Page 143 of Project Hail Mary

My eyes water. They sting. Why? Am I crying? I have personally failed my entire species and they’re all going to die because of it. It’s a good reason to cry. But this isn’t emotional. It’s pain. My nose hurts too. And not from physical pressure or anything. Something burns at my nasal passages from the inside.

Something probably broke open in the lab. Some nasty chemical. Just as well I can’t breathe. I probably wouldn’t like the smell.

Then, out of nowhere, I can breathe again! I don’t know how or why, but I gasp and wheeze in my newfound freedom. I immediately fall into a violent coughing fit. Ammonia. Ammonia everywhere. It’s overpowering. My lungs scream and my eyes water over. Then there’s a new smell.

Fire.

I roll around to see Rocky hovering over me. Not in his compartment. He’s in the control room!

He has slashed my restraints and pulled the chair free. He shoves it to the side.

He stands over me, wobbling. I can feel the heat radiating from his body just inches away. Smoke billows out of the radiator slits atop his carapace.

His knees buckle and he collapses onto the screen next to me, destroying it. The LCD unit blacks out and the plastic bezel melts.

I see a trail of smoke leading up the tunnel to the lab and beyond.

“Rocky! What have you done!”

The crazy bastard must have used the large airlock in the dormitory! He came into my partition to save me. And he’ll die because ofit!

He shivers and folds his legs under himself.

“Save…Earth…Save…Erid…”he quavers. Then he slumps down.

“Rocky!” I grab his carapace without thinking. It’s like putting my hands on a burner. I jerk away. “Rocky…no…”

But he is motionless.

Rocky’s body heats up the whole room.

I can barely move, the force of the centrifuge is so great.

“Nnnn!” I groan, pushing myself up off the cracked monitor. I drag myself across the shards to the next monitor over. I try not to lift too much of my body up at a time—I have to save my strength.

I slide my finger onto the monitor from the edge and tap the screen-select buttons at the bottom. I’ve got one chance at this.

I remember the navigation controls. The manual-control section has a button to zero out all rotation. That’s mighty tempting right now, but I can’t risk it. The fuel bay is wide open, I’ve jettisoned a couple of pods, and I have no idea what other damage may have been done. The last thing I want to do is fire up any spin drives—even the little ones that do attitude control.

I bring up the Centrifuge screen. It blinks red and white, still angry about the excessive tumble the ship is undergoing. With effort, I dismiss the warning, then enter into manual mode. There are a bunch of “hey, don’t do this” kind of dialogs, but I dismiss them all. Soon I have direct control over the cable spools. I set them spinning at max speed.

The room spins and tilts in weird ways. My inner ears and my eyes are not enjoying the discrepancy. I know it’s because the two halves of the ship are separating and that has nasty effects on the forces I feel here in the control room. But logic doesn’t do any good in this situation. I turn my head and vomit on the wall.

After a few seconds, the force reduces dramatically. Much more manageable now. Less than 1 g, actually. All thanks to the magic of centrifuge math.

The force you feel in a centrifuge is inverse to the square of the radius. By spooling out the cables, I made the radius go from 20 meters (half the length of the ship) to 75 meters (distance from the control room to the center of mass with full cable extension). I don’t know how much force I was dealing with before, but now it’s one-fourteenth as much as it was.

I’m still pinned against the monitor, though not nearly as hard. I estimate about half a g. I can breathe again.

Everything feels upside down. I used the centrifuge in manual mode, so it did exactly what I told it to do and nothing else: It extended the cables. It didnotrotate the crew compartment to face inward. The centrifuge pushes everything toward the nose of the crew compartment. The lab is “up” from me now, and the dormitory is even farther “up.”

I don’t even know where the manual controls for the crew-compartment rotation are and I don’t have time to look for them. For now, I’ll have to work in upside-down land.

I bound to the airlock and open it up. Everything is a shambles inside, but I don’t care. I untangle the wadded-up EVA suit and detach the gloves. I put them on.

Back in the control room, I stand on the consoles (the control panels are “down” now). I hope I’m not damaging things too much. I position myself over Rocky’s body, grab both sides of his carapace with my gloved hands, and lift.

Good. God.