Project Hail Mary

Chapter 20

Rocky’s body heats up the whole room.

I can barely move, the force of the centrifuge is so great.

“Nnnn!” I groan, pushing myself up off the cracked monitor. I drag myself across the shards to the next monitor over. I try not to lift too much of my body up at a time—I have to save my strength.

I slide my finger onto the monitor from the edge and tap the screen-select buttons at the bottom. I’ve got one chance at this.

I remember the navigation controls. The manual-control section has a button to zero out all rotation. That’s mighty tempting right now, but I can’t risk it. The fuel bay is wide open, I’ve jettisoned a couple of pods, and I have no idea what other damage may have been done. The last thing I want to do is fire up any spin drives—even the little ones that do attitude control.

I bring up the Centrifuge screen. It blinks red and white, still angry about the excessive tumble the ship is undergoing. With effort, I dismiss the warning, then enter into manual mode. There are a bunch of “hey, don’t do this” kind of dialogs, but I dismiss them all. Soon I have direct control over the cable spools. I set them spinning at max speed.

The room spins and tilts in weird ways. My inner ears and my eyes are not enjoying the discrepancy. I know it’s because the two halves of the ship are separating and that has nasty effects on the forces I feel here in the control room. But logic doesn’t do any good in this situation. I turn my head and vomit on the wall.

After a few seconds, the force reduces dramatically. Much more manageable now. Less than 1 g, actually. All thanks to the magic of centrifuge math.

The force you feel in a centrifuge is inverse to the square of the radius. By spooling out the cables, I made the radius go from 20 meters (half the length of the ship) to 75 meters (distance from the control room to the center of mass with full cable extension). I don’t know how much force I was dealing with before, but now it’s one-fourteenth as much as it was.

I’m still pinned against the monitor, though not nearly as hard. I estimate about half a g. I can breathe again.

Everything feels upside down. I used the centrifuge in manual mode, so it did exactly what I told it to do and nothing else: It extended the cables. It did not rotate the crew compartment to face inward. The centrifuge pushes everything toward the nose of the crew compartment. The lab is “up” from me now, and the dormitory is even farther “up.”

I don’t even know where the manual controls for the crew-compartment rotation are and I don’t have time to look for them. For now, I’ll have to work in upside-down land.

I bound to the airlock and open it up. Everything is a shambles inside, but I don’t care. I untangle the wadded-up EVA suit and detach the gloves. I put them on.

Back in the control room, I stand on the consoles (the control panels are “down” now). I hope I’m not damaging things too much. I position myself over Rocky’s body, grab both sides of his carapace with my gloved hands, and lift.

Good. God.

I put him back down. If I try to move him like that, I’ll throw out my back. But I did lift him, however briefly. It felt like 200 pounds. Thank god we’re in one-half gravity. He’d weigh 400 pounds at full gravity.

I’ll need more than my hands to lift him.

I throw off the gloves, bounce back to the airlock, and fling items aside until I find the safety tethers. I wrap two tethers under Rocky’s carapace and loop them over my shoulders. I burn my arms in several places during the process, but I’ll deal with that later.

I clip each tether to itself under my armpits. This won’t be comfortable and it definitely won’t look cool, but my hands will be free and I’ll be lifting with my legs.

I reach through the hatchway to the lab with both hands and get ahold of the closest rung of the ladder. It’s slow going at first. There’s no ladder in the control room. Why would there be? No one thought it would be upside down.

My shoulders scream in pain. This is not a well-designed backpack with a properly distributed load. It’s 200 pounds of alien held up by two thin straps digging into my collarbones. And I just have to hope the melting point of the nylon tethers is higher than Rocky’s body temperature.

I grunt and grimace, one rung at a time, until I get my feet into the lab. I use the edge of the hatchway to brace my feet and pull Rocky up with the straps.

The lab is a disaster. Everything is in piles all over the ceiling. Only the table and chairs remain on the floor above me—they’re bolted to the floor. And, thankfully, most of the more delicate equipment is bolted to them. However, that delicate off-the-shelf lab equipment wasn’t designed to be rattled around like popcorn and subjected to 6 or 7 g’s. I wonder how many things are hopelessly broken.

The gravity is less up here. I’m closer to the center of the centrifuge. The higher I get the easier things will be.

