Page 59 of Project Hail Mary

Lokken slapped the table. “How could a common ancestor have gotten across interstellar space?”

“The same way Astrophage does it!”

She leaned toward me. “Then why haven’t we seen interstellar life all along?”

I leaned toward her. “No idea. Maybe it was a fluke.”

“How do you explain the differences in mitochondria?”

“Four billion years of divergent evolution.”

“Stop,” Stratt said calmly. “I don’t know what this is…some sort of science-related pissing contest? That’s not what we’re here for. Dr. Grace, Dr. Lokken, please sit down.”

I plopped into my seat and folded my arms. Lokken sat as well.

Stratt fiddled with a pen. “Dr. Lokken, you’ve been hassling governments to hassle me. Over and over. Day in and day out. I know you want to be involved in Project Hail Mary, but I won’t make it a huge international mess. We don’t have time for the politicking and kingdom-building that always happens on big projects.”

“I’m not happy to be here either,” Lokken said. “I’m here, at great inconvenience to me as well as you, because this was the only way to tell you a critical design flaw in theHail Mary.”

Stratt sighed. “We sent out those preliminary designs for general feedback. Not command appearances in Geneva.”

“Then file this under ‘general feedback.’ ”

“Could have been an email.”

“You would have deleted it. You have to listen to me, Stratt. This is important.”

Stratt twirled the pen around a few more times. “Well, I’m here. Go ahead.”

Lokken cleared her throat. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but the entire purpose of theHail Maryis to be a laboratory. One we can send to Tau Ceti to see why that star—and that star alone—is immune to Astrophage.”

“That’s right.”

She nodded. “Then would you also agree that the lab aboard the ship itself is the most important component?”

“Yes,” Stratt said. “Without it, the mission is meaningless.”

“Then we have a serious problem.” Lokken pulled several sheets of paper from her purse. “I have a list of the lab equipment you want aboard. Spectrometers, DNA sequencers, microscopes, chemistry lab glassware—”

“I’m aware of the list,” Stratt said. “I was the one who signed off on it.”

Lokken dropped the papers on the table. “Most of this stuff won’t work in zero g.”

Stratt rolled her eyes. “We’ve thought of that, of course. Companies all over the world are working on zero-g-rated versions of this equipment as we speak.”

Lokken shook her head. “Do you have any idea how much research and development went into making electron microscopes? Gas chromatographs? Everything else on this list? A century of scientific advances brought about by failure after failure. You want to justassumethat making these things zero-g functional is going to work on the first try?”

“I don’t see any way around it, unless you invented artificial gravity.”

“Wehaveinvented artificial gravity,” Lokken insisted. “A long time ago.”

Stratt shot me a look. Obviously that had caught her off guard.

“I think she means a centrifuge,” I said.

“I know she means a centrifuge,” Stratt said. “What do you think?”

“I hadn’t thought of it before. I guess…it could work….”