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Dr. Ryland Grace is an asshole. At least, that’s what I thought at first. They’d invited— of all people— Ryland Grace to this conference. It made me want to turn around and walk right back out the door. We’re trying to save the world. We don’t have time for the flaming steamroller that is Ryland Grace— the man who derailed the 2017 UNESCO conference in Denmark; the man who wrote that outrageous paper, then acted shocked when the science community balked. It felt as if they’d brought one of those psychotic conspiracy theory kooks from the History channel into the room and asked us to trust him, to believe that his expertise would help save the world. Hadn’t he done us all a favor and left academia in a fit when his unhinged science-fiction ideas were rejected by the wider scientific community?
Ryland Grace is actually reasonable. That was the first chip to fall. It fell in that initial meeting. He was cocky. That hadn’t changed. His brash ‘You got a problem with that?’ set my teeth on edge. I wanted him out of the room. I wanted to talk to Stratt by myself— hell, we were only speaking English because he was there. Fluent as I am, my native Norwegian is always more comfortable, and I'd be willing to bet Stratt herself feels more comfortable speaking in our childhood tongue. Yet here we are, catering to Ryland Waste-of-Carbon Grace. My shoulders were squared. My voice was tense. I was halfway through my arguments when Stratt turned to him.
“Grace? Your thoughts?” I stared him down across the table, breathing in to keep myself from truly snapping, and--
“I… I think it’s a good idea.” You could have knocked me over with a feather. For a moment, I was staring as Ryland Grace and Eva Stratt continued the discussion. I recovered myself enough to jump back in as the complexity of the two halves of the ship design was discussed. But from then on, I started to extend the tiniest, most cautious tendril of trust.
Maybe… just maybe he’s evolved. Maybe there’s a halfway decent scientist, an occasionally sensible man behind the abrasive and childish firebrand presented to me all those years ago at UNESCO.
Ryland Grace is resourceful— clever well beyond what I’d expected from the man who blew up a conference with unbecoming insults. In fact, it was he who learned how to breed astrophage. I learned that a few weeks into the job. His name is on every tongue. His reputation has preceded him, just as it had with me, but now his reputation has a whole new stripe. Word was that he’d bred his astrophage with a shoestring budget in a lab in California alone using a few chemicals, lights, and a cardboard box held together with some tape. No other scientists were with him. He’d figured it out with a little ingenuity and determination. That initial breakthrough brought Grace fully onto the science team of the Petrova Taskforce. He was drafted at that point: officially removed from his home, previous job, and all other attachments… just as I was. I saw the sympathy in his eyes as Stratt assigned me to the design of the Hail Mary without so much as a by your leave.
“You get used to it,” he’d said.
It takes some time before I realize just how monumental Grace's achievement truly was--how little astrophage he had to experiment with, how he tackled that job after being ripped from his beloved classroom. Well. If he can roll with those punches and get this done, so can I.
Ryland Grace is the Stratt Whisperer. It didn’t take long on Stratt’s Vat to realize that if you wanted to get to Eva Stratt, your best bet was to go through Ryland Grace. Our first meeting was proof enough of that. She had turned to him for advice within minutes. As time went on, I noticed that she turned to him often: for insight, for grounding, for an explanation of the science in a clear and simple way. His patient explanations allowed her to parse out the most important elements of each choice laid upon her shoulders. Eva Stratt might not be a scientist, but she was a master strategist, and it was down to her to weigh the multitude of factors in each scenario against one another. Ryland Grace was her advisor, interpreter, and her closest confidante. Everyone knew it — everyone, I think, except perhaps Dr. Grace himself. He didn't seem to realize that the rest of us viewed him as Stratt's right hand. Nonetheless, each time Stratt left the aircraft carrier, Dr. Grace left with her. When she returned, he was there at her side, in lock step, the bright eyed counterpart to her solemn and cool gray gaze. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they planned it that way. It felt like a more nuanced version of the good-cop bad-cop routine: Eva Stratt in her pitch black turtleneck, Ryland Grace close beside her with his messy blond hair, his glasses hanging askew from one ear, yellow rain-jacket flapping behind him, yet not to be underestimated despite his ruffled appearance. He was the bright light that cast Stratt in gentler relief for the rest of us.
It wasn’t until one gray and windy day on dry land as the launch approached that I realized just how invaluable a role Grace truly played. We'd been troubleshooting concerns with the final facets of the Hail Mary's design. It had been contentious to say the least. I was making my way back across the pavement. My fingers were almost numb, wrapped around a warm paper coffee cup, coved with a plastic lid. I’d slipped out of a meeting under the guise of needing more coffee. I did, but that wasn’t really why I’d left. My jaw was set as I made my way back to the room. I wasn’t the only one who’d stepped out. I needed a minute.
