Page 18 of Project Hail Mary

“I’d be a pretty lame science teacher if I wasn’t.”

“Do you think those dots are alive?” she asked.

“I don’t know—they could just be dust bouncing around in magnetic fields. I guess we’ll find out whenArcLightgets back to Earth. That’s coming up, right? Just a few weeks from now?”

“It returns on the twenty-third,” she said. “Roscosmos will recover it from low-Earth orbit with a dedicated Soyuz mission.”

I nodded. “Then we’ll know soon enough. The most brilliant minds in the world will look at them and find out what they’re about. Who’s going to do that? Do you know?”

“You,” she said. “You’re going to do it.”

I stared blankly.

She waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello?”

“You wantmeto look at the dots?” I said.

“Yes.”

“The whole world put you in charge of solving this problem, and you came directly to a junior high school science teacher?”

“Yes.”

I turned and walked out the door. “You’re lying, insane, or a combination of the two. I have to get going now.”

“This is not optional,” she said to my back.

“Seems optional to me!” I waved goodbye.

Yeah. It wasn’t optional.

When I got back to my apartment, before I even got to my front door, four well-dressed men surrounded me. They showed me their FBI badges and hustled me into one of three black SUVs parked in the complex parking lot. After a twenty-minute drive where they refused to answer any of my questions or even speak to me at all, they parked and showed me into a generic-looking business-park building.

My feet barely touched the ground as they led me down an empty hallway with unmarked doors every 30 feet or so. Finally, they opened a set of double doors at the end of the hall and gently nudged me inside.

Unlike the rest of the abandoned building, this room was full of furniture and shiny, high-tech devices. It was the most well-stocked biology lab I’d ever seen. And right in the middle of it all was Eva Stratt.

“Hello, Dr. Grace,” she said. “This is your new lab.”

The FBI agents closed the doors behind me, leaving Stratt and me alone in the lab. I rubbed my shoulder where they had manhandled me a little too hard.

I looked at the door behind me. “So…when you say ‘a certain amount of authority’…”

“I have all of the authority.”

“You have an accent. Are you even from America?”

“I’m Dutch. I was an administrator at ESA. But that doesn’t matter. Now I’m in charge of this. There is notimefor slow, international committees. The sun is dying. We need a solution. It’s my job to find it.”

She pulled up a lab stool and sat down. “These ‘dots’ are probably a life-form. The exponential progression of solar dimming is consistent with the exponential population growth of a typical life-form.”

“You think they’re…eatingthe sun?”

“They’re eating its energy output at least,” she said.

“Okay, that’s—well, terrifying. But regardless: What the heck do you want from me?”

“TheArcLightprobe is bringing the samples back to Earth. Some of them might still be alive. I want you to examine them and find out what you can.”