Project Hail Mary

Chapter 26

I sat in my cell, staring at the wall.

It wasn’t a dingy jail cell or anything. If anything, it looked kind of like a college dorm room. Painted brick walls, desk, chair, bed, en-suite bathroom, et cetera. But the door was steel and the windows were barred. I wasn’t going anywhere.

Why did the Baikonur launch facility have a jail cell handy? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.

That launch would be today. Soon, some muscular guards would come through that door along with a doctor. He’d inject me with something and that’d be the last time I’d see Earth.

Almost on cue, I heard the clink of the door being unlocked. A braver person might have seen that as an opportunity. Charge the door and maybe get past the guards. But I’d given up hope of escape long ago. What would I do? Run into the Kazakhstani desert and take my chances?

The door opened and Stratt walked in. The guards closed the door behind her.

“Hey,” she said.

I glared at her from my bunk.

“The launch is on schedule,” she said. “You’ll be on your way soon.”

“Whoopee.”

She sat in the chair. “I know you won’t believe this, but it wasn’t easy for me to do this to you.”

“Yeah, you’re really sentimental.”

She ignored the barb. “Do you know what I studied in college? What my undergraduate degree was in?”

I shrugged.

“History. I was a history major.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “Most people assume I had a science major or business management. Communications, maybe. But no. It was history.”

“Doesn’t seem like you.” I sat up on my bunk. “You don’t spend a lot of time looking backward.”

“I was eighteen years old and had no idea what to do with my life. I majored in history because I didn’t know what else to do.” She smirked. “Hard to imagine me like that, eh?”

“Yeah.”

She looked out the barred window toward the launchpad in the distance. “But I learned a lot. I actually liked it. People nowadays…they have no idea how good they have it. The past was unrelenting misery for most people. And the further back in time you go, the worse it was.”

She stood and meandered around the room. “For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food.

“Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.”

She walked to the other side of the room. “The industrial revolution mechanized agriculture. Since then, we’ve been able to focus our energies on other things. But that’s only been the last two hundred years. Before that, most people spent most of their lives directly dealing with food production.”

“Thanks for the history lesson,” I said. “But if it’s all the same to you, I’d like my last few moments on Earth to be a little more pleasant. So…you know…could you leave?”

She ignored me. “Leclerc’s Antarctica nukes bought us some time. But not much. And there’s only so many times we can dump chunks of Antarctica into the ocean before the direct problems of sea-level rise and ocean-biome death cause more problems than Astrophage. Remember what Leclerc told us: Half the global population will die.”

“I know,” I muttered.

“No, you don’t know,” she said. “Because it gets a lot worse.”

“Worse than half of humanity dying?”

“Of course,” she said. “Leclerc’s estimate assumes all the nations of the world work together to share resources and ration food. But do you think that will happen? Do you think the United States—the most powerful military force of all time—is going to sit idly by while half their population starves? How about China, a nation of 1.3 billion people that’s always on the verge of famines in the best of times? Do you think they’ll just leave their militarily weak neighbors alone?”

I shook my head. “There’ll be wars.”

“Yes. There’ll be wars. Fought for the same reason most wars in ancient times were fought for: food. They’d use religion or glory or whatever as an excuse, but it was always about food. Farmlands and people to work that land.

“But the fun doesn’t stop there,” she said. “Because once the desperate, starving countries start invading each other for food, the food production will go down. Ever heard of the Tai Ping rebellion? It was a civil war in China during the nineteenth century. Four hundred thousand soldiers died in combat. And twenty million people died from the resulting famine. The war disrupted agriculture, see? That’s how massive in scale these things are.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. I’d never seen her look so vulnerable. “Malnourishment. Disruption. Famine. Every aspect of infrastructure going to food production and warfare. The entire fabric of society will fall apart. There’ll be plagues too. Lots of them. All over the world. Because the medical-care systems will be overwhelmed. Once easily contained outbreaks will go unchecked.”

