Page 205 of Project Hail Mary

His joyous bouncing stops.“Why, question?”

“I don’t have enough food. After I take you to Erid, I will die.”

“You…you no can die.”His voice gets low.“I no let you die. We send you home. Erid will be grateful. You save everyone. We do everything to save you.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” I say. “There’s no food. I have enough to last until we get to Erid and then a few months more. Even if your government gave me the Astrophage to go home, I wouldn’t survive the trip.”

“Eat Erid food. We evolve from same life. We use same proteins. Same chemicals. Same sugars. Must work!”

“No, I can’t eat your food, remember?”

“You say is bad for you. We find out.”

I hold up my hands. “It’s not just bad for me. It will kill me. Your whole ecology uses heavy metals all over the place. Most of them are toxic to me. I’d die immediately.”

He trembles.“No. You no can die.You are friend.”

I float closer to the divider wall and talk softly. “It’s okay. I made my decision. This is the only way to save both of our worlds.”

He backs away.“Then you go home. Go home now. I wait here. Erid maybe send another ship someday.”

“That’s ridiculous. Do you really want to risk the survival of your entire species on that guess?”

He’s silent for a few moments and finally answers. “No.”

“Okay. Get that ball thing you use as a spacesuit and come on over. Talk me through how to patch up the xenonite walls. Then you can move your stuff in—”

“Wait,”he says.“You no can eat Erid life. You no have Earth life to eat. What about Adrian life, question?”

I snort. “Astrophage? I can’t eat that! It’s ninety-six degrees all the time! It would burn me alive. Plus, I doubt my digestive enzymes would even work on its weird cell membrane.”

“Not Astrophage. Taumoeba. Eat Taumoeba.”

“I can’t eat—” I pause. “I…what?”

Can I eat Taumoeba?

It’s alive. It has DNA. Is has mitochondria—the powerhouse of the cell. It stores energy as glucose. It does the Krebs cycle. It’s not Astrophage. It’s not 96 degrees. It’s just an amoeba from another planet. It won’t have heavy metals like Eridian life evolved to have—they aren’t even present in Adrian’s atmosphere.

“I…I don’t know. Maybe I can.”

He points to his ship.“I have twenty-two million kilograms of Taumoeba in fuel bays. How much you want, question?”

I widen my eyes. It’s the first time I’ve felt genuine hope in a long time.

“Settled.”He puts his claw against the divider.“Fist my bump.”

I laugh and put my knuckles against the xenonite. “Fist-bump. It’s just ‘fist-bump.’ ”

“Understand.”

I finish off the last bite of my meburger and gulp down the vitamin-enriched soda. I put my dishes in the sink and check the clock on my kitchen wall. Wow, is it VlIλλalready? I better hurry up.

My first few years on Erid were touch-and-go. Taumoeba kept me alive, but I became severely malnourished. The microbes gave me calories, but they weren’t a balanced diet.

Those were painful days. I had scurvy, beriberi, and a raft of other maladies. Was it worth it? I still don’t know. I might never know. There’s no way to communicate with Earth. It’s sixteen light-years away.

For all I know, the beetles may have malfunctioned or missed their target. I don’t even know if the climatologists like Leclerc were right in their models for what would happen. TheHail Marymight have been hopeless from the get-go. Earth might already be a frozen wasteland with billions of corpses.