Project Hail Mary

Chapter 7

A flood of thoughts hit me all at the same time: We’re not alone. This is an alien. That ship is weird, how does the engineering of that work? Do they live here? Is this their star? Am I starting an interplanetary incident by wandering into alien territory?!

“Breathe,” I tell myself.

Okay, one thing at a time. What if this is another ship from Earth? One I don’t remember? Heck, it took me a few days to remember my name. Maybe Earth sent multiple ships with different designs? Like, for redundancy or to increase the odds that at least one of them works. Maybe that ship is the Praise Allah or the Blessings of Vishnu or something.

I look all around the control room. There are screens and controls for everything, but there’s nothing for a radio. The EVA panel has some radio controls, but that’s obviously just for talking to crewmates when they’re outside.

If they’d sent multiple ships, surely they would have had some radio system so we could talk to each other.

Also, that ship…it’s insane.

I cycle through the navigation console screens until I find the Radar panel. I’d noticed it earlier, but didn’t think much of it. I assume it’s there so I can get near asteroids or other objects and not collide with them.

After a few halting attempts, I manage to turn it on. It immediately spots the other ship and sounds an alarm. The shrill noise hurts my ears.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I say. I frantically scan the panel until I see a button labeled “Mute Proximity Alert.” I press it and the noise stops.

I scan the rest of the screen. There’s a lot of data here, all in a window titled “BLIP-A.” I guess if there were multiple contacts I’d get multiple windows. Whatever. It’s all just raw numbers about the reading. Nothing useful like an isometric Star Trek scan or anything.

“Velocity” is zero. They have matched my velocity exactly. That can’t be a coincidence.

“Range” is 217 meters. I’m assuming that’s the distance to the closest part of the other ship. Or maybe the average. No, it would be the closest part. The point of this system is probably to avoid collisions.

Speaking of collisions—217 meters is a ridiculously small distance compared to the size of a solar system. There’s no way this is a coincidence. That ship positioned itself here on purpose because I’m here.

Another reading, “Angular width,” is 35.44 degrees. Okay, some basic math should handle this.

I bring up the Utility panel on the main screen and launch the calculator app. Something 217 meters away is occupying 35.44 degrees of the view. Presuming the radar can see in all 360 degrees (it would be a pretty cruddy radar if it couldn’t)…I type some numbers into the calculator to do an ARCTAN operation, and:

The ship is 139 meters long. Roughly.

I bring the Astrophage panel up on another screen. The little map there shows that the Hail Mary is just 47 meters long. So yeah. The alien ship is three times the size of mine. There’s just no way Earth sent something that big.

And the shape. What is up with that shape? I turn my attention back to the Petrovascope (which is now just acting as a camera).

The center of the ship is diamond-shaped—a rhombus. Well, I guess it’s an octahedron, really. Looks like it has eight faces, each triangular. That part alone is about the size of my ship.

The diamond is connected by three thick rods (I don’t know what else to call them) to a wide trapezoidal base. That looks like it might be the rear. And in front of the diamond is a narrow stalk (just making up terms at this point) that has four flat panels attached parallel to the main ship axis. Maybe solar panels? The stalk continues forward to a pyramid-shaped nose cone. Nose pyramid, I guess.

Every part of the hull is flat. Even the “rods” have flat faces.

Why would anyone do that? Flat panels are a terrible idea. I don’t know anything about who made this, but presumably they need some kind of atmosphere inside, right? Huge, flat panels are awful at that.

Maybe this is just a probe and not an actual ship. Maybe there’s no atmosphere inside because there’s nothing alive inside. I might be looking at an alien artifact instead of a ship.

Still the most exciting moment in human history.

So it’s Astrophage-powered. That was the steady Petrova-frequency glow I saw earlier. Interesting that they have the same propulsion tech as we do. But considering it’s the best energy-storage medium possible, that’s not a surprise. When European mariners first came across Asian mariners, no one was surprised they both used sails.

But the “why.” That’s what gets me. Some entity aboard (either a computer or a crew) decided to come to my ship. How did they even know I was here?

Same way I saw them, I guess. The massive IR light coming off my engines. And since the rear of my ship was pointed at Tau Ceti, that means I was shining a 540-trillion-watt flashlight in their direction. Depending on where they were at the time, I might have appeared even brighter than Tau Ceti itself. At least, in the Petrova frequency.

So they can see the Petrova frequency. And so can I.

I flip through the Spin Drive console screens until I find one labeled “Manual Control.” When I select it, a warning dialog pops up:

MANUAL CONTROL IS RECOMMENDED ONLY FOR EMERGENCIES. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ENTER MANUAL CONTROL MODE?

