Project Hail Mary

Chapter 21

“We can do this in private,” I said. “I can meet with you one at a time.”

The three astronauts sat on a couch in front of me. I’d commandeered the breakroom and locked the door for this meeting. Yáo sat in the center, looking stern as always. DuBois was to his left, his back arched to provide perfect posture. Ilyukhina slouched to Yáo’s left, sipping a beer.

“No need for individual meetings,” said Yáo. “There’s no room on this mission for secrets.”

I shifted in my chair. Why did Stratt send me to do this job? I’m not a people person and I don’t know how to approach delicate matters. She said something about the crew liking me more than anyone else. Why? Maybe I just seemed friendly and pleasant because I was usually standing next to Stratt.

In any event, launch was just a month away and I had to get this information.

“Okay,” I said. “Who wants to go first?”

DuBois raised his hand. “I can start if that’s amenable to everyone.”

“Sure.” I did a quick test-scribble with my pen. “So…how would you like to die?”

Yeah. Awkward topic. But one that had to be covered. These three were going to give their lives just so the rest of us could have a fighting chance. The least we could do was help them die on their own terms.

DuBois handed me a crisp piece of paper. “I’ve detailed my request in this document. I believe you’ll find everything in order.”

I took the paper. There were bullet points, charts, and some references at the bottom. “What am I looking at here?”

DuBois pointed somewhere at the middle of the page. “I would like to die by nitrogen asphyxiation. All my research shows it is among the least painful ways to die.”

I nodded and took some notes.

“That paper includes a list of the equipment I will need to ensure my death. It’s well within my personal-item mass allowance.”

I furrowed my brow, mostly to hide the fact that I had no idea what to say.

He folded his hands on his lap. “It’s a simple matter of a nitrogen tank and a universal connector to the EVA suit. I can wear the suit and have it pump in nitrogen instead of oxygen. The suffocation reflex comes from excess carbon dioxide in the lungs, not lack of oxygen. The suit’s systems will continuously remove the carbon dioxide that I exhale, leaving only nitrogen behind. I will simply get tired and perhaps a bit lightheaded. Then I will lose consciousness.”

“All right.” I tried to remain professional. “How about if the EVA suit isn’t available?”

“Subsection four details the backup plan. If I cannot use the EVA suit, I will use the ship’s airlock. The volume of the airlock will be sufficient to ensure the carbon-dioxide buildup isn’t unpleasant.”

“Okay.” I wrote a few more notes down. Though I hardly had to. His paper was very thorough. “We’ll make sure there’s a tank with plenty of nitrogen, and a backup tank as well just in case the first one leaks.”

“Excellent. Thank you.”

I set the paper aside. “Ilyukhina? How about you?”

She set her beer down. “I want heroin.”

Everyone looked at her. Even Yáo blanched a little.

“Sorry, what?” I said.

“Heroin.” She shrugged. “I have been good girl all my life. No drugs. Limited sex. I want to experience massive pleasure before I die. People die from heroin all the time. Must be very nice.”

I rubbed my temples. “You want to die…from a heroin overdose?”

“Not immediately,” she said. “I want to enjoy. Start with normal effective dose. Get high. Addicts all agree first few uses are best. Then downhill from there. I want to feel those first few doses. Then overdose when time is right.”

“I guess…we can do that,” I said. “Death by overdose can be really unpleasant, though.”

She waved the concern away. “Have doctors work out best dose schedule for me. Correct amount to maximize pleasantness on earlier doses. Then lethal dose can have other drugs inside to make sure I die without pain.”

I wrote down her request. “Okay. Heroin. I don’t know where we’ll get it, but we’ll work it out.”

“You have entire world working for you,” she said. “Get pharma company to make me heroin. Cannot be hard.”

“Right. I’m sure Stratt can make a call or something.”

I sighed. Two down, one to go. “All right. Commander Yáo? How about you?”

“I want a gun, please,” he said. “A Type-92 handgun. Standard Chinese military-issue. Store the ammunition in a dry, sealed plastic container for the trip.”

