Chapter no 10

Project Hail Mary

‌They knocked, so it’s only polite for me to knock back. I know that wall is going to be hot, so I rap my knuckles on it as fast as I can.‌

I knock three times, just like they did.

There’s no immediate response. I take a good long look at the hex wall. There are forty hexes, I’d say, and each one seems to be unique. Diﬀerent materials, maybe? I feel like I’m supposed to do something here, but what?

Are they watching me? I don’t see anything that looks like a camera.

I hold up my ﬁnger and point back to my airlock. I don’t know if they can see me or if they have any idea what that hand gesture means. I kick oﬀ the hex wall and back to the airlock, and then I open the inner door. Why not? The pressure is the same on both sides. It’s okay to leave the airlock open. If there’s a pressure loss in that tunnel, the air leaving the ship will slam the inner airlock door shut and I’ll get to stay alive.

I go to the lab and pack a bag with a few choice items, then return to the tunnel.

First I tape LED lamps to various spots along the tunnel and aim them at the hex wall. Now I can see what I’m doing, at least. I pull out my trusty handheld x-ray spectrometer and scan one of the hexes. It’s xenonite. Almost the same composition as the cylinders they sent me earlier.

Almost.

There are a few diﬀerences in the trace elements. Interesting. Maybe xenonite is like steel—lots of diﬀerent recipes? I check the next hex over. Another slightly unique combination.

Best guess: Diﬀerent types of xenonite are optimal for diﬀerent situations. They had no idea what my air was like. So they want to test various

compounds against it. When I leave the tunnel, they’ll inspect the hexes to decide which one fares best.

That means I should leave the tunnel. Should I depressurize my side for them? Seems polite. I could easily do it—I’d just tell the airlock to cycle. It would think, “Golly, there sure is a lot of air in me today!” but would just keep pumping until there was a vacuum.

But then again, maybe they have a way of sampling the air on this side. If so, I should leave it here, right?

I decide to leave it be. They probably have a sampling technique. If I were making this tunnel, that’s what I’d do, and they seem pretty bright.

I turn back toward the airlock, but something catches my eye. Movement!

I shoot my attention back to the hex wall. Nothing’s changed. But I could swear I saw something move. Some of the hexes are shiny—I probably caught a glimpse of my reﬂection.

Wait…

One hex stands out. Why?

It’s near the tunnel wall. Not very obvious. I ﬂoat over to take a closer look.

“Holy cow!” I say.

This hex is clear! All the others are opaque, but this one is like glass! I pull one of the lamps oﬀ the wall and hold it up to the hex. I press my head against the hot wall to get a closer look.

Light gets through into the other side. I can see the tunnel walls beyond. Either their side is a vacuum or their air is clear. Either way, there’s nothing blocking or dulling my view.

Suddenly, a rock hits the other side of the hex. It stays there. It’s just a few inches away from me. It’s roughly triangular, kind of a dark brown, and has rough, jagged edges. Like you might see on the tip of a spear from a caveman.

Have I met spacefaring cavemen? Stop being stupid, Ryland.

Why did they put a rock there? And is it sticky? Are they trying to block

my view? If so, they’re doing a terrible job. The little triangle is only a couple

of inches wide at the thickest point and the hex is a good 8 inches across.

And it gets sillier. Now the rock is bending at articulated joints, and there are two similar rocks that do the same thing, and there’s a longer rock attached to them that—

That’s not a rock. It’s a claw! It’s a claw with three ﬁngers!

I’m desperate to see more! I press my face against the hex. It burns, but I resist the urge to pull away. There’s pain, yes, and it’s probably going to leave a mark. I should go back to the lab and ﬁnd a camera, but come on. No one would have that presence of mind at a time like this.

I groan as my face aches, but I’m rewarded with a better view.

The alien’s claw—er…I’ll call it a hand. That’s less scary. The alien’s hand has three triangular ﬁngers, each one with articulation points. Knuckles, I guess. They can close up into a raindrop shape or widen out to a sort of three- legged starﬁsh.

