Page 200 of Project Hail Mary

“Hmm.”

I wish I had better radar. Mine is good for a few thousand kilometers. Obviously that’s nowhere near good enough. Rocky could probably whip something up if he were here. It’s a little paradoxical, but I wish Rocky were here to help me save Rocky.

“Better radar…” I mumble.

Well, I have plenty of power. I have a radar system. Maybe I can work something out.

But you can’t just add power to the emitter and expect things to go well. I’ll burn it out for sure. How can I turn Astrophage energy into radio waves?

I shoot up from my pilot’s seat. “Duh!”

I have everything I need for the best radar ever! To heck with my built-in radar system, with its measly emitter and sensors. I have spin drives and a Petrovascope! I can throw900 terawattsof IR light out the back of my ship and see if any of it bounces back with the Petrovascope—an instrument carefully designed to detect even the smallest amounts of that exact frequency of light!

I can’t have the Petrovascope and engines on at the same time. But that’s okay! Rocky is up to a light-minute away!

I work up a search grid. It’s pretty simple. I’m smack-dab in the middle of my guesstimate on Rocky’s location. So I have to search all directions.

Easy enough. I fire up the spin drives. I take manual control, which, as usual, requires me to say “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” and “override” to a bunch of warning dialogs.

I throw the throttle to full and turn hard to port with the yaw controls. The force shoves me back into the seat and to the side. This is the astronavigational equivalent of doing donuts in the 7-Eleven parking lot.

I keep it tight—it takes me thirty seconds to do one full rotation. I’m roughly back where I started. Probably a few dozen kilometers off but whatever. I cut the engines.

Now I watch the Petrovascope. It’s not omnidirectional, but it can cover a good 90-degree arc of space at a time. I slowly pan across space in the same direction I’d shined the engines and at the same rate. It’s not perfect; I could get the timing wrong. If Rocky is very close or very far away this won’t work. But this is just my first try.

I finish a full circle with the Petrovascope. Nothing. So I do another lap. Maybe Rocky is farther than I thought.

The second lap turns up nothing.

Well, I’m not done yet. Space is three-dimensional. I’ve only searched one flat slice of the area. I pitch the ship forward 5 degrees.

I do the same search pattern again. But this time, the plane of my search pattern is 5 degrees different from the last time. If I don’t get a hit on this pass, I’ll do another 5-degree tilt and try again. And so on until I get to 90 degrees, when I will have searched all directions.

And ifthatdoesn’t work, I’ll start over, but with a faster pan rate on the Petrovascope.

I rub my hands together, take a sip of water, and get to work.

—

A flash!

I finally see a flash!

Halfway through my Petrova pan of the 55-degree plane. A flash!

I flail in surprise, which launches me out of the seat. I bounce around the zero-g control room and scramble back into position. It’s been slow going up till now. I was as bored as a guy could be. But not anymore!

“Crud! Where was it! Okay! Relax! Calm down.Calm down!”

I put my finger on the screen where I saw the blip. I check the Petrovascope bearing, do some math on the screen, and work out the angle. It’s 214 degrees’ yaw in my current plane, which is 55 degrees off the Tau Ceti–Adrian orbital ecliptic.

“Gotcha!”

Time for a better reading. I strap on my now-worn and banged-up stopwatch. Zero g has not been kind to the little guy, but it still works.

I take the controls and angle the ship directly away from the contact. I start the stopwatch, thrust in a straight line for ten seconds, turn, and shut down the engines. I’m moving something like 150 meters per second away from the contact, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to zero out the velocity I just added. I want the Petrovascope.

I stare at the screen with the stopwatch ticking away in my hand. Soon, I see the blip again. Twenty-eight seconds. The spot of light remains for ten seconds, then disappears.