I kick lab supplies and equipment out of my way and drag Rocky to the dormitory hatchway. I repeat the painful process I just did a moment ago. The force is less, but it still hurts. Again, I use the hatchway as a bracing point to pull Rocky into the room.

My little section of the dormitory barely fits us both. Rocky’s section is a mess, just like the lab. His workbench wasn’t bolted in place, so it’s on the ceiling now.

I drag him across the ceiling and I get up on my bunk. It has swiveled completely around, thanks to its rocking pivot mounting. It’s a handy platform for reaching the airlock between my zone and Rocky’s.

The airlock door sits open on my side. He used it to come save me.

“Man, why did you do that?!” I grouse.

He could have let me die. He should have, really. He could handle the centripetal force, no problem. He could have taken his time, whipped up an invention, and used it to get back control of the ship. Yeah, I know, he’s a good guy and he saved my life, but this isn’t about us. He has a planet to save. Why risk his life and his whole mission for me?

The airlock door doesn’t reach the ceiling, so I’ll have to play “The Floor Is Lava” to get in.

I hop into the airlock from my bunk, then use the straps to pull Rocky in with me. I start to climb back out and that’s when I see the airlock-control panel.

Or, rather, I see the destroyed box that was once the airlock-control panel.

“Oh, come on!” I yell.

Both sides of the airlock had control panels, so either Rocky or I could operate it as needed. But now mine are ruined—probably smacked by some debris flying around during the chaos.

I have to get him back into his environment, but how? I have an idea. It’s not a good idea. There’s an emergency valve in the airlock chamber itself that can let air in from Rocky’s side.

It’s there to cover a very specific edge case. There’s no way I can ever enter Rocky’s area of the ship. I certainly can’t handle his environment, and my EVA suit would be crushed like a grape. But Rocky can come into my area with his homemade ball-spacesuit thing. So, just to be extra safe—just in case there was an emergency while Rocky was in his ball in the airlock—there’s a relief valve that will let the air from his side vent in. It’s a large iron lever, so it can be manipulated with the magnets Rocky carries with him while in the ball.

I look at the lever in the airlock. I glance at the airlock’s door to my compartment and its spinning-wheel lock. I look back to the lever, then back to the door.

I coil my muscles and mentally count to three.

I pull the lever and leap toward my compartment.

Blazing-hot ammonia floods the airlock and dormitory. I slam the airlock door behind me and spin the wheel lock. I hear hissing on the other side but I don’t see anything. I might never see anything again.

My eyes burn like they’re on fire. My lungs feel like a hundred knives are having a dance-off. My skin is numb all along my left side. And my nose—forget it. The smell is so overpowering my sense of smell just gives up.

My throat completely closes off. My body wants nothing to do with the ammonia.

“Com…” I wheeze. “Com…pu…ter…”

I want to die. Pain is everywhere. I climb into my bunk.

“Help!” I wheeze.

“Multiple injuries,” says the computer. “Excessive eye mucus. Blood around the mouth, second-degree burns. Breathing distress. Triage result: intubate.”

The mechanical arms, which thankfully don’t seem to have any problem with being upside down, grab me and something is shoved violently down my throat. I feel a poke on my good arm.

“IV fluids and sedation,” the computer reports.

And then I’m out like a light.

I wake up covered in medical equipment and pain.

There’s an oxygen mask on my face. My right arm has an IV and my left arm is bandaged from wrist to shoulder. It hurts like heck.

Everything else hurts too. Especially my eyes.

But at least I can see. That’s good.

“Computer,” I say with a raspy voice. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Unconsciousness lasted six hours, seventeen minutes.”

I take a deep breath. My lungs feel like they’re coated in tar. Probably phlegm or some other gunk. I look over to Rocky’s area. He’s right where I left him in the airlock.

How can I tell if an Eridian is dead? When Rocky sleeps all movement stops. But that’s also presumably what happens when an Eridian dies.

I spot a pulse-ox monitor on my right index finger.

“Compu—” I cough. “Computer: What is my blood oxygen content?”

“Ninety-one percent.”

“It’ll have to do.” I take the mask off and sit up in bed. My bandaged arm stings with every movement. I pull the various things off of my body.

I open and close my left hand. It’s working. The muscles are only a little bit sore.

I got hit with a quick blast of very hot, very high-pressure ammonia. Most likely, I have chemical burns in my lungs and on my eyes. And probably a physical burn on my arm. My left side took the brunt of the blast.

