Page 25 of Project Hail Mary

I remember what I tell my students: If you’re upset, take a deep breath, let it out, and count to ten. It dramatically reduced the number of tantrums in my classroom.

I take a breath. “One…two…thr—this isn’t working! I’m going to die!”

I hold my head in my hands. “Oh God. Where the heck am I?”

I scour the monitors for anything I can make sense of. There’s no lack of information—there’s too much. Each screen has a handy label on the top. “Life Support,” “Airlock Status,” “Engines,” “Robotics,” “Astrophage,” “Generators,” “Centrifuge”—wait a minute. Astrophage?

I check the Astrophage panel closely.

REMAINING: 20,906 KG

CONSUMPTION RATE: 6.045 G/S

Far more interesting than those numbers is the diagram below them. It shows what I assume is theHail Mary. My first real overview of what this ship looks like.

The top of the ship is a cylinder with a nose cone at the front. That’s a rocket shape if ever I saw one. Judging by the tapered, conical walls of the control room, this must be the very front of the ship. Beneath me is the lab. On the diagram that room is labeled “Lab.” Below that is the room I woke up in.

The one with my dead friends.

I sniffle and wipe away a tear. No time for that right now. I put it out of my head and keep looking at the diagram. That room is named “Dormitory.” Okay, so this whole diagram lines up with my experiences. And it’s nice to know the official names of things. Underneath the dormitory is a much shorter room, maybe about 1meter high, named “Storage.” Aha! There must be a panel in the floor that I missed. I make a mental note to check that out later.

But there’s more. A lot more. Under the storage area, there’s an area labeled “Cable Faring.” No idea what that is or why it exists. Beneath that, the ship fans out and there appear to be three cylinders the same width as my little area. They’re all side by side. My guess is they assembled this ship in space and the largest diameter they could launch was about 4meters.

The trio of cylinders—I’d estimate they’re 75 percent of the total ship’s volume—are labeled “Fuel.”

The fuel area is broken up into nine subcylinders. I tap one of them out of curiosity, and it brings up a screen for that one fuel bay. It saysASTROPHAGE: 0.000KG.It also has a button labeled “Jettison.”

Well, I’m not sure why I’m here or what these things are all about, but I definitely don’t want to hit any button labeled Jettison.

It’s probably not as dramatic as it seems. These are fuel tanks. If the fuel has been spent, the ship can ditch the tank to reduce its mass and make the remaining fuel last longer. It’s the same reason rockets lifting off from Earth have multiple stages.

Interesting that the ship didn’t automatically eject them as they became empty. I dismiss the window and return to the main ship map.

Under each of those large fuel zones is a trapezoidal area labeled “Spin Drive.” I’ve never heard that term before, but since it’s in the back of the ship and has the word “drive” in its name, I assume it’s the propulsion system.

Spin drive…spin drive…I close my eyes and try to think about it….

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Nothing happens. I can’t call up memories at will. I’m not quite there yet.

I peer at the diagram more closely. Why is there 20,000 kilograms of Astrophage on this ship? I’ve got a strong suspicion. It’s the fuel.

And why not? Astrophage can propel itself with light and has absurd energy-storage capability. It’s had God-knows-how-many billion years of evolution to get good at it. Just like a horse is more energy efficient than a truck, Astrophage is more energy efficient than a spaceship.

Okay, that explains why there’s a buttload of Astrophage on the ship. It’s fuel. But why put a diagram of the ship on this screen? That’s like putting a blueprint of a car on its gas gauge.

Interestingly, the diagram doesn’t really care about the rooms. It doesn’t even show what’s inside them—just a label for each one and that’s it. However, the diagram isveryfocused on the hull and the rear part of the ship.

I see red pipes leading from the fuel areas to the spin drives. Probably how fuel gets to the engines. But I also see the pipes all along the hull of the ship. And they cut across the Cable Faring area. So the Astrophage fuel is mostly in the fuel tank, but also kept in a shell all around the hull.

Why do that?

Oh, and there are temperature readings all over the place. I guess temperature is important because the readings are every few meters along the hull. And every single one of them reads96.415°c.

Hey, I know that temperature. I know that exact temperature! What do I know it from? Come on, brain…come on…

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