Ah, the c-word. “Culture.” We have an unspoken agreement that cultural things just have to be accepted. It ends any minor dispute. “Do it my way because it’s how I was raised,” basically. We haven’t run into anything where our cultures clash… yet.

I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. Rocky doesn’t say anything to me during that time. He never does. Eridian courtesy.

“Trash,” I say.

The arms collect my empty cup and meal package.

I head up to the control room and settle into the pilot’s seat. I bring up the telescope view on the main screen. Planet Adrian sits in the center. I’ve been watching it grow larger and larger for the past ten days. The closer we get, the more I respect Rocky’s astronomy skills. All of his observations on its motion and mass have been spot-on.

Hopefully his gravity calculation is right too. Or we’ll have a very short and painful attempt to orbit.

Adrian is a pale-green planet with wispy white clouds in the upper atmosphere. I can’t see the ground at all. Again, I’m amazed at the software that must have gone into this ship’s computers. We are spinning around as we hurtle through space. But the image on-screen is rock solid.

“We’re getting close,” I say. Rocky is two floors below me, but I speak at a normal volume. I know he can hear it just fine.

“You know air yet, question?” Rocky calls out. Just as I know his hearing prowess, he knows my hearing limitations.

“I’ll try again right now,” I say.

I switch to the Spectrometer screen. The Hail Mary has been incredibly reliable in almost every way, but you can’t expect everything to work perfectly. The spectrometer has been acting up. I think it has something to do with the digitizer. I’ve been trying it every day, and it keeps saying it can’t get enough data to analyze.

I zero in on Adrian and give it another go. The closer we get, the more reflected light we’ll get, and maybe it’ll be enough for the spectrometer to tell me what Adrian’s atmosphere is made of.

ANALYZING…

ANALYZING…

ANALYZING…

ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

“It worked!” I say.

“Worked, question?!” Rocky says, a full octave higher than normal. He scampers up his tunnels to the control-room bulb. “What is Adrian air, question?”

I read the results off the screen. “Looks like it’s… 91 percent carbon dioxide, 7 percent methane, 1 percent argon, and the rest are trace gases. It’s a pretty thick atmosphere too. Those are all clear gases, but I can’t see the planet’s surface.”

“Normally you can see surface of planet from space, question?”

“If the atmosphere lets light through, yes.”

“Human eyes are amazing organ. Jealous.”