I made the new Taumoeba farm. Sheet aluminum and some basic milling on the CNC mill. It wasn’t a problem. Rocky’s ship is the problem. I’ve been watching his engine flare every day for the past month. Now it’s gone. I float in the control room. The spin drives are off, and the Petrovascope is set to maximum sensitivity. There’s some random Petrova-wavelength light coming from Tau Ceti itself, as always. And even that’s dim. The star, almost as bright as Earth’s sun, now just looks like a fatter-than-usual dot in the night sky. But aside from that... nothing. I’m way too far away to detect the Tau Ceti–Adrian Petrova line and the Blip-A is nowhere to be seen. And I know right where it should be. Down to the milli-arc-second. And from here, its engines should be lighting up my scope.... I ran the numbers again and again. Though I’d already proven my formulae correct by daily observations of his progress. Now there’s nothing. No blip from the Blip-A. He’s derelict out there. His Taumoeba es caped their enclosure and wormed their way into his fuel bays. From there, they ate everything. Millions of kilograms of Astrophage gone in a matter of days. He’s smart, so he surely has the fuel compartmentalized. But those compartments are made of xenonite, right? Yeah. Three days. If the ship were damaged, he’d fix it. There’s nothing Rocky can’t fix. And he works fast. Five arms whipping around, often doing unrelated things. He could be dealing with a massive Taumoeba infection, but how long would that take? He has plenty of nitrogen. He can harvest as much as he wants from his ammonia atmosphere. Let’s assume he did that as soon as he noticed the contagion.
How long would it take him to get things back online? Not this long. Whatever may have happened, if the Blip-A could be fixed, he would have fixed it by now. The only explanation for it still being dead in space is that it has no fuel. He wasn’t able to stop the Taumoeba in time. I put my head in my hands. I can go home. I really can. I can return and spend the rest of my life a hero. Statues, parades, et cetera. And I’ll be in a new world order where all energy problems are solved. Cheap, easy, renewable energy everywhere thanks to Astrophage. I can track down Stratt and tell her to shove it. But then Rocky dies. And more important, Rocky’s people die. Billions of them. I’m this close. I just need to survive four years. Yeah, it’ll be eating nasty coma slurry but I’ll be alive. My annoying logical mind points out the other option: Launch the beetles —all four of them. Each with their own Taumoeba mini-farm and a USB stick full of data and findings. Earth scientists will take it from there. Then turn the Hail Mary around, find Rocky, and take him home to Erid. One problem: It means I die. I have enough food to survive the trip to Earth. Or I have enough to survive the trip to Erid. But even if the Eridians refuel the Hail Mary right away, there won’t be enough food for me to survive the trip back to Earth from Erid. I’ll have only a few months of food left at that point. I can’t grow anything. I don’t have any viable seeds or living plant matter. I can’t eat Eridian food. Too many heavy metals and other major toxins. So that’s what I’m left with. Option 1: Go home a hero and save all of humanity. Option 2: Go to Erid, save an alien species, and starve to death shortly after. I pull on my hair. I sob into my hands. It’s cathartic and exhausting. All I see when I close my eyes is Rocky’s dumb carapace and his little arms always fidgeting with something. It’s been six weeks since I made my decision. It wasn’t easy, but I’m sticking with it. I have the spin drives off for my daily ritual. I bring up the Petrovascope and look out into space. I see nothing at all. “Sorry, Rocky,” I say. Then I spot a tiny speck of Petrova light. I zoom in and search that area. A total of four little dots, barely visible, are on the monitor. “I know you’d love a beetle to take apart, but I couldn’t spare one.” The beetles, with much smaller spin drives, won’t be visible for much longer. Especially with them zooming off toward Earth and me headed almost the opposite direction toward the Blip-A. The Astrophage coils in the mini-farms will protect the Taumoeba from radiation, and I did thorough tests to make sure both the farms and the life inside could handle the massive acceleration that beetles use. They’ll be back at Earth in a couple of years from their point of view. About thirteen years, from Earth’s time frame. I bring the spin drives back online and continue on course.
