Project Hail Mary

Chapter 17

I wake up with Rocky staring at me.

It happens every morning now. But it never stops being creepy.

How do I know that a pentagonally symmetrical creature with no eyes is “staring” at me? I just know. Something in the body language.

“You awake,” he says.

“Yeah.” I step out of bed and stretch. “Food!”

The arms reach up and hand me a hot box. I open it up and take a peek. Looks like eggs and sausage.

“Coffee.”

The arms dutifully hand me a cup of coffee. It’s kind of cool that the arms will hand me a cup when there’s gravity, but a pouch when there isn’t. I’ll remember this when writing up the Hail Mary’s Yelp review.

I look to Rocky. “You don’t have to watch me sleep. It’s okay.”

He turns his attention to a worktable in his partition of the dormitory. “Eridian culture rule. Must watch.” He picks up a device and tinkers with it.

Ah, the c-word. “Culture.” We have an unspoken agreement that cultural things just have to be accepted. It ends any minor dispute. “Do it my way because it’s how I was raised,” basically. We haven’t run into anything where our cultures clash…yet.

I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. Rocky doesn’t say anything to me during that time. He never does. Eridian courtesy.

“Trash,” I say.

The arms collect my empty cup and meal package.

I head up to the control room and settle into the pilot’s seat. I bring up the telescope view on the main screen. Planet Adrian sits in the center. I’ve been watching it grow larger and larger for the past ten days. The closer we get, the more I respect Rocky’s astronomy skills. All of his observations on its motion and mass have been spot-on.

Hopefully his gravity calculation is right too. Or we’ll have a very short and painful attempt to orbit.

Adrian is a pale-green planet with wispy white clouds in the upper atmosphere. I can’t see the ground at all. Again, I’m amazed at the software that must have gone into this ship’s computers. We are spinning around as we hurtle through space. But the image on-screen is rock solid.

“We’re getting close,” I say. Rocky is two floors below me, but I speak at a normal volume. I know he can hear it just fine.

“You know air yet, question?” Rocky calls out. Just as I know his hearing prowess, he knows my hearing limitations.

“I’ll try again right now,” I say.

I switch to the Spectrometer screen. The Hail Mary has been incredibly reliable in almost every way, but you can’t expect everything to work perfectly. The spectrometer has been acting up. I think it has something to do with the digitizer. I’ve been trying it every day, and it keeps saying it can’t get enough data to analyze.

I zero in on Adrian and give it another go. The closer we get, the more reflected light we’ll get, and maybe it’ll be enough for the spectrometer to tell me what Adrian’s atmosphere is made of.

ANALYZING…

ANALYZING…

ANALYZING…

ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

“It worked!” I say.

“Worked, question?!” Rocky says, a full octave higher than normal. He scampers up his tunnels to the control-room bulb. “What is Adrian air, question?”

I read the results off the screen. “Looks like it’s…91 percent carbon dioxide, 7 percent methane, 1 percent argon, and the rest are trace gases. It’s a pretty thick atmosphere too. Those are all clear gases, but I can’t see the planet’s surface.”

“Normally you can see surface of planet from space, question?”

“If the atmosphere lets light through, yes.”

“Human eyes are amazing organ. Jealous.”

“Well, not amazing enough. I can’t see Adrian’s surface. When air gets really thick, it stops letting light through. Anyway, that’s not important. The methane—that’s weird.”

“Explain.”

“Methane doesn’t last. It breaks apart very fast in sunlight. So how is methane present?”

“Geology creates methane. Carbon dioxide plus minerals plus water plus heat makes methane.”

“Yes. Possible,” I say. “But there’s a lot of methane. Eight percent of a very thick atmosphere. Can geology make that much?”

“You have different theory, question?”

I rub the back of my neck. “No. Not really. It is odd, though.”

“Discrepancy is science. You think about discrepancy. Make theory. You is science human.”

“Yes. I’ll think about it.”

“How long until orbit, question?”