She turned to face me. “War, famine, pestilence, and death. Astrophage is literally the apocalypse. The Hail Mary is all we have now. I’ll make any sacrifice to give it even the tiniest additional chance of success.”

I lay down on my bunk and faced away from her. “Whatever lets you sleep at night.”

She walked back to the door and knocked on it. A guard opened it up. “Anyway. I just wanted you to know why I’m doing this. I owed you that.”

“Go to hell.”

“Oh, I will, believe me. You three are going to Tau Ceti. The rest of us are going to hell. More accurately, hell is coming to us.”

Yeah? Well, hell’s coming back to you, Stratt. In the form of me. I’m hell.

I mean…I don’t know what I’ll say to her. But I definitely plan to say stuff. Mean stuff.

I’m eighteen days into my nearly four-year journey. I’m just now reaching Tau Ceti’s heliopause—the edge of the star’s powerful magnetic field. At least, the edge of where it’s strong enough to deflect fast-moving interstellar radiation. From now on, the radiation load on the hull will be much higher.

Doesn’t matter to me. I’m surrounded by Astrophage. But it’s interesting to see the external radiation sensors go up and up and up. It’s progress, at least. But in the grand scheme of things, I’m on a long road trip and my current status is “just walking out the front door of the house.”

I’m bored. I’m by myself in a spaceship without much to do.

I clean and catalog the lab again. I might come up with some research experiments for either Astrophage or Taumoeba. Heck, I could write some papers while I’m on my way home. Oh, and there’s the matter of the intelligent alien life-form I hung out with for a couple of months. I might want to jot a few things down about him too.

I do have a huge collection of video games. I have every piece of software that was available when we built the ship. I’m sure they can keep me busy for a while.

I check the Taumoeba farms. All ten of them are doing just fine. I feed them Astrophage from time to time, just to keep them healthy and breeding. The farms emulate Venus’s atmosphere, so as the generations of Taumoeba go by, they’ll get even better at Venusian life. After four years of this, by the time I drop them off at the planet, they’ll be well suited for it.

And yes, I’ve already decided I’ll drop them off. Why not?

I have no idea what kind of world I’ll be returning to. Thirteen years have passed on Earth since I left, and they’ll experience another thirteen before I get back. Twenty-six years. All my students will be adults. I hope they all survive. But I have to admit…some probably won’t. I try not to dwell.

Anyway, once I get back to my solar system, I may as well swing by Venus and drop off the Taumoeba. Not sure how I’ll seed it, but I have a few ideas. The simplest is just to wad up a ball of Taumoeba-infested Astrophage and throw it at Venus. The Astrophage will absorb the heat of reentry and the Taumoeba will be released into the wild. Then they’ll have a field day. Venus must be Astrophage-central by now, and lord knows Taumoeba can get right to work once they find their prey.

I check my food stores. I’m still on schedule. I have another three months of real, edible food packs left, and then it’ll be coma slurry from then on.

I’m reluctant to go back into a coma. I’ve got the genes to survive it, but so did Yáo and Ilyukhina. Why risk death if I don’t have to?

Also, I can’t be 100 percent sure I correctly reprogrammed the course navigation. I think it’s right, and whenever I spot-check, I’m still on course toward home. But what if something goes wrong while I’m in a coma? What if I wake up and I missed the solar system by a light-year?

But between isolation, loneliness, and disgusting food, I may be willing to take those risks eventually. We’ll see.

Speaking of loneliness, my thoughts turn back to Rocky. My only friend now. Seriously. He’s my only friend. I didn’t have much of a social life back when things were normal. Sometimes I’d grab dinner with other faculty and staff at the school. I’d have the occasional Saturday-night beer with old college friends. But thanks to time dilation, when I get home all those folks will be a generation older than me.

I liked Dimitri. He was probably my favorite of the whole Hail Mary gang. But who knows what he’s up to now? Heck, Russia and the United States may be at war. Or they may be allies in a war. I have no idea.