At least that made some sense. Quick and painless. “A gun. Got it. That’s easy enough.”

He looked back and forth to his crewmates. “I will be the last to die. If anything goes wrong with either of your methods, I will be on-hand with the weapon. Just in case.”

“Very considerate,” said DuBois. “Thank you.”

“Don’t shoot me if I look like I’m having a good time,” Ilyukhina said.

“Understood,” said Yáo. He turned back to me. “Will that be all?”

“Yeah,” I said, already standing. “This has been very awkward, thanks. I’m going to…go be somewhere else now.”

I writhe in my bed. The burns on my arm hurt more than ever. The painkillers barely do anything. I’m beginning to wonder if I can find Ilyukhina’s heroin.

I won’t, I won’t. But I definitely would if this were still a suicide mission.

Focus on that. This is no longer a suicide mission. If I play my cards right, I save the world and go home.

The pain subsides somewhat. It comes and goes. When I get a chance, I’ll take a look at whatever books I have on burns. I’d at least like to know when it’ll stop hurting.

Tap.

“Huh?” I mumble.

Tap.

I look at the source of the noise. It’s Rocky tapping on the airlock wall.

“Rocky!” I fall out of my bunk and roll onto my right side before landing. I scrabble along the floor to the airlock wall. “Rocky, buddy! Are you okay?!”

I hear a low thrum from within him.

“I don’t understand. Speak louder.”

“Sick…” he mumbles.

“Yeah, you’re sick. You came into my air. Of course you’re sick! You almost died!”

He tries to lift himself from the floor, then slumps back down. “How I return here, question?”

“I moved you.”

He taps the ground with a claw, annoyed. “You touch me air, question?”

“A little, yeah.”

He points to my left arm. “Skin on arm is not smooth. Damage, question?”

I guess he can see right through the bandages with his sonar. Must be pretty ugly under there. I kind of figured that would be the case, but now I know. “Yeah. But I’ll be fine.”

“You damage self to save me. Thank.”

“You did the same thing. Is your radiator organ okay? You were on fire and got full of soot and oxides.”

“It healing.” He points to the soot all along the wall and floor. “This come from inside me, question?”

“Yes.”

“How it leave me, question?”

I preen a little. Why shouldn’t I? It was no easy task and I got it done. I point to the now-triply-covered steel box on the airlock wall. “I made a device to blow air at you. I aimed at your radiator vents and all that nasty stuff came out.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Then, still a little wobbly, he says, “How long was that stuff inside me, question?”

I run through the day in my mind. “About…two days.”

“You almost kill me.”

“What?! How?! I blew all the soot out of your radiator!”

He shifts his weight a little. “Black substance is not soot. My body make this. It cover damage while body repairs.”

“Oh…” I say. “Oh no…”

I didn’t blow soot out of his radiator. I blew the scabs off his wounds! “I’m so sorry! I was trying to help.”

“Is okay. If you did earlier I die. But I heal enough before you do it. Removing help a little. Thank.”

I put my head in my hands. “Sorry,” I say again.

“No say sorry. You save me when you put me here. Thank thank thank.” He tries to stand again, but only rises for a second before collapsing. “I am weak. I will heal.”

I step back and sit on my bunk. “Would you be more comfortable in zero g? I can turn off the centrifuge.”

“No. Gravity help heal.” He adjusts his legs into sort of a bed for his carapace to rest on. Probably a comfortable sleeping pose. “Sample container is safe, question?”

“Yes. It’s in the lab now. I made an Adrian environment in a sealed container and put some Astrophage in along with the sample container. I’ll see how it’s doing in a bit.”

“Good,” he says. “Human light sense very useful.”

“Thanks,” I say. “But my human brain wasn’t as useful. I don’t have a way to get the sample out of the container.”

He tilts his carapace slightly. “You seal sample and can no access sample, question?”

“Yes.”

“Usually you not stupid. Why stupid, question?”

“Humans are stupid when we need sleep. And when we take medicine to stop pain. I’m tired and drugged right now.”

