Page 77 of Project Hail Mary

I hold up a finger and rush back into the ship to get my stopwatch. I come back and time Rocky’s clock. I start the timer just as thethirdrotor changes state. The right rotor continues clicking over every two seconds or so, and every six steps, the next rotor advances one. This is going to take a while, but I want as accurate a count as possible. It takes around a minute and a half for the third rotor to move just one step. I can expect to be at this for ten minutes or so. But I plan to watch the whole time.

Rocky gets bored. At least, I think that’s what happens. He starts fidgeting, and then lets the clock float in place near the divider wall. Then he wanders around his side of the tunnel. I’m not sure if he’s doing anything in particular. He opens a door leading into his ship, begins to climb through, and then stops. He seems to think it over, then changes his mind. He closes the door. He doesn’t want to leave while I’m still here. After all, I might do or say something interesting.

“???,” he says.

“I know, I know,” I say. I hold up a finger.

He holds up his finger, then returns to slowly bouncing from wall to wall. Zero-g pacing.

Finally, the third rotor completes a full lap and I stop my timer. Total time: 511.0 seconds. I don’t have a calculator, and I’m too excited to go back into the ship to get one. I pull out a pen and do long division on the palm of my other hand. One Eridian second is 2.366 Earth seconds.

I circle the answer on my palm and stare at it. I add a few exclamation points nearby because I feel like they’re warranted.

I know it doesn’t seem like much, but this is a huge deal. Rocky and I are astronauts. If we’re going to talk, we’re going to talk science. And just like that, Rocky and I have established a fundamental unit of time. Next up: length and mass!

No, actually. Next up—a nap. I’m so tired. I pull my clock off the wall, circle the “2” with my dry-erase marker—just to be as clear as possible, then tape it back in place. I wave. He waves back. Then I go back for a nap.

—

This is ridiculous. How can I expect to sleep? How could anyone under these circumstances? I’m still wrapping my head around what’s happening. There’s an alien out there.

And it’s killing me that I can’t find out what he knows about Astrophage. But you can’t talk about complex scientific concepts with someone via pantomime. We need a shared language, however rudimentary.

I just need to keep doing what I’m doing. Work on science communication. The verbs and nouns of physics. It’s the one set of concepts we’re guaranteed to share—physical laws are the same everywhere. And once we have enough words to actually talk about science, we’ll start talking about Astrophage.

And in “VVlλI” Eridian seconds I’ll be talking to him again. How the heck can a guy sleep at a time like this? There’s no way I can just—

My timer beeps at me. I’d set it for a two-hour countdown. It just reached zero. I blink a couple of times. I’m floating in a fetal position in the control room. I didn’t even make it to the dormitory.

I am not rested at all. Every pore of my being yells at me to go back to sleep, but I told Rocky I’d be back in two hours and I wouldn’t want him to think humans are untrustworthy.

I mean…we’re pretty untrustworthy, but I don’t want him to know that.

I trudge (can you trudge in zero g? I say yes) through the airlock. Rocky is there waiting for me in the tunnel. He’s been busy in my absence. There’s all sorts of stuff in there now.

The Eridian clock is still ticking away—now mounted to one of the lattice poles. But more interesting to me is the box that’s been added to the dividing wall. It’s a 1-foot cube and it juts out into my half of the tunnel. It’s made of the same transparent xenonite that the rest of the wall is made of.

On Rocky’s side, the box has a flat panel door with an opaque xenonite border. Also, there’s a square hole with a perfectly fitted square pipe leading away.

There are some…controls?…on the pipe near the box. Buttons, maybe? A wire coming from the control box snakes along the pipe, disappearing into the hull where the pipe does.

Meanwhile, on my side of the cube is a crank, roughly the same shape as my own airlock door’s crank. And that’s attached to a square panel like the one on Rocky’s side and—

“It’s an airlock!” I said. “You made an airlock in our airlock tunnel!”

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Rocky and I can both access it. He can control the air in that little chamber by means of the mystery pipe, which presumably leads back to some pumps or something in theBlip-A. And those buttons or whatever are the controls. Just like that, we have a way to transfer stuff back and forth.

I do jazz hands. He does them back.

Hmm. Again with the square, flat panels. Who makes a square airlock? Especially one designed to handle Eridian atmospheric pressure. Even the pipe that runs the mini-airlock is square. I know they can make round xenonite—the cylinders he sent me when we first met were round. This tunnel is round.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Xenonite is so strong you don’t have to carefully shape it into pressure vessels. Flat panels are probably easier to make.

This is awesome. I hold up a finger—he returns the gesture. I fly down to the lab and grab a tape measure. He showed me a unit of time, so I’ll show him a unit of length. The tape measure is metric, thank God. It’s going to be confusing enough using base-6 Eridian seconds. The last thing I want to throw in there is imperial units—even if they are natural to me.

Back in the tunnel, I hold up the tape measure. I pull it out a bit, then release it to let it retract. I repeat the process a few times. He does jazz hands. I point to the “squarelock” (well, what else should I call it?) and he does jazz hands again.