I tap “Yes.”

It brings up another dialog.

I groan and type Y-E-S.

The panel finally takes me to the Manual Control screen. It’s a bit scary. Not because it’s complex, but because it’s so simple.

There are three sliders labeled “Drive 1,” “Drive 2,” and “Drive 3,” each presently at zero. The top of each slider is labeled “10⁷ N.” The N must mean “Newtons”—a unit of force. I guess if I threw all three drives to maximum, it would give me 30 million Newtons. That’s about sixty times the thrust a jumbo jet’s engines produce during takeoff.

Science teachers know a lot of random facts.

There are a bunch more little sliders. In groups labeled “Yaw,” “Pitch,” and “Roll.” There must be little spin drives on the sides of the ship to adjust its orientation. I can definitely see why it’s a bad idea to mess with this panel. One screw-up and I’ll put the ship into a spin that tears it apart.

But at least they thought of that. There’s a button in the middle of the screen labeled “Zero All Rotation.” Good.

I check the Petrovascope again. Blip-A hasn’t moved. It’s on my port side, and slightly forward.

I flick the Petrovascope back to Petrova-frequency mode, and the screen turns mostly black. As before, I can see the Petrova line in the background, occluded by Blip-A.

“Let’s see if you have anything to say…” I mumble. Spin drive 2 is in the center of the ship. Its thrust will be along my central axis and hopefully won’t introduce attitude change. We’ll see.

I set it to 0.1% power for one second, then back to 0.

Even with just one engine, at one one-thousandth power, for one second, the ship drifts a bit. The “Velocity” value for Blip-A on the Radar panel shows 0.086 m/s. That tiny thrust set my ship moving about 8 centimeters per second.

But I don’t care about that. I care about the other ship.

I watch the Petrovascope. A bead of sweat separates from my forehead and floats away. I feel like my heart is going to beat out of my chest.

Then, the rear of the ship lights up in the Petrova frequency for one second. Just like I did.

“Wow!”

I flick the drive on and off several times: three short bursts, a long one, and one more short one. There’s no message there. I just want to see what they do with it.

They were more prepared this time. Within seconds, the other ship repeats the pattern.

I gasp. And I smile. Then I wince. Then I smile again. This is a lot to take in.

That was too fast for any probe to respond. If it had remote control or something, the controllers would have to be at least a few light-minutes away—there’s just nothing around here that could be housing them.

There is an intelligent life-form aboard that ship. I am about 200 meters away from an honest-to-God alien!

I mean…my ship is powered by aliens. But this new one is intelligent!

Oh my gosh! This is it! First Contact! I’m the guy! I’m the guy who meets aliens for the first time!

The Blip-A (that’s what I’m calling their ship for now) fires up its engines again briefly. I watch closely to memorize the sequence, but it’s just a single low-intensity light. They’re not signaling. They’re maneuvering.

I check the Radar panel. Sure enough, the Blip-A brings itself alongside the Hail Mary and holds position at 217 meters.

I flick through the Scientific panel to bring the normal telescopic cameras back up. The Petrovascope’s normal-light camera is just to orient things for the main scope itself. The telescope has much better resolution and clarity. I guess I’m too excited to think clearly because it took me until now to think of it.

The image is far clearer through the main telescope. I guess it’s just an insanely high-resolution camera, because I can still zoom in and out with no loss of clarity. I have a very good view of the Blip-A now.

The ship’s hull is a mottled gray and tan. The pattern seems random and smooth, like someone started mixing paint but stopped way too early.

I spot motion in the corner of the screen. An irregular-shaped object slides along a track in the hull. It’s a stalk sticking up with five articulated “arms” coming out of the top. Each arm has a clamp-like “hand” on the end.

It’s only now that I notice a network of the tracks all along the hull.

It’s a robot. Something controlled from the inside. At least, I assume it is. It doesn’t look like a little green man, and it certainly doesn’t look like an alien EVA suit.

Not that I have any idea what either of those things would look like.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a hull-mounted robot. Space stations back at Earth have them. They’re a nice way to do stuff outside your ship without having to suit up.

The robot works its way along the hull until it reaches the spot closest to the Hail Mary. One of its little clamp hands holds a cylindrical object. I don’t really have a sense of scale, but the robot is tiny compared to the ship. I feel like it’s about my size or maybe smaller, but that’s a wild guess.

The robot stops, reaches toward my ship, and gently releases the cylinder into space.

The cylinder moves slowly toward me. It has a slight rotation, end-over-end. Not perfect, but still a very smooth release.

