Maybe Tau Ceti just doesn’t have any planets with carbon dioxide in their atmospheres. That would suck. It would mean this whole trip was for nothing and Earth is doomed.

I could speculate all day. Without data, it’s just pure guesswork. And without the Petrovascope, I don’t have data. At least, not the data I want.

I turn my attention to the Navigation screen. Should I mess with it? I mean—I don’t know how to fly this ship. The ship does, but I don’t. If I push the wrong button, I’ll be dead in space.

Actually, it would be worse than that. I’d be hurtling toward Tau Ceti at—I check the info on-screen—7,595 kilometers per second. Wow! A couple days ago, that was over 11,000. That’s what constantly accelerating at 1.5 g’s will do for you. Or “decelerating,” I guess. From a physics standpoint it’s all the same. Point is, I’m slowing down with respect to the star.

There’s a button on-screen that just says “Course.” That seems reasonable to tap, right? Famous last words. Really I should just wait until the computer feels like the trip is done. But I can’t help myself.

I tap the button. The screen changes to show the Tau Ceti solar system. Tau Ceti itself sits at the center, denoted with the Greek letter tau.

Ohhhh… that’s what the lowercase t is on the Hail Mary crest. It’s a tau, for “Tau Ceti.” Okay.

Anyway, four planetary orbits are shown as thin white ellipses around the star. The locations of the planets themselves are shown as circles with error bars. We don’t have super-accurate information on exoplanets. If I could figure out how to get the science instruments working, I could probably get much better info on those planet locations. I’m twelve light-years closer to them than astronomers on Earth.

A yellow line runs almost directly into the system from off-screen. It bends toward the star somewhere between the third and fourth planets and into a circle. There’s a yellow triangle on the line, way far away from the four planets. Pretty sure that’s me. And the yellow line is my course. Above the map is the text:

TIME TO ENGINE CUTOFF: 0005:20:39:06

The final digit decrements once per second. Okay, I learned a couple of things here. First off, I have about five days left (closer to six) before the engine cuts off. Second off, the readout has four digits for days. That means this journey took at least one thousand days. Over three years. Well, it takes light twelve years to make this trip, so it should take me a long time too.

Oh, right. Relativity.

I have no idea how much time it took. Or, rather, I have no idea how much time I experienced. When you get going near the speed of light, you experience time dilation. More time will have gone by on Earth than I have experienced since I left Earth.

Relativity is weird.

Time is of the essence here. And unfortunately, while I slept, Earth experienced at least thirteen years. And even if I find a solution to the Astrophage problem right now, it would take at least thirteen years for that information to get back to Earth. So that means there’ll be an absolute minimum of twenty-six years of Astrophage misery on Earth. I can only hope they are coming up with ways to deal with it. Or at least ameliorate the damage. I mean, they wouldn’t have sent the Hail Mary out at all if they didn’t think they could survive at least twenty-six years, right?