Page 70 of Project Hail Mary

I let the wall catch up to me. At some lizard-brain level, I like being a little farther from the airlock. Some scary stuff is going on over there.

Clunk.

The Eridian tunnel has hit the hull. Clicks and scrapes follow. I watch the hull camera feeds.

The mouth of the tunnel, now firmly held to the airlock aperture, is larger than the entire airlock door. I guess that’s that. Presuming the glue will hold pressure. They don’t even know what my atmospheric pressure is. What’s the glue made of? So many questions.

I can’t operate the control-room panels with my EVA suit gloves. I wish I could zoom in or something. I squint at one of the feeds showing the tunnel. It sure looks tight against the hull to me. There’s some curvature to the hull around that spot. Kind of a complicated shape to make, but the Eridians duplicated it perfectly.

After another minute, the robot arms let go of their handles, leaving them on the hull.

A muffled sound comes from the airlock. It’s a whooshing sound. Is that airflow? They’re pressurizing the tunnel!

My heart races. Can my hull handle this? What if their air dissolves aluminum? What if aluminum is highly toxic to Eridians and one whiff of it kills them instantly? This is a terrible idea!

The whooshing stops.

I gulp.

They’re done. Nothing dissolved yet. I float over to the airlock for a look-see.

I had both airlock doors sealed, of course. More protection in case of a breach. I open the inner door and float inside. I peek out the porthole window.

The blackness of space gone, replaced with the blackness of a dark tunnel. I turn on the helmet lamps and angle my head to shine light through the porthole.

The end of the tunnel is too close. I don’t mean I’m bothered by it. I mean the end of it is not 20 feet away. It’s more like 10 feet. And while the rest of the tunnel is made of gray and tan blotchy xenonite, the wall at the end is a hexagonal pattern of random colors.

They didn’t just connect a tunnel. They connected my airlock to theirs, with a wall in the middle.

Clever.

I close the inner airlock door with me inside and depressurize it. I spin the outer door’s hatch handle and push. It opens without resistance. The tunnel is a vacuum—at least, it is on my side of the divider.

I think I see. This is a test. They had all the same concerns I had. Attach it, let me pressurize my half with my air, and see what happens. Either it works or it doesn’t. If it works, great! If not, they’ll try something else. Or maybe ask me to try something.

Okay. Let’s see.

I tell the airlock to repressurize. It refuses—the outer door is open. Nice to know that safety interlock is there, but I’ll have to work around it.

It’s not hard—there’s a manual relief valve that will just let air from the ship into the airlock. It bypasses all computer controls. You don’t want someone to die because of a software malfunction, right?

I open the relief valve. Air rushes in from theHail Maryand, with the airlock wide open, into the tunnel. Within three minutes, the airflow slows and then stops. My suit readings tell me there’s 400 hectopascals of pressure outside. TheHail Maryhas equalized with my part of the tunnel.

I close the relief valve and wait. I watch the external pressure gauge on my EVA suit. The pressure stays put at 400 hectopascals. We have a good seal.

Eridians know how to glue xenonite to aluminum. Of course they do. Aluminum’s an element, and any species that could invent xenonite in the first place must know their way around the periodic table a thousand times better than we do.

Time for a leap of faith. I pop the seals of the EVA suit and climb out the back. The strong smell of ammonia permeates the air but it’s otherwise breathable. It’s my own air supply, after all. I push the EVA suit back toward the airlock. The helmet lamps are my only source of light, so I finagle the suit so the lights stay pointed down the tunnel.

I float over to the mystery wall and reach out to touch it, but stop short. I can feel the heat even from a few inches away. Eridians like it hot.

In fact, I’m starting to sweat. The tunnel walls are heating up my air. It’s uncomfortable, but not too bad. I can open theHail Mary’s inner airlock door if I want my climate control to take over. Then our life-support systems can fight it out. They’ll keep the hot side hot and I’ll keep the cold side cold.

Even with the sweat forming on my brow and the strong ammonia odor making my eyes water, I press on. I’m just too curious not to. Could anyone blame me?

There are at least twenty little hexagons on this wall. They’re all different colors and textures and I think a couple of them might be translucent. I should catalog each one and figure out if I can identify what they’re made of. Looking closer, I see there’s a definite seam running along the edges of the hexes.

That’s when I hear a sound come from the other side: