“Taumoeba-35!” Rocky says. “Took many many generations but finally success!”

It’s a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There’s no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.

We linked the ships back up together weeks ago. Rocky was pretty stoked to have access to his much larger ship again. First thing he did was set up a tunnel directly from his portion of the Hail Mary to the Blip-A. It meant another hole in my hull, but at this point I trust Rocky to do any engineering task. Heck, if he wanted to do open-heart surgery on me, I’d probably let him. The guy is amazing at this stuff.

With the ships linked, I can’t have the Hail Mary’s centrifuge going, which means we’re back to zero g. But now that we’re just breeding Taumoeba in tanks, I can live without my gravity-dependent lab equipment for now.

Over the weeks, we watched generation after generation of Taumoeba become more and more nitrogen-resistant. And now, today, we finally have Taumoeba-35: a strain of Taumoeba that can survive 3.5 percent nitrogen in a 0.02 atmosphere overall air pressure—the same situation found on Venus.

“You. Be happy now,” Rocky says from his workbench.

“I am, I am,” I say. “But we need to get to 8 percent so it can survive on Threeworld. Until then, we’re not done.”

“Yes yes yes. But this is moment. Important moment.”

“Yeah.” I smile.

He fiddles with some kind of new gadget. He’s always working on one thing or another. “Now you make exact Venus atmosphere in one tank and do detailed tests on Taumoeba-35, question?”

“No,” I say. “We’ll keep going until we get to Taumoeba-80. It should work on Venus and Threeworld. I’ll test everything then.”

“Understand.”

I turn to face his side of the room. The whole “watching me sleep” thing doesn’t creep me out anymore. If anything, it’s comforting. “What are you working on?”

The device is clamped to his workbench to keep it from drifting away. He works on it from many angles with many hands holding many tools. “This is Earth electricity unit.”

“You’re making a power converter?”

“Yes. Convert from Eridian prime-sequence electric amplitude to inefficient Earth direct-current system.”

“Prime sequence?”

“Would take long time to explain.”

I make a mental note to ask about it later. “Okay. What will you use that for?”

He puts down two tools and picks up three more. “If all plans work, we make good Taumoeba. I give you fuel. You go Earth and I go Erid. We say goodbye.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I mumble. I should be happier about surviving a suicide mission, returning home a hero, and saving my entire species. But saying goodbye to Rocky forever will be hard. I put it out of my mind.

“You have many portable thinking machines. I ask favor: You give one to me as gift, question?”

“A laptop? You want a laptop? Sure, I have a bunch of them.”