The skin is weird. It looks like brownish-black rock. It’s irregular and bumpy, like someone carved the hand out of granite and hasn’t gotten around to smoothing it out yet. Natural armor, maybe? Like a turtle shell but less organized?

There’s an arm too. I can barely see it from this angle, no matter how hard I stupidly press my face into the Hot Wall of Pain. But there’s deﬁnitely an arm leading away from the hand. I mean, there’d have to be, right? Not just a magic ﬂoating hand.

I can’t take the pain anymore. I pull my head away. I feel my face. It’s pretty raw, but there aren’t any blisters.

Tap-tap-tap.

The alien is tapping the clear hex with a ﬁnger. So I ﬂick it with my ﬁnger three times.

It taps the hex again, three times. So I tap again as well.

Then comes something creepy. The cla—hand—retreats and returns with an object and holds it against the clear hexagon. Whatever it is, it’s small. I let myself drift closer to the wall for a better look. The heat warms my face.

The object is xenonite, of course. It’s about a half-inch high and ﬁnely detailed. It looks like a doll. But it has an oversized head and really thick

arms and legs— “Oh!”

It’s me. It’s a teeny, tiny Russian Orlan-MKS2 EVA suit. That’s all they’ve seen of me so far.

Another hand shows up. Hey, I have two hands, so I shouldn’t be surprised that they do too. The second hand holds a model of the Hail Mary. It looks to be at the same scale as the ﬁgurine of me. The hands then push the little me into the little Hail Mary’s airlock.

Pretty clear. It’s saying, Go back into your ship.

I give a thumbs-up. The alien releases Mini-Me and the Hail Mary model to ﬂoat away. Then it contorts a hand into something resembling a thumbs-up. It’s just two ﬁngers curled into a ball with the third pointed up. At least it’s not the middle one that’s pointed up.

I return to the Hail Mary and close the airlock door behind me.

I pant and wheeze with excitement. I can’t believe that just happened.

That’s an alien. I just saw an alien. Not just an alien ship. An alien being. I mean—just his claw—er…hand. But yeah.

Well, I say “his hand,” but maybe it’s her hand. Or some other pronoun I don’t have a word for. They might have seventeen biological sexes, for all I know. Or none. No one ever talks about the really hard parts of ﬁrst contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I’m going to go with “he” for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being “it.”

Also, until I hear otherwise, his name is Rocky.

—

Okay, now what? Rocky told me to go back into my ship. So I did.

I feel kind of stupid. There’s a whole bunch of science I should be doing, right?

I peek through the airlock porthole. My lamps are still taped to the walls in the tunnel and I can see there have been some…changes.

The hex wall is gone. Just plain gone. I can see all the way to the Blip-A’s hull. And there’s a hull robot attached to it reaching out and doing stuﬀ with

its little robot hands.

And yeah, its hands look like Rocky’s hands, broadly speaking. Three ﬁngers. About the same size as Rocky’s hands. Probably controlled with a Nintendo Power Glove kind of thing inside the ship.

Man, I’m old.

The robot takes a particular interest in my lamps. Heck, I’d take an interest too. Those are alien artifacts with alien technology. Sure, they’re just lights, but they’re alien lights to my Eridian friends over there. Probably the most exciting scientiﬁc ﬁnd of their history. The robot arm puts them in a little cubby on the Blip-A hull and a latch closes. I bet those are going to be the most heavily studied lamps in the history of lamps.

I’m glad they got to have that moment of discovery and all, but they took my light source away. I can hear the occasional clunk but it’s pitch-dark in there.

That’s interesting in and of itself. I’m not an alien from 40 Eridani, but if I were working with a remote-controlled robot, I’d have a camera on it somewhere and a light source to see what I was doing. But they don’t need that. They don’t need light.

Well, hold on. Their visible spectrum might be completely diﬀerent from ours. Humans only see a tiny fraction of all the wavelengths of light out there. We evolved to see the wavelengths that are most plentiful on Earth. Maybe Eridians evolved to see diﬀerent wavelengths. The room could be well illuminated with infrared or ultraviolet light and I wouldn’t see a thing.

Hmm. A robot. Why a robot? They had a living being there a few minutes ago—my boy Rocky. Why replace him with a robot?