Twenty-nine atmospheres of pressure at 210 degrees Celsius (over 400 degrees Fahrenheit!). That must be what a grenade feels like. Side note: With no one manning the helm, it’s pure luck we didn’t crash into the planet.

The ship is either in a stable orbit or we escaped Adrian’s gravity entirely. I shake my head. It’s truly ridiculous how much power I have sitting in the fuel bay. To not even know if I’m still near a planet … wow.

I’m lucky to be alive. There’s no other way to put it. Anything I do beyond that moment is a gift from the universe to me. I step off the bed and stand in front of the airlock. Gravity is still at one-half g and everything is still upside down.

What can I do for Rocky?

I sit on the floor opposite his body. I put my hand on the airlock wall. That feels too melodramatic, so I pull it back. Okay, I know the very basics of Eridian biology. That doesn’t make me a doctor.

I grab a tablet and swipe through various documents I’ve made. I don’t remember everything he told me, but at least I took copious notes.

When severely wounded, an Eridian body will shut down so it can try to work on everything at once. I hope Rocky’s little cells are doing their thing in there. And I hope they know how to fix damage done by: (1) dropping air pressure to one twenty-ninth what he evolved to live in, (2) being suddenly exposed to a bunch of oxygen, and (3) being almost 200 degrees colder than his body expects.

I shake off the worry and return to my notes.

“Ah, here!” I say.

There’s the information I need: Those capillaries in his carapace radiator are made of deoxidized metal alloys. The ambient circulatory system pumps his mercury-based blood through those vessels and air passes over them. In Erid’s oxygen-free atmosphere, this makes perfect sense. In ours, it makes a perfect tinderbox.

A bunch of oxygen just passed over very hot metal pipes no thicker than a human hair. They burned. That’s the smoke I saw coming out of Rocky’s vents. His radiator was literally on fire.

Jesus.

The whole organ must be completely full of soot and other combustion products. And the capillaries will be coated in oxides, which ruin heat conductivity. Heck, oxides are insulators. The worst-possible outcome.

Okay. If he’s dead, he’s dead. I can’t do any further harm. But if he’s alive, I have to help. There’s no reason not to try.

But what do I do?

So many pressures. So many temperatures. So many air mixtures. I have to keep track of them all. My own environment, Rocky’s environment, and now the Adrian Astrophage breeding-ground environment too.

But first: gravity. I’m sick of living in The Poseidon Adventure. Time to right this ship.

I make my way back “down” to the control room. The center panel is ruined, but the others work fine. And they’re interchangeable anyway. I’ll mount a replacement in the middle when I have time.

I bring up the Centrifuge screen and poke around at the controls a bit. I finally find the manual controls for the crew-compartment rotation. They were buried pretty deep in the options; I’m glad I didn’t try to find them during the crisis.

I order the crew compartment to rotate. Very, very slowly. I set the rate at 1 degree per second. It takes three minutes to turn around. And I hear a lot of thunks, clunks, and crashes from the lab. I don’t care about any of that. I just want to make sure Rocky doesn’t get further injured. This slow rate should make his body slide along the airlock ceiling, then along the wall, and finally to the floor. That’s the plan, anyway.

Once the rotation is complete, things are back to feeling normal, albeit at half a g. I go back down to the dormitory to check on Rocky. He’s now on the airlock floor, and still right-side up. Good. He slid rather than tumbled.

I really want to work on Rocky, but I have to make sure the adventure that may have killed him wasn’t in vain. I grab the sample container from the ship’s airlock. I’m kind of glad I left it there, honestly. It got cushioned from the crazy sudden accelerations by the EVA suit wadded up with it.

Rocky had the foresight to put readouts on the sampler to tell us what the temperature and pressure inside were. They’re analog dial indicators in Eridian base-six numerology. But I’ve seen enough of that to be able to translate. The inside of the ball is minus 51 degrees Celsius with a pressure of 0.02 atmospheres. And I know from my spectrometry earlier what the atmospheric makeup is.

Okay, that’s the environment I have to duplicate.

I sort through what’s left of the lab. It’s slow going because I only have minimal use of my left arm. But I can use it to help slide things aside, at least. Just no heavy lifting for now.