“You should sleep.”

I stand up. “I will in a bit. But first I have to stabilize our orbit. Our apogee and perigee are…well, it’s not a good orbit.”

“Adjust orbit while stupid. Good plan.”

I snicker. “New word: ‘sarcasm.’ You say opposite of true meaning to make point. Sarcasm.”

He chimes the word for “sarcasm” in his language.

Between exhaustion and drugs, I sleep like a baby. I wake up feeling a million times better, but my burns feel a million times worse. I look at the bandages. They’re new.

Rocky is at his workbench, tinkering with his tools. He’s cleaned up his area. It looks good as new. “You are awake, question?”

“Yeah,” I say. “How are you feeling? Are you healing?”

He wiggles a claw. “Much more heal needed. But some heal complete. Cannot move much.”

I plop my head back on the pillow. “Same.”

“Robot arms do things to you arm while you sleep.”

I point to the bandages. “It changed the cloth. It’s important for human healing to change the cloth.”

He pokes at his latest invention with various tools.

“What’s that?”

“I go to lab to see device that store Adrian life. I made device now to collect sample from inside and not let you air in.” He holds up a large box. “Put you vacuum chamber in this. Close this. This make Adrian air inside.”

He opens the top and points to a couple of hinged rods. “Control these from outside. Gather sample. Seal you device. Open my device. Have sample. Do human science with sample.”

“Smart,” I say. “Thanks.”

He gets back to work.

I lie in my bunk. There are a bunch of things I want to do, but I need to take it slow. I can’t risk another “stupid day” like yesterday. I almost ruined the sample and killed Rocky. I’m smart enough now to know I’m stupid. That’s progress.

“Computer: coffee!”

After a minute, the arms hand me a cup of java.

“Hey,” I say, sipping my coffee. “How come you and I hear the same sounds?”

He keeps working on the armatures inside his device. “Useful trait. Both evolve. Not surprising.”

“Yeah, but why the same frequencies? Why don’t you hear much higher frequencies than I can? Or much lower?”

“I do hear much higher frequency and much lower frequency.”

Didn’t know that. But I should have figured that was the case. It’s an Eridian’s primary sensory input. Of course he’ll have a wider range than I do. That still leaves one unanswered question, though.

“Okay, but why is there overlap? Why don’t you and I hear completely different frequency ranges?”

He puts the tool in one of his hands down, which leaves two hands still plugging away on his device. With the newly free hand, he scrapes his workbench. “You hear this, question?”

“Yes.”

“That is sound of predator approaching you. That is sound of prey running away. Sound of object touching object very important. Evolve to hear.”

“Ah! Yes.”

It’s obvious now that he points it out. Voices, instruments, birdcalls, whatever—they can all be wildly different sounds. But the sound of objects colliding isn’t going to have much variance from planet to planet. If I bang two rocks together on Earth, they’re going to make the same noise as if I bang them together on Erid. So we’re all selected-for by being able to hear it.

“Better question,” he says. “Why we think same speed, question?”

I shift over to lie on my side. “We don’t think at the same speed. You do math way faster than I can. And you can remember things perfectly. Humans can’t do that. Eridians are smarter.”

He grabs a new tool with his free hand and gets back to tinkering. “Math is not thinking. Math is procedure. Memory is not thinking. Memory is storage. Thinking is thinking. Problem, solution. You and me think same speed. Why, question?”

“Hmm.”

I ponder it for a while. It’s a really good question. How come Rocky isn’t a thousand times smarter than me? Or a thousand times dumber?

“Well…I have a theory for why we’re about the same intelligence. Maybe.”

“Explain.”

“Intelligence evolves to gives us an advantage over the other animals on our planet. But evolution is lazy. Once a problem is solved, the trait stops evolving. So you and me, we’re both just intelligent enough to be smarter than our planet’s other animals.”

“We are much much smarter than animals.”

“We’re as smart as evolution made us. So we’re the minimum intelligence needed to ensure we can dominate our planets.”

