Return to Save Rocky

Ryland Grace had made his choice. After weeks of daily observation, the Blip-A's engine flare had vanished from the Petrovascope. The Taumoeba-82.5 strain, which he had bred for nitrogen resistance, had evolved an unintended side effect: it could worm its way through xenonite. Rocky's ship, with its xenonite fuel tanks and bulkheads, was now a derelict, its Astrophage consumed. Grace knew that if he continued toward Earth, he would return a hero, but Rocky and the entire Eridian species would die. The alternative was to turn the Hail Mary around, find the Blip-A, and take Rocky home to Erid — a journey that would consume all his remaining food, leaving him to starve to death shortly after arrival. He made his decision and stuck with it.

The Search for the Blip-A

Finding a derelict ship somewhere on the edge of the Tau Ceti system was a task of staggering difficulty. Grace knew Rocky's course and that he had followed it, but he did not know the exact moment the engines had died. The margin of error on his best guess for the Blip-A's position was twenty million kilometers — one-eighth the distance between Earth and the Sun. He had only checked on Rocky once a day, and the uncertainty was enormous. He wished he had tracked him more often. Space was so vast that even this error margin was, he admitted, lucky; if the Taumoeba had escaped a month later, the search would have been exponentially worse. He was smack-dab in the center of his guesstimate, and he had to find a way to cover that volume. His built-in radar was useless beyond a few thousand kilometers, so he improvised a vastly more powerful system: he used the Hail Mary's own spin drives as a flashlight and the Petrovascope as its detector. By firing the engines in a tight turn, he could throw 900 terawatts of infrared light into space and watch for any reflection. He worked up a search grid, doing donuts in the parking lot of interstellar space, then panning the Petrovascope across the sky. After many sweeps at different angles, he finally saw a flash. He calculated the distance at fourteen light-seconds — about four million kilometers — and set a course. Nine and a half hours later, he arrived at the location, but his radar still showed nothing. He was too far away. He refined his approach using the attitude-adjustment thrusters, which were small enough to leave the Petrovascope active, and after several more sweeps, he spotted the contact again. He crept closer, taking repeated readings, until the object appeared on his radar screen as "BLIP-A." He confirmed it was on an escape trajectory from Tau Ceti — no natural asteroid could be — and closed to within fifty meters.

The Rescue

Grace matched velocities with the Blip-A and tried every method of communication: radio, flashes of spin-drive light. Nothing. A terrible thought struck him: Rocky might be dead, killed by radiation sickness after the Astrophage that had protected him was consumed, or his life-support might have failed while he slept. But Grace refused to give up. He suited up for an EVA, tethered himself to the Hail Mary, and kicked off toward the dark mass of the Blip-A. He hit the hull harder than intended, bounced, and began to drift away. Desperately, he threw a slipknot in his tether at a jagged antenna and caught it. He pulled himself to the hull, grabbed a robot rail, and then took the biggest wrench from his tool belt. He smacked the hull, over and over, and pressed his helmet against the metal. "Rocky!" he yelled. "I'm here, buddy! I'm on your hull!" A crackle came over the radio. Then a voice: "Grace, question?" It was Rocky. He was alive. Grace told him to set up the airlock tunnel. Rocky warned him about the Taumoeba, but Grace already knew. He had come because he knew Rocky would be in trouble. He still had fuel. He was taking Rocky to Erid.

The Cost of Friendship

When they were reunited through the tunnel, Grace explained the full situation. He had sent the beetles to Earth with the Taumoeba mini-farms, so humanity would be saved. But he himself would not go home. He did not have enough food. After taking Rocky to Erid, he would have only a few months of supplies left, and Eridian food was toxic to humans, full of heavy metals. He would die. Rocky was devastated. "You no can die," he said. "You are friend." He insisted that Erid would do everything to save him, but Grace knew there was nothing they could do. Then Rocky had an idea: Taumoeba. It was alive, had DNA and mitochondria, stored energy as glucose, and came from Adrian's atmosphere, which had no heavy metals. It was not 96 degrees like Astrophage. Could Grace eat it? Grace paused. He had never considered it. It might work. Rocky pointed out that he had twenty-two million kilograms of Taumoeba in his fuel bays. Grace felt genuine hope for the first time in a long time. Rocky pressed his claw against the divider. "Fist my bump." Grace laughed and put his knuckles to the xenonite. "Fist-bump. It's just 'fist-bump.'"