Page 11 of Project Hail Mary

She mulled it over. “Why not? You’ll hear it from the president in about twelve hours anyway.”

“The president?” I said. “Of the United States?”

She took another gulp of whiskey. “Have you heard ofAmaterasu? It’s a Japanese solar probe.”

“Sure,” I said. “JAXA has been getting some great data from it. It’s really neat, actually. It’s in a solar orbit, about halfway between Mercury and Venus. It has twenty different instruments aboard that—”

“Yeah, I know. Whatever,” she said. “According to their data, the sun’s output is decreasing.”

I shrugged. “So? Where are we in the solar cycle?”

She shook her head. “It’s not the eleven-year cycle. It’s something else. JAXA accounted for the cycle. There’s still a downward trend. They say the sun is 0.01 percent less bright than it should be.”

“Okay, interesting. But hardly worth three whiskeys before dinner.”

She pursed her lips. “That’s what I thought. But they’re saying that value is increasing. And therateof the increase is increasing. It’s some sort of exponential loss that they caught very, very early thanks to their probe’s incredibly sensitive instruments.”

I leaned back in the booth. “I don’t know, Marissa. Spotting an exponential progression that early seems really unlikely. But okay, let’s say the JAXA scientists are right. Where’s the energy going?”

“The Petrova line.”

“Huh?”

“JAXA took a good long look at the Petrova line and they say it’s getting brighter at the same rate that the sun is getting dimmer. Somehow or another, whatever it is, the Petrova line is stealing energy from the sun.”

She pulled a sheaf of papers from her purse and put them on the table. It looked like a bunch of graphs and charts. She shuffled through them until she found the one she wanted, then pushed it toward me.

The x-axis was labeled “time” and the y-axis was labeled “luminosity loss.” The line was exponential, for sure.

“This can’t be right,” I said.

“It’s right,” she said. “The sun’s output will drop a full percent over the next nine years. In twenty years that figure will be five percent. This is bad. It’s really bad.”

I stared at the graph. “That would mean an ice age. Like…right away. Instant ice age.”

“Yeah, at the very least. And crop failures, mass starvation…I don’t even know what else.”

I shook my head. “How can there be a sudden change in the sun? It’s astar, for cripes’ sake. Things just don’t happen this fast for stars. Changes take millions of years, not dozens. Come on, you know that.”

“No, I don’t know that. I used to know that. Now I only know the sun’s dying,” she said. “I don’t know why and I don’t know what we could do about it. But I know it’s dying.”

“How…” I furrowed my brow.

She downed the rest of her drink. “President addresses the nation tomorrow morning. I think they’re coordinating with other world leaders to all announce at the same time.”

The waiter dropped off my Guinness. “Here you go, sir. The steaks should be out shortly.”

“I need another whiskey,” Marissa said.

“Make it two,” I added.

—

I blink. Another flash of memory.

Was it true? Or is that just a random memory of me talking to someone who got sucked into a bogus doomsday theory?

No. It’s real. I’m terrified just thinking about it. And it’s not just sudden terror. It’s a cozy, comfortable terror with a permanent seat at the table. I’ve felt it for a long time.