Chapter no 18

Project Hail Mary

‌The crew of the Hail Mary sat on the couch in the break room, each with their drink of choice.‌

Commander Yáo had a German beer, Engineer Ilyukhina had a distressingly large tumbler of vodka, and Science Specialist DuBois had a glass of 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon that he had poured ten minutes in advance to ensure it had time to breathe.

The break room itself had been a struggle to arrange. Stratt didn’t like anything that wasn’t directly related to the mission, and an aircraft carrier wasn’t exactly overﬂowing with extra space. Still, with more than a hundred scientists from all over the world demanding a place to relax, she had relented. A small room in the corner of the hangar deck was built to house the “extravagance.”

Dozens of people crowded into the room and watched the TV feed on the wall-mounted monitor. By silent agreement, the crew got to sit on the couch. The crew got all possible perks and privileges. They were sacriﬁcing their lives for humanity. The least we could do was give them the best seats.

“And we’re just minutes away from lift-oﬀ,” said the BBC reporter. We could have watched American news, Chinese news, Russian news, it would have all been the same. The long shot of Baikonur Cosmodrome interspersed with shots of the huge launch vehicle on the pad.

The reporter stood in the observation room overlooking Moscow’s Mission Control Center. “Today’s launch is the ninth in a total of sixteen total launches for Project Hail Mary, but it is arguably the most important one. This payload contains the cockpit, lab, and dormitory modules. Astronauts on ISS are ready to receive the modules and will spend the next two weeks

positioning them on the Hail Mary’s frame, which was built over the last several expeditions…”

Ilyukhina raised her vodka. “Do not fuck up my house, Roscosmos bastards!”

“Aren’t they your friends?” I asked.

“They can be both!” She bellowed with laughter.

The countdown came on-screen. Less than a minute to go.

Yáo leaned forward and peered intently. It must have been hard—a military man of action forced to passively watch something so important play out.

DuBois saw Yáo’s expression. “I’m certain the launch will go well, Commander Yáo.”

“Mm,” said Yáo.

“Thirty seconds to launch,” said Ilyukhina. “I cannot wait that long.” She downed her vodka and immediately poured herself another glass.

The assembled scientists pressed forward a bit as the countdown continued. I found myself pinned against the back of the couch. But I was too focused on the screen to care.

DuBois craned his neck to look back at me. “Will Ms. Stratt not be joining us?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “She doesn’t care about fun stuﬀ like launches.

She’s probably going over spreadsheets in her oﬃce or something.”

He nodded. “Then it’s fortunate that we have you here. To represent her, in a way.”

“Me? Represent her? How did you get that idea?”

Ilyukhina spun her head to face me. “You are number two, no? You are ﬁrst oﬃcer of Project Hail Mary?”

“What? No! I’m just one of the scientists. Like all these guys.” I gestured to the men and women behind me.

Ilyukhina and DuBois looked at each other and then back to me. “You honestly think this?” she said.

Bob Redell spoke up behind me. “You’re not like the rest of us, Grace.” I shrugged at him. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“The point is,” DuBois said, “you are, somehow, special to Ms. Stratt. I had assumed you two were engaged in sexual congress.”

My mouth fell agape. “Wha—what?! Are you out of your mind?! No! No way!”

“Huh,” said Ilyukhina. “Perhaps you should be? She is uptight. She could use good roll in hay.”

“Oh my God. Is that what people think?” I turned to face the scientists. Most of them averted their eyes. “Nothing like that is going on! And I’m not her number two! I’m just a scientist—drafted into this project like the rest of you!”

Yáo turned around and stared at me for a moment. The room fell silent.

He didn’t speak much, so when he did, people paid attention.

“You are the number two,” he said. Then he turned back to the screen.

The BBC announcer counted the last few seconds along with the on-screen timer. “Three…two…one…and we have lift-oﬀ!”

Flames and smoke surrounded the rocket on-screen, and it rose skyward.

Slow at ﬁrst, then picking up more and more speed.

Ilyukhina held her glass up for a few seconds and ﬁnally burst into cheers. “Tower is clear! Launch is good!” She gulped her vodka.

“It’s only a hundred feet oﬀ the ground,” I said. “Maybe wait till it reaches orbit?”

DuBois sipped his wine. “Astronauts celebrate when the tower is clear.” Without a word, Yáo took a sip of his beer.