He thinks it over. “I accept this. Still not explain why Earth intelligence evolve same level as Erid intelligence.”

“Our intelligence is based on the animals’ intelligences. So what is animal intelligence based on? How smart do animals have to be?”

“Smart enough to identify threat or prey in time to act.”

“Yes, exactly!” I say. “But how long is that time? How long does an animal have to react? How long will the threat or prey take to kill the animal or escape? I think it’s based on gravity.”

“Gravity, question?” He sets the device down entirely. I’ve got his undivided attention.

“Yeah! Think about it. Gravity is what determines how fast an animal can run. Higher gravity, more time spent in contact with the ground. Faster movement. I think animal intelligence, ultimately, has to be faster than gravity.”

“Interesting theory,” Rocky says. “But Erid have double Earth gravity. You and I same intelligence.”

I sit up on my bed. “I bet our gravities are so close to the same, astronomically, that the intelligence needed is almost the same. If we met a creature from a planet with one one-hundredth of Earth’s gravity, I bet it would seem pretty stupid to us.”

“Possible,” he says. He gets back to work on his gadget. “Another similarity: You and me both willing to die for our people. Why, question? Evolution hate death.”

“It’s good for the species,” I say. “A self-sacrifice instinct makes the species as a whole more likely to continue.”

“Not all Eridians willing to die for others.”

I chuckle. “Not all humans either.”

“You and me are good people,” Rocky says.

“Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”

Nine days until launch.

I paced around my room. It was pretty bare, but I didn’t mind. The portable unit was a small mobile home complete with a kitchenette. Better than most people got. The Russians had their hands full erecting dozens of temporary shelters a few miles from Baikonur Cosmodrome. But then, I guess we all had our hands full lately.

Anyway, I’d barely used my bed since we’d arrived. There just always seemed to be some new issue or problem. Nothing major. Just…issues.

The Hail Mary was complete. Over 2 million kilograms of spacecraft and fuel in a nice, stable orbit—four times the mass of the International Space Station, and put together in one-twentieth the time. The press used to keep track of the total cost, but around the $10 trillion mark, they gave up. It just didn’t matter. It wasn’t about efficient use of resources anymore. It was Earth versus Astrophage, and no price was too high.

ESA astronauts had been on the ship for the past few weeks, putting it through its paces. The test crew reported about five hundred problems that we’d been mopping up for the past few weeks. None of them were showstoppers.

This was happening. The Hail Mary was going to launch in nine days.

I sat at the table that served as my desk and shuffled through papers. I signed off on some and set others aside for Stratt to look at tomorrow. How did I end up an administrator? We all had to accept changes to our lives, I guess. If this was my part to play, then so be it.

I set the papers down and looked out the window. The Kazakhstani steppes were flat and featureless. People generally don’t build launch facilities next to anything important. For obvious reasons.

I missed my kids.

Dozens of them. Hundreds, really, over the course of a school year.

They didn’t swear at me or wake me up in the middle of the night. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And, somewhat selfish, but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed being that respected.

I sighed.

My kids would have a rough time even if the mission worked. It would take thirteen years for the Hail Mary to get to Tau Ceti, and (presuming the crew found an answer to our problems) another thirteen years for the beetles to get back to us. That’s over a quarter century before we would even know what to do. My kids wouldn’t be kids anymore when it was over.

“Onward,” I mumbled, and grabbed the next problem report. Why was it on paper instead of just an email? Because Russians do things a certain way and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.

The report was from the ESA crew about anomalies in Slurry Pump Fourteen of the medical feeding transport system. Pump Fourteen was only part of the tertiary system and it was still 95 percent effective. But there was no reason to put up with that. We still had 83 kilograms of unclaimed launch mass. I made a note to include a spare slurry pump—it was only 250 grams. The crew could install it before leaving orbit.

I set the paper aside and saw a brief flash out my window. Probably a jeep driving on the dirt road that led to the temporary shelters. I got headlights through my window from time to time. I ignored it.

