“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.

Chapter 19

Rocky was dumbfounded by relativity. For the first couple of hours, he simply refused to believe me. But then, as I showed more and more about how it explained his trip, he came around. He doesn’t like it, but he accepts that the universe uses rules that are much more complicated than we can see.

And since then, we’ve spent an eternity making chain.

I made molds as fast as I could and Rocky cranked out links as fast as xenonite would set. It was a good system—one with a geometric progression of results. Every new mold I made added one to the number of links Rocky could make per batch.

Chain, chain, chain.

If I never see another chain again in my life, it will be too soon. Ten kilometers of chain—each link just 5 centimeters long. That’s two hundred thousand links. Each one connected by hand or claw. It worked out to each of us working eight hours per day for two weeks doing nothing but connecting links.

I saw chain whenever I closed my eyes. I dreamed of chain every night. One of my dinner packets was spaghetti and all I could see were smooth, white chains instead of noodles.

But we got it done.

Once we had all the links made, we assembled them in parallel. We both made ten-meter lengths that we linked into twenties, and so on. At least we could be efficient that way. The tricky part was putting it all somewhere. Ten kilometers is a lot of chain.

The lab ended up being sort of a holding area. And even then, it just wasn’t big enough. Rocky—ever the talented engineer—made large spools that could just barely fit through the airlock. With a whole bunch of EVAs, I mounted them to the hull. Then I stored the chain on them in 500-meter chunks. But of course, to do EVAs I had to spin down the centrifuge. So everything from that point on was in zero g.

Ever assemble chain in zero g? It’s not fun.