—

“Why. Doesn’t. This. Work?!” I hit my forehead with both palms at each word.

I ﬂop into the lab chair, deﬂated.

Rocky watches from his tunnel above. “No predator, question?” “No predator.” I sigh.

The experiment is simple enough. It’s a glass bulb full of Adrian’s air. The air didn’t actually come from Adrian, but the proportions of gases are based

on the spectrograph of its atmosphere. The pressure is very low—one-tenth atmosphere, like the upper atmosphere of Adrian must be.

Also inside the bulb is our collected Adrian life-forms and some fresh Astrophage. I hoped that providing a bunch of nice, juicy Astrophage would make the predator population spike and I could isolate it from the sample once it was the dominant cell type present.

Didn’t work.

“You are certain, question?”

I check my makeshift heat-energy indicator. It’s just a thermocouple with part of it sticking in ice water and part of it attached to the bulb. Heat energy is provided by Astrophage and consumed by the ice. The resulting temperature of the thermocouple tells me how much total heat energy the Astrophage is giving oﬀ. If the temperature goes down, it means the Astrophage population went down. But that’s not happening.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I say. “No change in Astrophage population.”

“Maybe temperature of bulb no good. Too hot. Adrian upper atmosphere is probably much colder than you room temperature.”

I shake my head. “Adrian air temperature shouldn’t matter. The predator has to be able to handle Astrophage temperature.”

“Ah. Yes. You are right.”

“Maybe the predator theory is wrong,” I say.

He clicks across the tunnel to the far side of the lab. He paces when he thinks. Interesting that humans and Eridians would both have that behavior. “Predators is only explanation. Maybe predators no live in Petrova line. Maybe predators live further down in atmosphere.”

I perk up. “Maybe.”

I look over to the lab monitor. I have it showing the external camera view of Adrian. Not for any scientiﬁc reason—just because it looks cool. Right this moment we’re about to cross the terminator into the day side of the planet. The light of orbital dawn glows along an arc.

“Okay, let’s say the predator lives in the atmosphere. What altitude?” “What altitude is best, question? If you predator, where you go, question?

You go to Astrophage.”

“Okay, so what altitude are the Astrophage at?” The question answers itself. “Ah! There’s a breeding altitude. Where air has enough carbon dioxide for Astrophage to breed.”

“Yes!” He clatters back up his tunnel and stands above me. “We can ﬁnd.

Easy. Use Petrovascope.”

I slam my ﬁst into my palm. “Yes! Of course!”

Astrophage have to breed somewhere. Some partial pressure of carbon dioxide will be key. But we don’t have to work that out or take any guesses. When an Astrophage divides, it and its oﬀspring head back to Tau Ceti. And they use IR-light emission to make it happen. That means there will be a glow of Petrova-frequency light coming from all over the planet at that speciﬁc altitude.

“To the control room!” I say.

“Control room!” He scampers across the lab ceiling tunnel and disappears through his personal control-room entrance. I follow along beside but I’m not quite as fast.

I climb up the ladder, take the pilot’s seat, and ﬂip on the Petrovascope. Rocky has already taken up position in his bulb and points his camera at my main screen.

The entire screen glows red. “What is this, question? No data.”

“Wait,” I say. I bring up the controls and options and start moving sliders.

“We’re inside the Petrova line. There’s Astrophage all around us. Let me just change the setting to only show the brightest sources….”

It takes a lot of manipulation, but I ﬁnally manage to get the brightness range set. What I’m left with are irregular blotchy areas of IR light coming from Adrian.

“I think this is our answer,” I say.

Rocky gets closer to his textured screen to “see” what I’m looking at. “Not what I expected,” I say.

I thought it would just be a general layer of IR glow at a given altitude. But it’s nothing like that. The clumps are basically clouds. And they don’t match

up with the wispy white clouds I can see with visible light. These are, for lack of a better term, IR clouds.

Or, more accurately, clouds of Astrophage that are emitting IR. For whatever reason, Astrophage breed much more in some areas than others.

“Unusual distribution,” says Rocky, echoing my own thoughts. “Yes. Maybe the weather aﬀects breeding?”

“Maybe. Can you calculate altitude, question?” “Yes. Wait.”

