Page 124 of Project Hail Mary

“Welcome back, Dr. Shapiro. I’ve told Dr. Grace about our sexual relationship.”

I put my head in my hands.

“Cool,” said Annie. “Yeah, we’ve got nothing to hide.”

“In any event,” said DuBois, “if I remember the previous lesson correctly, we were working on the cellular biology within Astrophage mitochondria.”

I cleared my throat. “Yes. Today I’ll be talking about the Astrophage’s Krebs cycle. It’s identical to what we find in Earth mitochondria, but with one additional step—”

Annie held up her hand. “Oh, sorry. One more thing—” She turned to DuBois. “Martin, we have about fifteen minutes of personal time after this lesson and before our next training exercise. Want to meet up in the bathroom down the hall and have sex?”

“I find that agreeable,” said DuBois. “Thank you, Dr. Shapiro.”

“Okay, cool.”

They both looked to me, ready for their lesson. I waited a few seconds to make sure there was no more oversharing, but they seemed content. “Okay, so the Krebs cycle in Astrophage has a variant—wait. Do you call her Dr. Shapirowhilehaving sex?”

“Of course. That’s her name.”

“I kind of like it,” she said.

“I’m sorry I asked,” I said. “Now, the Krebs cycle…”

—

Rocky’s data about Planet Adrian was dead-on. It’s 3.93 times Earth’s mass and has a radius of 10,318 kilometers (almost double Earth’s). It’s plugging along around Tau Ceti with an average orbital velocity of 35.9 kilometers per second. Plus, he had the position of the planet correct to within 0.00001 percent. That data was all I needed to work out the insertion thrust needed.

It’s a good thing those numbers were right. If they hadn’t been, there would have been some serious scrambling when the orbital insertion went wrong. Maybe even some dying.

Of course, to use the spin drives at all, I had to take us out of centrifuge mode.

Rocky and I float in the control room, he in his ceiling bulb and me in the pilot’s seat. I watch the camera-feed screen with a stupid grin on my face.

I’m at another planet! I shouldn’t be this excited. I’ve been at anotherstarfor the past several weeks. But that’s kind of esoteric. Tau Ceti is pretty much like the sun. It’s bright, you can’t get too close to it, and it even emits the same general range of frequencies. For some reason, being at a newplanetis much more exciting.

The wispy clouds of Adrian coast by beneath us. Or, more accurately, the wispy clouds barely move at all and we zoom by overhead. Adrian has a higher gravity than Earth, so our orbital velocity is just over 12kilometers per second—far more than what’s needed to orbit Earth.

The pale-green planet that I’ve been watching for eleven days has a lot more detail now that we’re on top of it. It’s not just green. There are dark and light bands of green wrapping around it. Just like Jupiter and Saturn. But unlike those two gas-giant leviathans, Adrian is a rocky world. Thanks to Rocky’s notes, we know the radius and mass, which means we know its density. And it’s far too dense to be just gas. There’s a surface down there, I just can’t see it.

Man, what I wouldn’t give for a lander!

Realistically, it wouldn’t do me any good. Even if I had some way of landing on Adrian, the atmosphere would crush me dead. It’d be like landing on Venus. Or Erid, for that matter. Heck, in that case, I wishRockyhad a lander. The pressure down there might not be too much for an Eridian.

Speaking of Erid, Rocky’s calibrating some kind of device in his control-room bubble. It looks almost like a gun. I don’t think we’ve started a space war, so I assume it’s something else.

He holds the device with one hand, taps it with another, and uses two more to hold a rectangular panel that is connected to the device by a short cable. He uses his remaining hand to anchor himself at a handhold.

He makes some more adjustments to the device with what looks like a screwdriver, and suddenly the panel springs to life. It was completely flat, but now has a texture to it. He waves the gun part left and right and the patterns on the screen move left and right.

“Success! It functions!”

I lean over the edge of the pilot’s seat for a better look. “What’s that?”

“Wait.”He points the gun part at my external camera readout screen. He adjusts a couple of controls and the pattern on the rectangle settles into a circle. Looking closer, I see some parts of the circle are a little more raised than others. It looks like a relief map.

“This device hear light. Like human eye.”

“Oh. It’s a camera.”