“Now hold on. Time out.” It was Grace’s tone that made me stop. Sometimes I could really hear the schoolteacher in him. I could just imagine him holding up his hand the way he would in meetings when too many people got talking at once— One voice at a time. Let’s all wait. “Lokken has already left her work at ESA. She’s dropped everything else in her life. So has everyone in that room. This isn't for lack of investment or dedication. They’re tired. They’re frustrated. And I know we’re running out of time, but sometimes, you need to let them have a moment to breathe.”
“We don’t have a moment to breathe—”
“Yes, we do.” Grace’s even tone somehow, amazingly, seemed to cut through Stratt’s frustration. “A tired and overtaxed science team makes mistakes. Not all of us are inhuman machines like you.” I heard a soft scoff from Stratt, but the sound was part amusement. I didn’t even need to see her to recognize that. “The best thing we can do right now is dissolve the meeting and set a time to reconvene tomorrow. Let them rest.” I clutched my cup tightly, my breath held.
“Fine.” Stratt’s tone was clipped. “We reconvene tomorrow at 9AM.”
I was still standing frozen as she breezed past me, Grace two steps behind. He glanced at me.
“Is there any left in the pot?” He asked. I wordlessly handed him my untouched cup of coffee and follow Stratt back inside the conference room.
Ryland Grace is funny. I wanted to ignore it at first, but truth be told, it was welcome. I heard little Grace-isms all over the ship as we kicked off the mission. One weary day, I heard Dimitri Komorov as he chuckled about Grace’s first introduction to the conference of scientists aboard the aircraft carrier: the way Stratt had hustled him away from the mic after his eloquent 'whoomp, there it is'. He could’ve just said the astrophage went to Venus to breed… But no, not Ryland Grace, middle school teacher extraordinaire. It wasn’t his only dry little junior high joke. Carl, whom Grace credited with part of the astrophage breeding breakthrough, noted that in Grace’s words, Astrophage “toot to scoot”. It had earned snickers and eyerolls depending on who heard the descriptor. Oddly enough, the funniest part was that Grace seemed unable to help himself. I was fighting back an open laugh at a later date when the centrifuge idea was explained to our crew: Yao, Ilyukhina, and Dubois.
“They used them to make butter during the Civil War, actually,” Grace interjected. For a moment, a couple of us stared at him. He seemed to deflate a little. "Fun... fun fact.” He leaned forward to drop his forehead against a pole with a soft thud. I smiled a little as I brushed past him.
I didn’t like him. I told myself that on the regualr. He was annoying. He still had that snarky edge I remembered from his caustic self presentation at UNESCO, that fateful day in Copenhagen. I couldn’t unsee the man he’d been back then, tried not to engage with him too much, and clearly he did the same. We usually only saw each other in group settings.
On one particular day, however, despite our best efforts, we found ourselves just the two of us together in a conference room, with the pre-release copy of a breaking CERN report between us.
“Of course, I don’t think this is necessary,” I pointed out.
“Neither do I,” he agreed. “But Stratt insisted you run this stuff by me. So here we are.” As annoying as he is, Grace is quick on the uptake, and I can't deny his genuine awe and excitement, his hunger for knowledge. He was appropriately thrilled over CERN’s discovery. And I supposed Grace was the leading expert on astrophage microbiology, so he did need to be roped in. He lived up to that reputation. He’d studied them well. With new clarity on astrophage, the two of us suss out a plan for the Hail Mary’s hull— how to line it with astrophage, protecting its inhabitants from the radiation. It was in that moment of professional camaraderie that I let my guard down.
“Did you hear that global warming has been almost undone?” he asked. God, he was annoying. He could be so earnest and wide eyed in moments like this— so easy to converse with, almost easy enough to forget what a prick he’d been in the past. I nodded.
“Humanity’s recklessness with our environment accidentally bought us an extra month of time by pre-heating the planet.” That familiar glint lit in Grace’s eyes— the one that meant he had something ridiculous on the tip of his tongue. Sure enough.
“We fell in poop and came out smelling like roses.”
I laughed. It felt good to laugh. It’d been a challenging week. Just this once, I found that I wasn’t annoyed when Dr. Grace smiled back in return.
Ryland Grace is lonely. It didn’t seem that way at a first glance. He was always somewhere about our compound, busy. If he wasn’t in the lab walking Martin Dubois and Annie Shapiro through the finer details of astrophage biology, he was following Stratt about, her listening ear, her support, her cipher, her anchor in the storm.
I saw Yao smiling at one of his children on a video call in a quiet corner. I heard Ilyukhina’s bright, clear laugh as she spoke to a family member on the phone. I watched Leclerc turn the wedding ring on his finger quietly in the difficult moments. I saw Dubois lean his head against Shapiro’s shoulder, smiling as they shared a quiet moment at the bar. I myself called my sister once a week. Dr. Grace, on the other hand…
“Don’t you have someone to call?” I found myself sliding into a seat beside him. It was Christmas Eve. He was nursing a mug of hot chocolate quietly in the corner. It was rare that anyone left the insulated circle of recruited scientists working relentlessly on the Hail Mary mission. Christmas wasn’t top priority with the future of humanity on the line, so we’re all here, our families far away. Grace included. I’d reluctantly started to wonder whether Grace might well be here anyways, even if we were given the freedom to go home for the season.