I zoom and pan the Petrovascope until I’m looking at an Astrophage cloud right on the horizon of Adrian. The readouts show the camera’s current angle with respect to the axes of the ship. I jot those angles down and switch to the navigation console. It tells me the angle of the ship relative to the center of our orbit. With that information, and a whole bunch of trigonometry, I can work out the altitude of the Astrophage clouds.

“The breeding altitude is 91.2 kilometers from the surface. The width is less than 200 meters.”

Rocky folds one of his claws over the other. I know that body language.

He’s thinking. “If predators exist, predators are there.” “Agreed,” I say. “But how do we get a sample?” “How close can orbit get, question?”

“One hundred kilometers from the planet. Any closer and the ship will burn up in the atmosphere.”

“This is unfortunate,” Rocky says. “Eight point eight kilometers away from breeding zone. No can get closer, question?”

“If we hit the atmosphere at orbital speed, we die. But what if we slow down?”

“Slow down means orbit no good. Fall into air. Die.”

I lean over the armrest to look at him. “We can use the engines to keep from falling into the atmosphere. Just thrust constantly away from the planet. Lower ourselves into the atmosphere, get a sample, and then leave.”

“No work. We die.” “Why no work?”

“Engines give oﬀ enormous IR light. If you use in air, air become ions.

Explosion. Destroy ship.”

I wince. “Right, of course.”

Back when Dimitri ﬁrst tested a spin drive, it was only on for 100 microseconds and it melted a metric ton of metallic silicon behind it. And that test drive was one-thousandth the power of the Hail Mary’s engines. Everything works ﬁne when I’m in a vacuum. But using the engines in air would create a ﬁreball that makes a nuclear bomb look like a ﬁrecracker.

We sit in frustrated silence for a while. The salvation of both our worlds might be just 10 kilometers below us, and we can’t get to it. There has to be a way. But how? We don’t even need to be there. We just need to get a sample of the air there. Anything, no matter how small.

Wait a minute.

“How do you make xenonite again? You mix two liquids?”

Rocky is caught oﬀ guard by the question, but he answers. “Yes. Have liquid and liquid. Mix. They become xenonite.”

“How much can you make? How much of those liquids did you bring?” “I bring much. I use to make my zone.”

I bring up a spreadsheet and start typing in numbers. “We need 0.4 cubic

meters of xenonite. Can you make that much?”

“Yes,” he says. “Have enough liquids remain to make 0.61 cubic meters.” “Okay. Then I have…an idea.” I steeple my ﬁngers.

—

It’s a simple idea, but also stupid. Thing is, when stupid ideas work, they become genius ideas. We’ll see which way this one falls.

The Astrophage breeding grounds are 10 kilometers into the atmosphere of Adrian. I can’t ﬂy the Hail Mary that low because the air is too thick and I’d burn up. I can’t use the engines in the atmosphere because then all heck breaks loose and everything blows up.

So, it’s time to go ﬁshing. We’re going to make a 10-kilometer-long chain, put a sampling device of some kind on the end (Rocky will make that), and

drag it through the atmosphere. Easy enough, right?

Wrong.

The Hail Mary has to maintain a velocity of 12.6 kilometers per second to stay in orbit. Any slower and we’ll decay and burn up. But if we drag a chain through the air at that velocity—even a xenonite chain—it’ll get torn up and vaporized.

So we have to go slower. But going slower means falling toward the planet. Unless I use the engines to constantly maintain altitude. But if I do that, I’d be thrusting directly away from the chain and sample device. The exhaust from the engines will vaporize all of it.

So we’ll thrust at an angle. Simple as that.

It’ll look absolutely ridiculous. The Hail Mary will be tilted to 30 degrees from vertical, thrusting upward at that angle. Below it, the chain will dangle 10 kilometers into the air straight down. The atmosphere behind the thrusters will be in a constant state of ionized ﬁre. It should be quite a show. But it’ll be behind us and the chain will be passing through unaﬀected air.

All told, our lateral velocity will be just over 100 meters per second. The chain can handle that speed in the thin high-altitude air, no problem. I calculated that it’ll only deﬂect about 2 degrees from vertical.

Once we feel like we have a sample, we skedaddle. What could possibly go wrong!

I say that ironically.

I’m not the greatest 3-D modeler, but I’m able to make a chain link in CAD reasonably well. It’s not a normal oval link, though. It’s mostly oval, but with a thin opening for another link to enter. Easy to assemble the links, but extremely unlikely for them to rattle apart. Especially when they’re under tension.