Finding a spaceship “somewhere just outside the Tau Ceti system” is no small task. Imagine being given a rowboat and told to find a toothpick “somewhere in the ocean.” It’s like that, but nowhere near as easy. I know his course and I know he followed it. But I don’t know when his engines conked out. I only checked up on him once a day. Right now, I’m smack-dab in the center of my “best guess” for his position and I’ve matched my best guess on his velocity. But that’s only the beginning. I have a heck of a search ahead of me. I wish I had tracked him more often. Because I don’t know the exact time his engines died, the margin of error on my guess is about 20 million kilometers. That’s about one-eighth the distance between the Earth and the sun. It’s a distance so large it takes light a full minute to traverse it. That’s the best I can do with the information I have. Frankly, I’m lucky the error margin is so small. If the Taumoeba had es caped a month later, it would have been exponentially worse. And all this is going on at the edge of the Tau Ceti system. Barely the beginning of the trip. The distance between Tau Ceti and Earth is over four thousand times the width of the entire Tau Ceti system. Space is big. It’s... so, so big. So yeah. I’m extremely lucky to have only 20 million kilometers to search. “Hmm,” I mumble. This far away from Tau Ceti, his ship won’t be reflecting much Taulight. There’s no chance I’d spot the Blip-A with my telescope. Side note: I’m going to die. “Stop,” I say. Whenever I think about my impending death, I think about Rocky instead. He must have a sense of hopelessness right now. I’m coming, buddy. “Wait...” I’m sure he’s sad, but he’s also not one to mope for long. He’ll be working on a solution. What would he do? His whole species is on the line and he doesn’t know I’m coming. He wouldn’t just kill himself, right? He’d do anything he could think of, even if it would have only a tiny percent chance of success. Okay. I’m Rocky. My ship is dead. Maybe I rescued some Astrophage. The Taumoeba can’t have gotten all of it, right? So I have some. Can I make my own beetle? Something to send back to Erid? I shake my head. That would require a guidance system. Computer stuff. Way beyond Eridian science. That’s why they had a crew of twenty-three on a massive ship in the first place. Besides, it’s been a month and a half. If he were going to build a little ship, he’d be done by now and I would have seen its engine flare. Rocky moves fast. Okay. No beetle. But he’s got energy. Life support. Food enough to last him a long, long time (original crew of twenty-three, and it was always intended to be a round-trip voyage). “Radio?” I say. Maybe he’ll make a radio signal. Something powerful enough to be heard on Erid. Just a small chance of detection, but something. Eridians have a long life-span. Waiting a decade or so for rescue wouldn’t be that big a deal. Well, not on the life-or-death scale. If you asked me a few years ago I’d say it’s not possible to send a radio signal ten light-years. But this is Rocky we’re talking about, and he might have some rescued Astrophage to power whatever he creates.
It doesn’t have to contain information. It just needs to be noticed. But... no. There’s just no way. Some back-of-the napkin math tells me that even with Earth’s radio technology (which is better than Erid’s), the strength of that signal at Erid would be way less than background noise. Rocky will know that too. So there’s no point. “Hmm.” I wish I had better radar. Mine is good for a few thousand kilometers. Obviously that’s nowhere near good enough. Rocky could probably whip something up if he were here. It’s a little paradoxical, but I wish Rocky were here to help me save Rocky. “Better radar...” I mumble. Well, I have plenty of power. I have a radar system. Maybe I can work something out. But you can’t just add power to the emitter and expect things to go well. I’ll burn it out for sure. How can I turn Astrophage energy into radio waves? I shoot up from my pilot’s seat. “Duh!” I have everything I need for the best radar ever! To heck with my built-in radar system, with its measly emitter and sensors. I have spin drives and a Petrovascope! I can throw 900 terawatts of IR light out the back of my ship and see if any of it bounces back with the Petrovascope—an instrument carefully designed to detect even the smallest amounts of that exact frequency of light! I can’t have the Petrovascope and engines on at the same time. But that’s okay! Rocky is up to a light-minute away! I work up a search grid. It’s pretty simple. I’m smack-dab in the middle of my guesstimate on Rocky’s location. So I have to search all directions. Easy enough. I fire up the spin drives. I take manual control, which, as usual, requires me to say “yes,” “yes,” “yes,” and “override” to a bunch of warning dialogs. I throw the throttle to full and turn hard to port with the yaw controls. The force shoves me back into the seat and to the side. This is the astronavigational equivalent of doing donuts in the 7-Eleven parking lot. I ke ep it tight—it takes me thirty seconds to do one full rotation. I’m roughly back where I started. Probably a few dozen kilometers off but whatever. I cut the engines. Now I watch the Petrovascope. It’s not omnidirectional, but it can cover a good 90-degree arc of space at a time. I slowly pan across space in the same direction I’d shined the engines and at the same rate. It’s not perfect; I could get the timing wrong. If Rocky is very close or very far away this won’t work. But this is just my first try. I finish a full circle with the Petrovascope. Nothing. So I do another lap. Maybe Rocky is farther than I thought. The second lap turns up nothing. Well, I’m not done yet. Space is three-dimensional. I’ve only searched one flat slice of the area. I pitch the ship forward 5 degrees. I do the same search pattern again. But this time, the plane of my search pattern is 5 degrees different from the last time. If I don’t get a hit on this pass, I’ll do another 5-degree tilt and try again. And so on until I get to 90 degrees,
