Page 23 of Project Hail Mary

“I’m in the middle of—”

“Have a seat.”

I took a seat. She had a commanding presence, that’s for sure. Something about her tone of voice or her general confidence level, maybe? One way or another, when she spoke you just kind of assumed you should do what she said.

“What have you found so far?” she asked.

“It’s only been one afternoon,” I said.

“I didn’t ask how long it’s been. I asked what you’ve found out so far.”

I scratched my head. After hours in that suit, I was sweaty and presumably smelled bad. “It’s…weird. I don’t know what those dots are made of. And I’d really like to know.”

“Is there some equipment you need that you don’t have?” she asked.

“No, no. There’s everything a guy could hope for in there. It just…doesn’t work on these dots.” I settled back into the chair. I’d been on my feet most of the day and it was nice to relax for a moment. “First thing I tried was the x-ray spectrometer. It sends x-rays into a sample, making it emit photons and you can tell from the wavelengths of the photons what elements are present.”

“And what did that tell you?”

“Nothing. As far as I can tell, these dots just absorb x-rays. The x-rays go in and they never come out. Nothing comes out. That’s very odd. I can’t think of anything that does that.”

“Okay.” She took some notes on her tablet. “What else can you tell me?”

“Next I tried gas chromatography. That’s where you vaporize the sample and then identify the elements or compounds in the resulting gas. That didn’t work either.”

“Why not?”

I threw up my hands. “Because the darn things just won’t vaporize. That led me down a rabbit hole of burners, ovens, and crucible furnaces that turned up nothing. The dots are unaffected at temperatures up to two thousand degrees Celsius. Nothing.”

“And that’s odd?”

“It’s crazy odd,” I said. “But these things live on the sun. At least some of the time. So I guess having a high resistance to heat makes sense.”

“Theyliveon the sun?” she said. “So they’re a life-form?”

“I’m pretty sure they are, yeah.”

“Elaborate.”

“Well, they move around. It’s plainly visible through the microscope. That alone doesn’t prove they’re alive—inert stuff moves all the time from static charge or magnetic fields or whatever. But there is something else I noticed. Something weird. And it made the pieces fall into place.”

“Okay.”

“I put a few dots under a vacuum and ran a spectrograph. Just a simple test to see if they emit light. And they do, of course. They give off infrared light at the 25.984 micron wavelength. That’s the Petrova frequency—the light that makes the Petrova line. I expected that. But then I noticed they only emit light when they’re moving. And boy, do they emit a lot of it. I mean, not a lot from our point of view, but for a tiny single-celled organism it’s a ton.”

“And how is that relevant?”

“I did some back-of-the napkin math. And I’m pretty sure that light is how they move around.”

Stratt raised an eyebrow. “I don’t follow.”

“Believe it or not, light has momentum,” I said. “It exerts a force. If you were out in space and you turned on a flashlight, you’d get a teeny, tiny amount of thrust from it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do. And a teeny-tiny thrust on a teeny-tiny mass can be an effective form of propulsion. I measured the dots’ average mass at about twenty picograms. That took a long time, by the way, but that lab equipment is awesome. Anyway, the movement I see is consistent with the momentum of the emitted light.”

She set her tablet down. I had, apparently, accomplished the rare feat of getting her undivided attention. “Is that something that happens in nature?”