I switch to the Navigation console. We’re right on course, and the orbital-insertion burn is scheduled for twenty-two hours from now. “Just under one day,” I say.

“Excitement,” he says. “Then we sample Astrophage at Adrian. You ship sampler working well, question?”

“Yes,” I say, with no way to know if I’m telling the truth. There’s no reason for Rocky to know I only vaguely understand the operation of my own ship.

I flip through the science instruments until I land on the controls for the External Collection Unit. I look at the diagram on the screen. It’s simple enough. The sampler is a rectangular box. When activated, it will pivot up to be perpendicular to the hull. Then, doors on both sides of the rectangle will open up. Inside, there’s a bunch of sticky resin—ready to catch anything that flies in.

That’s it. Flypaper. Fancy space flypaper, but just flypaper.

“After collection, how sample enter ship, question?”

Simple doesn’t mean convenient. As far as I can tell, there’s no automated system to do anything with the sample. “I have to go get it.”

“Humans are amaze. You leave ship.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Eridians never bothered to invent spacesuits. Why would they? Space is devoid of sensory input to them. It would be like a human with scuba gear diving into an ocean of black paint. There’s just no reason to do it. Eridians use hull robots for EVA work. The Hail Mary doesn’t have one of those, so any EVA work has to be done by me.

“Amaze is wrong word,” he says. “Amaze is compliment. Better word is ♫♪♫♪.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It is when person not act normal. Danger to self.”

“Ah,” I say, adding the new chord into my language database. “Crazy. My word for that is ‘crazy.’ ”

“Crazy. Humans are crazy.”

I shrug.

“Gosh darn it!” I said.

“Language!” came the voice over the radio. “Seriously, though, what happened?”

The sample vial fell gently away from my hand to the bottom of the pool. It took several seconds to fall 3 feet but, wearing this EVA suit at the bottom of the world’s largest swimming pool, I had no chance of reaching out to grab it.

“I dropped vial number three.”

“Okay,” said Forrester. “That’s three vials so far. We’re going to have to work on the clamper tool.”

“Might not be the tool. Might just be me.”

The tool in my awkwardly gloved hand was far from perfect, but still pretty ingenious. It turned the clumsy pawing of an EVA suit glove into fine manipulation at the other end. All I had to do was squeeze a trigger with my index finger and the clamp constricted by 2 millimeters. If I squeezed a different trigger with my middle finger, it would rotate up to 90 degrees clockwise. My ring and pinkie fingers made it tilt forward up to 90 degrees.

“Stand by, I’m checking the video,” said Forrester.

NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Johnson Space Center was a marvel of engineering in itself. The gigantic swimming pool was large enough to fit a full-size replica of the International Space Station inside. They used it to train astronauts on zero-g maneuvering while in EVA suits.

After countless meetings (that I was unfortunately forced to attend), the microbiology community convinced Stratt the mission needed custom-designed tools. She agreed, on the condition that none of them be mission-critical. She was resolute on having all the important stuff be off-the-shelf products with millions of hours of consumer testing.

And, being her little science lapdog, it fell to me to test out the IVME kit.

IVME was an acronym that stood for four words God never intended to be together: “in vacuo microbiology equipment.” Astrophage lives in space. We could study them on Earth in our atmosphere all we wanted, but we wouldn’t get the full picture of how they worked until we studied them in vacuum and in zero g. The crew of the Hail Mary would need these tools.

I stood in one corner of the NBL, the imposing figure of ISS behind me. Two scuba divers floated nearby, ready to rescue me in the event of an emergency.

NASA had sunk a metal lab table into the pool for me. The biggest problem wasn’t making equipment that worked in vacuum—though they did have to completely redesign pipettes because there’s no suction force in space. The problem was the ham-fisted EVA gloves the user had to wear. Astrophage may like vacuum, but human bodies certainly don’t.

But hey, at least I was learning a lot about how Russian EVA suits worked.

Yes, Russian. Not American. Stratt listened to several experts and they all agreed the Russian Orlan EVA suit was the safest and most reliable. So that’s what the mission would use.