Grace shrugged.
“My kids have long since gotten a new teacher,” he said. There was no denying the trace of sadness in his eyes when he said it. He’d spoken of his classes before. I used to think that he’d left academia for good because he had no choice. I doubted that hypothesis when I heard the way he talked about the students. He was made for that job— bright and lively and warm, and with boundless patience when he explained the nuances of the science involved to Stratt, to newcomers on the project, to anyone who needed it. He had onboarded every new member with an ease and warmth that I reluctantly admired.
“I meant your family,” I told him, raising an eyebrow. Grace turned the spoon in his drink, watching a marshmallow dissolve into the surface of the cocoa.
“Don’t have any,” he said. His tone was blasé, as if he’d just made an observation about the weather. I blinked. “Only child. My parents have both passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” I said at last, unable to think of any more suitable response.
“It’s alright. It’s been six years,” he said. Six years. I looked at him for a moment. He was taking a sip of his drink and paused to scoop a yet unmelted marshmallow into his mouth.
“2017?” I asked. He glanced at me sidelong. “That’s… not very long ago.” But it wasn’t the length of time that struck me. Grace turned his gaze back on his drink, as if the foamy pattern of melted marshmallows were more interesting than our conversation.
“Suppose not,” he said.
For the first time, I feel a genuine wash of pity for the sharp tongued, insult flinging, childish, caustic man who delivered that indefensible paper six years ago in Copenhagen.
Christmas packages arrived that week. I left a little tin of some of the cookies my sister sent me outside his door, perched atop a t-shirt. He’d know it was me. The cookies were traditionally Norwegian. So I picked a shirt that was a bit of a jab still, because I couldn’t quite help myself — a tongue-in-cheek comment on the man who burned his bridges so violently on his way out the door. The caption ‘I had potential’ accompanied a diagram of a ball come to a stop after rolling down a slope.
I saw him wearing it a day later. He smiled at me.
It was five days before launch. The wind was whipping across our compound. Across the wide stretch of pavement laid the science building in shambles. There was nothing left: not even bodies. We’ve barely absorbed the shock of the explosion, let alone its ramifications. Standing in stark relief against the gray and black of the rubble was Dr. Ryland Grace.
I approached him and stood for a long minute, just within reach, my hands deep in the pockets of my gray sweater. He didn’t move. His eyes were fixed on the ruins.
“They were my friends too.” I spoke the words not in accusation but as support. Dr. Grace has been at Stratt’s side nearly this entire journey. He’s the most invested in this project short of her. He’s given up his entire life, his beloved classroom, his home… he’s done so much, and say what one will about his past; he’s been invaluable to this project. Dubois and Shapiro were only ever mission ready because of Dr. Grace.
He was quiet for a moment. His shoulders were tense, his gaze downcast. I could see from his eyes that he’d been crying.
“I saw them this morning,” he said at last. “They were walking a foot ahead of me, close together, laughing about something.” He lifted his head. I saw the shadows behind his eyes. He looked tired, troubled, as if the weight of the world had descended upon his shoulders. It had.
On impulse, I reached out a hand, squeezed his arm.
“Drinks. Tonight,” I tell him quietly. And for the first time, I realized with a weight that nearly bowls me over… I like him. I’m not doing this just to support a member of the science team. I’m doing it to help a friend.
He never joined me for drinks. Maybe the impact of taking over the science officer role was too heavy for him. Maybe Stratt isolated him for fear he’d fall ill or get hurt and strip away our last chance at an on-time launch. He vanished from my life as abruptly as Dubois and Shapiro, and I felt a heavy guilt settle in my chest.
I wonder if he left thinking I still hated him for being the cocky yet deeply wounded young man who chose to leave academia with a one-two punch, ready to be rejected. I don’t hate him anymore. I can’t. I feel an ache in my chest whenever I think of him. I feel the ache that comes with the loss of a friend.
I’m sixty-eight when the Beatles return to earth: George first, then Paul and Ringo. John comes almost half a year after his companions. I’m an old woman, the battle of the earth against the cold having worn me down along with the rest of the planet. I expect the videos of his findings to leave an ache in my chest. We sent him to die. He looked so hollow eyed when I last saw him, staring out at the scene of our loss.
He looks as young as ever he was when we were colleagues for those three years. For the first time since we launched the Hail Mary I feel peace settle over my heavy memory of Ryland Grace. He’s smiling in the videos. He is not alone.