Vacuum.

They probably took all the air out of the tunnel. They have a sample of my hull—they know it’s made of aluminum and roughly how thick it is. Maybe they aren’t sure if my ship can handle outside pressure. Or maybe their atmosphere reacts badly with aluminum.

So they keep the tunnel a vacuum, which means they have to do work with a robot.

I feel like Sherlock Holmes. All I saw was “nothing,” and I drew a bunch of conclusions! Conclusions that are wildly speculative and with nothing to

prove them, but conclusions!

I could get another lamp—the lab has a few more. I could shine it in there to see what Robo-Rocky is doing. But I’ll know soon enough. And I don’t want to be in some other part of the ship if something interesting happens.

Just as I’m thinking that, something interesting happens. Knock-knock-knock.

No, that’s not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from

home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.

Okay, now I need another lamp. I pinball down to the lab to grab another one, then back up to the control room. I cycle the airlock without bothering to put on the EVA suit. I turn the manual vent valves on both doors of the airlock to repressurize the tunnel. It works just like I expect. There’s still a good seal out there.

I open the outer door and ﬂoat in, lamp in hand.

The hex wall is gone—it’s been replaced by a solid wall of clear material.

And on the other side of that wall is Rocky.

He’s a spider. A big-assed spider.

I turn to ﬂee. But my rational brain takes over.

“Easy…easy…they’re friendly,” I say to myself. I turn back and take in the scene.

Rocky is smaller than a human. He’s about the size of a Labrador. He has ﬁve legs radiating out from a central carapace-looking thing. The carapace, which is roughly a pentagon, is 18 inches across and half as thick. I don’t see eyes or a face anywhere.

Each leg has a joint in the middle—I’ll call it an elbow. Each leg (or should I say arm?) ends in a hand. So he’s got ﬁve hands. Each hand has those triangular ﬁngers I got a good look at last time. Looks like all ﬁve hands are the same. I don’t see any “front” or “back” to him. He appears to be pentagonally symmetrical.

He wears clothing. The legs are bare, showing the rocklike skin, but there’s cloth on the carapace. Sort of like a shirt with ﬁve armholes. I don’t know what the shirt is made of but it looks thicker than typical human clothing. It’s a dull greenish-brown, and inconsistently shaded.

The top of the shirt has a large open hole. Like where the neck goes on a human’s T-shirt. That hole is smaller than the carapace. So he must have to put that shirt on by pulling it downward and sliding the arms through their respective holes. Again, like a human’s shirt.

But there’s no neck or head to go through that hole on top. Just a hard- looking rocky pentagon that sticks up a little bit from the crusty skin.

On his side of the tunnel, he has handles and latticework on the walls. He casually hangs on to a couple of bars with two of his hands. I guess when you have ﬁve hands, zero g isn’t that big a deal. Just allocate a hand or two for keeping in one place and use the other three to do stuﬀ.

For me, the tunnel is kind of small. But for him it’s absolutely spacious.

He waves to me with a free arm. He knows one human greeting and by golly he plans to use it.

I wave back. He waves again. I shake my head. No more waving.

He pivots his “shoulders” to rotate his carapace back and forth. He “shook his head” inasmuch as he could. I wonder how we’re going to break out of this game of “Eridian See Eridian Do,” but he takes care of that for me.

He taps the clear wall three times with a ﬁnger, then keeps the ﬁnger extended. Is he…pointing?

I follow the line and wow, there’s stuﬀ in the tunnel with me! They left me a present!

I can be forgiven for not noticing. Seeing an alien kind of distracted me from the small collection of objects on the tunnel wall.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s see what you left me.” “♩♫♪♪♫,” says Rocky.

My jaw drops. Yes, I’m in zero g. It still drops.

There was no pronunciation or inﬂection of the sounds. Just notes. Like whale song. Except not quite like whale song, because there were several at once. Whale chords, I guess. And he was responding to me. That means he can hear too.

And notably, the sounds were in my range of hearing. Some of the notes were low, some of them high. But deﬁnitely audible. That alone is amazing

when I think about it. He’s from a diﬀerent planet, and totally diﬀerent evolutionary line, but we ended up with compatible sound ranges.