“Okay, I see what happened,” said Forrester through the headset. “You told the clamp to tilt yaw, but it released instead. The internal microcable wires must be tangled up. I’ll be right there. Can you surface and bring the clamp with you?”

“Sure thing.” I waved to the two divers and pointed upward. They nodded and helped me to the surface.

I got hoisted out of the pool by a crane assembly and placed on the deck nearby. Several techs came forward and helped me out of the suit. Though it was pretty easy—I just stepped out the back panel. Got to love chrysalis suits.

Forrester came from the control room next door and collected the tool. “I’ll make some changes and we can try again in a couple of hours. I got a call while you were in the pool; you’re needed in Building 30. Shapiro and DuBois have a couple-hour break while they reset the flight-control simulators. No rest for the wicked. Stratt wants you over there training them on Astrophage.”

“Copy that, Houston,” I said. The world might have been ending, but being at NASA’s main campus was too awesome for me not to be excited.

I left the NBL and walked to Building 30. They would have sent a car if I’d asked, but I didn’t want one. It was only a ten-minute walk. Besides, I loved walking around in my country’s space history.

I walked in, through security, and onward to a small conference room they’d set up. Martin DuBois, in his blue flight uniform, stood and shook my hand. “Dr. Grace. Good to see you again.”

His meticulous paperwork and notes were arrayed in front of him. Annie Shapiro’s sloppy notes and wadded papers lay strewn on the table next to him, but her seat was empty.

“Where’s Annie?” I asked.

He sat back down. Even while seated, he kept a firm, perfect posture. “She had to use the facilities. She should be back shortly.”

I sat down and opened my backpack. “You know, you can call me Ryland. We’re all PhDs here. I think first names are fine.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Grace. That is not how I was raised. However, you may call me Martin if you wish.”

“Thanks.” I pulled out my laptop and fired it up. “How have you been lately?”

“I have been well, thank you. Dr. Shapiro and I have begun a sexual relationship.”

I paused. “Um. Okay.”

“I thought it prudent to inform you.” He opened his notebook and set a pen beside it. “There should be no secrets within the core mission group.”

“Sure, sure,” I said. “I mean. It shouldn’t be a problem. You’re the primary science position and Annie’s the alternate. There’s no scenario where you would both be on the mission. But…I mean…your relationship…”

“Yes, you are correct,” DuBois said. “I will be setting out on a suicide mission in under a year. And if for some reason I am deemed unfit or unable, she will go on the suicide mission. We are aware of this, and we know this relationship can only end in death.”

“We live in bleak times,” I said.

He folded his hands in front of him. “Dr. Shapiro and I do not see it that way. We are enjoying very active sexual encounters.”

“Yeah, okay, I don’t need to know—”

“No need for condoms either. She is on birth control and we have both had extremely thorough medical examinations as part of the program.”

I typed on my computer, hoping he’d change the subject.

“It’s quite pleasurable.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“In any event, I thought you should know.”

“Yeah, no, sure.”

The door opened, and Annie trotted in.

“Sorry! Sorry! I had to pee. Like…so bad,” said the world’s smartest and most accomplished microbiologist. “My back teeth were floating!”

“Welcome back, Dr. Shapiro. I’ve told Dr. Grace about our sexual relationship.”

I put my head in my hands.

“Cool,” said Annie. “Yeah, we’ve got nothing to hide.”

“In any event,” said DuBois, “if I remember the previous lesson correctly, we were working on the cellular biology within Astrophage mitochondria.”

I cleared my throat. “Yes. Today I’ll be talking about the Astrophage’s Krebs cycle. It’s identical to what we find in Earth mitochondria, but with one additional step—”

Annie held up her hand. “Oh, sorry. One more thing—” She turned to DuBois. “Martin, we have about fifteen minutes of personal time after this lesson and before our next training exercise. Want to meet up in the bathroom down the hall and have sex?”

“I find that agreeable,” said DuBois. “Thank you, Dr. Shapiro.”