I check the Radar panel. The Blip-A is at velocity zero. And there’s a “Blip-B” screen now. It shows the much smaller cylinder approaching at 8.6 centimeters per second.

Interesting. That’s the exact same velocity I moved the Hail Mary a moment ago while flashing the engine to say hi. That can’t be a coincidence. They want me to have that cylinder, and they want to deliver it to me at a velocity they know I’m comfortable working with.

“Very considerate of you…” I say.

These are smart aliens.

I have to assume friendly intent at this point. I mean, they’re going out of their way to say hi and be accommodating. Besides, if there is hostile intent, what would I do about it? Die. That’s what I’d do. I’m a scientist, not Buck Rogers.

Well, I mean, I guess I could point the spin drives at their ship, fire them up to full, which would vaporize—you know what? I’m just not going to think along those lines right now.

Some quick math tells me the cylinder will take over forty minutes to reach me. I have that long to get in an EVA suit, go outside, and position myself on the hull for humanity’s first touchdown-pass reception with an alien quarterback.

I learned a lot about the airlock when I was giving my crewmates a burial in space and—

Ilyukhina would have loved this moment. She would have been absolutely bouncing around the cabin with excitement. Yáo would have been stoic and steady, but he would have cracked a smile when he thought we weren’t looking.

The tears ruin my vision. Lacking gravity, they coat my eyes. It’s like trying to see underwater. I wipe them off and fling them across the control room. They splatter onto the opposite wall. I don’t have time for this. I have an alien thingy to catch.

I unhook the belt on the chair and float over to the airlock. My mind is awhirl with ideas and questions. And I’m jumping to wild, unfounded conclusions left and right. Maybe this intelligent alien species invented Astrophage. Maybe they genetically engineered it specifically to “grow” spaceship fuel. The ultimate in solar power. Maybe once I explain what’s happening to Earth, they’ll have a solution.

Or maybe they’ll board my ship and lay eggs in my brain. You can never be sure.

I open the inner airlock door and pull out the EVA suit. So, do I have any idea how to get into this thing? Or how to safely use it?

I disable the chrysalis-lock of the Orlan-MKS2 EVA suit and open the rear hatch. I activate main power by flicking a switch on the belt. The suit boots up almost immediately and the status panel attached to the chest component reads ALL SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL—what the heck? I know everything that’s going on in here.

We were probably trained on this thing extensively. I know it the same way I know physics. It’s there in my mind, but I don’t remember learning it.

The Russian-made suit is a single-pressure vessel. Unlike American models where you put the top and bottom on, then a bunch of complex stuff for the helmet and gloves, the Orlan series is basically a onesie with a hatch in the back. You step into it, close the hatch, and you’re done. It’s like an insect molting in reverse.

I open the back and wriggle into the suit. Zero g is a real boon here. I don’t have to fight with the suit nearly as much as I normally would. Weird. I know this is easier than other times I’ve done it, but don’t remember any other times I’ve done it. I think I have brain damage from that coma.

I’m functional enough for now. I press on.

I get my arms and legs into their respective holes. The jumpsuit is uncomfortable in the Orlan. I’m supposed to be wearing a special undergarment. I even know what it looks like, but it’s just for temperature regulation and bio-monitoring. I don’t have time to find it in the storage area. I have a date with a cylinder.

Now in the suit, I push steadily against the airlock wall with my legs to push the open rear flap to the wall. Once it gets to within a few inches (centimeters, I should say. This is Russian-made after all), a light turns green on the chest-mounted status panel. I reach up to the panel with my thickly gloved hand and press the Autoseal button.

The suit ratchets the opening closed with a series of loud clicks. With a final “clunk” the outer seal locks into place. My status board reads green and I have seven hours of life support available. Internal pressure is 400 hectopascals—about 40 percent of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. That’s normal for spacesuits.

The whole process took only five minutes. I’m ready to go outside.

Interesting. I didn’t have to go through a decompression step. On space stations back home, astronauts have to spend hours in an airlock slowly acclimating to the low pressure needed for the EVA suit before they can go out. I don’t have that problem. Apparently, the entire Hail Mary is at that 40 percent pressure.

Good design. The only reason space stations around Earth have a full atmosphere of pressure is in case the astronauts have to abort and return to Earth in a hurry. But for the Hail Mary crew…where would we go? May as well use the low pressure all the time. Makes things easier on the hull and lets you do rapid EVAs.

I take a deep breath and let it out. A soft whir comes from somewhere behind me and cool air flows along my back and shoulders. Air conditioning. It feels nice.