On top of all that, he decided my noises warranted a response.

“You have a language!” I say. “How do you have a language?! You don’t have a mouth!”

“♫♫♩,” Rocky explains.

Thinking rationally, you can’t make spaceships without a civilization and you can’t have civilization without being able to communicate. So of course they have language. It’s interesting that communication is done with sound, like humans do. Coincidence? Maybe not. Maybe that’s just the easiest way to evolve that trait.

“♪.” Rocky points to the objects they left me.

“Right, right,” I say. The whole language thing is way more interesting to me, and I’d rather explore that. But for now, Rocky wants to know what I think of his presents.

I ﬂoat over to the objects. They’re attached to the wall with my own tape.

The objects are a pair of spheres. Each one has a raised image embossed on it. One has the Hail Mary and the other has the Blip-A.

I pull the Hail Mary ball oﬀ the tape. It’s not warm. In fact, the tunnel isn’t warm anymore. Interesting. Maybe they noticed I like things cooler and they did something to make it more comfortable for me.

There’s a rattle from inside the ball. I shake it and listen. More rattling.

I ﬁnd a seam. I rotate the top and bottom of the ball against each other and sure enough, they rotate. Left-handed screw, of course.

I look to Rocky for approval. He has no face and thus no facial expressions. He just ﬂoats there, watching me. Well, not watching…no eyes. Actually, wait. How does he know what I’m doing? He clearly knows—he waved and stuﬀ. He must have eyes somewhere. I probably just don’t recognize them.

I turn my attention back to the sphere. I pull the two halves apart and inside is…a bunch more little spheres.

I sigh. This raises more questions than it answers.

The little beads ﬂoat out and drift across my ﬁeld of view. They’re not individual items. They’re connected to one another by little strings. Like a complicated necklace. I spread it out as best I can.

They look like—for lack of a better term—beaded handcuﬀs. Two circles of threaded beads connected to each other by a little bridge of thread. Each circle has eight beads on it. The connecting thread has none. This seems very deliberate. But I have no idea what it means.

Maybe the other ball—the one with the Blip-A picture on it—will shed more light. I let the handcuﬀs ﬂoat and pull the Blip-A ball oﬀ the wall. I shake it and hear lots of rattling from inside. I unscrew the two halves and another set of beads comes out.

Unlike the handcuﬀs, there’s only one ring in this construction. And it has seven beads, not eight. Also, it has three connector strings sticking out of the circle and leading to a single bead each. Kind of like a necklace with some ornamentation hanging oﬀ of it.

There’s more stuﬀ inside. I shake the model and another necklace ﬂoats out. I take a look and it’s identical to the one I just inspected. I keep shaking and more and more necklaces come out. Each one the same. I collect them all and stuﬀ them in my pockets.

“This reminds me of something…” I thump my forehead. “What does this remind me of…?”

Rocky taps his carapace with a claw. I know he’s just mimicking my movements but it feels like he’s saying, Think, dummy!

What would I tell my students at a time like this?

Why did I suddenly think of my students? I got an image of my classroom.

A ﬂash of memory. I’m holding a model of a molecule and explaining— “Molecules!” I grab the handcuﬀs and hold them out to Rocky. “These are

molecules! You’re trying to tell me something about chemistry!”

“♫♪♫♫♪.”

But wait. These are some weird molecules. They make no sense. I look at the handcuﬀs. Nothing forms a molecule like this. Eight atoms on one side, eight on the other, and connected by…what? Nothing? The connector string isn’t even coming oﬀ a bead. It’s just teeing oﬀ strings from the two circles.

“Atoms!” I say. “The beads are protons. So the circles of beads are atoms.

And the little connectors are chemical bonds!”

“Okay, if that’s the case…” I hold up the handcuﬀs and count everything again. “Then this is two atoms, each with eight protons, connected to each other. Element number eight is oxygen. Two oxygens. O2! And it was in the

Hail Mary ball.”

I hold it toward Rocky. “You clever fellow, this is my atmosphere!”