I find a vacuum container that’s only a little broken. It’s a drum-shaped glass cylinder about a foot in diameter. I patch up the crack with epoxy and give it a test. It’s able to pump the air out and maintain a vacuum. If it can maintain a vacuum, it can maintain 0.02 atmospheres.

I put the sample container inside.

The chemical-storage cabinet is still firmly anchored to the wall. I open it up. Everything is jumbled around inside, of course, but most containers look intact. I grab the small vial of Earth Astrophage.

There’s about a gram in there, included in the supplies for testing purposes. I can always get more if I need it. All I have to do is cut any of the Astrophage-based coolant lines in the hull. But there’s no need for that right now.

The sample is an oily sludge at the bottom of the vial. I open the vial and scoop it up with a cotton swab. (That gram of Astrophage has 100 trillion Joules of energy. Best not to think about it.)

I smear the Astrophage along the inner wall of the vacuum chamber and drop the cotton swab in next to the sample probe.

I pump all the air out of the vacuum chamber.

The chemistry supplies include several small cylinders of gases. Thankfully, steel cylinders are tough, so they survived the game of cosmic pinball we just went through. I add gases into the vacuum chamber, one at a time, through the infeed valve. I want to replicate Adrian’s atmosphere. I pump in carbon dioxide, methane, and even argon. I don’t imagine the argon will matter—it’s a noble gas, so it shouldn’t react with stuff. But that’s what I used to think about xenon, and that turned out to be wrong.

I don’t have any way to chill the air in there to minus 50 degrees, so I’ll just have to hope whatever the life inside can handle Earth room temperature.

I hear a click just as I finish putting the argon in. It’s the sampler. Just as Rocky designed them to do, the little valves opened when the outside pressure matched the pressure at the Astrophage breeding altitude on Adrian. Good old Rocky. Best engineer I’ve ever met.

Okay. I’ve made the sample as safe as I can. The air composition and pressure is as close to its native environment as I could get it, and there’s plenty of Astrophage to eat. If there are any microscopic predators in there, they should be in good shape.

I wipe my brow with my bandaged arm, and immediately regret it. I wince in pain.

“How hard is it, Ryland?!” I seethe to myself. “Stop using your burned-up arm!”

I climb back down the ladder to the dormitory.

“Computer: painkillers.”

The arms reach up and hand me a paper cup with two pills in it and a cup of water. I take the pills without even checking what they are.

I look back at my friend and try to come up with a plan….

It’s been over a day since I shoved Rocky in that airlock and he still hasn’t moved. But I haven’t been wasting my time. I’ve been mad sciencing some inventions in the lab. This kind of gadget creation is really Rocky’s forte, but I give it my best.

I thought about lots of different approaches. But in the end, I think I should let Rocky’s body heal itself as much as possible. I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to operate on a human, let alone an Eridian. His body should know what to do. I just have to let it.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to do nothing at all, though. I have a guess as to what’s going on. And if I’m wrong, my idea for treatment won’t hurt him.

Right now, there’s a bunch of soot and other combustion by-product crap in his radiator organ. So it probably doesn’t work well. If he’s alive at all, it’ll take his body a long time to clear that out. Maybe too long.

So maybe I can help?

I hold the box in my hand. It’s enclosed on five of six sides with the remaining side open. The walls are 4-inch-thick steel. It took me all day to repair the mill and get it working again, but once I did, milling up this box was a breeze.

Inside is a high-powered air pump. Simple as that. I can shoot high-pressure air really hard. I tested it out in the lab and it blew a hole in a 1-millimeter-thick sheet of aluminum from a foot away. It really works. I wish I could claim I’m a genius who made this all from scratch, but the reality is I only made the box. The pump is repurposed from a high-pressure tank.

Also in the box is a battery, a camera, some stepper motors, and a drill. I’ll need all of these things for my plan to work.

I’ve cleaned up the lab, somewhat. Most of the equipment is ruined, but some might be fixable. I cross to the other side of the table, where I have another experiment.

I have a little chip of xenonite—some chaff left over from when we made two hundred thousand chain links. I used a generous application of epoxy to glue it to the tip of a roughed-up drill bit. It’s been setting for over an hour. Should be done.

I pick up the bit and the xenonite comes with it. I use all my strength to try to pull them apart. I can’t.

I nod and smile. This might work.