I grab a handhold and spin myself around. I pull the inner airlock door closed and then rotate the primary lever to begin the cycling sequence. A pump fires up. It’s louder than I would have thought. It sounds like an idling motorcycle. I keep my hand on the lever. Pushing it back to the original position will cancel the cycle and repressurize. If I see even a hint of a red light on my suit panel, I’m going to throw that lever so fast it’ll make my head spin.

After a minute, the pump grows quieter. Then quieter still. It’s probably as loud as it ever was. But with the air leaving the chamber, there’s no way for the noise to get to me other than through my feet touching the Velcro pads on the floor.

Finally, the pump stops. I’m in total silence aside from the fans inside the suit. The airlock controls show that the pressure inside is zero, and a yellow light turns green. I’m clear to open the outer door.

I grab the hatch crank, then hesitate.

“What am I doing?” I say.

Is this really a good idea? I want that cylinder so badly I’m just plowing ahead without any sort of plan. Is this worth risking my life over?

Yes. Unequivocally.

Okay, but is it worth risking the lives of everyone on Earth over? Because if I mess up and die out there, then the whole Hail Mary Project will have been in vain.

Hmm.

Yes. It’s still worth it. I don’t know what these aliens are like, what they want, or what they’re planning to say. But they will have information. Any information, even stuff I’d rather not know, is better than none.

I spin the handle and open the door. The empty blackness of space lies beyond. The light of Tau Ceti glistens off the door. I peek my head out and see Tau Ceti with my own eyes. At this distance, it’s a little less bright than the sun as seen from Earth.

I double-check my tether to make darn sure I’m attached, then I step out into space.

I’m good at this.

I must have practiced a lot. Maybe in a neutral-buoyancy tank or something. But it comes as second nature to me.

I exit the airlock and clamp one of my tethers to a rail on the outside hull. Always have two tethers. And always have at least one attached. That way you’re never at risk of floating away from the ship. The Orlan-MKS2 is possibly the best EVA suit ever made, but it doesn’t have a SAFER unit like NASA’s EMU suit. At least with a SAFER unit you have minimal thrust capability to return to the ship if you fall adrift.

All that information floods into my mind at once. I guess I’ve put a lot of time and thought into spacesuits. Maybe I’m our crew’s EVA specialist? I don’t know.

I flip up the sun visor and peer toward the Blip-A. I wish I could glean some special insight by seeing it in person, but it’s pretty far away. The Hail Mary’s telescope gave me a much better view. Still, there’s something…unique about staring directly at an alien spacecraft.

I catch a glint of the cylinder. Every now and then the flat ends of the gently tumbling cylinder reflect Taulight.

I’ve decided “Taulight” is a word, by the way. Light from Tau Ceti. It’s not “sunlight.” Tau Ceti isn’t the sun. So…Taulight.

I still have a good twenty minutes before the cylinder reaches the ship. I watch it for a while to guess where it’ll hit. It’d be nice to have a crewmate inside at the radar station.

It’d be nice to have a crewmate at all.

After five minutes, I have a good bead on the cylinder. It’s headed for roughly the center of the ship. It’s as good a place as any for aliens to aim for.

I make my way across the hull. The Hail Mary is pretty big. My little pressurized area is only half its length and the back half flares out to be three times as wide. Most of that will be empty now, I guess. It used to be full of Astrophage for my one-way trip here.

The hull is crisscrossed with rails and latch points for EVA tethering. Tether by tether, rail by rail, I make my way toward the center of the ship.

I have to step over a thick ring. It circles the crew compartment area of the ship. It’s a good 2 feet thick. I don’t know what it is, but it must be pretty heavy. Mass is everything when it comes to spaceship design, so it must be important. I’ll speculate about that later.

I continue along, one hull latch point at a time, until I’m roughly in the center of the hull. The cylinder creeps closer. I adjust my position a tad to keep up with it. After an excruciatingly long wait, it’s almost within reach.

I wait. No need to get greedy. If I paw at it too early, I might knock it off course and into space. I’d have no way of recovering it. I don’t want to look dumb in front of the aliens.

Because they’re surely watching me right now. Probably counting my limbs, noting my size, figuring out what part they should eat first, whatever.

I let the cylinder get closer and closer. It’s moving less than 1 mile per hour. Not exactly a bullet pass.

Now that it’s so close, I can estimate its size. It’s not big at all. About the size and shape of a coffee can. It’s a dull gray color with splotches of slightly darker gray randomly here and there. Similar to the Blip-A’s hull, kind of. Different color but same blotchiness. Maybe it’s a stylistic thing. Random splotches are “in” this season or something.

