Recruitment by Eva Stratt

Eva Stratt, the Dutch administrator granted near-absolute authority by a secret unanimous vote of every UN member nation, personally recruits Ryland Grace, a junior high school science teacher in San Francisco, to lead the investigation of the Astrophage samples returned by the ArcLight probe, leveraging his controversial expertise in non-water-based life and overriding his protests with her absolute authority.

Identity and Background

Eva Stratt is a Dutch woman in her mid-forties, a former administrator at the European Space Agency (ESA), who now heads the Petrova Taskforce, an international body created to deal with the Petrova-line situation. She describes herself as having been given "a certain amount of authority" by every member nation of the UN through a unanimous secret vote, a power she later clarifies as "all of the authority." She carries a briefcase and wears a well-tailored business suit, and her slight European accent is one Grace cannot immediately place. She is the sole figure at the defense table in the Intellectual Property Alliance v. Project Hail Mary lawsuit, where she dismisses the case by producing an international treaty granting her personal immunity from prosecution and a preemptive pardon from the U.S. president.

Recruitment and Confrontation

Stratt appears unannounced in Grace's classroom after the final bell, having tracked him down through his published scientific paper, "An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models." She opens a binder and reads the title aloud, then quotes his section called "The Goldilocks Zone Is for Idiots," in which he berated dozens of eminent scientists for believing a temperature range is a requirement for life. When Grace protests that his paper-writing days are over and that academia did not work well for him, she reveals her knowledge of his past: the assholes who got him kicked out of his university, had all his funding cut off, and ensured he never got published again. She tells him she believes his theory that life does not require liquid water, and that the field of speculative extraterrestrial biology—only about five hundred people worldwide—agrees he could have led it if he had not suddenly left. When Grace walks out, calling her lying, insane, or a combination of the two, she responds to his back: "This is not optional." He discovers this is literal when four FBI agents surround him at his apartment complex, hustle him into a black SUV, and deliver him to a generic business-park building where Stratt has set up a fully stocked biology lab. She tells him, "This is your new lab," and when he asks about her accent, she replies, "I'm Dutch. I was an administrator at ESA. But that doesn't matter. Now I'm in charge of this. There is no time for slow, international committees. The sun is dying. We need a solution. It's my job to find it."

The Mission and Its Stakes

Stratt explains that the ArcLight probe has returned samples from Venus that are probably a life-form, and that the exponential progression of solar dimming is consistent with the exponential population growth of a typical life-form. She tells Grace, "You are aware of the ArcLight probe and the Petrova line, I assume," and when he asks who will examine the samples, she replies, "You. You're going to do it." She reveals that she has already arranged for the Soyuz capsule to land in Saskatchewan instead of Russia, with the Royal Canadian Air Force recovering the sample and delivering it directly to San Francisco via fighter jet, and that the Russians, Canadians, and Americans all do whatever she tells them without question. When Grace asks if she is joshing him, she walks out without another word, leaving him in the lab. Her authority extends to ordering a nuclear strike on Antarctica to release methane for greenhouse warming, and she tells Grace that once the Hail Mary launches, her authority ends and she will probably be put on trial by a bunch of pissed-off governments for abuse of power, possibly spending the rest of her life in jail. She accepts this as her sacrifice: "If I have to be the world's whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that's my sacrifice to make."