I grab a block of aluminum and mount it in the mill.

“This will work, question?” Rocky asks from his ceiling tunnel. “It should,” I say.

I ﬁre up the mill and it gets right to work. It drills out the mold for a chain link exactly the way I’d hoped.

I pull the workpiece out, dust oﬀ the aluminum shavings, and hold it up to the tunnel. “How’s this?”

“Very good!” Rocky says. “We will need many many many chain links. More molds means I can make more at one time. You can make many molds, question?”

“Well.” I look in the supply cabinet. “I have limited amounts of aluminum.”

“You have many items in ship you no use. Two beds in dormitory, for instance. Melt them, make blocks, make more molds.”

“Wow. You don’t do anything by half-measure, do you?” “No understand.”

“I’m not going to melt a bunch of stuﬀ. How would I even do that?”

“Astrophage. Melt anything.”

“You got me there,” I say. “But no. The heat would be too much for my life-support system to handle. That reminds me. Why do you have so much extra Astrophage?”

He pauses. “Strange story.”

I perk up. Always up for a strange story. He clicks along his tunnel and sits in a slightly wider section. “Science Eridians do much math. Calculate trip. More fuel mean faster trip. So we make much much much Astrophage.”

“How’d you make so much? Earth had a very diﬃcult time making it.” “Was easy. Put in metal balls with carbon dioxide. Put in ocean. Wait.

Astrophage double, double, double. Much Astrophage.”

“Riiight. Because your oceans are hotter than Astrophage.” “Yes. Earth oceans are not. Sad.”

When it comes to Astrophage manufacturing, Erid was born on third base.

The whole planet is a pressure cooker. Twenty-nine atmospheres at 210 degrees Celsius means water is liquid on the surface. And their oceans are far, far hotter than the Astrophage critical temperature. They just put Astrophage in the water, let it absorb heat, and breed.

I’m jealous. We had to pave the Sahara Desert to breed up our Astrophage. All they had to do was throw it in the water. The stored heat energy of Erid’s oceans is ridiculous. A whole bunch of water—multiples of

Earth’s total oceans—holding a temperature around 200 degrees Celsius or more. That’s a lot of energy.

And that’s why they can take a century or so to solve the problem while Earth is going to freeze in a few decades. It’s not just their air storing heat. Their oceans store even more. Born on third base. Again.

“Science Eridians design ship and fuel requirements. Journey to take 6.64 years.”

That trips me up for a moment. 40 Eridani is ten light-years away from Tau Ceti, so you can’t get from one to the other in less than ten years from Erid’s point of view. He must mean 6.64 years of time experienced by his ship thanks to time dilation.

“Strange things happen on trip. Crew sick. Die.” His voice lowers. “Now I know was radiation.”

I look down and give him a moment.

“Everyone sick. I alone to run ship. More strange things happen. Engines not work right. I am engine expert. I cannot ﬁgure out problem.”

“Your engines failed?”

“No. Not fail. Thrust normal. But speed…not increase. No can explain.” “Huh.”

He clatters back and forth as he talks. “Then more strange: Reach halfway point earlier than should. Much earlier. I turn ship around. Thrust to slow down. But Tau get farther away. How? Still moving toward Tau but Tau moving away. Much confusion.”

“Uh-oh,” I say. A thought creeps into my head. A very disturbing thought. “I speed up. Slow down. Much confuse. But get here. Even with all mistakes

and confusion, I get here in three years. Half of time science Eridian say

should be. So much confuse.” “Oh…oh my…” I mumble.

“Much much much fuel remain. Much more than should have. No complain. But confuse.”

“Yeah…” I say. “Tell me this: Is time on Erid the same as time on your ship?”

He cocks his carapace. “Question make no sense. Of course time is same.

Time is same everywhere.”

I put my head in my hands. “Oh boy.” Eridians don’t know about relativistic physics.

They calculated their entire journey with Newtonian physics. They worked it all out by assuming they could just accelerate faster and faster and the speed of light wasn’t an issue.

They don’t know about time dilation. Rocky doesn’t realize that Erid experienced a whole bunch more time than he did on that trip. They don’t know about length dilation. The distance to Tau Ceti will actually increase as you slow down relative to it—even if you’re still going toward it.

