Project Hail Mary

Chapter 8

By the time we reached Geneva, I’d completely lost track of what day it was.

The computer models for the Astrophage breeder weren’t lining up with the real-world performance. Though I had managed to breed up almost six grams of Astrophage so far. When all was said and done, the aircraft carrier’s reactor just couldn’t generate enough heat to speed up the reaction any further. Stratt kept vaguely saying they were going to provide a heat source capable of keeping up, but nothing had come of it yet.

I typed away on my computer even as the luxury private jet came to a halt at the gate. Stratt had to nudge me to make me stop working at all.

Three hours later, we waited in a conference room.

Always a conference room. My life was a collection of conference rooms these days. This one was nicer than most, at least. With fancy wood paneling and a stylish mahogany table. It was really something.

Stratt and I didn’t talk. I worked on heat-transfer-rate coefficients while she typed away on her laptop doing gosh-knows-what. We spent enough time together as it was.

Finally, a dour-looking woman entered the room and sat across from Stratt.

“Thank you for seeing me, Ms. Stratt,” she said with a Norwegian accent.

“No need to thank me, Dr. Lokken,” she said. “I’m here against my will.”

I looked up from my laptop. “You are? I thought you scheduled this.”

She didn’t take her eyes off the Norwegian. “I scheduled it because I had six different world leaders on the phone at the same time nagging me to do it. I finally relented.”

“And you are…?” Lokken asked me.

“Ryland Grace.”

She actually backed away. “The Ryland Grace? Author of ‘An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models’?”

“Yeah, got a problem with that?” I said.

Stratt half smiled at me. “You’re famous.”

“Infamous,” said Lokken. “His childish paper was a slap in the face to the entire scientific community. This man works for you? Absurd. All his assumptions about alien life were proven wrong.”

I scowled. “Hey. My claim is life doesn’t need water to evolve. Just because we found some life that does use water, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“Of course it does. Two life-forms independently evolved to require water—”

“Independently?!” I snorted. “Are you out of your mind? Do you honestly think something as complicated as mitochondria would evolve the same way twice? This is obviously a panspermia event.”

She waved off my statement as if it were an annoying insect. “Astrophage mitochondria is very different from Earth mitochondria. They clearly evolved separately.”

“They’re ninety-eight percent identical!”

“Ahem,” said Stratt. “I don’t really get what you’re fighting about, but can we—”

I pointed at Lokken. “This idiot thinks Astrophage evolved independently, but it’s obvious Astrophage and Earth life are related!”

“That’s fascinating, but—”

Lokken slapped the table. “How could a common ancestor have gotten across interstellar space?”

“The same way Astrophage does it!”

She leaned toward me. “Then why haven’t we seen interstellar life all along?”

I leaned toward her. “No idea. Maybe it was a fluke.”

“How do you explain the differences in mitochondria?”

“Four billion years of divergent evolution.”

“Stop,” Stratt said calmly. “I don’t know what this is…some sort of science-related pissing contest? That’s not what we’re here for. Dr. Grace, Dr. Lokken, please sit down.”

I plopped into my seat and folded my arms. Lokken sat as well.

Stratt fiddled with a pen. “Dr. Lokken, you’ve been hassling governments to hassle me. Over and over. Day in and day out. I know you want to be involved in Project Hail Mary, but I won’t make it a huge international mess. We don’t have time for the politicking and kingdom-building that always happens on big projects.”

“I’m not happy to be here either,” Lokken said. “I’m here, at great inconvenience to me as well as you, because this was the only way to tell you a critical design flaw in the Hail Mary.”

Stratt sighed. “We sent out those preliminary designs for general feedback. Not command appearances in Geneva.”

“Then file this under ‘general feedback.’ ”

“Could have been an email.”

“You would have deleted it. You have to listen to me, Stratt. This is important.”

Stratt twirled the pen around a few more times. “Well, I’m here. Go ahead.”

Lokken cleared her throat. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the entire purpose of the Hail Mary is to be a laboratory. One we can send to Tau Ceti to see why that star—and that star alone—is immune to Astrophage.”

