Page 57 of Project Hail Mary

I let the cylinder get closer and closer. It’s moving less than 1 mile per hour. Not exactly a bullet pass.

Now that it’s so close, I can estimate its size. It’s not big at all. About the size and shape of a coffee can. It’s a dull gray color with splotches of slightly darker gray randomly here and there. Similar to theBlip-A’s hull, kind of. Different color but same blotchiness. Maybe it’s a stylistic thing. Random splotches are “in” this season or something.

The cylinder floats into my arms and I grab it with both hands.

It has less mass than I expected. It’s probably hollow. It’s a container. There’s something inside they want me to see.

I hold the cylinder under one arm and use the other to deal with tethers. I hurry back to the airlock. It’s a stupid thing to do. There’s no reason to hurry and it literally endangers my life. One slip-up and I’d be off in space. But I just can’t wait.

I get back into the ship, cycle the airlock, and float into the control room with my prize in hand. I open the Orlan suit, already thinking about what tests I’ll run on the cylinder. I have a whole lab to work with!

The smell hits me immediately. I gasp and cough. The cylinder is bad!

No, not bad. But itsmellsbad. I can barely breathe. The chemical smell is familiar. What is it? Cat pee?

Ammonia. It’s ammonia.

“Okay,” I wheeze. “Okay. Think.”

My gut instinct is to close the suit again. But that would just trap me in a small volume with the ammonia that’s already in here. Better to let the cylinder air out in the larger volume of the ship.

Ammonia isn’t toxic—at least, not in small quantities. And the fact that I can still breathe at all tells me it’s a small quantity. If it weren’t, my lungs would have caustic burns and I’d be unconscious or dead now.

As it is, there’s just a bad smell. I can handle a bad smell.

I climb out the back of the suit while the cylinder floats in the middle of the console room. Now that it’s not a shock anymore, I can handle the ammonia. It’s no worse than using a bunch of Windex in a small room. Unpleasant but not dangerous.

I grab the cylinder—and it’s hot as heck!

I yelp and pull my hands away. I blow on them for a moment and check for burns. It wasn’t too bad. Not stovetop hot. But hot.

Grabbing it with my bare hands was stupid. Flawed logic. I assumed that since I’d been holding it earlier it was okay to do now. But earlier I had very thick spacesuit gloves protecting my hands.

“You’ve been a bad alien cylinder,” I say to it. “You need a time-out.”

I pull my arm into my sleeve and wrap my hand in the cuff. I use my now-protected knuckles to nudge the cylinder into the airlock. Once it’s in, I close the door.

I’ll let it be for now. It’ll cool down to ambient air temperature eventually. And while it does, I don’t want it floating randomly around my ship. I don’t think there’s anything in the airlock that can get hurt by some heat.

How hot was it?

Well, I had both hands on it (like an idiot) for a fraction of a second. My own reaction time was enough to keep me from getting burned. So it’s probably less than 100 degrees Celsius.

I open and close my hands a few times. They don’t hurt anymore, but the memory of the pain lingers.

“Where’d the heat come from?” I mumbled.

The cylinder was out in space for a good forty minutes. Over that time it should have radiated heat via blackbody radiation. It should becold, not hot. I’m about 1 AU from Tau Ceti, and Tau Ceti has half the luminosity of the sun. So I don’t think the Taulight could have heated the cylinder up much. Definitely not more than blackbody radiation would cool it down.

So either it has a heater inside or it was extremely hot when it started its trip. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. It’s not very heavy, so it’s probably thin. If there’s no internal heat source, it’ll cool off very fast in the air here.

The room still smells like ammonia. Yuck.

I float down to the lab. I don’t know where to begin. So many things I want to do. Maybe I should start by just identifying the material the cylinder is made of? Something harmless to theBlip-A’s crew might be incredibly toxic to me and neither of us would know it.

Maybe I should check for radiation.

I drift down to the lab table and put out a hand to steady myself. I’m getting better at the zero-g thing. I think I remember seeing an astronaut documentary saying some people handle it fine, while others really struggle. Looks like I’m one of the lucky ones.