An entire planet of intelligent people put together a ship based on incorrect scientiﬁc assumptions, and by some miracle, the sole survivor of the crew was clever enough at trial-and-error problem solving to actually get it to its destination.

And out of that major screw-up comes my salvation. They thought they’d need a whole lot more fuel. So Rocky has boatloads to spare.

“Okay, Rocky,” I say. “Get comfortable. I have a lot of science to explain.”

—

He knocked twice and leaned into my oﬃce. “Dr. Grace? Are you Dr. Grace?”

It wasn’t a large oﬃce, but you’re lucky to have any personal space at all on an aircraft carrier. Before it held the high honor of being my oﬃce, the room was a storage locker for bathroom supplies. The crew had three thousand butts that needed daily wiping. I got to keep the room as my oﬃce until the next time we were in port. Then they’d ﬁll it up with more supplies.

I was approximately as critical as toilet paper.

I looked up from my laptop. The short, somewhat disheveled man at the door waved awkwardly.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m Grace. You are…?”

“Hatch. Steve Hatch. University of British Columbia. Nice to meet ya.”

I gestured to the folding chair in front of the folding table I used as a desk.

He shuﬄed in, carrying a bulbous metal object. I’d never seen anything like it. He plunked it on my table.

I looked at the object. It was like someone had ﬂattened a medicine ball, added a triangle to one end, and a trapezoid to the other.

He sat in the chair and stretched his arms. “Man, that was weird. I’ve never been on a helicopter before. Have you? Well, of course you have. How else would you get here? I mean, I guess you could have used a boat, but probably not. I hear they keep the carrier far away from land in case there’s a disaster during Astrophage experiments. A boat would have been nicer, honestly, that helicopter ride almost made me puke. But I’m not complaining. I’m just happy to be involved.”

“Um”—I gestured to the object on my desk—“what is this thing?”

He somehow became even more energetic. “Ah, right! That’s a beetle! Well, a prototype for one, anyway. My team and I think we have most of the kinks worked out. Well, you never have all the kinks worked out, but we’re ready for actual engine tests. And the university said we had to do those here on the carrier. Also the provincial government of British Columbia said it. Oh, and the national government of Canada said it too. I’m Canadian, by the way. But don’t worry! I’m not one of those anti-American Canadians. I think you guys are all right.”

“Beetle?”

“Yeah!” He picked it up and turned the trapezoid toward me. “This is how the Hail Mary crew will send us back the information. It’s a little self- contained spacecraft that will automatically navigate itself back to Earth from Tau Ceti. Well, from anywhere, really. That’s what me and my team have been working on for the past year.”

I peek into the trapezoid and see a shiny glasslike surface. “Is that a spin drive?” I asked.

“Sure is! Man, those Russians know their stuﬀ. We just used their designs and everything came out great. At least, I think it did. We haven’t tested the spin drive yet. The tricky part is navigation and steering.”

He turned the device around and faced the triangular head toward me. “This is where the cameras and computer are. No fancy-schmancy inertial-

navigation nonsense. It uses ordinary visible light to see the stars. It identiﬁes constellations and works out its orientation from that.” He tapped the center of the bulbous carapace. “There’s a little DC generator in here. As long as we have Astrophage, we have power.”

“What can it carry?” I ask.

“Data. It’s got a redundant RAID array with more memory storage than anyone would ever need.” He knocked on the dome. It echoed slightly. “The bulk of this puppy is fuel storage. It’ll need about 125 kilos of Astrophage to make the trip. Seems like a lot but…man…twelve light-years!”

I lifted the device and hefted it in my hands a couple of times. “How does it turn?”

“Reaction wheels inside,” he said. “It spins them one way, the ship turns the other. Easy-peasy.”

“Interstellar navigation is ‘easy-peasy’?” I smiled.

He snickered. “Well, for what we have to do, yeah. It has a receiver that’s constantly listening for a signal from Earth. Once it hears that signal, it’ll broadcast its location and await instructions from the Deep Space Network. We don’t have to be super accurate with the navigation. We just need it to show up within radio range of Earth. Anywhere within the orbit of Saturn or so will do just ﬁne.”

I nod. “And then scientists can tell it exactly how to get back. Clever.”