“That’s right.”

She nodded. “Then would you also agree that the lab aboard the ship itself is the most important component?”

“Yes,” Stratt said. “Without it, the mission is meaningless.”

“Then we have a serious problem.” Lokken pulled several sheets of paper from her purse. “I have a list of the lab equipment you want aboard. Spectrometers, DNA sequencers, microscopes, chemistry lab glassware—”

“I’m aware of the list,” Stratt said. “I was the one who signed off on it.”

Lokken dropped the papers on the table. “Most of this stuff won’t work in zero g.”

Stratt rolled her eyes. “We’ve thought of that, of course. Companies all over the world are working on zero-g-rated versions of this equipment as we speak.”

Lokken shook her head. “Do you have any idea how much research and development went into making electron microscopes? Gas chromatographs? Everything else on this list? A century of scientific advances brought about by failure after failure. You want to just assume that making these things zero-g functional is going to work on the first try?”

“I don’t see any way around it, unless you invented artificial gravity.”

“We have invented artificial gravity,” Lokken insisted. “A long time ago.”

Stratt shot me a look. Obviously that had caught her off guard.

“I think she means a centrifuge,” I said.

“I know she means a centrifuge,” Stratt said. “What do you think?”

“I hadn’t thought of it before. I guess…it could work….”

Stratt shook her head. “No. That won’t fly. We have to keep things simple. As simple as possible. Big, solid ship, minimal moving parts. The more complications we have the more points of failure we risk.”

“It’s worth the risk,” said Lokken.

“We’d have to add a huge counterweight to the Hail Mary to even make that work.” Stratt pursed her lips. “I’m sorry, but we barely have enough energy to make the Astrophage for the current mass limit. We can’t just double it.”

“Wait. We have enough energy to make all the fuel? When did that happen—?” I said.

“You don’t need to add mass,” Lokken said. She pulled another paper from her purse and slapped it down on the table. “If you take the current design, cut it in half between the crew compartment and the fuel tanks, the two sides will have a good mass ratio for a centrifuge.”

Stratt peered at the diagram. “You put all the fuel on the same side. That’s two million kilograms.”

“No.” I shook my head. “The fuel would be gone.”

They both looked at me.

“It’s a suicide mission,” I said. “The fuel will be gone when they get to Tau Ceti. Lokken picked a split point where the back of the ship will weigh three times as much as the front. It’s a good mass ratio for a centrifuge. It could work.”

“Thank you,” said Lokken.

“How do you cut a ship in half?” asked Stratt. “How does it become a centrifuge?”

Lokken flipped the diagram over to reveal a detailed image showing a faring between the two ship halves. “Spools of Zylon cabling between the crew compartment and the rest of the ship. We could simulate one g of gravity with a hundred meters of separation.”

Stratt pinched her chin. Had someone actually changed her mind on something?

“I don’t like complexity…” she said. “I don’t like risk.”

“This removes complexity and risk,” Lokken said. “The ship, the crew, the Astrophage…it’s all just a support system for the lab equipment. You need reliable equipment. Stuff that’s been in use for years with millions of man-hours of commercial use. Every imaginable kink has been worked out of those systems. If you have one g of gravity—to make sure they’ll be in the environment they were perfected for—you get the benefit of all that reliability.”

“Hmm,” said Stratt. “Grace? Your thoughts?”

“I…I think it’s a good idea.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, we already have to design the ship to withstand four years of constant acceleration at one and a half g’s or so. It’s going to be pretty solid.”

She took a longer look at Lokken’s diagram. “Wouldn’t this make the artificial gravity in the crew area upside down?”

And she was right. The Hail Mary was designed so that “down” was “toward the engines.” As the ship accelerates, the crew is pushed “down” to the floor. But inside a centrifuge, “down” is always “away from the center of rotation.” So the crew would all be pushed toward the nose of the ship.