I grab the other set of beads. “So your atmosphere is…seven protons connected to three individual atoms with one proton each. A nitrogen attached to three hydrogens. Ammonia! Of course it’s ammonia! You breathe ammonia!”

That explains the pervasive smell on all of the little presents they left me.

Residual traces of their air.

My smile fades. “Yikes. You breathe ammonia?”

I count all the little ammonia necklaces they gave me. I only got one O2 molecule, but he gave me twenty-nine ammonias.

I think about it for a moment.

“Oh,” I say. “I get it. I see what you’re saying.”

I look to my alien counterpart. “You have twenty-nine times as much atmosphere as I do.”

Wow. Two things come immediately to mind: First, Eridians live in immense pressure. Like—similar to being a thousand feet deep in the ocean back on Earth. Secondly, xenonite is some amazing stuﬀ. I don’t know how thick that wall is—half an inch, maybe? Less? But it’s holding back a relative pressure of 28 atmospheres. All while being a big, un-reinforced ﬂat panel (the absolute worst way to make a pressure vessel). Heck, their whole ship is made of big ﬂat panels. The tensile strength of that stuﬀ must be oﬀ the charts. No wonder I couldn’t bend or break the things they sent earlier.

We don’t have remotely compatible environments. I’d die in seconds if I were on his side of the tunnel. And my guess is he wouldn’t do well in one twenty-ninth his normal atmospheric pressure and with no ammonia at all.

Okay, not a problem. We have sound and we can pantomime. That’s a good start for communication.

I take a moment to let this all sink in. This is amazing stuﬀ. I have an alien buddy here, and we’re chatting! I can barely contain myself! The problem is

—I haven’t contained myself. Fatigue washes over me so hard I can barely concentrate. It’s been two days since I slept. There’s just always been something monumental going on. I can’t just stay up forever. I need to sleep.

I hold up a ﬁnger. The “hang on a sec” motion. Hopefully he remembers it from last time. He holds up a ﬁnger on one of his hands to match.

I rush back into the ship and careen down to the lab. There’s an analog clock on the wall. Because every lab needs an analog clock. It takes some doing, but I pull it oﬀ the wall and put it under my arm. I also grab a dry- erase marker from the workstation.

Back I go, through the control room and into the Tunnel of Aliens. Rocky is still there. He seems to perk up when I return. How could I know that? I don’t know. He just kind of repositioned himself and seems more attentive.

I show him the clock. I spin the time-set dial in the back. I just want him to see how the hands move around. He makes a circular motion with a hand. He gets it!

I set the clock to 12:00. Then I use the dry-erase marker to draw a long line from the center toward the twelve and a short line from the center to the two. I’d rather sleep a solid eight hours, but I don’t want to keep Rocky waiting too long. I’ll settle for a two-hour nap. “I’ll come back when the clock matches this,” I say. As if that would help him understand.

“♩♪♫.” He makes a gesture. He reaches forward with two of his hands and grabs…nothing. And then he pulls the nothing toward him.

“What?”

He taps the wall and points to the clock, then repeats the gesture. Does he want the clock to be closer to the wall?

I push the clock closer. This seems to excite him. He makes the gesture more rapidly. I move it further forward. The clock is almost touching the wall now. He does the gesture one more time, but this time a little slower.

At this point, I have no idea what he wants. So I just push the clock up against the wall. It’s touching now. He raises his hands and kind of shakes them. Alien jazz hands. Is that a good thing?

Okay, I hope he understands I’ll be back in two hours. I turn to leave but immediately hear tap-tap-tap.

“Whaaat?” I say.

“♪♪♫♪,” he says, pointing to the clock. It drifted a little bit away from the wall. He doesn’t like that.

“Um, okay,” I say. I pull a loop of tape oﬀ the wall, unloop it, and rip it in half. I use the two halves to tape the left and right sides of the clock to the clear wall.

Rocky gives me the jazz hands signal again. I think it means “yes” or “I approve of this.” Like nodding.

I turn to leave again, but tap-tap-tap!

I spin around once more. “Dude, I just want a darn nap!”