when I will have searched all directions. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll start over, but with a faster pan rate on the Petrovascope. I rub my hands together, take a sip of water, and get to work. A flash! I finally see a flash! Halfway through my Petrova pan of the 55-degree plane. A flash! I flail in surprise, which launches me out of the seat. I bounce around the zero-g control room and scramble back into position. It’s been slow going up till now. I was as bored as a guy could be. But not anymore! “Crud! Where was it! Okay! Relax! Calm down. Calm down!” I put my finger on the screen where I saw the blip. I check the Petrovascope bearing, do some math on the screen, and work out the angle. It’s 214 degrees’ yaw in my current plane, which is 55 degrees off the Tau Ceti–Adrian orbital ecliptic. “Gotcha!” Time for a better reading. I strap on my now-worn and banged-up stopwatch. Zero g has not been kind to the little guy, but it still works. I take the controls and angle the ship directly away from the contact. I start the stopwatch, thrust in a straight line for ten seconds, turn, and shut down the engines. I’m moving something like 150 meters per second away from the contact, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t want to zero out the velocity I just added. I want the Petrovascope. I stare at the screen with the stopwatch ticking away in my hand. Soon, I see the blip again. Twenty-eight seconds. The spot of light remains for ten seconds, then disappears. I can’t guarantee it’s the Blip-A. But whatever it is, it’s definitely a reflection of my spin drives. And it’s fourteen light-seconds away (fourteen seconds to get there, fourteen seconds to get back equals twenty-eight seconds). That works out to about 4 million kilometers. No point in trying to work out the object’s velocity by taking multiple readings. I don’t have that kind of precision with my “finger on the screen” approach. But I have a heading. I can cover 4 million kilometers in nine and a half hours. I fist-pump. “Yes! I’m definitely going to die!” I don’t know why I said that. I guess... well, if I wasn’t able to find Rocky, I’d set course for Earth. I’m surprised I put this much effort into it, actually. Whatever. I set course for where I saw the blip and fire up the engines. I don’t even need to account for relativity on this one. Just high-school physics. I’ll accelerate half the way, then decelerate the other half. I spend the next nine hours cleaning up. I’m going to have a guest again! I hope. Rocky will have to plug up all the holes he made in the xenonite walls. But that shouldn’t be a problem.
That assumes the contact I got was the Blip-A and not just a random piece of debris in space. I try not to think about it. Ke ep hope alive and all that. I move all my junk out of the xenonite areas. Once I’m done with that, I fidget a lot. I want to stop and do another swe ep to confirm my heading, but I resist the urge. Just wait it out. I stare at the aluminum Taumoeba farm in my lab. And the slide of Astrophage next to it in the Taumoeba alarm. Everything is going just fine. Maybe I could— The timer be eps. I’m at the location! I scramble up the ladder to the control room and shut off the spin drives. I have the Radar screen up before I even get in the chair. I do a full active ping and full power. “Come on... come on....” Nothing. I settle into the seat and strap in. I thought something like this might happen. I’m a lot closer to the contact now, but still not in radar range. I just traveled 4 million kilometers. Radar range is less than a thousandth of that. So my precision isn’t 99.9 percent. Big surprise. Time for another Petrovascope swe ep. But this time I don’t have the luxury of a full light-minute between me and the contact, wherever it is. If I’m, say, 100,000 kilometers away, I’ll have less than a second before the light comes back to me. And I can’t use the Petrovascope with the spin drives on. So now what? I need to create a bunch of Astrophage light without turning off the Petrovascope. I look through the menu options and don’t find anything. There’s no way to have the scope on when the spin drives are running. It must be a physical interlock somewhere. Somewhere aboard this ship is a wire leading from the spin-drive controls to the Petrovascope. I could spend the rest of my life looking for that and have no success. However, the main engines aren’t the only spin drives I have. The attitude-adjustment engines are little spin drives sticking out the side of the Hail Mary. They’re what let me yaw, pitch, and roll the ship. I wonder if the Petrovascope cares about them? I ke ep the scope on and do a quick roll to the left. The ship rolls and the scope stays active! Got to love those edge cases! Though I’m sure someone on the design team thought of this case. They probably decided the comparatively small output from the attitude drives wouldn’t hurt the scope. And, looking at the overall conc epts, it makes sense. The engines and attitude drives all point away from the ship and thus away from the Petrovascope. The reason it shuts down when the main drives are on is because of reflected light off small amounts of cosmic dust. The reflected light from the far less powerful adjustment drives was deemed acc eptable. But those adjustment drives are still putting out enough light to vaporize steel. Maybe they’ll be enough to light up the Blip-A. I aim the Petrovascope parallel to the port-side yaw thruster. In fact, I can see the thruster itself in the bottom of the visible-light mode image. I fire it up.