“Yes, that would be a problem.” Lokken pointed to the diagram. The cables didn’t attach directly to the crew compartment. They attached to two large discs on either side. “The cabling attaches to these big hinges. The whole front half of the ship can rotate 180 degrees. So when they’re in centrifuge mode, the nose will face inward toward the other half of the ship. Inside the crew compartment, the force of gravity will be away from the nose—same as when the engines are thrusting.”

Stratt took it in. “This is a fairly complicated piece of machinery and you’ll be breaking the ship into two parts. You honestly think this is less of a risk?”

“Less risk than using brand-new, insufficiently tested equipment. Trust me, I’ve used sensitive equipment most of my career,” I said. “It’s finicky and delicate even in ideal conditions.”

Stratt picked up her pen and tapped it on the table several times. “Okay. We’ll do it.”

Lokken smiled. “Excellent. I’ll write up a paper and send it along to the UN. We can form a committee—”

“No, I said we’ll do it.” Stratt stood up. “You’re with us now, Dr. Lokken. Pack a bag and meet us at Genève Aéroport. Terminal 3, private plane called Stratt.”

“What? I work for ESA. I can’t just—”

“Yeah, don’t bother,” I said. “She’s going to call your boss or your boss’s boss or whatever and have you assigned to her. You just got drafted.”

“I…I wasn’t volunteering to design it personally,” Lokken protested. “I only meant to point out—”

“I never said you volunteered,” Stratt said. “It’s not voluntary at all.”

“You can’t just force me to work for you.”

But Stratt was already walking out of the room. “Meet us at the airport in one hour or I’ll have the Swiss Gendarmerie drag you there in two hours. Your call.”

Lokken stared at the door, flabbergasted, then back to me.

“You get used to it,” I said.

The ship is a centrifuge! I remember it all now!

That’s why there’s a mysterious area called “Cable Faring.” That’s where the spools and Zylon cables are. The ship can break in half, turn the crew compartment around, and spin.

That turning-around part—that’s the weird ring I saw on the hull during my EVA! I remember the design now. It has two big hinges on it, allowing the crew compartment to turn around before the centrifuge is activated.

It’s strangely reminiscent of Apollo spacecraft. The lunar lander was attached below the command module at launch, but they’d separate, turn the command module around, and reconnect with the lander during their trip to the moon. It’s one of those things that looks ridiculous but ends up being the most effective way to solve a problem.

I float back up to the cockpit and flip through screens on various consoles. As each one fails to be what I want, I move to the next. Finally, I find it. The “Centrifuge” screen. It was hiding out as a subpanel in the Life Support screen.

It looks simple enough. There are yaw, pitch, and roll readouts, showing the current state of the ship, just like the Navigation panel has. A separate readout is labeled “Crew Compartment Angle”—that must be the turning-around bit. Each one reads “0° per second.”

Below those is a button labeled “Engage Centrifuge Sequence.” Underneath that are a bunch of numbers related to rotational acceleration rate, final speed, spooling rate, estimated g-force at the floor of the lab, four different screens for spool status (I guess there are four spools, two on each side), which emergency protocols to follow if there’s a problem, and a lot more stuff I won’t pretend to understand. The important thing is all those readouts have values already in them.

Got to love computers. They do all the thinking for you so you don’t have to.

I do take a closer look at the emergency protocol mode. It just reads “Spin Down.” I tap the readout and a dropdown appears. Looks like my options are: “Spin Down,” “Halt All Spools,” and one in red labeled “Separate.” I’m pretty sure I don’t want to do that. I suspect “Spin Down” will slowly decelerate the ship’s spin if there’s a problem. Sounds good, so I’ll leave it set to that.

I’m about to engage the centrifuge, but then I pause. Is everything tied down? Is it safe to suddenly have a bunch of force acting on the ship? I shake it off. The ship was accelerating constantly for several years. It has to be comfortable with a little centrifuge action, right?

Right?

As hundreds of astronauts have done before, I place my faith and my life in the hands of the engineers who designed the system. Dr. Lokken, I guess. Hope she did her job.

I push the button.

First, nothing happens. I wonder if I even pressed it right, or if I just fumbled at the screen like I have so many times on my phone in the past.