He holds up a ﬁnger. Using my own sign language against me. Now I have to wait! I guess that’s fair. I hold up my ﬁnger to acknowledge it.

He opens a circular door leading into his ship. It’s the right size for an Eridian—I would have a hard time squeezing through if that ever became a plan. He disappears inside, leaving the door open. I’d love to know what’s beyond the door, but I can’t see anything. It’s pitch-black in there.

Hmm. Interesting. It is completely dark in his ship. That door probably leads to an airlock. But even an airlock would have some lights in it, wouldn’t it?

Rocky didn’t have any problem getting around. But I know he can see—he responds to my gestures. This lends strength to my earlier theory about Eridian vision: I think they see a diﬀerent part of the spectrum than humans do. Maybe they see entirely in infrared or entirely in ultraviolet. That airlock might be perfectly lit up as far as Rocky’s concerned and I can’t see a thing. Conversely, my lights are completely useless to him.

I wonder if we have any wavelengths in common. Maybe red (the color with the lowest wavelength that humans can see) is “ ♪ ♫ ♩ ,” the highest wavelength they can see. Or something. Might be worth looking into. I should bring a rainbow of lights in and ﬁnd out if he can—oh, he’s back.

Rocky bounces into the tunnel and spider-walks along the rails to the dividing wall. He’s incredibly graceful at it. Either he’s very seasoned at being in zero g or Eridians are just really good at climbing around. They have ﬁve

hands with opposable ﬁngers, and he’s an interstellar traveler, so it’s probably a little bit of both.

With one of his hands, he holds a device up for me to see. It’s…I don’t know what it is.

It’s a cylinder (man, these people like cylinders), a foot long and maybe 6 inches wide. I can see that his grip deforms the casing a little bit. It’s made of a soft material, like foam rubber. The cylinder has ﬁve horizontally aligned square windows. Inside each window is a shape. I think they might be letters. But they’re not just ink on paper. They’re on a ﬂat surface, but the symbols themselves are raised an eighth of an inch or so.

“Huh,” I say.

The symbol on the right rotates away to be replaced by a new symbol.

After a couple of seconds it happens again. Then again.

“It’s a clock!” I say. “I showed you a clock, so you showed me a clock!”

I point to my clock, still taped to the wall, and then to his. He does the jazz hands with two of the hands he’s not using at the moment. I do jazz hands back.

I watch the Eridian clock for a while. Rocky just holds it in place for me to see. The symbols—numbers, probably—cycle through on the rightmost window. They’re on a rotor. Like an old-school digital clock back home. After a while, the rotor one step to the left of it changes one position. Aha!

As far as I can tell, the right rotor changes once every two seconds. A little more than two seconds, I think. It cycles through six unique symbols before repeating: “ℓ,” “I,” “V,” “λ,” “+,” and “V,” in that order. Whenever it reaches “ ℓ ,” the next rotor to the left advances one step. Eventually, after about a minute of this, that second-from-the-right rotor works its way through all the symbols, and when it reaches “ℓ,” the third rotor from the right advances.

Looks like they read information from left to right—same as English. Neat coincidence. Though not incredibly unlikely. I mean, there’s really only four options: left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. So there was a 1 in 4 chance we’d be the same.

So his clock is intuitive for me to read. And it works like an odometer. “ℓ” is clearly their 0. From that, I know that “I” is 1, “V” is 2, “λ” is 3, “+” is 4,

and “V” is 5. What about 6 through 9? They don’t exist. After “V” we go back to “ℓ.” Eridians use base six.

Of all the things I teach my students, numerical bases are the hardest to make them truly understand. There’s nothing special about the number 10. We have ten unique digits because we have ten ﬁngers. Simple as that. Rockies have three ﬁngers per hand and I guess they only like to use two hands when counting (they probably keep the other three feet/hands on the ground to stay steady). So they have six ﬁngers to work with.

“I like you, Rocky! You’re a genius!”

And he is! With this simple act, Rocky showed me:

How Eridian numbers work (base six)

How Eridian numbers are written (ℓ, I, V, λ,+, V)

How Eridians read information (left to right)

How long an Eridian second is

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 the third rotor 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—