I climb the ladder to the control room. I sit in the pilot’s seat and bring up the Nav panel. I really shouldn’t do this, but it’s become a bit of a ritual. I shut off the spin drives and coast. Gravity immediately disappears, but I hardly notice. I’m used to it.

With the spin drives off, I can safely use the Petrovascope. I scan around in space for a bit—I know where to look. I quickly find it. The little dot of Petrova-frequency light. The Blip-A’s engines. If I were within a hundred kilometers of that light, my entire ship would be vaporized.

I’m on one side of the system and he’s on the other. Heck, even Tau Ceti itself just looks like a lightbulb in the distance. But I can still clearly make out the Blip-A’s engine flare. Using light as a propellant releases a simply absurd amount of power.

Maybe that’s something we could use in the future. Maybe Earth and Erid could communicate with massive releases of Petrova light thanks to Astrophage. I wonder how much it would take to make a flash visible from 40 Eridani. We could talk in Morse code or something. They have a copy of Wikipedia now. They’d work out what we’re up to when they saw the flashes.

Still, our “conversation” would be slow. 40 Eridani is sixteen light-years away from Earth. So if we sent a message like “Hey, how ya doin’?” it would be thirty-two years before we got their reply.

I stare at the little point of light on the screen and sigh. I’ll be able to track him for quite a while. I know where his ship will be at any given moment. He’ll use the exact flight plan I gave him. He trusts my science as much as I trust his engineering. But after a few months, the Petrovascope won’t be able to see the light anymore. Not because the light is too dim—it’s a very sensitive instrument. It won’t be able to see him because our relative velocities will cause a red-shift in the light coming off his drives. It won’t be the Petrova wavelength anymore when it gets to me.

What? Would I do a ridiculous amount of relativistic math to calculate our relative velocity at any given moment as perceived by my inertial reference frame and then do Lorentz transformations to figure out when the light from his engines will drop out of the Petrovascope’s perception range? Just so I know how much longer I can see my friend in the distance? Wouldn’t that be kind of pathetic?

Yeah.

Okay, my sad little daily ritual is over. I turn off the Petrovascope and fire up the spin drives again.

I check my dwindling supply of real food. I’ve been “on the road” for thirty-two days now. According to my calculations, fifty-one days from now I’ll be completely reliant on coma slurry.

I go to the dormitory. “Computer. Provide coma food substance sample.”

The mechanical arms reach into their supply area and come back with a bag of white powder and drop it on the bunk.

I pick up the bag. Of course it’s a powder. Why would they include the liquid in the long-term storage? The water system of the Hail Mary is a closed loop. Water goes into me, it comes out of me in various ways, and then it’s purified and reused.

I take the package to the lab, open it up, and pour some powder in a beaker.

I add a little water, give it a stir, and it becomes a milky-white slurry. I give it a sniff. It doesn’t really smell like anything. So I take a sip.

It takes effort, but I resist the urge to spit it out. It tastes like aspirin. That nasty pill-like taste. I’m going to have to eat this Bitter Pill Chow™ every meal for several years.

Maybe a coma isn’t that bad.

I set the beaker aside. I’ll deal with that misery when the time comes. For now, I’m going to work on the beetles.

I have four little Taumoeba farms, courtesy of Rocky. Each one is a steel-ish capsule no larger than my hand. I say “steel-ish” because it’s some Eridian alloy of steel that humans haven’t invented yet. It’s much harder than any metal alloys we have, but not harder than diamond-cutting tools.

We went back and forth on the mini-farm casing. The obvious first choice was to make it out of xenonite. The problem is: How would Earth scientists get in? None of our tools would be able to cut it. The only option would be extremely high heat. And that risks harming the Taumoeba inside.