But then the alert chimes throughout the ship. The piercing triple beep repeats every few seconds. There is no way for any crewmember to miss a signal like that. A final warning, I guess, in case the crew had a failure to communicate.

Over my head, the Petrovascope screen changes to lock-out mode. That confirms my earlier suspicion that the ship’s maneuvering engines are Astrophage-based. I mean, it’s kind of obvious when you think about it. But I wasn’t sure until now.

The beeping stops and nothing really happens. Then I notice that I’m closer to the Nav panel than I was before. I drifted to the edge of the room. I put my arm out to steady myself and get back to normal. And then I drift toward the Nav panel again.

“Ohhh,” I say.

It’s begun. I’m not drifting toward the Nav panel. The whole cockpit is drifting toward me. The ship is starting to spin.

Everything veers off and changes direction. That’ll be because as the ship spins, the crew compartment is also turning around. This could get complicated.

“Uh…right!” I kick off the wall and into the pilot seat.

I tilt. Or, rather, the room tilts. No, that doesn’t make sense. Nothing tilts. The ship is spinning around faster and faster. It’s also accelerating the acceleration. Also, the front half of the ship has detached from the rear, and it’s rotating around those two big hinges. When it’s done, the nose will be pointed in toward the rear half of the ship. All of this is going on at the same time, so the forces I’m feeling are really weird. Extremely complicated stuff, but also not my problem. It’s up to the computer to deal with.

I watch the Centrifuge panel. The pitch rate reads 0.17° per second. Another readout labeled “Component Separation” reads 2.4 meters. There’s a little beep and the “Crew Compartment Angle” readout blinks. It shows as 180°. I assume this whole sequence was worked out well in advance to minimize shock to the system and/or crew.

I feel a slight pressure on my butt as the seat pushes up against me. The transition is very smooth. I just…experience more and more gravity in what feels like a tilting room. It’s a weird sensation.

I know, logically, that I’m in a ship spinning around. But there are no windows to see out of. Only screens. I check the telescope screen that’s still pointed at the Blip-A. The stars in the background do not move. It’s accounting for my rotation somehow and canceling it. That bit of software was probably tricky, considering the camera probably isn’t at the exact center of rotation.

My arms grow heavy, so I put them on the armrests. I have to start using my neck muscles again for the first time in a while.

Five minutes after the sequence began, I experience a little less than normal Earth gravity. A quadruple beep announces the end of the sequence.

I check the Centrifuge screen. It shows a pitch rate of 20.71° per second, a total separation of 104 meters, and a “Lab Gravity” of 1.00 g.

The diagram of the ship shows the Hail Mary split in two pieces, the nose of the crew compartment pointed inward toward the other half. The two halves are comically far apart, and the entire system spins slowly. Well, actually pretty fast, but it looks slow at that scale.

I unstrap from the chair, walk to the airlock, and open the hatch. The smell of ammonia drifts into the cockpit again, but not nearly as bad as before. The alien artifact lies on the floor. I give it a quick touch with my finger to gauge temperature. It’s still pretty warm, but no longer scalding hot. Good. There’s no internal heater or weird stuff like that. It just started out really hot.

I pick it up. Time to see what this thing is made of. And what’s inside.

Before leaving the cockpit, I take one last look at the Telescope screen. I don’t know why—I guess I just like to keep track of what extraterrestrial ships in my vicinity are up to.

The Blip-A spins in space. It rotates end-over-end, probably at the exact same rate as the Hail Mary. I guess they saw me spin up the centrifuge and figured it was another communication thing.

Humanity’s first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race. Glad I could be a part of it.

I set the cylinder on the lab table. Where do I begin? Everywhere!

I check to see if it’s radioactive with a Geiger counter. It’s not. That’s nice.

I poke it with various things to get a feel for its hardness. It’s hard.

It looks like metal but doesn’t feel quite like metal. I use a multimeter to see if it’s conductive. It isn’t. Interesting.

I get a hammer and chisel. I want a small chip of the cylinder material for the gas chromatograph—that way I’ll know what elements it’s made of. After a few smacks with the hammer, the chisel chips. The cylinder isn’t even dented.