The cylinder floats into my arms and I grab it with both hands.

It has less mass than I expected. It’s probably hollow. It’s a container. There’s something inside they want me to see.

I hold the cylinder under one arm and use the other to deal with tethers. I hurry back to the airlock. It’s a stupid thing to do. There’s no reason to hurry and it literally endangers my life. One slip-up and I’d be off in space. But I just can’t wait.

I get back into the ship, cycle the airlock, and float into the control room with my prize in hand. I open the Orlan suit, already thinking about what tests I’ll run on the cylinder. I have a whole lab to work with!

The smell hits me immediately. I gasp and cough. The cylinder is bad!

No, not bad. But it smells bad. I can barely breathe. The chemical smell is familiar. What is it? Cat pee?

Ammonia. It’s ammonia.

“Okay,” I wheeze. “Okay. Think.”

My gut instinct is to close the suit again. But that would just trap me in a small volume with the ammonia that’s already in here. Better to let the cylinder air out in the larger volume of the ship.

Ammonia isn’t toxic—at least, not in small quantities. And the fact that I can still breathe at all tells me it’s a small quantity. If it weren’t, my lungs would have caustic burns and I’d be unconscious or dead now.

As it is, there’s just a bad smell. I can handle a bad smell.

I climb out the back of the suit while the cylinder floats in the middle of the console room. Now that it’s not a shock anymore, I can handle the ammonia. It’s no worse than using a bunch of Windex in a small room. Unpleasant but not dangerous.

I grab the cylinder—and it’s hot as heck!

I yelp and pull my hands away. I blow on them for a moment and check for burns. It wasn’t too bad. Not stovetop hot. But hot.

Grabbing it with my bare hands was stupid. Flawed logic. I assumed that since I’d been holding it earlier it was okay to do now. But earlier I had very thick spacesuit gloves protecting my hands.

“You’ve been a bad alien cylinder,” I say to it. “You need a time-out.”

I pull my arm into my sleeve and wrap my hand in the cuff. I use my now-protected knuckles to nudge the cylinder into the airlock. Once it’s in, I close the door.

I’ll let it be for now. It’ll cool down to ambient air temperature eventually. And while it does, I don’t want it floating randomly around my ship. I don’t think there’s anything in the airlock that can get hurt by some heat.

How hot was it?

Well, I had both hands on it (like an idiot) for a fraction of a second. My own reaction time was enough to keep me from getting burned. So it’s probably less than 100 degrees Celsius.

I open and close my hands a few times. They don’t hurt anymore, but the memory of the pain lingers.

“Where’d the heat come from?” I mumbled.

The cylinder was out in space for a good forty minutes. Over that time it should have radiated heat via blackbody radiation. It should be cold, not hot. I’m about 1 AU from Tau Ceti, and Tau Ceti has half the luminosity of the sun. So I don’t think the Taulight could have heated the cylinder up much. Definitely not more than blackbody radiation would cool it down.

So either it has a heater inside or it was extremely hot when it started its trip. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. It’s not very heavy, so it’s probably thin. If there’s no internal heat source, it’ll cool off very fast in the air here.

The room still smells like ammonia. Yuck.

I float down to the lab. I don’t know where to begin. So many things I want to do. Maybe I should start by just identifying the material the cylinder is made of? Something harmless to the Blip-A’s crew might be incredibly toxic to me and neither of us would know it.

Maybe I should check for radiation.

I drift down to the lab table and put out a hand to steady myself. I’m getting better at the zero-g thing. I think I remember seeing an astronaut documentary saying some people handle it fine, while others really struggle. Looks like I’m one of the lucky ones.

I’m using “lucky” loosely here. I’m on a suicide mission. So…yeah.

The lab is a mystery. It has been for a while. It’s clearly set up with the idea that there’ll be gravity. It has tables, chairs, test-tube trays, et cetera. There’s none of the usual stuff you would expect to see in a weightless environment. No Velcro on the walls, no computer screens at all angles. No efficient use of space. Everything assumes there will be a “floor.”

The ship can accelerate just fine. For a good long time too. It had me at 1.5 g’s for probably a few years. But they can’t expect me to just leave the engines on and fly in circles to keep gravity in the lab, right?

I look around at each piece of lab equipment and try to relax my mind. There has to be a reason for this. And it’s in my memory somewhere. The trick is to think about what I want to know, but not stress about it too much. It’s like falling asleep. You can’t really do it if you concentrate on it too hard.

So many top-of-the-line pieces of equipment. I let my mind wander as I scan across them all….