Our agriculture, literature, music, sports, and visual arts rivaled those on Earth. But our great intelligence and peaceful culture never hit upon combustion or printing or metalworking or electricity or anything like advanced industry. On Nithar, there was molten magma, combusting magnesium, and other kinds of burning. But there was no fire.
Cool, my son said. I’m going to explore.
I told him not to go too far from the surface, especially the vents. But he was young, and the young suffered most from Nithar’s biggest challenge. A planet where the word forever was the same as the word never was hard on its youth.
He came back from a too-brief adventure upward. He was crushed. There’s nothing up there but heaven, he complained. And heaven is as hard as rock.
He wanted to know what was above the sky. I didn’t laugh at him, but I was no help. He asked around and got mocked mercilessly by both his generation and mine. That’s when he vowed to drill.
I didn’t try to talk him out of it. I figured he could toy at the project for a few million macro-beats, and that would be the end of it.
He used the sharp tip of long, straight, heated nautiloid shell. The work was grindingly dull. It took many millions of heartbeats for his hole to reach the depth of one outstretched tentacle. But rubble dropped from on high, and that made for the first novelty on Nithar in almost never. The Hole became the butt of jokes, the object of suspicions, and the rite of new religious cults. Generations came and went, watching his infinitesimal progress. My son drilled on, with all the time in this world on his hands before bedtime.
Tens of thousands of lifetimes in, he struck air. And in one great rush of understanding, a revolution so great that nothing on Nithar survived it, my son discovered ice and crust and water and atmosphere and starlight and trapped and eternity and elsewhere.
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ROBIN WAS BESIDE HIMSELF, about our trip to Washington. I was going there to help save the search for life in the universe. My most devoted full-time student was coming along for the ride.
I’m gonna make something for the trip, okay?
He wouldn’t tell me what. But as Robin’s legal teacher, I was always looking out for anything better than the grim social studies materials I found online. (How Do I Save Money? What Is Profit? I Need a Job!) A civics field trip to Our Nation’s Capital, with homemade show-and-tell, seemed just the thing.
He made me wait in the car while he went into the art supply store with his life savings. He came out a few minutes later clasping a bag to his chest. When we got home, he squirreled away his covert treasures in his room and got to work. A sign appeared on his door. His balloon-letter writing had grown more playful, more like Aly’s with each new feedback session:
I had no clue what he was up to, other than that it involved a roll of eighteen-inch-wide white butcher paper too bulky to hide. My questions succeeded only in eliciting stern warnings not to pry. So the two of us prepared for our joint field trip. While my son worked on his secret project, I polished the testimony I would present to the congressional Independent Review Panel.
The panel was tasked with making a simple recommendation: answer the world’s oldest and deepest unanswered question or walk away. Dozens of my colleagues were testifying on behalf of NASA’s proposed Earthlike Planet Seeker mission, over several days. Our job was simple: save the telescope from the ax of the Appropriations subcommittee, and make a world that would be able, in a few more years, to look into nearby space and see life.
The party in power was not inclined to hunt for other Earths. The heads of the review panel threatened to add our Planet Seeker to a growing graveyard of NASA cancellations. But scientists across three continents were giving up the pretense of detached objectivity and making the case for exploration, every way we knew how. That’s how the son of a con man, a kid who went by the nickname Mad Dog and got his start in life cleaning out septic tanks, found himself on a plane to D.C., testifying for the most powerful pair of spectacles ever made. And my son was coming with, bringing his own campaign.
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HE HUSTLED DOWN THE AISLE IN FRONT OF ME, beaming and greeting all the passengers. He chided me as I put his bag in the overhead bin. Careful, Dad! Don’t crush it! Robbie wanted the window. He watched the baggage loaders and ground crew as if they were building the pyramids. He gripped my hand during takeoff but was fine once we were airborne. During the flight, he charmed the attendants and told the businessman on my right about “a few good nonprofits” he might want to consider supporting.
We had to change in Chicago. Robin sketched people in the gate area and gave them their portraits as gifts. Three kids across the concourse whispered to each other and pointed, as if they’d never seen a living video meme before.
He was better with takeoff the second time. As we broke down through the clouds in our final approach, he shouted over the engines, Holy crap! Washington Monument! Just like in the book!
The rows near us laughed. I pointed over his shoulder. “There’s the White House.”
He answered in hushed tones. Wow. So beautiful!
“Three branches of government,” I quizzed.
He held out his finger, fencing with me. Executive, legislative, and… the one with the judges.
We saw the Capitol from the cab on our way to the hotel. He was awed. What will you tell them?
I showed him my prepared comments. “They’ll ask questions, too.”
What kind of questions?
“Oh, they might ask anything. Why the Seeker cost keeps going up. What we hope to discover. Why we can’t discover life some cheaper way. What difference it would make if it never got built.”
Robin gazed out the window of the cab, marveling at the monuments. The cab slowed as we entered Georgetown and neared the hotel. Robbie sat in a cloud of preoccupation, trying to solve my political crisis. I straightened his hair, like Aly used to do when the three of us were heading out into public. I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.
We pulled into the hotel’s circular drive and the cabbie said, “Here we are. Comfort Inn.”
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I FED MY CARD INTO THE CAB’S READER and credits poured out from a server farm nestled in the melting tundra of northern Sweden into the cabbie’s virtual hands. Robbie got out, retrieved his bag from the trunk, gazed at the very modest chain hotel, and gave a deep, appreciative whistle. Holy crow. We are living like kings. He wouldn’t let the doorman take his bag. It’s got stuff in it!