“Okay, cool.”

They both looked to me, ready for their lesson. I waited a few seconds to make sure there was no more oversharing, but they seemed content. “Okay, so the Krebs cycle in Astrophage has a variant—wait. Do you call her Dr. Shapiro while having sex?”

“Of course. That’s her name.”

“I kind of like it,” she said.

“I’m sorry I asked,” I said. “Now, the Krebs cycle…”

Rocky’s data about Planet Adrian was dead-on. It’s 3.93 times Earth’s mass and has a radius of 10,318 kilometers (almost double Earth’s). It’s plugging along around Tau Ceti with an average orbital velocity of 35.9 kilometers per second. Plus, he had the position of the planet correct to within 0.00001 percent. That data was all I needed to work out the insertion thrust needed.

It’s a good thing those numbers were right. If they hadn’t been, there would have been some serious scrambling when the orbital insertion went wrong. Maybe even some dying.

Of course, to use the spin drives at all, I had to take us out of centrifuge mode.

Rocky and I float in the control room, he in his ceiling bulb and me in the pilot’s seat. I watch the camera-feed screen with a stupid grin on my face.

I’m at another planet! I shouldn’t be this excited. I’ve been at another star for the past several weeks. But that’s kind of esoteric. Tau Ceti is pretty much like the sun. It’s bright, you can’t get too close to it, and it even emits the same general range of frequencies. For some reason, being at a new planet is much more exciting.

The wispy clouds of Adrian coast by beneath us. Or, more accurately, the wispy clouds barely move at all and we zoom by overhead. Adrian has a higher gravity than Earth, so our orbital velocity is just over 12 kilometers per second—far more than what’s needed to orbit Earth.

The pale-green planet that I’ve been watching for eleven days has a lot more detail now that we’re on top of it. It’s not just green. There are dark and light bands of green wrapping around it. Just like Jupiter and Saturn. But unlike those two gas-giant leviathans, Adrian is a rocky world. Thanks to Rocky’s notes, we know the radius and mass, which means we know its density. And it’s far too dense to be just gas. There’s a surface down there, I just can’t see it.

Man, what I wouldn’t give for a lander!

Realistically, it wouldn’t do me any good. Even if I had some way of landing on Adrian, the atmosphere would crush me dead. It’d be like landing on Venus. Or Erid, for that matter. Heck, in that case, I wish Rocky had a lander. The pressure down there might not be too much for an Eridian.

Speaking of Erid, Rocky’s calibrating some kind of device in his control-room bubble. It looks almost like a gun. I don’t think we’ve started a space war, so I assume it’s something else.

He holds the device with one hand, taps it with another, and uses two more to hold a rectangular panel that is connected to the device by a short cable. He uses his remaining hand to anchor himself at a handhold.

He makes some more adjustments to the device with what looks like a screwdriver, and suddenly the panel springs to life. It was completely flat, but now has a texture to it. He waves the gun part left and right and the patterns on the screen move left and right.

“Success! It functions!”

I lean over the edge of the pilot’s seat for a better look. “What’s that?”

“Wait.” He points the gun part at my external camera readout screen. He adjusts a couple of controls and the pattern on the rectangle settles into a circle. Looking closer, I see some parts of the circle are a little more raised than others. It looks like a relief map.

“This device hear light. Like human eye.”

“Oh. It’s a camera.”

“♫♪♫,” he says quickly. Now we have “camera” in our vocabulary.

“It analyze light and show as texture.”

“Oh, and you can sense that texture?” I say. “Cool.”

“Thank.” He attaches the camera to the bulb wall and fixes its angle to point at my central screen. “What are wavelengths of light humans can see, question?”

“All wavelengths between 380 nanometers and 740 nanometers.” Most people don’t just know that off the top of their head. But most people aren’t junior high schoolteachers who have giant charts of the visible spectrum on their classroom walls.

“Understand,” he says. He turns a few knobs on his device. “Now I ‘see’ what you see.”

“You’re an amazing engineer.”