There’s definitely a visible glow in the Petrova spectrum. A general haze near the thruster, like turning on a flashlight in the fog. But after a few seconds the haze dies down. It’s still there, just not as prevalent. Probably dust and trace gases from the Hail Mary herself. Tiny particles of stuff drifting away from the ship. Once the thruster vaporized all the ones nearby, things calmed down. I ke ep the thruster on, and let the ship rotate on its yaw axis as I watch the Petrovascope. Now I have a flashlight. The rotation rate of the ship increases faster and faster. I can’t have that. So I activate the starboard-side yaw thruster as well. The computer complains up a storm. There’s no sensible reason to tell the ship to rotate clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. I ignore the warnings. I do a full re volution and see nothing. Okay. Nothing new. I do a 5-degree pitch adjustment and try again. On my sixth go-around—at 25 degrees from the Adrian ecliptic, I spot the contact. Still too far away to make out any detail. But it’s a flash of light in response to my yaw thruster. I flick the thruster on and off a few times to gauge the response time. It’s nearly instant—I’d say less than a quarter second. I’m within 75,000 kilometers. I point toward the contact and fire up the drives. This time I won’t go barreling in willy-nilly. I’ll stop every 20,000 kilometers or so and take another reading. I smile. It’s working. Now I just have to hope I haven’t been chasing an asteroid all day. With careful flying and r epeated measurements, I finally have the object on radar! It’s right there on the screen. “blip-a.” “Oh, right,” I say. I forgot that’s how it got its name. I’m 4,000 kilometers away—the very edge of radar range. I bring up the telescope view, but I can’t see anything, even at the highest magnification. The telescope was made for finding celestial bodies hundreds or thousands of kilometers across, not a spaceship a few hundred meters long. I cre ep closer. The object’s velocity with respect to Tau Ceti is about right for Rocky’s ship. Roughly the speed he would have gotten to around the time his engines died. I could take a bunch of readings and do math to work out its course, but I have an easier plan. I thrust for a few minutes here, a few minutes there, slowing down and speeding up until I match the object’s velocity. It’s still 4,000 kilometers away, but now the relative velocity to me is almost zero. Why do this? Because the Hail Mary is very good at telling me about its own course. I bring up the Nav console and tell it to calculate my current orbit. After some stargazing and calculation, the computer tells me exactly what I wanted to hear: The Hail Mary is on a hyperbolic trajectory. That means I’m not in orbit at all. I’m on an es cape vector, leaving Tau Ceti’s gravity influence entirely. And that means the object I’m tracking is also on an es cape vector. You know what objects in a solar system don’t do? They don’t es cape the star’s gravity. Anything going fast enough to es cape did so billions of years ago. Whatever this is, it’s no normal asteroid. “Yes yes yes yes...” I say. I kick the spin drives on and head toward the contact. “I’m comin’, buddy. Hold tight.”
When I’m within 500 kilometers, I finally get some resolution on the object. All I see is a highly pixelated triangle. It’s four times as long as it is wide. It’s not much information, but it’s enough. It’s the Blip-A. I know the profile well. I have a bag of Ilyukhina’s vodka handy for just such an occasion. I take a sip from the zip-straw. I cough and wheeze. Dang, she liked her liquor rough. Rocky’s ship sits 50 meters off my starboard side. I came up really carefully —I don’t want to cross an entire solar system just to accidentally vaporize him with my engines. I’ve matched velocities to within a few centimeters per second. It’s been almost three months since we parted. From the outside, the Blip- A looks the same as it always has. But something is definitely wrong. I’ve tried everything to communicate. Radio. Flashes of spin-drive light. Nothing gets a response. I get a sinking feeling. What if Rocky’s dead? He was all alone in there. What if all heck broke loose while he was in a sle ep cycle? Eridians don’t wake up until their bodies are ready. What if the life-support system went offline while he was asle ep and he just... never woke up? What if he died of radiation sickness? All that Astrophage that was protecting him from radiation turned into methane and Taumoeba. Eridians are very susc eptible to radiation. It might have happened so fast he didn’t have a chance to react. I shake my head. No. He’s Rocky. He’s smart. He’d have backup plans. A s eparate life- support system that he sle eps in, I bet. And he’d account for radiation—it killed his entire crew. But why no response? He can’t see. He doesn’t have windows. He’d have to actively look outside with the Blip-A’s sensory equipment to know I’m there at all. Why would he do that? He thinks he’s hopelessly derelict in space. EVA time. I climb into the Orlan for what seems like the millionth time and cycle through the airlock. I have a nice long tether anchored to the airlock interior itself. I look out into the vast nothingness before me. I can’t see the Blip-A. Tau Ceti is too far away to light things up. I only know where the ship is because it blocks the background stars. I’m just... out in space and a big chunk of it has no pinpricks of light. There’s no good way to do this. I’m just going to have to take a guess. I kick off the Hail Mary’s hull as hard as I can, aiming for the Blip-A. It’s a big ship. I just have to hit any part of it. And hey, if I miss, the tether will bounce me back in the galaxy’s first interstellar bungee jump. I float across space. The blackness ahead of me grows. More and more stars disappear until I see nothing. I don’t even have a sense of movement. I know logically I must have the same velocity as when I kicked off my ship. But there’s nothing to prove it. Then, I spot a faint blotchy tan glow ahead. I’m finally close enough to the Blip-A that my helmet lights are illuminating part of it. It gets brighter and brighter. I can see the hull more clearly now.