I suggested a xenonite container with a lid. Something that could be clamped down tight like a pressure door. I’d leave instructions on the USB stick on how to safely open it. Rocky rejected that idea right away. No matter how good the seal was, it wouldn’t be perfect. Over the two years that the farm will experience during the trip, enough air could leak out to suffocate the Taumoeba inside. He insisted the whole farm be a single, completely sealed container. Probably a good idea.

So we settled on Eridian steel. It’s strong, it doesn’t oxidize easily, and it’s extremely durable. Earth can cut it open with a diamond saw. And hey, they’ll probably analyze it to learn how to make their own. Everyone wins!

His approach for the farms themselves was simple. Inside, there’s an active colony of Taumoeba and a Venus-like atmosphere. Also, there’s a coil of very thin steel-ish tubing full of Astrophage. The Taumoeba can only get at the outermost layer, so they have to work their way down the tube, which has a total length of about 20 meters. Some basic experimentation tells us that will last the small Taumoeba population several years. As for waste products—they’ll just stew in their own poop. The capsule will gain methane and lose carbon dioxide over time, but it doesn’t matter. Though it’s a small volume by human standards, it’s a vast, gigantic cavern to the tiny microbes inside.

The beetles have been a priority for me. I want them ready for launch at a moment’s notice. Just in case there’s a catastrophic problem with the Hail Mary. But I don’t want to send them off if there isn’t a mission-critical problem. The closer we are to Earth when they launch, the better their odds of making it there safely.

In addition to installing the mini-farms, I also have to refuel the little buggers. I’d used almost half their fuel supply when they served as ad-hoc engines for the Hail Mary. But they only need 60 kilograms of Astrophage each to be full. Barely a drop in the bucket compared to my supply of imported, Eridian-made Astrophage.

The hardest part is opening the beetle’s little fuel bay. Like everything else around here, it wasn’t intended for reuse. It’s like adding fresh butane to a Bic lighter. It’s just not meant for that. It’s completely sealed. I have to clamp it into the mill and use a 6-millimeter bit to get in…it’s a whole big thing. But I’m getting good at it.

I finished John and Paul yesterday. Today I’m working on Ringo and, time permitting, George. George will be the easiest. I don’t need to refuel him—I never used him as an engine. I just have to attach the mini-farm.

Figuring out where to put the mini-farm was another matter. Even with its small size, it’s too big to fit inside the little probe. So I epoxy it to the undercarriage. Then I spot-weld a small counterweight to the top of the beetle. The computer inside has very strong opinions about where the center of mass of the probe is. It’s easier to add a counterweight than completely reprogram a guidance system.

Which brings us to the matter of weight.

The additional weight of the farm makes the beetles weigh a kilogram more than they should. That’s okay. I remember countless meetings with Steve Hatch discussing the design. He’s a weird little guy, but he’s a heck of a rocket scientist. The beetles know their location in space by looking at the stars, and if they have less fuel than they expected to have, they taper their acceleration down as needed.

In short: They’ll get home. It’ll just take a little longer. I ran the numbers and it’s a trivial difference in Earth time. Though the beetles will experience several additional months during the trip than the original plan.

I go to the supply cabinet and pull out the BOCOA (big ol’ container of Astrophage). It’s a lightproof metal bin with wheels. There are several hundred kilograms of Astrophage in there and I’m in 1.5 g’s of gravity. That’s why I added the wheels. You’d be amazed what you can do with a machine shop and a firm desire not to drag heavy stuff around.

I hold the handle with a towel because it’s so hot. I wheel it over to the lab table, settle into the chair, and get ready for the methodical refueling process. I get the plastic syringe at the ready. With it, I can squirt 100 milliliters of Astrophage into that 6-millimeter hole per shot. That’s about 600 grams. All told, I have to do it about two hundred times per beetle.

I open the BOCOA and—

“Ugh!” I wince and draw away from the container. It smells horrible.

“Uh…” I say. “Why does it smell like that?”

Then it hits me. I know that smell. It’s the smell of dead, rotting Astrophage.

The Taumoeba are loose again.