He waves a claw dismissively. “No. Camera is old technology. Display is old technology. Both were on my ship for science. I only modify to use inside.”

I think Eridians have a lot of modesty in their culture. Either that, or Rocky is one of those people who just can’t take a compliment.

He points to the circle on his display. “This is Adrian, question?”

I check the exact region of Adrian he’s pointing at, then compare to my screen. “Yes, and that part is ‘green.’ ”

“I not have word for this.”

Of course the Eridian language has no words for colors. Why would it? I never thought of colors as a mysterious thing. But if you’ve never heard of them before, I guess they’re pretty weird. We have names for frequency ranges in the electromagnetic spectrum. Then again, my students all have eyes and they were still amazed when I told them “x-rays,” “microwaves,” “Wi-Fi,” and “purple” were all just wavelengths of light.

“You name it then,” I say.

“Yes yes. I name this color: middle-rough. My display pattern is smooth for high-frequency light. Rough for low-frequency light. This color is middle-rough.”

“Understand,” I say. “And yes, green is right in the middle of the wavelengths humans can see.”

“Good good,” he says. “Is sample ready, question?”

We’ve been in orbit for about a day now and I activated the sampler right when we got here. I flip to the External Collection Unit screen. It reads as fully functional and even reports how long it’s been open: 21 hours and 17 minutes.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You get.”

“Ugh,” I groan. “EVAs are so much work!”

“Lazy human. Go get!”

I laugh. He has a slightly different tone when he’s joking around. It took a long time for me to identify. It’s like…it’s in the timing between words. They don’t have the same cadence. I can’t really put my finger on it, but I know when I hear it.

From the External Collection Unit screen, I order the sampler to close its doors and return to its flat configuration. The panel reports that it’s been done, and I confirm it with hull cameras.

I climb into the Orlan EVA suit, enter the airlock, and cycle it.

Adrian is absolutely gorgeous in person. I stay out on the hull staring at the huge world for several minutes. Bands of dark and light green cover the orb, and the reflected glow from Tau Ceti is simply breathtaking. I could stare at it for hours.

I probably got to do this with Earth too. I wish I could remember. Man, I really wish I could remember that. It must have been every bit as beautiful.

“You out long time,” comes Rocky’s voice through the headset. “You are safe, question?”

I set up the EVA panel to always play my radio feed over speakers in the control room. Plus, I taped a headset microphone to Rocky’s control-room bulb and set it to be voice-activated. All he has to do is talk and it broadcasts.

“I’m looking at Adrian. It’s pretty.”

“Look later. Get sample now.”

“You’re pushy.”

“Yes.”

I climb along the hull, bathed in Adrian-light. Everything has a light-green tinge to it. I find the sample collector right where it’s supposed to be.

It’s not as big as I expected. It’s a half-meter square or so. There’s a lever beside it with red and yellow stripes all around it. Text on the lever reads PULL LEVER TO RELEASE ECU—ПОТЯНУТЬ РЫЧАГ ЧТОБЫ ОСВОБОДИТЬ ECU—拉杆释放ECU.

I clip a tether to a convenient hole on the unit (presumably put there for this exact use), and pull the lever over to the open position.

The sampler floats free of the hull.

I work my way back across the hull to the airlock with the sampler in tow. I cycle my way back in and climb out of the suit.

“All is good, question?” Rocky asks.

“Yes.”

“Good!” Rocky says. “You inspect with science gear, question?”

“Yes. Now.” I bring up the Centrifuge panel. “Prepare for gravity.”

“Yes, gravity.” He grips handholds with three of his claws. “For science gear.”

Once the centrifuge spins up, I get to work in the lab.

Rocky scurries into his tunnel in the lab ceiling and watches intently. Well, not “watches.” Listens intently, I guess.

I lay the sampler on the lab table and open one of the panels. This is the side that faced Tau Ceti. I smile at what I see.

I crane my head to look up at Rocky. “This panel was white when we started; now it’s black.”

“Not understand.”

