Page 199 of Project Hail Mary

All I see when I close my eyes is Rocky’s dumb carapace and his little arms always fidgeting with something.

—

It’s been six weeks since I made my decision. It wasn’t easy, but I’m sticking with it.

I have the spin drives off for my daily ritual. I bring up the Petrovascope and look out into space. I see nothing at all.

“Sorry, Rocky,” I say.

Then I spot a tiny speck of Petrova light. I zoom in and search that area. A total of four little dots, barely visible, are on the monitor.

“I know you’d love a beetle to take apart, but I couldn’t spare one.”

The beetles, with much smaller spin drives, won’t be visible for much longer. Especially with them zooming off toward Earth and me headed almost the opposite direction toward theBlip-A.

The Astrophage coils in the mini-farms will protect the Taumoeba from radiation, and I did thorough tests to make sure both the farms and the life inside could handle the massive acceleration that beetles use. They’ll be back at Earth in a couple of years from their point of view. About thirteen years, from Earth’s time frame.

I bring the spin drives back online and continue on course.

Finding a spaceship “somewhere just outside the Tau Ceti system” is no small task. Imagine being given a rowboat and told to find a toothpick “somewhere in the ocean.” It’s like that, but nowhere near as easy.

I know his course and I know he followed it. But I don’t know when his engines conked out. I only checked up on him once a day. Right now, I’m smack-dab in the center of my “best guess” for his position and I’ve matched my best guess on his velocity. But that’s only the beginning. I have a heck of a search ahead of me.

I wish I had tracked him more often. Because I don’t know the exact time his engines died, the margin of error on my guess is about 20 million kilometers. That’s about one-eighth the distance between the Earth and the sun. It’s a distance so large it takes light a full minute to traverse it. That’s the best I can do with the information I have.

Frankly, I’m lucky the error margin is sosmall. If the Taumoeba had escaped a month later, it would have been exponentially worse. And all this is going on at the edge of the Tau Ceti system. Barely the beginning of the trip. The distance between Tau Ceti and Earth is overfour thousand timesthe width of the entire Tau Ceti system.

Space is big. It’s…so, so big.

So yeah. I’m extremely lucky to have only 20 million kilometers to search.

“Hmm,” I mumble.

This far away from Tau Ceti, his ship won’t be reflecting much Taulight. There’s no chance I’d spot theBlip-Awith my telescope.

Side note: I’m going to die.

“Stop,” I say. Whenever I think about my impending death, I think about Rocky instead. He must have a sense of hopelessness right now.I’m coming, buddy.

“Wait…”

I’m sure he’s sad, but he’s also not one to mope for long. He’ll be working on a solution. What would he do? His whole species is on the line and he doesn’t know I’m coming. He wouldn’t just kill himself, right? He’d do anything he could think of, even if it would have only a tiny percent chance of success.

Okay. I’m Rocky. My ship is dead. Maybe I rescued some Astrophage. The Taumoeba can’t have gottenallof it, right? So I have some. Can I make my own beetle? Something to send back to Erid?

I shake my head. That would require a guidance system. Computer stuff. Way beyond Eridian science. That’s why they had a crew of twenty-three on a massive ship in the first place. Besides, it’s been a month and a half. If he were going to build a little ship, he’d be done by now and I would have seen its engine flare. Rocky moves fast.

Okay. No beetle. But he’s got energy. Life support. Food enough to last him a long, long time (original crew of twenty-three, and it was always intended to be a round-trip voyage).

“Radio?” I say.

Maybe he’ll make a radio signal. Something powerful enough to be heard on Erid. Just a small chance of detection, but something. Eridians have a long life-span. Waiting a decade or so for rescue wouldn’t be that big a deal. Well, not on the life-or-death scale. If you asked me a few years ago I’d say it’s not possible to send a radio signal ten light-years. But this is Rocky we’re talking about, and he might have some rescued Astrophage to power whatever he creates.

It doesn’t have to contain information. It just needs to be noticed.

But…no. There’s just no way. Some back-of-the napkin math tells me that even with Earth’s radio technology (which is better than Erid’s), the strength of that signal at Erid would be way less than background noise.

Rocky will know that too. So there’s no point.