“Hm.”

The cylinder is too big to put in the gas chromatograph. But I find a handheld x-ray spectrometer. It looks like a UPC scanner gun. Easy enough to use, and it’ll give me some idea of what this thing is made of. It’s not as accurate as the chromatograph, but better than nothing.

After a quick scan, it tells me the cylinder is made of xenon.

“What…?”

I use the spectrometer on the steel lab table to make sure it’s working correctly. It reports iron, nickel, chromium, and so on. Just what it should say. So I check the cylinder again and get the same wacky results as with my first test. I test it four more times but keep getting the same answer.

Why did I run the test so many times? Because those results make no sense at all. Xenon is a noble gas. It doesn’t react with anything. It doesn’t form bonds with anything. And it’s a gas at room temperature. But somehow it’s part of this solid material?

And no, it’s not a cylinder filled with xenon or anything like that. A spectrometer is not a deep, penetrating scan. It can only tell you what’s on the surface. If I pointed it at gold-plated nickel, it would say “100% gold,” because that’s all it can see. It can only tell me what the molecules on the surface of the cylinder are made of. Apparently, they’re made of xenon.

This handheld spectrometer can’t detect elements lower than aluminum. So there could be carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, whatever is lurking in there too. But as for elements within the detector’s range…I’m looking at pure xenon.

“How?!”

I plop down onto a stool and stare at the cylinder. What a strange artifact. What do I even call noble gases that react with things? Ignobles?

But being flummoxed has one good side effect. It makes me stop my frenzied attack on the cylinder and just look at it. For the first time, I see that there is a thin line running around the circumference about an inch from the top. I feel it with my fingernail. It’s definitely an indentation of some kind. Is that a lid? Maybe it just opens.

I pick up the cylinder and try to pull off the top. It doesn’t budge. On a whim, I try to unscrew it. It also doesn’t budge.

But there’s no reason aliens would follow the righty-tighty-lefty-loosey rule, is there?

I turn the lid to the right and it rotates. My heart skips a beat!

I keep turning. After 90 degrees I feel it release. I pull the two chunks apart.

Both halves have complicated stuff going on inside. They look like…models of some kind? They both feature whisker-thin poles sticking up from their bases, leading to spheres of various sizes. I don’t see any moving parts, and everything appears to be made out of the same weird material as the case.

I check out the bottom half first. Have to start somewhere.

A single whisker holds up…an abstract sculpture? It’s a marble-sized sphere and a BB-sized sphere each held in place by thinner whiskers branching off the main vertical “trunk.” There’s also an oddly parabolic shape connecting the tops of the two spheres. This whole thing looks familiar to me…why…?

“Petrova line!” I blurt out.

I’ve seen that arc shape enough times to know it by heart. My heart races.

I point to the large sphere. “So you must be a star. And the little guy must be a planet.”

These aliens are aware of Astrophage. Or, at least, they’re aware of the Petrova line. But that doesn’t really tell me anything. They’re in an Astrophage-powered ship, so of course they know about Astrophage. And we’re chatting in a solar system that has a Petrova line, so that’s not surprising either. This might be their home system for all I know.

This is a good start, though. We were “talking” by flashing our engines. So they know I use Astrophage and that I can “see” (with help from the ship) the Petrova frequency. From that, they concluded I must be able to see the Petrova line. They’re smart.

I look at the other half of the doohickey. Dozens of whiskers rise from the base. They’re all different lengths and each one ends in a sphere less than a millimeter across. I poke a whisker with my finger and it doesn’t bend. I press harder and harder. Eventually the whole doohickey slides on the table. Those whiskers are stronger than anything that thin should be.

I guess xenon makes pretty strong material when you get it to react with things. It infuriates my tender scientist’s heart! I try to put it out of my head and get back to the task at hand.

I count thirty-one whiskers, each with its little sphere at the end. While counting, I spot something special. There’s one whisker sticking up from the exact center of the disc, but unlike the others, it’s not connected to a sphere. I squint to get a good look.