The next paper in my stack was all about potential ballast issues. The Hail Mary kept its center of mass along its long axis by pumping Astrophage around as needed. But we still wanted to keep things as balanced as possible anyway. The ESA crew had rearranged several supply bags in the storage compartment to more adequately balance—

The window shattered as a deafening explosion shook the room. Glass shards nicked my face as a shockwave knocked me clean out of my chair.

After that: silence.

And then: sirens in the distance.

I got to my knees, and then to my feet. I opened and closed my mouth a few times to pop my ears.

I stumbled to the door and opened it. The first thing I noticed was that the small triplet of steps that once led to my door were several feet away. Then I saw the freshly disturbed earth between the steps and my door and I understood what happened.

The steps are anchored into the ground with four-by-fours sunk deep like fence posts. My portable has no such support.

My whole house moved and the stairs stayed put.

“Grace?! Are you okay?!” It was Stratt’s voice. Her portable was next to mine.

“Yeah!” I say. “What the heck was that?!”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Hang on.”

Shortly after, I saw the bobbing of a flashlight. She came to me, wearing a bathrobe and boots. She was already on her walkie-talkie. “Eto Stratt. Chto sluchylos’?” she demanded.

“Vzryv v issledovatel’skom tsentre,” came the reply.

“The research center blew up,” she said.

Baikonur was a launch facility, but they did have some research buildings. They weren’t laboratories. They were more like classrooms. Astronauts generally spent a week before launch at Baikonur, and they usually wanted to study and prepare right up to launch day.

“Oh God,” I said. “Who was there? Who was there?!”

She pulled a wad of papers from her robe pocket. “Hang on, hang on…” She rifled through the papers, throwing each to the ground as she moved on to the next. I knew what they were at a glance—I’d been seeing them every day for a year. Schedule charts. Showing where everyone was and what they were doing at all times.

She stopped when she reached the page she was looking for. She actually gasped. “DuBois and Shapiro. They’re scheduled to be there doing some Astrophage experiments.”

I put my hands on my head. “No! No, please no! The research center is five kilometers away. If the blast did this much damage to us here—”

“I know, I know!” She flicked on her walkie-talkie again. “Prime crew—I need your locations. Call them in.”

“Yáo here,” came the first reply. “In my bunk.”

“Ilyukhina here. At officers’ bar. What was that explosion?”

Stratt and I waited for the response we hoped would come.

“DuBois,” she said. “DuBois! Check in!”

Silence.

“Shapiro. Dr. Annie Shapiro. Check in!”

More silence.

She took a deep breath and let it out. She clicked the walkie-talkie on one more time. “Stratt to transport—I need a jeep to take me to Ground Control.”

“Copy,” came the reply.

The next few hours were, frankly, chaos. The entire base was put on lockdown for a while and everyone’s ID was checked. For all we knew, some doomsday cult wanted to sabotage the mission. But nothing turned up amiss.

Stratt, Dimitri, and I sat in the bunker. Why were we in a bunker? The Russians were taking no chances. It didn’t look like a terrorist attack, but they were securing the critical personnel just in case. Yáo and Ilyukhina were off in some other bunker. The other science leads were in other bunkers as well. Spread everyone out so there’s no single place to attack that would be effective. There was a grim logic to it. Baikonur was built during the Cold War, after all.

“The research buildings are a crater,” said Stratt. “And there’s still no sign of DuBois or Shapiro. Or the fourteen other staff that worked there.”

She pulled up pictures on her phone and showed them to us.

The photos told a story of utter destruction. The area was lit up with powerful floodlights the Russians had set up and the place was swarming with rescue personnel. Though there was nothing for them to do.

Virtually nothing was left. No debris, limited wreckage. Stratt swiped through photo after photo. Some were close-ups of the ground. Round, shiny beads dotted the area. “What’s up with the beads?” she said.

“Metal condensate,” Dimitri said. “It means metals were vaporized, then condensed like raindrops.”

“Jesus,” she said.

I sighed. “There’s only one thing in those labs that could create enough heat to vaporize metal: Astrophage.”

