delay and on the first try. The blood flowed into the tube. When the blood draw was complete, Stratt rolled down her sleeve. “Grace. You’re up next.”

“Why?” I asked. “I’m not volunteering.”

“To set an example,” she said. “I want everyone on this project, even tangentially related, to get tested. Astronauts are a rare breed, and only one in seven thousand of them will be coma-resistant. We might not have enough qualified candidates. We need to be ready to expand the pool.”

“It’s a suicide mission,” I said. “It’s not like we’ll have a line of people saying, ‘Oh, me! Please! Please me! Pick me!’ ”

“Actually, we do have that,” Stratt said.

Lamai poked me in the arm. I looked away. I get a little queasy when I see my blood squirting into a tube. “What do you mean, we have that?”

“We’ve already had tens of thousands of volunteers. All with the complete understanding that it’s a one-way trip.”

“Wow,” I said. “How many of them are insane or suicidal?”

“Probably a lot. But there are hundreds of experienced astronauts on the list too. Astronauts are brave people, willing to risk their life for science. Many of them are willing to give their life for humanity. I admire them.”

“Hundreds,” I say. “Not thousands. We’ll be lucky if even one of those astronauts qualifies.”

“We’re already counting on a lot of luck,” said Stratt. “May as well hope for some more.”

Shortly after college, my girlfriend Linda moved in with me. The relationship only lasted eight months beyond that and was a total disaster. But that’s not relevant right now.

When she moved in, I was shocked by the sheer volume of random junk she felt necessary to bring into our small apartment. Box after box of stuff she had accumulated over decades of never throwing anything out.

Linda was absolutely Spartan compared to Rocky.

He’s brought in so much crap we don’t have places to store it all.

Almost the entire dormitory is full of duffel-bag things made of a canvas-like material. They are random muddy colors. When visual aesthetic doesn’t matter, you just get whatever colors the manufacturing process makes. I don’t even know what’s in all of them. He doesn’t explain. Every time I think we might be done, he brings more bags in.

Well, I say “he” brings them in, but it’s me. He hangs out in his ball, magnetically attached to the wall, while I do all the work. Again, this is very reminiscent of Linda.

“This is a lot of things,” I say.

“Yes yes,” he says. “I need these things.”

“A lot of things.”

“Yes yes. Understand. Things in tunnel is last things.”

“Okay,” I grumble. I float back to the tunnel and grab the last few soft boxes. I maneuver them through the cockpit and lab down to the dormitory. I find a spot to cram them. There’s very little space left. I vaguely wonder how much mass we just added to my ship.

I manage to keep the area near my bunk clear. And there’s a spot on the floor that Rocky picked out as his sleeping locale. The rest of the room is a mad tangle of soft boxes taped to each other, the wall, the other bunks, and anything else that would keep them from floating loose.

“Are we done?”

“Yes. Now detach tunnel.”

I groan. “You made the tunnel. You detach it.”

“How I detach tunnel, question? Me inside ball.”

“Well, how do I do it? I don’t understand xenonite.”

He made a turning motion with two of his arms. “Rotate tunnel.”

“Okay, okay.” I grab my EVA suit. “I’ll do it. Jerk.”

“No understand last word.”

“Not important.” I climb into the suit and close the rear flap.

Rocky is surprisingly adept at doing things with a couple of magnets from inside a ball.

Each of his duffels has a metal pad on it. He’s able to climb along the pile and rearrange it as needed. Occasionally, a bag he’s using for purchase comes loose and he floats off. When that happens, he calls me and I put him back.

I hang on to my bunk and watch him do his thing. “Okay, step one. Astrophage sampling.”

“Yes yes.” He holds two hands in front of him and moves one around the other. “Planet move around Tau. Astrophage go there from Tau. Same at Eridani. Astrophage make more Astrophage with carbon dioxide there.”

“Yes,” I say. “Did you get a sample?”

“No. My ship had device for this. But device broke.”

“You couldn’t fix it?”

“Device not malfunction. Device broke. Fell off ship during trip. Device gone.”

“Oh! Wow. Why did it break off?”

He wiggles his carapace. “Not know. Many things break. My people make ship very hurry. No time to make sure all things work good.”

Deadline-induced quality issues: a problem all over the galaxy.

“I tried to make replacement. Failed. Tried. Failed. Tried. Failed. I put ship in path of Astrophage. Maybe some get stuck on hull. But robot on hull no can find any. Astrophage very small.”

His carapace slumps down. His elbows are above the level of his breathing holes. Sometimes he dips his carapace when sad, but I’ve never seen him dip it this far.

His voice drops an octave. “Fail fail fail. I am repair Eridian. I not science Eridian. Smart smart smart science Eridians died.”

“Hey…don’t think of it like that…” I say.

“No understand.”

“Uh…” I pull myself over to his pile of bags. “You’re alive. And you’re here. And you haven’t given up.”

But his voice remains low. “I try so many times. Fail so many times. Not good at science.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m a science human. You’re good at making and fixing things. Together we’ll figure this out.”

He raises his carapace a bit. “Yes. Together. You have device to sample Astrophage, question?”

The External Collection Unit. I remember it from my first day in the control room. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but that’s got to be it. “Yes. I have a device for this.”

“Relief! I try so long. So many times. Fail.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Much time here. Much time alone.”

“How long were you here alone?”

He pauses. “Need new words.”

I pull my laptop off the wall. We run into new words every day, but they’re happening fewer and fewer times per day. That’s something.

I launch the frequency analyzer and bring up my dictionary spreadsheet. “Ready.”

“Seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-six seconds is ♩♫♩♪♪. Erid rotate one circle in one ♩♫♩♪♪.”

I immediately recognize the number. I’d worked it out back when I was studying Rocky’s clock. 7,776 is six to the fifth power. It’s exactly how many Eridian seconds it takes to wrap an Eridian clock around to all zeroes again. They divided their day into a very convenient and (to them) metric number of seconds. I can follow that.

“Eridian day.” I enter it into my dictionary. “A planet rotating once is a ‘day.’ ”

“Understand,” he says.

“Erid circles Eridani one time every 198.8 Eridian days. 198.8 Eridian days is ♫♩♪♫♪.”

“Year,” I say, and enter it. “A planet going around a star once is one year. So that’s an Eridian year.”

“We stay with Earth units or you get confused. How long is Earth day, question? And how many Earth days is one Earth year, question?”

“One Earth day is 86,400 seconds. One Earth year is 365.25 Earth days.”

“Understand,” he says. “I am here forty-six years.”

“Forty-six years?!” I gasp. “Earth years?!”

“I am here forty-six Earth years, yes.”

He’s been stuck in this system for longer than I’ve been alive.

“How…how long do Eridians live?”

He wiggled a claw. “Average is six hundred eighty-nine years.”

“Earth years?”

“Yes,” he says a little sharply. “Always Earth units. You are bad at math, so always Earth units.”

I can’t even speak for a moment.

“How many years have you been alive?”

“Two hundred ninety-one years.” He pauses. “Yes. Earth years.”

Holy cow. Rocky is older than the United States. He was born around the same time as George Washington.

He’s not even that old for his species. There are old Eridians out there who were alive when Columbus discovered (a bunch of people already living in) North America.

“Why you so surprised, question?” Rocky asks. “How long do humans live, question?”