“The sampler’s color changed to the color of Astrophage. We got a lot of Astrophage.”

“Good good!”

Over the next two hours, I scrape everything off of both halves of the sampler, putting each group in their own containers. Then I give each sample a good rinse with water and let the Astrophage settle to the bottom. I’m sure a lot of that sticky substance came with the Astrophage when I scraped it off, and I want it gone.

I perform a series of tests. First I run a few Astrophage through DNA-marker testing to see if they are identical to the Astrophage found at Earth. They are—at least, the markers I checked are identical.

Then I check overall population of each sample.

“Interesting,” I say.

Rocky perks up. “What is interesting, question?”

“Both halves had approximately the same population.”

“Not expected,” he says.

“Not expected,” I agree.

One side of the sampler pointed toward Tau Ceti, while the other pointed toward Adrian. Astrophage migrate to breed. For every frisky Astrophage that heads to Adrian with a twinkle in its eye, two should return. So, broadly speaking, there should be twice as many Astrophage going from Adrian to Tau Ceti as there are going the other direction. But that’s not what’s happening. The outgoing population is the same as the incoming population.

Rocky climbs along the tunnel that runs across the roof of the lab to get a better look. “Flaw in counting, question? How you count, question?”

“I measure total heat energy output of both samples.” It’s a surefire way to know how much Astrophage you’re dealing with. Each one insists on being 96.415 degrees Celsius. The more of them there are, the more total heat will be absorbed by the metal plate I put them on.

He taps two claws together. “That is good method. Population must be same. How, question?”

“I don’t know.” I smear some of the “returning” Astrophage (that is, the Astrophage that was on the way from Adrian to Tau Ceti) onto a slide. I take it to a microscope.

Rocky scampers along his tunnel to keep up. “That is what, question?”

“Microscope,” I say. “It helps me see very small things. I can see Astrophage with this.”

“Amaze.”

I take a look at the sample and gasp. There’s a lot more than just Astrophage in there!

The familiar black dots of Astrophage are all over the sample. But so are translucent cells, smaller bacteria-looking things, and larger amoeba-like things. There are thin things, fat things, spiral things…too many to count. Too many different kinds of things to count. It’s like looking at all the life in a drop of lake water!

“Wow!” I say. “Life! There’s a whole bunch of life in here! Not just Astrophage. A bunch of different species!”

Rocky literally bounces off the tunnel walls. “Amaze! Amaze amaze amaze!”

“Adrian isn’t just a planet,” I say. “Adrian is a planet with life, like Earth or Erid! That explains where the methane comes from. Life makes methane!”

Rocky freezes. Then he shoots bolt-upright. I’ve never seen him raise his carapace so high. “Life is also reason for population discrepancy! Life is reason!”

“What?” I say. He’s more excited than I’ve ever seen him. “How? I don’t understand.”

He taps the tunnel wall with his claw, pointing at my microscope. “Some life on Adrian EATS Astrophage! Population in balance. Natural order. This explains all things!”

“Oh my God!” I gasp. My heart just about beats out of my chest. “Astrophage has a predator!”

There’s a whole biosphere at Adrian. Not just Astrophage. There’s even an active biosphere within the Petrova line.

This is where it all started. Has to be. How else can we explain countless extremely different life-forms that all evolved to migrate in space? They all came from the same genetic root.

Astrophage was just one of many, many life-forms that evolved here. And with all life, there is variance and predation.

Adrian isn’t just some planet that Astrophage infected. It’s the Astrophage homeworld! And it’s the home of Astrophage’s predators.

“This is amazing!” I yell. “If we find a predator…”

“We take home!” Rocky says, two octaves higher than normal. “It eat Astrophage, breed, eat more Astrophage, breed, eat more more more! Stars saved!”

“Yes!” I press my knuckles against the tunnel wall. “Fist-bump!”

“What, question?”

I rap the tunnel again. “This. Do this.”

He emulates my gesture against the wall opposite my hand.

“Celebration!” I say.

“Celebration!”