He shrugged. “They’ll probably do that, yeah. But they don’t need to. They’ll have it radio over all the data ﬁrst thing. The information gets across. Then they can collect it later if they want. Oh, and we’re making four of these. All we need is for one of them to survive the trip.”

I turned the beetle this way and that. It was surprisingly light. A few pounds at most. “Okay, so there are four of these. How likely is each one to survive the trip? Is there at least a little system redundancy aboard?”

He shrugged. “Not that much, no. But it doesn’t have to travel for nearly as long as the Hail Mary does. So stuﬀ doesn’t have to survive as long.”

“It’s going the same route, right?” I asked. “Why doesn’t it take the same time?”

“Because the Hail Mary’s acceleration is limited by the soft, squishy humans inside. The beetle doesn’t have that problem. Everything aboard is

military-grade cruise-missile electronics and parts that can handle hundreds of g’s of force. So it gets to relativistic speed much faster.”

“Oh, interesting…” I wondered if this would make a good question for my students. I dismissed the idea immediately. It was absurdly complicated math no eighth grader would be able to handle.

“Yeah,” Hatch said. “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. Do you believe in God? I know it’s a personal question. I do. And I think He was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing, don’t you? The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe, you know?”

He fell silent and stared at me.

“Well,” I said. “This is really impressive. Good work.” “Thanks!” he said. “So can I have some Astrophage to test it?” “Sure,” I said. “How much you want?”

“How about a hundred milligrams?”

I drew back. “Easy there, cowboy. That’s a lot of energy.”

“All right, all right. Can’t blame a guy for trying. How about one milligram?”

“Yeah, I can swing that.”

He clapped. “Hell yeah! Astrophage comin’ my way!” He leaned forward to me. “Isn’t it amazing? Astrophage, I mean? It’s like…the coolest thing ever! Again, God’s just handing us the future!”

“Cool?” I said. “It’s an extinction-level event. If anything, God’s handing us the apocalypse.”

He shrugged. “I mean, maybe a little. But man. Perfect energy storage! Imagine a battery-powered household. Like—you have a double-A battery, but full of Astrophage. That’d last your house about a hundred thousand years. Imagine buying a car and never having to charge it up? The entire concept of power grids is going to end. And it’ll all be clean, renewable energy once we start breeding the stuﬀ on the moon or something. All it needs is sunlight!”

“Clean? Renewable?” I said. “Are you suggesting Astrophage will be… good for the environment? Because it won’t be. Even if Hail Mary ﬁnds a solution, we’re looking at a mass extinction. Twenty years from now, a whole bunch of species on Earth will be extinct. And we’re working hard to make sure humans aren’t one of them.”

He waved oﬀ my comment. “Earth’s had ﬁve mass extinction events in the past. And humans are clever. We’ll pull through.”

“We’ll starve!” I said. “Billions of people are going to starve.”

“Naaaah,” he said. “We’re already stockpiling food. We’ve got a bunch of methane in the air to hold in the solar energy. It’ll be all right. As long as Hail Mary succeeds.”

I just stared at him for a moment. “You are, without a doubt, the most optimistic person I’ve ever met.”

He gave me a double thumbs-up. “Thanks!”

He picked up the beetle and turned to leave. “Come on, Pete, let’s get you some Astrophage!”

“Pete?” I asked.

He looked over his shoulder. “Sure. I’m naming them after the Beatles.

The British rock group.” “I take it you’re a fan?”

He turned back to face me. “Fan? Oh, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate, but Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the greatest musical accomplishment in the history of mankind. I know, I know. Many would disagree. But they’re wrong.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But why Pete? Aren’t the Beatles named John, Paul, George, and Ringo?”

“Sure. And that’s what we’ll call the ones aboard the Hail Mary. But this fella is for testing in low Earth orbit. I get a whole SpaceX launch just for me! Isn’t that amazing! Anyway, I named him after Pete Best—he was the drummer for the Beatles before Ringo.”

“Okay, I didn’t know that,” I said.

“Now you do. I’m gonna get that Astrophage now. I’ve got to make sure these beetles will be able to…‘Get Back.’ ”

“Okay.”

He frowned. “ ‘Get Back.’ It’s a song. It’s by the Beatles.” “Sure. Okay.”

He spun on his heel and left. “Some people got no appreciation for the classics.”

I was left confused in his wake. Pretty sure I wasn’t the ﬁrst.