Page 154 of Project Hail Mary

“Yes, exactly!” I say. “But how long is that time? How long does an animal have to react? How long will the threat or prey take to kill the animal or escape? I think it’s based on gravity.”

“Gravity, question?”He sets the device down entirely. I’ve got his undivided attention.

“Yeah! Think about it. Gravity is what determines how fast an animal can run. Higher gravity, more time spent in contact with the ground. Faster movement. I think animal intelligence, ultimately, has to be faster than gravity.”

“Interesting theory,”Rocky says.“But Erid have double Earth gravity. You and I same intelligence.”

I sit up on my bed. “I bet our gravities are so close to the same, astronomically, that the intelligence needed is almost the same. If we met a creature from a planet with one one-hundredth of Earth’s gravity, I bet it would seem pretty stupid to us.”

“Possible,”he says. He gets back to work on his gadget.“Another similarity: You and me both willing to die for our people. Why, question? Evolution hate death.”

“It’s good for the species,” I say. “A self-sacrifice instinct makes the species as a whole more likely to continue.”

“Not all Eridians willing to die for others.”

I chuckle. “Not all humans either.”

“You and me are good people,”Rocky says.

“Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”

—

Nine days until launch.

I paced around my room. It was pretty bare, but I didn’t mind. The portable unit was a small mobile home complete with a kitchenette. Better than most people got. The Russians had their hands full erecting dozens of temporary shelters a few miles from Baikonur Cosmodrome. But then, I guess we all had our hands full lately.

Anyway, I’d barely used my bed since we’d arrived. There just always seemed to be some new issue or problem. Nothing major. Just…issues.

TheHail Marywas complete. Over 2 million kilograms of spacecraft and fuel in a nice, stable orbit—four times the mass of the International Space Station, and put together in one-twentieth the time. The press used to keep track of the total cost, but around the $10trillion mark, they gave up. It just didn’t matter. It wasn’t about efficient use of resources anymore. It was Earth versus Astrophage, and no price was too high.

ESA astronauts had been on the ship for the past few weeks, putting it through its paces. The test crew reported about five hundred problems that we’d been mopping up for the past few weeks. None of them were showstoppers.

This was happening. TheHail Marywas going to launch in nine days.

I sat at the table that served as my desk and shuffled through papers. I signed off on some and set others aside for Stratt to look at tomorrow. How did I end up an administrator? We all had to accept changes to our lives, I guess. If this was my part to play, then so be it.

I set the papers down and looked out the window. The Kazakhstani steppes were flat and featureless. People generally don’t build launch facilities next to anything important. For obvious reasons.

I missed my kids.

Dozens of them. Hundreds, really, over the course of a school year.

They didn’t swear at me or wake me up in the middle of the night. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And, somewhat selfish, but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed being that respected.

I sighed.

My kids would have a rough time even if the mission worked. It would take thirteen years for theHail Maryto get to Tau Ceti, and (presuming the crew found an answer to our problems) another thirteen years for the beetles to get back to us. That’s over a quarter century before we would even know what to do. My kids wouldn’t be kids anymore when it was over.

“Onward,” I mumbled, and grabbed the next problem report. Why was it on paper instead of just an email? Because Russians do things a certain way and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.

The report was from the ESA crew about anomalies in Slurry Pump Fourteen of the medical feeding transport system. Pump Fourteen was only part of the tertiary system and it was still 95 percent effective. But there was no reason to put up with that. We still had 83 kilograms of unclaimed launch mass. I made a note to include a spare slurry pump—it was only 250 grams. The crew could install it before leaving orbit.

I set the paper aside and saw a brief flash out my window. Probably a jeep driving on the dirt road that led to the temporary shelters. I got headlights through my window from time to time. I ignored it.

The next paper in my stack was all about potential ballast issues. TheHail Marykept its center of mass along its long axis by pumpingAstrophage around as needed. But we still wanted to keep things as balanced as possible anyway. The ESA crew had rearranged several supply bags in the storage compartment to more adequately balance—

The window shattered as a deafening explosion shook the room. Glass shards nicked my face as a shockwave knocked me clean out of my chair.