Page 94 of Project Hail Mary

My jaw dropped open.

“That went by fast,” said Stratt. “Explain.”

“Well,” I said. “He wants to pave a chunk of the Sahara Desert with blackpanels. Like…aquarterof the entire Sahara Desert!”

“It’d be the biggest thing ever made by humanity,” he said. “It’d be starkly visible from space.”

I glared at him. “And it would destroy the ecology of Africa and probably Europe.”

“Not as much as the coming ice age will.”

Stratt held up her hand. “Dr. Grace. Would it work?”

I fidgeted. “Well, I mean…it’s a sound concept. But I don’t know if it’s even possible to implement. This isn’t like making a building or a road. We’re talking about literally trillions of these things.”

Redell leaned in. “That’s why I designed the blackpanels to be made entirely out of foil, glass, and ceramics. All materials we have plenty of here on Earth.”

“Wait,” I said. “How do the Astrophage breed in this scenario? Your blackpanels will enrich them, sure, and they’ll be breed-ready. But there are a bunch of steps they need to go through when they breed.”

“Oh, I know.” He smirked. “We’ll have a static magnet in there to give them a magnetic field to follow—they need that to kick off their migration response. Then we’ll have a small IR filter on one part of the glass. It’ll only let the CO2IR spectral signature wavelengths through. The Astrophage will go there to breed. Then, after dividing, they’ll head toward the glass because that’s the direction of the sun. We’ll have a small pinhole somewhere in the side of the panel for air exchange with the outside. It’ll be slow enough that it doesn’t cool down the panel, but fast enough to replenish the CO2used by Astrophage while breeding.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. He’d thought it all through.

“Well?” said Stratt.

“As a breeder system it’s horrible,” I said. “Way less efficient and far lower yield than my system on the carrier’s reactor. But he didn’t design it for efficiency. He designed it for scalability.”

“That’s right,” he said. He pointed to Stratt. “I hear you have godlike authority over pretty much the whole world right now.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” she said.

“Not much of one, though,” I said.

Redell continued. “Can you get China to orient their industrial base around making blackpanels? Not just them but pretty much every industrial nation on Earth? That’s what it would take.”

She pursed her lips. After a moment, she said, “Yes.”

“And can you tell the goddamned corrupt government officials in North Africa to stay out of the way?”

“That part will be easy,” she said. “When this is all over, those governments will keep the blackpanels. They’ll be the industrial-energy powerhouse of the world.”

“See, there we go,” he said. “Save the world and permanently lift Africa out of poverty while we’re at it. Of course, this is all just a theory. I have to develop the blackpanel and make sure we can mass-produce it. I’d need to be in a lab instead of prison.”

Stratt mulled it over. Then she stood.

“Okay. You’re with us.”

He pumped his fist.

—

I wake up in my bed, which is mounted to the tunnel wall. That first night was a kludge with duct tape. Since then, I learned that epoxy glue works well on xenonite, so I was able to attach a couple of anchor points and mount the mattress properly.

I sleep in the tunnel every night now. Rocky insists. And, once every eighty-six hours or so, Rocky sleeps in the tunnel and wants me to watch. Well, he’s only slept three times so far, so my data on his waking period is a bit sparse. But he’s been kind of consistent on it.

I stretch out my arms and yawn.

“Good Morning,”Rocky says.