Page 68 of Project Hail Mary

Dimitri opened my vial of Astrophage and set it in the fueling chamber. I guess since the Astrophage will find their way to the triangle face, no special handling was required. He could just…let the fuel see the IR.

“Come, come,” he said. “Experiment time!”

We left the vacuum chamber and Dimitri sealed it off. He yelled something in Russian, and all the Russians started repeating it. Everyone made their way to the far side of the hangar deck, including us.

They’d set up a folding table. It had a laptop on it with Cyrillic writing on the screen.

“Ms. Stratt. How far is carrier from closest land?” Dimitri asked.

“About three hundred kilometers,” she said.

“This is good.”

“Wait, why?” I said. “Why is that good?”

Dimitri pursed his lips. “It is…good. Time for science!”

He pushed a button. There was a muffledwhumpfrom the far side of the bay, followed by a hum, and then nothing.

“Experiment done.” He leaned forward to read the screen. “Sixty thousand Newtons of force!”

He turned to the other Russians. “60,000????????!”

They all cheered.

Stratt turned to me. “That’s a lot, right?”

I was too busy staring slack-jawed at Dimitri to answer her. “Did you say sixtythousandNewtons?”

He pumped his fist in the air. “Yes! Sixty thousand Newtons! Maintained for one hundred microseconds!”

“Oh my God. From that little thing?!” I started to walk forward. I had to see this for myself.

Dimitri grabbed my arm. “No. You stay here, friend. We all stay here. One point eight billion Joules of light energy was released. This is why we needed vacuum chamber and one thousand kilograms of silicon. No air to ionize. Light goes directly to silicon block. Energy is absorbed by melting the metal. See?”

He turned the laptop toward me. A camera feed from inside the vacuum chamber showed the glowing blob that was once a thick plate of metal.

“Whoa…” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Dimitri said. “That Mr. Einstein with hisE = mc2. Very powerful stuff. We let the cooling system work on it for a few hours. Uses seawater. Will be fine.”

I just shook my head in awe. In just 100 microseconds—that’s one ten-thousandth of a second—Dimitri’s spin drive melted a metric ton of metal. All that energy had been stored up in my little Astrophages. Slowly harvested from the carrier’s nuclear reactor heat over time by my breeder. I mean, the math all checked out, but to see it actually demonstrated like that was another thing entirely.

“Wait…how much Astrophage did you use there?”

Dimitri smiled. “I can only estimate based on thrust generated. But was close to twenty micrograms.”

“I gave you two entiregrams! Can I have the rest back, please?”

“Don’t be greedy,” Stratt said. “Dimitri needs it for further experimentation.”

She turned to him. “Good work. How big will the real drive be?”

Dimitri pointed to the video feed. “That big. That is real drive.”

“No, I mean the one on the ship.”

“That,” he said, pointing again. “You want redundancy, safety, reliability, yes? So we don’t make just one big engine. We make thousand little ones. One thousand and nine, actually. Enough for all thrust needed and much to spare. Some malfunction during trip? Not a problem. More thrust from the others to compensate.”