Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

“They accelerate at five hundred g’s until they reach a cruising speed of 0.93 c. It’ll take over twelve years to get back to Earth, but all told the little guys will only experience about twenty months.

The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe, you know?”

If I never see another chain again in my life, it will be too soon. Ten kilometers of chain—each link just 5 centimeters long. That’s two hundred thousand links. Each one connected by hand or claw. It worked out to each of us working eight hours per day for two weeks doing nothing but connecting links.

I saw chain whenever I closed my eyes. I dreamed of chain every night. One of my dinner packets was spaghetti and all I could see were smooth, white chains instead of noodles.

Just like that, with minimal complication, Rocky had made a life-support system for Adrian life-forms—a system that didn’t need to know the conditions to provide in advance. It just maintains the status quo.

After a few more overcorrections, I get the feel for it. I increase the angle bit by bit as the ship slows down with respect to the planet. “You tell when to release probe,” Rocky says. His claw hovers over the button that will eject the spools and let the chain fall freely. We can only hope it doesn’t get tangled.

“The engines are heating up Adrian’s air a lot,” I say. “How you know, question?” “Sometimes I can see heat.” “What, question?! Why you no tell me this, question?” “It’s related to sight…there’s no time to explain it. Just trust me: We are making the atmosphere very hot.” “Danger, question?” “I don’t know.” “I no like that response.”

The weightlessness that astronauts experience while in orbit comes from constantly falling. But the curvature of the Earth makes the ground go away at the same rate you fall. So you just fall forever.

So we have…this other plan. I grab a special winch Rocky designed and attach it to my suit’s tool belt. “Be careful,” says Rocky. “You are friend now.” “Thanks,” I say. “You are friend also.” “Thank.” I cycle the airlock and look outside.

I attach a tether to the handrail at my feet. Will a zero-g tether save me if I fall? It’s not mountain-climbing gear. It wasn’t made for this. Better than nothing, I guess.

I keep my hand on the control lever and my eyes on the chain. If that sampler gets to the winch, everything will go south. The sample container will be torn apart, all the samples will die, and we’d have to make another chain. I don’t want to do that. Lord, I cannot express how much I don’t want to do that.

The horizon rises in my view. The Hail Mary isn’t maintaining her angle anymore. She’s tilting forward. That is absolutely not supposed to be happening.

And there it is. A massive hole in the port side of the ship. It must be 20 meters long and half as wide. The edges of the hole tell the tale—the hull melted.

“Oh crap! The Astrophage in the fuel bay! It’s exposed to space! That means it can see Adrian! My fuel is migrating to Adrian to breed!” “Bad bad bad!” That’s where the thrust is from. Trillions and trillions of horny little Astrophages, all ready to breed. And then, all at once, they see Adrian. Not just a source of carbon dioxide, but their ancestral homeland. The planet they evolved over billions of years to seek out.

The centrifugal force is less than the uncontrolled thrust force, but it’s still monumental. But hey, at least it pulls my arms toward the screen instead of away from it. If I can get the spin drives back online, maybe I can cancel the— My seat finally gives out.

The chair probably doesn’t weigh much in normal gravity. Maybe 20 kilograms. But with this much centripetal force, it’s like having a cement block on my back. I can’t breathe. This is it. The weight of the chair is so much I can’t inflate my lungs. I get dizzy. Mechanical suffocation, it’s called. It’s how boa constrictors kill their prey. What an odd thing to think as my last thought.

Fire. I roll around to see Rocky hovering over me. Not in his compartment. He’s in the control room! He has slashed my restraints and pulled the chair free. He shoves it to the side.

The crazy bastard must have used the large airlock in the dormitory! He came into my partition to save me. And he’ll die because of it! He shivers and folds his legs under himself. “Save…Earth…Save…Erid…” he quavers. Then he slumps down.

After a few seconds, the force reduces dramatically. Much more manageable now. Less than 1 g, actually. All thanks to the magic of centrifuge math. The force you feel in a centrifuge is inverse to the square of the radius. By spooling out the cables, I made the radius go from 20 meters (half the length of the ship) to 75 meters (distance from the control room to the center of mass with full cable extension). I don’t know how much force I was dealing with before, but now it’s one-fourteenth as much as it was.

My eyes burn like they’re on fire. My lungs feel like a hundred knives are having a dance-off. My skin is numb all along my left side. And my nose—forget it. The smell is so overpowering my sense of smell just gives up.

A bunch of oxygen just passed over very hot metal pipes no thicker than a human hair. They burned. That’s the smoke I saw coming out of Rocky’s vents. His radiator was literally on fire.

“Computer! Painkillers!” “Additional dose available in three hours and four minutes.” I frown. “Computer: What is the current time?” “Seven-fifteen p.m., Moscow Standard Time.” “Computer: Set time to eleven p.m. Moscow Standard Time.” “Clock set complete.” “Computer: painkillers.”

I’m still stupid. First the Adrian sample container, and now this. I want to sleep, but Rocky is more important. At least being stupid isn’t permanent. I’ll press on. I know I shouldn’t, but I’m too stupid to take that into consideration.

“You seal sample and can no access sample, question?” “Yes.” “Usually you not stupid. Why stupid, question?” “Humans are stupid when we need sleep. And when we take medicine to stop pain. I’m tired and drugged right now.” “You should sleep.” I stand up. “I will in a bit. But first I have to stabilize our orbit. Our apogee and perigee are…well, it’s not a good orbit.” “Adjust orbit while stupid. Good plan.” I snicker. “New word: ‘sarcasm.’ You say opposite of true meaning to make point. Sarcasm.”

I need to take it slow. I can’t risk another “stupid day” like yesterday. I almost ruined the sample and killed Rocky. I’m smart enough now to know I’m stupid. That’s progress.