“I agree,” said Dimitri. “But Astrophage does not just ‘explode.’ How could this happen?”

Stratt looked at her wrinkled schedule pages. “According to this, DuBois wanted more experience with Astrophage-powered electrical generators. Shapiro was there to observe and assist.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “Those generators use a tiny, tiny bit of Astrophage to make electricity. Nowhere near enough to blow up a building.”

She put her phone down. “We’ve lost our primary and secondary science specialists.”

“This is nightmare,” said Dimitri.

“Dr. Grace. I want a short list of possible replacements.”

I stared with my mouth agape. “Are you made of stone or something?! Our friends just died!”

“Yes, and everyone else will die, too, if we don’t make this mission happen. We have nine days to find a replacement science specialist.”

I well up. “DuBois…Shapiro…” I snuffled and wiped my eyes. “They’re dead. They’re dead …oh God…”

Stratt slapped me. “Snap out of it!”

“Hey!”

“Cry later! Mission first! You still have that list of coma-resistant candidates from last year? Start looking through it. We need a new science specialist. And we need them now!”

“Gathering sample now…” I say.

Rocky watches me from his tunnel in the lab ceiling. His device works just as it should. The clear xenonite box has a couple of valves and pumps that let me control the inside environment. The vacuum chamber is inside with its lid open. The box even has climate control, keeping the inside temperature a chilly minus 51 degrees Celsius.

Rocky admonished me for leaving the sample at (human) room temperature for so long. He had a lot to say on that subject, actually. We had to add “reckless,” “idiot,” “foolish,” and “irresponsible” to our shared vocabulary just so he could fully express his opinion on the matter.

There was another word he threw around a lot, but he declined to tell me what it meant.

Three days off the painkillers and I’m a lot smarter than I was. At least he understands that much—I wasn’t just some stupid human. I was a human with enhanced stupidity.

Rocky refused to give me the box I’m using until I slept three times without using the drugs. My arm hurts so bad right now, but he’s got a point.

Rocky healed a fair bit in that time too. I have no idea what’s going on inside his body. He looks the same as ever, but he’s moving around much better than before. Not full-speed, though. Neither am I. We’re the walking wounded, honestly.

By agreement, we’ve kept the gravity at one-half g.

I open and close the claws in the box a few times. “Look at me. I’m an Eridian now.”

“Yes. Very Eridian. Hurry and get sample.”

“You’re no fun.” I grab the cotton swab and bring it to a waiting glass slide. I rub it across the slide, leaving a noticeable smear, then return it to the vacuum chamber. I seal up the chamber, put the slide in a little clear xenonite container, and seal the box.

“Okay. That should do it.” I turn the valves to let my air in, then open the box from above. The slide is safe in its xenonite container. The galaxy’s smallest little spaceship. At least, from the point of view of any Adrian life that may be present.

I walk to the microscope station.

Rocky follows along in the tunnel above. “You certain you can see light so small, question?”

“Yes. Old technology. Very old.” I put the container on the tray and adjust the lenses. The xenonite is plenty clear enough for the microscope to see through.

“Okay, Adrian, what do you have for me?” I put my face to the eyepieces.

The most obvious thing is the Astrophage. As usual, they’re jet-black, absorbing all light. That’s expected. I adjust the backlight and focus. And I see microbes everywhere.

One of my favorite experiments with the kids is to have them look at a drop of water. A drop of water, preferably one from a puddle outside, will be swarming with life. It always goes over well, except for the occasional kid who then refuses to drink water for a while.

“Lots of life in here,” I say. “Different kinds.”

“Good. Expected.”

Of course there would be. Any planet that has life will have it everywhere. That’s my theory, at least. Evolution is extremely good at filling every nook in the ecosystem.

Right now I’m looking at hundreds of unique life-forms, never before seen by humans. Each one an alien race. I can’t help but smile. Still, I have work to do.

I pan around until I find a nice clump of Astrophage. If there’s a predator to be had, it’ll be where the Astrophage is. Otherwise it’d be a pretty bad predator.