I do a few more tests with the box. My remote control for the motors works well enough. It’s not true remote control. It’s a bank of switches attached to a plastic container lid. I have wires from the switches going through a tiny hole in the steel, which is in turn filled up with resin. I can turn the power on or off to any of the components in there. That’s my “remote control.” I can only hope the motors don’t have a problem with high heat or ammonia.

I bring everything to the dormitory and prep the epoxy. I stir it together and apply it generously to the edges of the steel box’s open side. I press the box to the airlock wall and hold it in place. Then I just stand there for ten minutes, holding the box in place. I could have taped it to the wall or something while the epoxy set, but I need a really good seal and I don’t want to take any chances. Human hands are better clamps than any tool I might have in the lab.

I gingerly release the box and wait for it to fall. It doesn’t. I poke it a couple of times and it seems pretty solid.

It’s five-minute epoxy, but I’ll give it an hour to fully set.

I return to the lab. I may as well, right? Let’s see what my little alien terrarium is up to.

Nothing much, as it happens. I don’t know what I expected. Little flying saucers whizzing around in the chamber, maybe?

But the cylinder looks exactly like it did before. The sampler sits where I left it. The smear of Astrophage is unchanged. The cotton swab is…

Hey…

I hunker down and take a seat. I squint into the chamber. The cotton swab has changed. Just a little bit. It’s…fluffier.

Sweet! Maybe there’s something on there I could get a look at. I just need to get it under a microscope to—

Oh.

The realization dawns on me. I don’t have any way to extract samples. I just plain overlooked that part.

“Dummy!” I smack my forehead.

I rub my eyes. Between the pain from my burns and the dopiness from the painkillers, it’s hard to concentrate. And I’m tired. One thing I learned back in my graduate school days: When you’re stupid tired, accept that you’re stupid tired. Don’t try to solve things right then. I have a sealed container that I need to get into eventually. I’ll figure out how later.

I pull out my tablet and take photos of the container. Science rule number 1: If something is changing unexpectedly, document it.

Just to be more scientific, I point a webcam at the experiment and set up the computer to take a time-lapse at one frame per second. If anything is happening slowly, I want to know.

I head back to the control room. Where the heck are we?

Some work with the Nav console and I learn we’re still in orbit. It’s stable-ish. This orbit will probably decay over time. No rush, though.

I check all the ship’s systems and do as many diagnostics as I can. The ship did pretty well, despite not being remotely designed to handle this situation.

The two fuel bays I jettisoned aren’t around anymore, but the other seven look to be in good shape. There are cracks in the hull here and there, according to the diagnostics test. But they all seem to be internal. Nothing facing outside, which is good. I don’t want my Astrophage to see Adrian again.

One of the micro-breaches is highlighted in red. I take a closer look. The breach’s location has the computer in a tizzy. It’s in the bulkhead between the fuel area and the edge of the pressure vessel. I can see the concern.

The bulkhead sits between the storage bay below the dormitory and Fuel Bay 4. I go take a look.

Rocky still hasn’t moved. No surprise there. My steel box remains where I put it. I could probably use it now, but I’m resolved to wait the full hour.

I open up the storage panels and pull a bunch of boxes out. I climb into the storage area with a flashlight and toolkit. It’s cramped—barely 3 feet tall. I have to crawl around in there for a good twenty minutes before I finally find the breach. I only spot it because there’s a small frosty buildup around the edges. Air escaping into a vacuum gets really cold really fast. In fact, that ice probably helped slow the leak.

Not that it mattered. The leak is so small it would take weeks to be a problem. And the ship probably has a bunch of spare air in tanks anyway. Still, there’s no reason to just let it leak. I apply a generous helping of epoxy on a small metal patch and seal the breach. I have to hold it for considerably more than five minutes before it sets. Epoxy takes a long time to set when it’s cold, and the bulkhead is below freezing at that spot thanks to the leak. I considered getting a heat gun from the lab but…that’s a lot of work. I just hold the patch for longer. It takes about fifteen minutes.

I climb back down and wince the whole time. My arm hurts nonstop now. It’s a constant sting. It’s been less than an hour, but the painkillers aren’t doing the job anymore.

“Computer! Painkillers!”

“Additional dose available in three hours and four minutes.”

I frown. “Computer: What is the current time?”

“Seven-fifteen p.m., Moscow Standard Time.”

“Computer: Set time to eleven p.m. Moscow Standard Time.”