It’s go time. I have just seconds to find something to grab on to. I know his hull has rails all over the place for that robot to get around. I’m hoping I’ll be close enough to one to grab. I spot a rail dead ahead. I reach out. Slam! I hit the Blip-A much harder than an EVA suit should. I shouldn’t have kicked off the Hail Mary with so much gusto. I scrabble at the hull, grabbing for anything. My plan to grab a rail failed miserably, I got a hand on one but just couldn’t ke ep a grip. I bounce and start drifting away. The tether gets tangled up behind and around me. It’ll be a long climb back to my ship for another try. Then I spot a weird, jagged protuberance on the hull a few meters away. An antenna, maybe? It’s too far to reach with my hands, but maybe I can get it with the tether. I’m drifting away from the hull at a slow but steady rate and I don’t have a jetpack. It’s now or never. I tie a quick slipknot in the tether and throw it at the antenna. And, I’ll be gosh darned, I nailed it! I just wrangled an alien spaceship. I pull the loop tight. For a second, I worry it might break the antenna off, but then I see the blotchy tan texture. The antenna (if that’s what it is) is made of xenonite. It’s not going anywhere. I pull myself along the tether to the hull. This time, with the antenna and tether to aid me, I manage to grab hold of a nearby robot rail. “Whew,” I say. I take a moment to catch my breath. Now to put Rocky’s hearing to the test. I pull the biggest wrench I have from my tool belt. I rear back and smack the hull. Hard. I smack it over and over. Clank! Clank! Clank! I hear the sound through my own EVA suit. If he’s alive in there, that’ll get his attention. I push one end of the wrench against the hull and crouch down to bring my helmet in contact with the other end. I stretch my neck out in the helmet and push my chin against the fac eplate. “Rocky!” I yell as loud as I can. “I don’t know if you can hear me! But I’m here, buddy! I’m on your hull!” I wait a few seconds. “I have my EVA suit radio on! Same frequency as always! Say something! Let me know you’re okay!” I turn up my radio volume. All I hear is static. “Rocky!” A crackle. My ears perk up. “Rocky?!” “Grace, question?” “Yes!” I’ve never been so happy to hear a few musical notes! “Yeah, buddy! It’s me!” “You are here, question?!” his voice is so high-pitched I can barely understand him. But I understand Eridian pretty well now. “Yes! I’m here!”
“You are...” he squeaks. “You...” he squeaks again. “You are here!” “Yes! Set up the airlock tunnel!” “Warning! Taumoeba-82.5 is—” “I know! I know. It can get through xenonite. That’s why I’m here. I knew you’d be in trouble.” “You save me!” “Yes. I caught the Taumoeba in time. I still have fuel. Set up the tunnel. I’m taking you to Erid.” “You save me and you save Erid!” he squeaks. “Set up the darn tunnel!” “Get back in you ship! Unless you want to look at tunnel from outside!” “Oh, right!” I wait eagerly by the airlock door, trying to watch the action play out through the little window. It’s all happened before—Rocky attaching the airlock-to- airlock tunnel with the hull robot. But this time it was a little more challenging. I had to maneuver the Hail Mary into position because the Blip-A can’t move at all. Still, we got it done. A final clank, then a hiss. I know that sound! I float into the airlock and check through the outer window. The tunnel is in place. He k ept it all this time. Why not? It’s an artifact from his species’ first contact with alien life. I’d ke ep it too! I turn the emergency relief valve. Air from my ship fills my half of the tunnel. Once it equalizes, I throw open the door and fly in. Rocky waits for me on the other side. His clothes are a mess. Covered in the all-too-familiar gunky Taumoeba residue. And there are burns all along one side of his jumpsuit and two of his arms are in pretty bad shape. Looks like he had a pretty rough time. But his body language is sheer joy. He bounces from handhold to handhold. “I am very very very happy,” he says with a high pitch. I point to his bad arms. “Are you hurt?!” “I will heal. Attempted many things to stop Taumoeba infestation. All failed.” “I succeeded,” I say. “My ship isn’t made of xenonite.” “What happen, question?” I sigh. “The Taumoeba e volved to resist nitrogen. But it also e volved to get into xenonite to hide from nitrogen. The side effect is Taumoeba-82.5 can work its way through xenonite over time.” “Amaze. Now what, question?” “I still have two million kilograms of Astrophage. Bring your stuff aboard. We’re going to Erid.” “Happy! Happy happy happy!” He pauses. “Need to make nitrogen wash.
