Page 191 of Project Hail Mary

“Go to hell.”

“Oh, I will, believe me. You three are going to Tau Ceti. The rest of us are going to hell. More accurately, hell is coming to us.”

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Yeah? Well, hell’s coming back to you, Stratt. In the form of me. I’m hell.

I mean…I don’t know what I’ll say to her. But I definitely plan to say stuff.Meanstuff.

I’m eighteen days into my nearly four-year journey. I’m just now reaching Tau Ceti’s heliopause—the edge of the star’s powerful magnetic field. At least, the edge of where it’s strong enough to deflect fast-moving interstellar radiation. From now on, the radiation load on the hull will be much higher.

Doesn’t matter to me. I’m surrounded by Astrophage. But it’s interesting to see the external radiation sensors go up and up and up. It’s progress, at least. But in the grand scheme of things, I’m on a long road trip and my current status is “just walking out the front door of the house.”

I’m bored. I’m by myself in a spaceship without much to do.

I clean and catalog the lab again. I might come up with some research experiments for either Astrophage or Taumoeba. Heck, I could write some papers while I’m on my way home. Oh, and there’s the matter of the intelligent alien life-form I hung out with for a couple of months. I might want to jot a few things down about him too.

I do have a huge collection of video games. I have every piece of software that was available when we built the ship. I’m sure they can keep me busy for a while.

I check the Taumoeba farms. All ten of them are doing just fine. I feed them Astrophage from time to time, just to keep them healthy and breeding. The farms emulate Venus’s atmosphere, so as the generations of Taumoeba go by, they’ll get even better at Venusian life. After four years of this, by the time I drop them off at the planet, they’ll be well suited for it.

And yes, I’ve already decided I’ll drop them off. Why not?

I have no idea what kind of world I’ll be returning to. Thirteen years have passed on Earth since I left, and they’ll experience another thirteen before I get back. Twenty-six years. All my students will be adults. I hope they all survive. But I have to admit…some probably won’t. I try not to dwell.

Anyway, once I get back to my solar system, I may as well swing by Venus and drop off the Taumoeba. Not sure how I’ll seed it, but I have a few ideas. The simplest is just to wad up a ball of Taumoeba-infested Astrophage and throw it at Venus. The Astrophage will absorb the heat of reentry and the Taumoeba will be released into the wild. Then they’ll have a field day. Venus must be Astrophage-central by now, and lord knows Taumoeba can get right to work once they find their prey.

I check my food stores. I’m still on schedule. I have another three months of real, edible food packs left, and then it’ll be coma slurry from then on.

I’m reluctant to go back into a coma. I’ve got the genes to survive it, but so did Yáo and Ilyukhina. Why risk death if I don’t have to?

Also, I can’t be 100 percent sure I correctly reprogrammed the course navigation. I think it’s right, and whenever I spot-check, I’m still on course toward home. But what if something goes wrong while I’m in a coma? What if I wake up and I missed the solar system by a light-year?

But between isolation, loneliness, and disgusting food, I may be willing to take those risks eventually. We’ll see.

Speaking of loneliness, my thoughts turn back to Rocky. My only friend now. Seriously. He’s my only friend. I didn’t have much of a social life back when things were normal. Sometimes I’d grab dinner with other faculty and staff at the school. I’d have the occasional Saturday-night beer with old college friends. But thanks to time dilation, when I get home all those folks will be a generation older than me.

I liked Dimitri. He was probably my favorite of the wholeHail Marygang. But who knows what he’s up to now? Heck, Russia and the United States may be at war. Or they may be allies in a war. I have no idea.

I climb the ladder to the control room. I sit in the pilot’s seat and bring up the Nav panel. I really shouldn’t do this, but it’s become a bit of a ritual. I shut off the spin drives and coast. Gravity immediately disappears, but I hardly notice. I’m used to it.

With the spin drives off, I can safely use the Petrovascope. I scan around in space for a bit—I know where to look. I quickly find it. The little dot of Petrova-frequency light. TheBlip-A’s engines. If I were within a hundred kilometers of that light, my entire ship would be vaporized.

I’m on one side of the system and he’s on the other. Heck, even Tau Ceti itself just looks like a lightbulb in the distance. But I can still clearly make out theBlip-A’s engine flare. Using light as a propellant releases a simplyabsurdamount of power.

Maybe that’s something we could use in the future. Maybe Earth and Erid could communicate with massive releases of Petrova light thanks to Astrophage. I wonder how much it would take to make a flash visible from 40 Eridani. We could talk in Morse code or something. They have a copy of Wikipedia now. They’d work out what we’re up to when they saw the flashes.

Still, our “conversation” would be slow. 40 Eridani is sixteen light-years away from Earth. So if we sent a message like “Hey, how ya doin’?” it would be thirty-two years before we got their reply.

I stare at the little point of light on the screen and sigh. I’ll be able to track him for quite a while. I know where his ship will be at any given moment. He’ll use the exact flight plan I gave him. He trusts my science as much as I trust his engineering. But after a few months, the Petrovascope won’t be able to see the light anymore. Not because the light is too dim—it’s a very sensitive instrument. It won’t be able to see him because our relative velocities will cause a red-shift in the light coming off his drives. It won’t be the Petrova wavelength anymore when it gets to me.

What? Would I do a ridiculous amount of relativistic math to calculate our relative velocity at any given moment as perceived by my inertial reference frame and then do Lorentz transformations to figure out when the light from his engines will drop out of the Petrovascope’s perception range? Just so I know how much longer I can see my friend in the distance? Wouldn’t that be kind of pathetic?

Yeah.

Okay, my sad little daily ritual is over. I turn off the Petrovascope and fire up the spin drives again.

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