Instead of a single sphere, it’s two spheres of different sizes and an arc—okay, I see. It’s a very small replica of the Petrova-line model on the other half of the doohickey. Maybe one-twentieth the scale.

And that little Petrova-line model has an even thinner whisker connecting it to another sphere at the tip of a different whisker. No, not quite a sphere. It’s another Petrova-line model. I scour the rest of the doohickey for any more of them, but I don’t see any. Just the one in the middle and the one off to the side.

“Wait a minute…waaaaait a minute…”

I pull out the drawer that has the lab computer panel in it. Time to make use of that virtually infinite reference material. I find a huge spreadsheet with the information I need, bring it into Excel (Stratt loves well-tested, off-the-shelf products), and do a bunch of operations on it. Soon, I have the data plot I wanted. And it matches.

Stars. The little spheres on the end of the whiskers are stars. Of course they are. What else would have a Petrova line?

But they’re not just any old stars. These are specific stars. They’re all in the correct relative positions to one another, with Tau Ceti right in the center. The map’s point of view is kind of odd. To make the spheres match my data plot of star locations, I have to hold the doohickey at a 30-degree angle and kind of rotate it around a bit.

But of course, all of Earth’s data is based on Earth’s orbital plane being the reference point. People from a different planet would have a different coordinate system. But no matter how you look at it, the end result is the same: The doohickey is a map of the local stars.

Then I’m suddenly very interested in that little filament connecting the center sphere (Tau Ceti) to another sphere. I check the corresponding star in my catalog: It’s called 40 Eridani. But I bet the crew of the Blip-A call it home.

That’s the message. “We’re from the 40 Eridani system. And now we’re here at Tau Ceti.”

But there’s even more to it than that. They’re also saying “40 Eridani has a Petrova line, just like Tau Ceti.”

I stop to let that sink in.

“Are you in the same boat?!” I say.

Of course they are! Astrophage is getting at all the local stars. These people are from a planet orbiting 40 Eridani, and 40 Eridani is infected just like Earth’s sun! They have some pretty good science going on, so they did the same thing we did. Make a ship, and go to Tau Ceti to see why it’s not dying!

“Holy cow!” I say.

Yes, I’m jumping to a conclusion there. Maybe they harvest Astrophage from their Petrova line and consider it a boon. Maybe they invented Astrophage. Maybe they just think Petrova lines are pretty. There are a bunch of different things this could mean. But the most likely, in my admittedly biased opinion, is that they’re here to find a solution.

Aliens.

Actual aliens.

Aliens from the 40 Eridani system. So I guess that makes them Eridanians? Hard to say, even harder to remember. Eridans? No. How about Eridians? Sounds kind of like “iridium,” which is one of the cooler-sounding elements on the periodic table. Yeah, I’m going to call them Eridians.

And I think it’s pretty obvious how I should respond.

I thoroughly searched the lab a few days ago. There’s an electronics kit in one of the drawers. The trick is remembering which one.

I don’t remember, of course. It takes me a while of searching and not-quite swearing while I do, but I eventually find it.

I don’t have any xenonite (that’s what I’m calling this weird alien compound, and no one can stop me). But I do have solder and a soldering iron. I break off a little piece of solder, melt one end, and stick it to the Tau Ceti sphere. It sticks pretty well, which is a relief. You never know with xenonite.

I check, double-check, and triple-check to make sure I correctly identify which one of the little stars in the model is Sol (Earth’s sun). I solder the other side of the wire to Sol.

I search the lab until I find some hard paraffin. With some poking, open flames, and mild swearing, I’m able to make a really poor approximation of the Petrova-line icon they sent me. I smush it onto Sol in the model. It looks all right. At least, good enough that they should get the idea.

I take a look. The sleek, thin lines of the xenonite whiskers are ruined by my crooked, blob-ended solder addition and crappy wax model. It’s like someone added a crayon drawing into the corner of a Da Vinci, but it will have to do.