Make sure no Taumoeba-82.5 get into Hail Mary.” “Yes. I have full faith in your abilities. Make a sterilizer.” He shifts from one set of bars to another. Those burned arms are hurting him, I can tell. “What about Earth, question?” “I sent the beetles with the mini-farms. Taumoeba-82.5 can’t get through Eridian steel.” “Good good,” he says. “I make sure my people take good care of you. They will make Astrophage maybe for you to go home!” “Yeah...” I say. “About that... I’m not going home. The beetles will save Earth. But I won’t ever see it again.” His joyous bouncing stops. “Why, question?” “I don’t have enough food. After I take you to Erid, I will die.” “You... you no can die.” His voice gets low. “I no let you die. We send you home. Erid will be grateful. You save everyone. We do everything to save you.” “There’s nothing you can do,” I say. “There’s no food. I have enough to last until we get to Erid and then a few months more. Even if your government gave me the Astrophage to go home, I wouldn’t survive the trip.” “Eat Erid food. We e volve from same life. We use same proteins. Same chemicals. Same sugars. Must work!” “No, I can’t eat your food, remember?” “You say is bad for you. We find out.” I hold up my hands. “It’s not just bad for me. It will kill me. Your whole ecology uses heavy metals all over the place. Most of them are toxic to me. I’d die immediately.” He trembles. “No. You no can die. You are friend.” I float closer to the divider wall and talk softly. “It’s okay. I made my decision. This is the only way to save both of our worlds.” He backs away. “Then you go home. Go home now. I wait here. Erid maybe send another ship someday.” “That’s ridiculous. Do you really want to risk the survival of your entire species on that guess?” He’s silent for a few moments and finally answers. “No.” “Okay. Get that ball thing you use as a spacesuit and come on over. Talk me through how to patch up the xenonite walls. Then you can move your stuff in—” “Wait,” he says. “You no can eat Erid life. You no have Earth life to eat. What about Adrian life, question?” I snort. “Astrophage? I can’t eat that! It’s ninety-six degrees all the time! It would burn me alive. Plus, I doubt my digestive enzymes would even work on its weird cell membrane.” “Not Astrophage. Taumoeba. Eat Taumoeba.” “I can’t eat—” I pause. “I... what?” Can I eat Taumoeba?
It’s alive. It has DNA. Is has mitochondria—the powerhouse of the cell. It stores energy as glucose. It does the Krebs cycle. It’s not Astrophage. It’s not 96 degrees. It’s just an amoeba from another planet. It won’t have heavy metals like Eridian life e volved to have—they aren’t even present in Adrian’s atmosphere. “I... I don’t know. Maybe I can.” He points to his ship. “I have twenty-two million kilograms of Taumoeba in fuel bays. How much you want, question?” I widen my eyes. It’s the first time I’ve felt genuine hope in a long time. “Settled.” He puts his claw against the divider. “Fist my bump.” I laugh and put my knuckles against the xenonite. “Fist-bump. It’s just ‘fist- bump.’ ” “Understand.” I finish off the last bite of my meburger and gulp down the vitamin- enriched soda. I put my dishes in the sink and check the clock on my kitchen wall. Wow, is it V n I λλ already? I better hurry up. My first few years on Erid were touch-and-go. Taumoeba k ept me alive, but I became severely malnourished. The microbes gave me calories, but they weren’t a balanced diet. Those were painful days. I had scurvy, beriberi, and a raft of other maladies. Was it worth it? I still don’t know. I might never know. There’s no way to communicate with Earth. It’s sixteen light-years away. For all I know, the beetles may have malfunctioned or missed their target. I don’t even know if the climatologists like Leclerc were right in their models for what would happen. The Hail Mary might have been hopeless from the get-go. Earth might already be a frozen wasteland with billions of corpses. But I try to stay positive. What else have I got? For what it’s worth, the Eridians are fantastic hosts. They don’t have a government, per se, but all the important entities agreed to do whatever it takes to ke ep me alive. After all, I played a critical role in saving