I flick on the microscope’s internal camera. The image appears on a little LCD screen. I adjust the screen and set it recording.

“This could take time,” I say. “Need to see interaction between—whoa!”

I shove my face back to the microscope to get a better look. It only took seconds before the Astrophage fell under attack. Am I incredibly lucky, or is this life-form just that aggressive?

Rocky skittered back and forth above me. “What, question? What happen, question?”

The monster lurches toward the clump of Astrophage. It’s an amorphous blob, like an amoeba. It presses itself against its much-smaller prey and begins to envelop the entire clump of them by oozing around both sides.

The Astrophage wriggle. They know something is wrong. They try to escape but it’s too late. They can only sputter a short distance before they stop. Normally, Astrophage can accelerate to near light speed in seconds, but these can’t. Maybe a chemical excretion by the monster that disables them somehow?

The encirclement completes, and the Astrophage are surrounded. A few seconds later, the Astrophage become cell-like in appearance. No longer featureless black, their organelles and membranes are starkly visible in the microscope’s light. They have lost their ability to absorb heat and light energy.

They’re dead.

“Got it!” I say. “I found the predator! It ate Astrophage right in front of me!”

“Found!” Rocky cheers. “Isolate.”

“Yes, I’ll isolate it!” I say.

“Happy happy happy!” he says. “Now you name.”

I grab a nano-pipette from the supply. “I don’t follow.”

“Earth culture. You find. You name. What is name of predator, question?”

“Oh,” I say. I’m not feeling creative at the moment. This is too exciting to take my attention away from. It’s an amoeba from Tau Ceti. “Taumoeba, I guess.”

Taumoeba. The savior of Earth and Erid.

Hopefully.

I should have a bolo tie. Maybe a cowboy hat. Because I’m a rancher now. And I’m running about 50 million head of Taumoeba on my ranch.

Once I isolated a few Taumoeba from the Adrian air sample, Rocky built a breeder tank and we let them get to work. It’s just a xenonite box full of Adrian air and a few hundred grams of Astrophage.

As far as we can tell, Taumoeba is very resilient to temperature variations. Good thing, too, because I let it sit at room temperature that one day.

Drugs are bad.

In retrospect, it makes sense that they’d be robust on temperature. They live in a negative-51-degree-Celsius environment, and eat Astrophage, which is always 96.415 degrees Celsius. Hey, everyone likes a hot meal, right?

And boy, do they breed! Well, I gave them a mother lode of Astrophage to work with. It’s the same as throwing yeast into a bottle of sugar water. But instead of making booze, we’re making more Taumoebas. Now that we have enough to experiment with, I get to work.

If you take a goat and put it on Mars, what happens? It dies immediately (and horribly). Goats didn’t evolve to live on Mars. Okay, so what happens if you put a Taumoeba on a planet other than Adrian?

That’s what I want to find out.

Rocky watches from his tunnel above the main worktable as I simulate a fresh new atmosphere in my vacuum chamber.

“No have oxygen, question?” he asked.

“No oxygen.”

“Oxygen dangerous.” He’s been a little edgy since his internal organs caught fire.

“I breathe oxygen. It’s okay.”

“Can explode.”

I pull my goggles off and look up at him. “There’s no oxygen in this experiment. Calm down.”

“Yes. Calm.”

I get back to work. I turn a valve to let a small bit of gas into the vacuum chamber. I check the pressure gauge to make sure that—

“Again confirm: No oxygen, question?”

I jerk my head up to glare at him. “It’s just carbon dioxide and nitrogen! Only carbon dioxide and nitrogen! Nothing more! Don’t ask me again!”

“Yes. No ask again. Sorry.”

Can’t blame him, I guess. Being on fire sucks.

We have two planets to deal with here. No, not Earth and Erid. Those are just the planets we live on. The planets we care about right now are Venus and Threeworld. That’s where Astrophage is breeding out of control.

