Page 178 of Project Hail Mary

“Yeah. Coma slurry. The ship fed it to me during the trip here. I have enough to last me almost four years.”

“Eat that.”

“It tastes bad.”

“Food experience not that important.”

“Hey.” I point at him. “To humans, food experience is very important.”

“Humans strange.”

I point at the spectrometer readout screen. “Why does Eridian food have thallium in it?”

“Healthy.”

“Thallium kills humans!”

“Then eat human food.”

“Ugh.” I walk over to the Taumoeba tanks. Rocky had outdone himself. I can control the nitrogen content to within one part per million. And so far, things are looking good. Sure, this generation can only handle a smidgen of nitrogen, but it’s a smidgen more than the previous generation could do.

The plan is working. Our Taumoeba are developing nitrogen resistance.

Will they ever be able to handle the 3.5 percent needed for Venus? Or the 8 percent for Threeworld? Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see.

I’m using percentages here to track the nitrogen. I can only get away with that because in all cases, Astrophage breed where the air is 0.02 atmospheres of pressure. So, since the pressure is always the same across all experiments, I can just track the percent of nitrogen.

Theproperway to do it would be to track “partial pressure.” But that’s annoying. I’d just end up dividing by 0.02 atmospheres and multiplying by it again later when dealing with data.

I pat the top of Tank Three. It’s been my lucky tank. Out of twenty-three generations of Taumoeba, Tank Three made the strongest strain nine times. Pretty good, considering she’s got nine other tanks to compete with.

Yes, Tank Three is a “she.” Don’t judge me.

“How long until we reach theBlip-A?”

“Seventeen hours until reverse-thrust maneuver.”

“Okay, let’s spin down the centrifuge now. Just in case we run into trouble and need extra time to fix something.”

“Agree. I go to control room now. You go to storage locker and lie flat. Do not forget control panel with long extension cords.”

I glance around the lab. Everything is firmly secured. “Yeah, okay. Let’s do it.”

—

“John, Ringo, Paul off,”says Rocky.“Velocity is orbital.”

There is no “stationary” in a solar system. You’re always moving around something. In this case, Rocky reduced our cruise velocity to put us in a stable orbit about 1 AU from Tau Ceti. That’s where he left theBlip-A.

Rocky relaxes in his control-room bulb. He clamps the boxes to their wall mounts. Now that the engines are off we’re back to zero g, and the last thing we want is for the “make ship thrust” button to be floating around unattended.

He grabs a couple of handholds and centers his carapace over the texture monitor. As always, it shows him my center monitor feed with colors represented as textures.

“You in control now.”He’s done his job. Now it’s my turn.

“How long until the flash?” I ask

Rocky pulls an Eridian clock off the wall.“Next flash is three minutes, seven seconds.”