their planet. And even if I hadn’t, I’m a living, breathing alien. Of course they’re going to ke ep me alive. I’m of extreme scientific interest. I live in a big dome in the middle of one of their “cities.” Though “city” isn’t quite the right word. A better description might be a “cluster.” I have grounds and everything. Thirty Eridians outside the dome maintain my life-support systems, or so I’m told. And my dome is very close to one of the larger science centers. Many of Erid’s greatest minds collect there and thrum. That’s sort of a song and discussion in one. But everyone talks at the same time and it’s not really conscious on their part. Somehow the thrum leads to conclusions and decisions. The thrum itself is much smarter than any Eridian in it. In a way, Eridians can become ad-hoc neurons in a group mind. But they come and go as they please. I’m particularly interesting, so pretty much every scientist on the planet came together to thrum up ways to ke ep me alive. I’m told it was the second- largest science-oriented thrum ever executed. (The largest, of course, was when they had to make a plan for dealing with Astrophage.) Thanks to my Earth scientific journals, they know all my nutritional needs and how to synthesize the various vitamins in labs. Once they solved that, smaller, less-focused groups worked on making them taste better. That’s
more or less up to me, actually. Lots of taste tests. Glucose, common to both Eridian and Human biomes, comes up a lot. The best thing, though, is they managed to clone my muscle tissue and grow it in labs. I can thank Earth science for that. They were nowhere near that technology when I first showed up. But that was sixteen years ago— they’re catching up quite well. Anyway, it means I can finally eat meat. Yes, that’s right, I’m eating human meat. But it’s my own meat, and I don’t feel bad about it. Spend a decade eating nothing but odd-tasting, vaguely sweet vitamin shakes and then see if you’ll turn down a burger. I love meburgers. I eat one every day. I grab my cane and head out. I’m not a young man anymore, and the high gravity of Erid has only made my bones degenerate faster. I think I’m fifty- three years old now, but I’m not sure. I’ve done a lot of time-dilated travel. I can accurately say seventy-one years have gone by on Earth since I was born, for what it’s worth. I leave through my front door and cross the grounds. There are no plants or anything—I’m the only thing on this planet that can survive my environment. But there are some very tasteful and aesthetically pleasing rocks. It’s become a hobby of mine: making the grounds as pretty as possible. The Eridians just see a bunch of rocks, but I see all the colors. They installed lights at the top of the dome that get brighter and dimmer on a twenty-four-hour cycle. I explained that’s critical to my mood and they took my word for it. Though I did have to explain to this species of interstellar travelers how to make lightbulbs. I make my way along the gravel pathway to one of the many “meeting” rooms at the dome’s wall. Eridians value face-to-carapace communication as much as humans do, and this is a good compromise. My side is within my bubble environment. And on the other side of the 1-centimeter clear xenonite is a room that’s out in Erid’s natural atmosphere. I hobble in. It’s one of the smaller meeting rooms, really only suitable for a one-on-one conversation. But it’s become our go-to spot for meeting up. Rocky waits for me on the Eridian side. “Finally! I’ve been waiting for n λ minutes! What took you so long?!” I can understand Eridian fluently now, of course. And Rocky is equally fluent in English comprehension. “I’m old. Give me a break. It takes me a while to get ready in the morning.” “Oh, you had to eat, right?” Rocky says, a tinge of disgust in his voice. “You told me not to talk about that in polite company.” “I’m not polite company, my friend!” I snicker. “So what’s up?” He wiggles and jiggles. I’ve almost never seen him this excited. “I just heard from the Astronomy hive. They have news!” I hold my breath. “Sol? Is it about Sol?!” “Yes!” he squeals. “Your star has returned to full luminance!” I gasp. “Are you sure? Like, I nn percent certainty?”