“Another similarity: You and me both willing to die for our people. Why, question? Evolution hate death.” “It’s good for the species,” I say. “A self-sacrifice instinct makes the species as a whole more likely to continue.” “Not all Eridians willing to die for others.” I chuckle. “Not all humans either.” “You and me are good people,” Rocky says. “Yeah.” I smile. “I suppose we are.”

Rocky admonished me for leaving the sample at (human) room temperature for so long. He had a lot to say on that subject, actually. We had to add “reckless,” “idiot,” “foolish,” and “irresponsible” to our shared vocabulary just so he could fully express his opinion on the matter.

Three days off the painkillers and I’m a lot smarter than I was. At least he understands that much—I wasn’t just some stupid human. I was a human with enhanced stupidity.

The monster lurches toward the clump of Astrophage. It’s an amorphous blob, like an amoeba. It presses itself against its much-smaller prey and begins to envelop the entire clump of them by oozing around both sides. The Astrophage wriggle. They know something is wrong. They try to escape but it’s too late. They can only sputter a short distance before they stop.

If you take a goat and put it on Mars, what happens? It dies immediately (and horribly). Goats didn’t evolve to live on Mars. Okay, so what happens if you put a Taumoeba on a planet other than Adrian? That’s what I want to find out.

It’s a good thing these planets aren’t covered in helium or something. I don’t have any of that aboard. But carbon dioxide? That’s easy. I make that stuff with my body.

“First I have to wait for my computer to wake up.” “Hurry.” “Okay, I’ll wait faster.” “Sarcasm.”

Some small hole in a fuel line somewhere must have let Taumoeba in. It only takes one.” “Bad! Bad bad bad!” I start to hyperventilate. “We’re dead in space. We’re stuck here forever.” “Not forever,” Rocky says. I perk up. “No?” “No. Orbit decay soon. Then we die.”

“You tell me humans need to sleep eight hours every sixteen hours. You no sleep for thirty-one hours. You sleep now.” I sit on my bunk and sigh. “You make a good point. I should at least try. It’s been a hard day. Night. Whatever. A hard day’s night.” I lie back in the bunk and pull the blanket over me. “That sentence make no sense.”

There’s a teeny, tiny amount of hydrogen and helium wandering around out there in space. It’s on the order of one atom per cubic centimeter, but when you’re traveling near the speed of light, that adds up. Not only because you’re hitting a whole bunch of atoms but also because those atoms, from your inertial reference frame, weigh more than normal. Relativistic physics is weird. Long story short: I need the nose intact.

Working with Rocky is like having the world’s best engineer from 1950 on the ship with me. Seems odd that a species could invent interstellar travel before inventing the transistor, but hey, Earth invented nuclear power, television, and even did several space launches before the transistor.

“Now I do math. A whole lot of math. I have to calculate the thrust duration and angle to get us back to your ship using the beetles as engines.”

“There’s no one as qualified as you. Frankly, we’re lucky—lucky beyond our wildest dreams—that you happen to be coma-resistant. Do you think I kept you on the project for so long because I needed a junior high schoolteacher around?”

I made sure of it. You have the genes we need, so I made damn sure you had the skills we need. God knows I didn’t want it to come to this, but here we are. You’ve been the tertiary science specialist all along.”

I’m not the right guy for this job. I’m a last-second replacement because the actually qualified people blew up. But I’m here. I may not have all the answers, but I’m here. I must have volunteered, believing at the time that it was a suicide mission. Doesn’t help Earth, but it’s something.

“Do you think I don’t know you, Dr. Grace?!” she yelled. “You’re a coward and you always have been. You abandoned a promising scientific career because people didn’t like a paper you wrote. You retreated to the safety of children who worship you for being the cool teacher. You don’t have a romantic partner in your life because that would mean you might suffer heartbreak. You avoid risk like the plague.”

“Believe it or not, Dr. Grace, I kind of like you. I don’t respect you very much, but I do think you’re a fundamentally good man.”

By the time your amnesia wears off, you guys might have already sent the beetles back. And if not, my guess is you’ll be too far invested in the project to give up.”

I’m not some intrepid explorer who nobly sacrificed his life to save Earth. I’m a terrified man who had to be literally dragged kicking and screaming onto the mission. I’m a coward. All that came to me in a flash.

I didn’t know I was a coward.

“Real food is food that tastes good. Food that’s fun to eat.” “You have not-fun food, question?” “Yeah. Coma slurry. The ship fed it to me during the trip here. I have enough to last me almost four years.” “Eat that.” “It tastes bad.” “Food experience not that important.” “Hey.” I point at him. “To humans, food experience is very important.” “Humans strange.”

“I make storage tank.” “You don’t have enough xenonite for that!” “Don’t need xenonite. Any strong material will do. Have much metal aboard my ship. Melt, shape, make tank for you.” I blink a couple of times. “You can do that?” “Obvious I can do that! You are stupid right now. You sleep. I watch and also design replacement tank. Agree, question?” He starts down the tube toward the dormitory. “Huh…” “Agree, question?!” he says, louder. “Yeah…” I mumble. “Yeah, okay…”

“Eridians need water, too, you know.” “We keep inside. Closed system. Some inefficiencies inside, but we get all water we need from food. Humans leak! Gross.”

“On Earth, we have a scary, deadly creature called a spider. You look like one of those. Just so you know.” “Good. Proud. I am scary space monster. You are leaky space blob.” He points to the breeder tanks. “Check tanks!”

“Erid will live! Earth will live! Everyone live!” He curls the claws of one hand into a ball and presses it against the xenonite. “Fist me!” I push my knuckles against the xenonite. “It’s ‘fist-bump,’ but yeah.”