I stare at the screen with the stopwatch ticking away in my hand. Soon, I see the blip again. Twenty-eight seconds. The spot of light remains for ten seconds, then disappears.

I can’t guarantee it’s the Blip-A. But whatever it is, it’s definitely a reflection of my spin drives. And it’s fourteen light-seconds away (fourteen seconds to get there, fourteen seconds to get back equals twenty-eight seconds). That works out to about 4 million kilometers.

No point in trying to work out the object’s velocity by taking multiple readings. I don’t have that kind of precision with my “finger on the screen” approach. But I have a heading.

I can cover 4 million kilometers in nine and a half hours.

I fist-pump. “Yes! I’m definitely going to die!”

I don’t know why I said that. I guess… well, if I wasn’t able to find Rocky, I’d set course for Earth. I’m surprised I put this much effort into it, actually.

Whatever. I set course for where I saw the blip and fire up the engines. I don’t even need to account for relativity on this one. Just high-school physics. I’ll accelerate half the way, then decelerate the other half.

I spend the next nine hours cleaning up. I’m going to have a guest again!

I hope.

Rocky will have to plug up all the holes he made in the xenonite walls. But that shouldn’t be a problem.

That assumes the contact I got was the Blip-A and not just a random piece of debris in space.

I try not to think about it. Keep hope alive and all that.

I move all my junk out of the xenonite areas.

Once I’m done with that, I fidget a lot. I want to stop and do another sweep to confirm my heading, but I resist the urge. Just wait it out.

I stare at the aluminum Taumoeba farm in my lab. And the slide of Astrophage next to it in the Taumoeba alarm. Everything is going just fine. Maybe I could—

The timer beeps. I’m at the location!

I scramble up the ladder to the control room and shut off the spin drives. I have the Radar screen up before I even get in the chair. I do a full active ping and full power. “Come on… come on….”

Nothing.

I settle into the seat and strap in. I thought something like this might happen. I’m a lot closer to the contact now, but still not in radar range. I just traveled 4 million kilometers. Radar range is less than a thousandth of that. So my precision isn’t 99.9 percent. Big surprise.

Time for another Petrovascope sweep. But this time I don’t have the luxury of a full light-minute between me and the contact, wherever it is. If I’m, say, 100,000 kilometers away, I’ll have less than a second before the light comes back to me. And I can’t use the Petrovascope with the spin drives on.

So now what?

I need to create a bunch of Astrophage light without turning off the Petrovascope. I look through the menu options and don’t find anything. There’s no way to have the scope on when the spin drives are running. It must be a physical interlock somewhere. Somewhere aboard this ship is a wire leading from the spin-drive controls to the Petrovascope. I could spend the rest of my life looking for that and have no success.