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I head up to the control room and settle into the pilot’s seat. I bring up the telescope view on the main screen. Planet Adrian sits in the center. I’ve been watching it grow larger and larger for the past ten days. The closer we get, the more I respect Rocky’s astronomy skills. All of his observations on its motion and mass have been spot-on.
Hopefully his gravity calculation is right too. Or we’ll have a very short and painful attempt to orbit.
Adrian is a pale-green planet with wispy white clouds in the upper atmosphere. I can’t see the ground at all. Again, I’m amazed at the software that must have gone into this ship’s computers. We are spinning around as we hurtle through space. But the image on-screen is rock solid.
“We’re getting close,” I say. Rocky is two floors below me, but I speak at a normal volume. I know he can hear it just fine.
“You know air yet, question?”Rocky calls out. Just as I know his hearing prowess, he knows my hearing limitations.
“I’ll try again right now,” I say.
I switch to the Spectrometer screen. TheHail Maryhas been incredibly reliable in almost every way, but you can’t expect everything to work perfectly. The spectrometer has been acting up. I think it has something to do with the digitizer. I’ve been trying it every day, and it keeps saying it can’t get enough data to analyze.
I zero in on Adrian and give it another go. The closer we get, the more reflected light we’ll get, and maybe it’ll be enough for the spectrometer to tell me what Adrian’s atmosphere is made of.
ANALYZING…
ANALYZING…
ANALYZING…
ANALYSIS COMPLETE.
“It worked!” I say.
“Worked, question?!”Rocky says, a full octave higher than normal. He scampers up his tunnels to the control-room bulb.“What is Adrian air, question?”
I read the results off the screen. “Looks like it’s…91 percent carbon dioxide, 7 percent methane, 1 percent argon, and the rest are trace gases. It’s a pretty thick atmosphere too. Those are all clear gases, but I can’t see the planet’s surface.”
“Normally you can see surface of planet from space, question?”
“If the atmosphere lets light through, yes.”
“Human eyes are amazing organ. Jealous.”
“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?”