“Yes. The data was analyzed by a thrum of λ V astronomers. It checks out.” I can’t move. I can barely breathe. I start to tremble. It’s over. We won. Simple as that. Sol—Earth’s sun—has returned to its pre-Astrophage brightness. There’s only one possible way that happens: Astrophage is gone. Or at least reduced in population so much that it doesn’t matter. We won. We did it! Rocky cocks his carapace. “Hey, your face is leaking! I haven’t seen that in a long-ass time! Remind me—does that mean you’re happy or sad? ’Cause it can mean either one, right?” “I’m happy, of course!” I sob. “Yeah, I thought so. Just checking.” He holds a balled claw against the xenonite. “Is this a fist-bump situation?” I press my knuckles to the xenonite as well. “This is a monumentally epic fist-bump situation.” “I guess your scientists got right on it,” he says. “If you account for the time it took your beetles to get there and the travel time for light to get from Sol to Erid... I think it took less than one of your years to get it done.” I nod. It’s still sinking in. “So will you go home now? Or will you stay?” The... entities... that make major decisions for Erid long ago offered to refuel the Hail Mary. It’s still sitting in a nice, stable orbit around Erid, where it’s been since Rocky and I first arrived all those years ago. The Eridians could stock it up with food and supplies, help me make sure everything is working right, and send me on my way. But so far I haven’t taken them up on it. It’s a long, lonely journey, and until a minute ago I didn’t even know if Earth was still habitable. Erid may not be where I’m from, but at least I have friends here. “I... I don’t know. I’m getting old and the trip is long.” “Speaking from a selfish perspective, I hope you stay. But that’s just me.” “Rocky... that news about Sol... it... it makes my whole life have meaning. You know? I still can’t... I can’t...” I start sobbing again. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I wanted to be the one to tell you.” I check my watch. (Yes, the Eridians made me a wristwatch. They make anything I ask for. I try not to abuse it.) “I have to go. I’m late. But... Rocky...” “I know,” he says, tilting his carapace in what I’ve come to realize is a smile. “I know. We’ll talk more about it later. I have to get home anyway. Adrian is going to sle ep soon, so I have to be there to watch.” We both head toward our respective exits, but he pauses. “Hey, Grace. Do you ever wonder? About other life out there?” I lean on my cane. “Sure, all the time.”
He walks back in. “I ke ep thinking about it. The theories are pretty hard to dispute. Some ancestor of Astrophage seeded Earth and Erid with life billions of years ago.” “Yeah,” I say. “And I know where you’re going with this.” “Do you?” “Yeah.” I shift my weight from one leg to the other. Arthritis is starting to settle in my joints. High gravity isn’t great for humans. “There are fewer than fifty stars as close to Tau Ceti as we are. But two of them ended up with life. It means life—at least, the life Tau Ceti puts out—might be a lot more common in our galaxy than we think.” “Think we’ll find more of them? Intelligent species?” “Who knows?” I say. “You and I found each other. That’s something.” “Yeah,” he says. “It really is something. Go do your job, old man.” “Later, Rocky.” “Later!” I hobble out of the room and make my way along the perimeter of the dome. They made the whole thing out of clear xenonite because they thought that’s what I would want. But it doesn’t matter. It’s pitch-dark outside all the time. Sure, I can shine a flashlight out there and occasionally see an Eridian going about his business. But I don’t get swe eping vistas of mountains or anything. Just inky blackness. My smile fades a little. How bad did it get back on Earth? Did they work together to survive? Or did millions die in wars and famine? They were able to collect the beetles, read my information, and implement a solution. A solution that would have in volved a probe going to Venus. So there’s definitely some advanced infrastructure still there. I bet they did work together. Maybe it’s just the childish optimist in me, but humanity can be pretty impressive when we put our minds to it. After all, everyone worked together to build the Hail Mary. That was no easy feat. I hold my head up high. Maybe I will go home someday. Maybe I’ll find out for sure. But not right now. Right now, I’ve got work to do. I continue along the path to the large double doors leading to another meeting space. And I have to say, it’s my favorite one. I st ep into the chamber. About one-fifth of the room is my Earth environment. The other side of the divider wall has thirty little Eridians bouncing around like idiots. Each one is no more than thirty Earth years old. The selection process for which ones get to attend... well... again, Eridian culture is complicated. An Earthlike organ keyboard sits in the center of my area, oriented such that the operator faces the kids. The organ has quite a few more options than a typical keyboard found on Earth. I can apply inflection, tone, mood, and all the other little intricacies of spoken language. I settle into the comfortable chair, crack my knuckles, and start the class. “All right, all right,” I play. “Everyone settle down and get in your seats.” They scamper to their assigned desks and sit quietly, ready for the lesson to begin. “Who here can tell me the speed of light?”
Twelve kids raise their claws. FOR JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE, AND RINGO I’ d like to thank the following people who helped me get the science as accurate as possible: Andrew Howell, for helping me with astronomy and stellar sciences. Jim Green, for explaining the basics of planetary science and how atmospheres work. Shawn Goldman, for telling me all about exoplanet detection. Charles Duba (who I actually went to high school with!), for explaining complex details about neutrinos. And finally, Cody Don Reeder, for giving me vital chemistry information and also being an all-around cool guy to exchange emails with. On the book front, I’d like to thank my agent, David Fugate, for always having my back. Also, Julian Pavia, my editor on this book and so far all of my books. And Sarah Breivogel, who has handled publicity for my books since day one. And I’d like to thank my eclectic group of beta readers: My mother, Janet, who loves everything I do; Duncan Harris, who questions every plot point and ke eps me honest; and Dan Snyder, who... wait. You never got back to me, Dan! What, am I not good enough for you!? And I’d like to thank my wife, Ashley, for putting up with god-knows how many conversations about possible plot and story structure ideas and always giving me wise feedback.