Page 163 of Project Hail Mary

“No, no, no, no…” I say with a squeak at the end. My heart is about to beat right out of my throat. I think I’m going to puke.

I smear some gunk onto a glass slide and shove the slide into the microscope. There’s no power for the backlight, so I grab a flashlight from the drawer and shine it at the plate. It’ll have to do.

I look through the eyepieces and my worst fears are realized. “Oh God.”

“What is problem, question?!”Rocky’s voice is a full octave higher than normal.

I grab my head with both hands, smearing foul gunk on myself but I don’t even care. “Taumoeba. There are Taumoeba in the generator.”

“They damage generator, question?”Rocky says.“Give me generator. I fix.”

“The generator isn’t broken,” I say. “If there are Taumoeba in the generator, it means there are Taumoeba in the fuel supply. Taumoeba ate all the Astrophage. We have no power because we have no fuel.”

Rocky raises his carapace so fast he clunks it against the roof of his tunnel.“How Taumoeba get into fuel, question?!”

“There are Taumoeba in my lab. I didn’t keep them sealed off. I didn’t think to. Some probably got loose. The ship has a bunch of cracks, holes, and leaks ever since we almost died at Adrian. Some small hole in a fuel line somewhere must have let Taumoeba in. It only takes one.”

“Bad! Bad bad bad!”

I start to hyperventilate. “We’re dead in space. We’re stuck here forever.”

“Not forever,”Rocky says.

I perk up. “No?”

“No. Orbit decay soon. Then we die.”

—

I spend the whole next day examining the fuel lines I can get to. It’s the same story everywhere. Instead of Astrophage suspended in oil, it’s Taumoeba and (let’s call it what it is) a lot of Taumoeba poop. Mostly methane with a bunch of other trace compounds. I guess that explains the methane in Adrian’s atmosphere. Circle of life and all that.

There’s some live Astrophage here and there, but with the overwhelming population of Taumoeba in the fuel they won’t live long. It’s pointless to try to salvage this. It’d be the same as trying to separate good meat from the botulism infecting it.

“Hopeless,” I say, slamming the latest fuel sample onto the lab table. “The Taumoeba is everywhere.”

“I have Astrophage on my side of partition,”Rocky says.“Approximately two hundred sixteen grams remaining.”

“That wouldn’t power my spin drive for long. Thirty seconds or so. And it probably wouldn’t live long enough. There’s Taumoeba everywhere on my side of the partition. Keep your Astrophage safe on your side.”

“I make new engine,”Rocky says.“Taumoeba turn Astrophage into methane. React with oxygen. Make fire. Make thrust. Get to my ship. Much Astrophage there.”

“That’s…not a bad idea.” I pinch my chin. “Use Taumoeba farts to propel ourselves through space.”

“No understand word after Taumoeba.”

“It’s not important. Hang on, let me do the math….”

I pull up a tablet—the computer screen in the lab is still offline. I don’t remember the specific impulse of methane, but I do know that a hydrogen-oxygen reaction is about 450 seconds. Call that the best-case scenario. I had 20,000 kilograms of Astrophage, so pretend that’s all methane now. The ship has a dry mass around 100,000 kilograms. I don’t know if I even have enough oxygen for this reaction, but ignore that for now….

Concentration is a constant struggle. I’m groggy and I know it.

I type away on the calculator app, then shake my head. “It’s no good. The ship would get less than 800 meters per second velocity. We can’t escape Adrian’s gravity with that, let alone cross 150 million kilometers of the Tau Ceti system.”

“Bad.”

I drop the tablet on the table and rub my eyes. “Yes. Bad.”

He clicks along his tunnel to hover above me.“Give me generator.”