Page 112 of Project Hail Mary

“No. My ship had device for this. But device broke.”

“You couldn’t fix it?”

“Device not malfunction. Device broke. Fell off ship during trip. Device gone.”

“Oh! Wow. Why did it break off?”

He wiggles his carapace.“Not know. Many things break. My people make ship very hurry. No time to make sure all things work good.”

Deadline-induced quality issues: a problem all over the galaxy.

“I tried to make replacement. Failed. Tried. Failed. Tried. Failed. I put ship in path of Astrophage. Maybe some get stuck on hull. But robot on hull no can find any. Astrophage very small.”

His carapace slumps down. His elbows are above the level of his breathing holes. Sometimes he dips his carapace when sad, but I’ve never seen him dip it this far.

His voice drops an octave.“Fail fail fail. I am repair Eridian. I not science Eridian. Smart smart smart science Eridians died.”

“Hey…don’t think of it like that…” I say.

“No understand.”

“Uh…” I pull myself over to his pile of bags. “You’re alive. And you’re here. And you haven’t given up.”

But his voice remains low.“I try so many times. Fail so many times. Not good at science.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m a science human. You’re good at making and fixing things. Together we’ll figure this out.”

He raises his carapace a bit.“Yes. Together. You have device to sample Astrophage, question?”

The External Collection Unit. I remember it from my first day in the control room. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but that’s got to be it. “Yes. I have a device for this.”

“Relief! I try so long. So many times. Fail.”He’s quiet for a moment. “Much time here. Much time alone.”

“How long were you here alone?”

He pauses.“Need new words.”

I pull my laptop off the wall. We run into new words every day, but they’re happening fewer and fewer times per day. That’s something.

I launch the frequency analyzer and bring up my dictionary spreadsheet. “Ready.”

“Seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-six seconds is?????.Erid rotate one circle in one?????.”

I immediately recognize the number. I’d worked it out back when I was studying Rocky’s clock. 7,776 is six to the fifth power. It’s exactly how many Eridian seconds it takes to wrap an Eridian clock around to all zeroes again. They divided their day into a very convenient and (to them) metric number of seconds. I can follow that.

“Eridian day.” I enter it into my dictionary. “A planet rotating once is a ‘day.’ ”

“Understand,”he says.

“Erid circles Eridani one time every 198.8 Eridian days. 198.8 Eridian days is?????.”

“Year,” I say, and enter it. “A planet going around a star once is one year. So that’s an Eridian year.”

“We stay with Earth units or you get confused. How long is Earth day, question? And how many Earth days is one Earth year, question?”

“One Earth day is 86,400 seconds. One Earth year is 365.25 Earth days.”

“Understand,”he says. “I am here forty-six years.”