“Clock set complete.”

“Computer: painkillers.”

The arms hand me a package of pills and a bag of water. I gobble them down. What a stupid system. Astronauts trusted to save the world but not to monitor their painkiller doses? Stupid.

Okay. It’s been long enough. I turn my attention back to the box.

First I’ll need to drill a hole in the xenonite. And that’s where all hell will break loose if things go bad. The general idea here is for the drill inside the box to put a hole in the xenonite and for the box to contain the pressure that rushes in. But you never know. The box might not be held on tight enough.

I wear a medical breathing mask and eye protection. If there’s going to be a jet of superheated, high-pressure ammonia in this room, I need to not die from it.

Earlier I filed down a metal rod to be sort of a spike. The full radius is a little bigger than the drill bit I have readied in the steel box. I hold the spike and hammer at the ready. If the pressure blows the box off, I’ll hammer the spike into the hole and hope it plugs the gap.

Of course, the pressure might not blow the box off entirely. It might just spurt out around the edges of the glue joint. If that happens, I’ll have to smack the box with the hammer until it comes off, then drive in the spike.

Yes, it’s ridiculously dangerous. But I just don’t know if Rocky will survive without help. Maybe I’m being emotional instead of rational. But so what?

I clench the hammer and spike. Then I activate the drill.

It takes so long for that drill to get through the xenonite, I actually calm down out of boredom. It’s only 1 centimeter, but it’s like trying to grind down diamond. I’m lucky the drill bit is hard enough to do anything at all. The camera feed from inside shows slow and steady progress. Instead of drilling like wood or metal, this is more like glass. It breaks off in chips and chunks.

Finally, the bit breaches to the other side. It is immediately launched back into the box and bent sideways by the pressure. There’s a whump as Eridian air rushes into the little box. I squint my eyes. Then, after a few seconds, I open them again.

If the box was going to blow off, it would have done so right then. My seal held. For now anyway. I breathe a sigh of relief.

But I don’t take the mask or goggles off. You never know when the seal might give out.

I check the camera screen. This will take careful aim, so I was very clever in making sure a camera could—

The camera feed is dead.

A pain in my wrist takes over and I pull it away.

Ah. Yeah. Webcams aren’t designed to work at 210 degrees Celsius and 29 atmospheres. And my solid steel box, well, it’s solid steel. Steel is an excellent heat conductor. I can’t even touch it now it’s so hot.

I’m still stupid. First the Adrian sample container, and now this. I want to sleep, but Rocky is more important. At least being stupid isn’t permanent. I’ll press on. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m too stupid to take that into consideration.

Okay, the camera is dead. I can’t see into the box. But I can still see Rocky in the airlock because the xenonite is clear. I’ll have to work with what I’ve got here.

I fire up the high-pressure pump. It still works—at least, it’s making noise. It should be shooting a very high-pressure jet of air in Rocky’s direction. At 29 atmospheres, air acts almost like water. You can really knock stuff around with it. But ammonia is clear. So I have no idea where it’s going.

I adjust the angle of the jet with the servo controls. Are they working? I have no idea. The pump is too loud for me to hear if the servos are doing anything. I sweep left and right, inching down and up in a pattern.

Finally, I spot something. One of the levers in the airlock wiggles a bit. I zero in on it. It gets pushed back several inches.

“Gotcha!” I say.

Now I know where it’s pointed. I do some guesswork and aim for Rocky’s carapace vents. Nothing happens, so I do a grid search, back and forth, up and down, until I get a result.

And oh, what a result it is!

I hit the sweet spot. All of a sudden, Rocky’s carapace vents belch out black smoke. The nasty dust and debris that built up when he was on fire. It’s intensely satisfying. Like that feeling when you blast an air duster into an old computer.

I sweep back and forth, trying to hit each vent one by one. The latter vents don’t cause nearly the commotion as that first one. I think they all lead to the same organ—like a human’s mouth and nose do. Multiple orifices for redundancy and safety.

After a few minutes, no more sooty dust is coming out. I shut off the pump.

“Well, buddy,” I say. “I’ve done all I can. I just hope you can do the rest.”

I spend the rest of the day working on a secondary and tertiary containment box. I glue them in place over my device. The Eridian air will have to breach three seals to get into my compartment now. That will have to do.

I hope Rocky wakes up.