Venus, of course, is the second planet in my solar system. It’s about Earth’s size with a thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

Threeworld is the third planet in Rocky’s home system. At least, Threeworld is what I call it. The Eridians don’t have a name for it, even in their own language. Just a designation: “Planet Three.” They didn’t have ancient people looking up at astronomical bodies and naming them after gods. They only discovered other planets in their system a few hundred years ago. But I don’t want to say “Planet Three” all the time, so I’ve named it Threeworld.

The hardest part about working with aliens and saving humanity from extinction is constantly having to come up with names for stuff.

Threeworld is a tiny little planet—only about the size of Earth’s moon. But unlike our airless neighbor, Threeworld somehow has an atmosphere. How? I have no idea. The surface gravity is only 0.2 g’s, which shouldn’t be enough. Yet somehow, Threeworld manages to hang on to a thin atmosphere. According to Rocky, it’s 84 percent carbon dioxide, 8 percent nitrogen, 4 percent sulfur dioxide, and a bunch of trace gases. All with a surface pressure less than 1 percent of Earth’s.

I check the readouts and nod approvingly. I do a visual inspection of the experiment inside. I’m pretty proud of myself for this idea.

A thin coat of Astrophage sits on a glass plate. I coated the plate by shining IR light through the glass and attracting Astrophage from the other side. It’s the same way the spin drive does it. The result is a uniform layer of Astrophage that’s just one cell thick.

Then I seeded the slide with Taumoeba. As they eat the Astrophage, the currently opaque slide will become more and more transparent. It’s a hell of a lot easier to measure light level than a quantity of microscopic organisms.

“Okay…the chamber has Venus’s upper atmosphere duplicated. As good as I can, anyway.”

I figure the breeding zone of Astrophage is based mainly on the air pressure. Basically, they have to aero-brake from near light speed when they hit the planet. But being so small that doesn’t take very long and of course they gobble up all the heat that’s created.

The end result is that Astrophage come to rest when the air is 0.02 atmospheres thick. So, going forward, that’ll be our standard for pressure. Venus’s atmosphere is 0.02 atmospheres at around the 70 kilometer mark, and the temperature there is about minus 100 degrees Celsius (thanks, infinite supply of reference material!). So that’s the temperature I have the Venus analog experiment set to. Rocky’s temperature-control system works perfectly, of course, even down to ultra-low temperatures.

“Good. Now Threeworld.”

“What temperature is Threeworld’s air at the 0.02 atmosphere altitude?”

“Minus eighty-two degrees of Celsius.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say. I move to the next chamber. It has an identical setup of Astrophage and Taumoeba. I let in the appropriate gases to simulate Threeworld’s atmosphere and temperature at the 0.02-atmosphere pressure area. I get the relevant information from Rocky’s perfect memory. It’s not much different from Venus or Adrian. Mostly carbon dioxide with some other gases running around. No surprise there—Astrophage go for the biggest concentration of CO₂ they can see.

It’s a good thing these planets aren’t covered in helium or something. I don’t have any of that aboard. But carbon dioxide? That’s easy. I make that stuff with my body. And nitrogen? Thanks to DuBois and his preferred method of death, there’s a whole bunch aboard.

Threeworld does have some sulfur dioxide, though. Four percent of the total atmosphere. It’s enough that I didn’t want to approximate it away, so I had to make some. The lab has quite a selection of reagents, but no sulfur dioxide gas. However, it does have sulfuric acid in solution. I recovered some copper tubing from a broken cooling coil in the freezer and used it as a catalyst. Worked like a charm to create the sulfur dioxide I needed.

“Okay, Threeworld’s done,” I say. “We’ll wait an hour and check results.”

“We have hope,” says Rocky.

“Yes, we have hope,” I say. “Taumoeba are very sturdy. They can live in a near vacuum, and they seem comfortable in extreme cold. Maybe Venus and Threeworld are habitable for them. They’re good enough for Taumoeba’s prey, so why not for Taumoeba?”

“Yes. Things are good. All is good!”

“Yeah. For once, everything’s going great.”

Then the lights go out.