“Well, not amazing enough. I can’t see Adrian’s surface. When air gets really thick, it stops letting light through. Anyway, that’s not important. The methane—that’s weird.”

“Explain.”

“Methane doesn’t last. It breaks apart very fast in sunlight. So how is methane present?”

“Geology creates methane. Carbon dioxide plus minerals plus water plus heat makes methane.”

“Yes. Possible,” I say. “But there’s a lot of methane. Eight percent of a very thick atmosphere. Can geology make that much?”

“You have different theory, question?”

I rub the back of my neck. “No. Not really. It is odd, though.”

“Discrepancy is science. You think about discrepancy. Make theory. You is science human.”

“Yes. I’ll think about it.”

“How long until orbit, question?”

I switch to the Navigation console. We’re right on course, and the orbital-insertion burn is scheduled for twenty-two hours from now. “Just under one day,” I say.

“Excitement,” he says. “Then we sample Astrophage at Adrian. You ship sampler working well, question?”

“Yes,” I say, with no way to know if I’m telling the truth. There’s no reason for Rocky to know I only vaguely understand the operation of my own ship.

I flip through the science instruments until I land on the controls for the External Collection Unit. I look at the diagram on the screen. It’s simple enough. The sampler is a rectangular box. When activated, it will pivot up to be perpendicular to the hull. Then, doors on both sides of the rectangle will open up. Inside, there’s a bunch of sticky resin—ready to catch anything that flies in.

That’s it. Flypaper. Fancy space flypaper, but just flypaper.

“After collection, how sample enter ship, question?”

Simple doesn’t mean convenient. As far as I can tell, there’s no automated system to do anything with the sample. “I have to go get it.”

“Humans are amaze. You leave ship.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Eridians never bothered to invent spacesuits. Why would they? Space is devoid of sensory input to them. It would be like a human with scuba gear diving into an ocean of black paint. There’s just no reason to do it. Eridians use hull robots for EVA work. The Hail Mary doesn’t have one of those, so any EVA work has to be done by me.

“Amaze is wrong word,” he says. “Amaze is compliment. Better word is ♫♪♫♪.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It is when person not act normal. Danger to self.”

“Ah,” I say, adding the new chord into my language database. “Crazy. My word for that is ‘crazy.’”

“Crazy. Humans are crazy.”

I shrug.

“Gosh darn it!” I said.

“Language!” came the voice over the radio. “Seriously, though, what happened?”