Page 175 of Project Hail Mary

“Okay…” I say. “How about this: I’ll lay down in the storage room under the dormitory. That’s the closest to the center of ship I can get. The force will be smallest there. I’ll be okay.”

“How you operate centrifuge controls from storage room, question?”

“I’ll…umm…I’ll bring the lab’s control screen down there with me. I’ll run data and power extension cables from the lab to the storage room. Yeah. That should work.”

“What if you unconscious and no can operate controls, question?”

“Then you cancel the rotation and I’ll wake up.”

He shimmies back and forth.“No like. Alternate plan: Wait eleven days. Get to my ship. Clean out you ship fuel tanks. Sterilize—make sure no Taumoeba. Refill with fuel from my ship. Then can use all functions of you ship again.”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to wait eleven days. I want to work now.”

“Why, question? Why no wait, question?”

He’s completely right, of course. I’m risking my life and maybe the structural integrity of theHail Mary. But I can’t just sit around for eleven days when there’s so much work to do. How do I explain “impatience” to someone who lives seven hundred years?

“Human thing,” I say.

“Understand. Not actually understand, but…understand.”

—

The spin-up went as planned. Rocky selected Ringo to do the spinning work, leaving John and Paul offline. George is still safely aboard the ship in case I need him.

The g-forces during the spin-up were rough—I won’t lie. But I stayed awake long enough to manually deal with the centrifuge steps. I’m getting pretty good at it now. Since then, it’s been a nice, level 1 g.

Yeah, it was impatient and a little risky, but thanks to that, I’ve had seven days of hardcore science since then.

Rocky delivered on the testing apparatus as promised. As always, everything worked flawlessly. Instead of a small, annoying glass vacuum chamber, I had something resembling a large fish tank. Xenonite doesn’t care if there’s a bunch of air pressure on a large, flat panel. “Bring it on,” says xenonite.

I have, shall we say, an inexhaustible supply of Taumoeba. TheHail Maryis currently the Taumoeba party bus. All I have to do is open the fuel line that used to lead to the generator when I want more.

—

“Hey, Rocky!” I call out from the lab. “Watch me pull a Taumoeba out of a hat!”

Rocky climbs up his tunnel from the control room.“I assume that is Earth idiom.”

“Yeah. Earth has entertainment called ‘television’ and—”

“Do not explain, please. You have findings, question?”

Just as well. It would take a long time to explain cartoons to an alien. “I have some results.”

“Good good.”He hunkers down into a comfortable sitting position.“Tell findings!”He tries to hide it, but his voice is just a touch higher in pitch than normal.

I gesture to the lab apparatus. “This functions perfectly, by the way.”

“Thank. Tell about findings.”

“My first experiment was Adrian’s environment. I added Taumoeba and a slide covered in Astrophage. The Taumoeba survived and ate it all. No surprise there.”

“No surprise. Is their native environment. But proves equipment works.”

“Exactly. I did more tests to learn Taumoeba’s limits. In Adrian air, they can live from minus 180 degrees Celsius to 107 degrees Celsius. Outside that range they die.”

“Impressive range.”