I try to screw the top and bottom of the doohickey back together. They refuse to mate. I try again. It still doesn’t work. I remember that Eridians use left-handed threading in their screws. So I do what, to me, is an unscrewing motion. The two pieces connect perfectly.

Time to throw it back to them. Politely.

Except I can’t. Not with the ship spinning around like this. If I tried to step out of the airlock, I’d go flying off into space.

I grab the doohickey and climb up to the control room. I strap myself into the chair and order the ship to spin down.

Like last time, I feel the room tilt, though this time it tilts the other way. And again, I know it’s not actually tilting, it’s my perception of the lateral acceleration being applied, but whatever.

I feel the gravity decrease and the tilt of the room reduce until I’m back in zero g again. This time there’s no disorientation. I guess my lizard brain has made its peace with the fact that gravity comes and goes. The operation ends with a final “clunk” as the reoriented crew compartment seats into the rear half of the ship.

I get back in the EVA suit, grab the doohickey, and head out into space once again. I don’t need to work my way across the hull with tethers this time. I just clip my tether in the airlock.

The Blip-A has stopped spinning—probably did it when the Hail Mary stopped. And it’s still 217 meters away.

I don’t have to be Joe Montana to make this pass. I just need to set the doohickey in motion toward the Blip-A. It’s over a hundred meters across. I should be able to hit it.

I give the doohickey a shove. It floats away from me at a reasonable speed. Maybe 2 meters per second—roughly a jogging pace. This is communication of a sort too. I’m telling my new friends that I can handle slightly faster deliveries.

The doohickey floats off toward the Eridian ship and I head back into mine.

“Okay, guys,” I say. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Astrophage is your enemy, I’m your friend.”

I watch the Telescope screen. Occasionally I look away. Sometimes I play Klondike solitaire on the Nav panel. But I never go more than a few seconds without checking the telescope. A thick pair of gloves, harvested from the lab earlier, tries to float away. I grab them and wedge them behind the pilot’s seat.

It’s been two hours and my alien friends haven’t had anything to say. Are they waiting for me to say something else? I just told them what star I was from. It’s their turn to say something, right?

Do they even have a concept of taking turns? Or is that a purely human thing?

What if Eridians have a life-span of 2 million years and waiting a century to reply is considered polite?

How am I going to get rid of this red 7 on the rightmost pile? I don’t have any black 8s in my deck and—

Movement!

I spin to the Telescope screen so fast my legs float out into the middle of the control room. There’s another cylinder coming my way. I guess the many-armed hull-robot thing threw it just a moment ago. I check the Radar screen. Blip-B is plugging along at over a meter per second. I only have a few minutes to suit up!

I get back into the EVA suit and cycle the airlock. Once I open the outer door, I spot the cylinder tumbling end-over-end. Might be the same one as before, might be new. And this time, it’s headed straight for the airlock. I guess they saw that’s where I exited and reentered the ship and decided to make things easier for me.

Very considerate of them.

They’re accurate too. A minute later, the cylinder floats right through the center of the open hatchway. I catch it. I wave to the Blip-A and close the hatch. They probably don’t know what a wave is, but I felt compelled to do it.

I return to the control room and wriggle out of the EVA suit, leaving the cylinder to float near the airlock. The ammonia smell is powerful, but this time I’m ready for it.

I put the thick lab gloves on and grab the cylinder. Even through the fireproof gloves, I can feel the warmth. I know I should wait for it to cool down but I don’t want to.

It looks the same as before. I unscrew it the same left-handed way. This time, there’s no star map. Instead, it’s a model. What am I looking at here?

A single post from the base holds up an irregular shape. No, two irregular shapes connected by a tube. Hey, wait. One of the shapes is the Hail Mary. Oh, and the other one is the Blip-A.

The models have no detail or texture. But they’re good enough for me to recognize what they represent, so they did their job. The Hail Mary is only 3 inches long, while the Blip-A is closer to 8 inches. Man, that ship is huge.

And that tube connecting them? It connects to the Hail Mary’s airlock and leads to the center of the Blip-A’s diamond-shaped segment. The tunnel is just wide enough to cover my airlock door.

They want to meet.