Project Hail Mary

by Andy Weir

“Thank! This is special clothing for celebration.” I hold up a liter of vodka. “This is special liquid for celebration.” “Humans…eat to celebrate?”

“I’ll experience four years, yes. Three years and nine months. Because time won’t be as compressed for me as it is for you.” “You have explained before, but again…why, question?” “Your ship accelerates faster than mine. You’ll be moving closer to the speed of light.”

I point toward his ship. “All the information about relativity is in the laptop. Have your scientists take a look.” “Yes. They will be very pleased.” “Not when they find out about quantum physics. Then they’ll be really annoyed.” “Not understand.” I laugh. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Yes. There’ll be wars. Fought for the same reason most wars in ancient times were fought for: food. They’d use religion or glory or whatever as an excuse, but it was always about food. Farmlands and people to work that land.

“War, famine, pestilence, and death. Astrophage is literally the apocalypse. The Hail Mary is all we have now. I’ll make any sacrifice to give it even the tiniest additional chance of success.”

I’m starting to get a bad feeling. A suspicion, really. What if Taumoeba can, for lack of a better description, work their way around the molecules of xenonite? What if there’s no hole at all?

In the end, I have four rough circles, each a couple of inches across. Yes, inches. When I’m stressed out, I revert to imperial units. It’s hard to be an American, okay?

Taumoeba-82.5 can work its way through xenonite, but natural Taumoeba can’t. “I’m so stupid!” I smack myself on the head.

Sure, it has nitrogen resistance. But evolution has a sneaky way of working on a problem from every angle. So not only did they gain resistance to nitrogen, they figured out how to hide from nitrogen by sneaking into the xenonite itself! Why wouldn’t they? Xenonite is a complicated chain of proteins and chemicals I have no hope of understanding. But I guess Taumoeba has a way to worm its way in.

It can’t get through epoxy resin. It can’t get through glass. It can’t get through metal. I’m not even sure if it could get through a ziplock bag. But thanks to me, Taumoeba-82.5 can get through xenonite. I took a life-form I knew nothing about and used technology I didn’t understand to modify it. Of course there were unintended consequences. It was stupidly arrogant of me to assume I could predict everything.

It doesn’t need xenonite to survive. I tested it thoroughly in my glass lab equipment back when we first isolated the strain. It’ll still do its thing on Venus and Threeworld. Everything’s fine.

All critical bulkheads of his ship, including the fuel tanks, are made of xenonite. There’s nothing standing between his Taumoeba and his fuel. “Oh…God…”

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.

“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 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.

“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.”

“Who here can tell me the speed of light?”