could finish her one last dream. This is what it means to die: You do not finish.
THE ROAD TO LANGLEY Research Center leads back through the swampy area of Virginia’s Eastern Shore. In the middle of the night, it is a dark and quiet place. Ditches on each side of the road drain the water, and herons stand, their heads tucked into their wings. It’s like a seedier, smaller version of the road to the Kennedy Space Center, over miles of swampy Florida coastal marsh. There you can see rows of palm trees swaying in the wind, in the morning, on the day of a bright and optimistic launch. Here she saw kudzu in the headlights, mile markers, and she could barely remember where to turn.
At 3:30 a.m. Sunny showed her ID at the gate. Off to the right was the hangar, huge and white, full of rocket parts, airplanes, and all kinds of apparatuses. Behind her was the wind tunnel. The base was like a college campus, but instead of stacked rectangles for office buildings and classrooms, the architecture was all outsized and strange, not built for human habitation, but for the convenience of science. This facility, like its geographical context, was a dingy, underfunded sister of the Kennedy Space Center. But he worked here because he didn’t want to move to Florida. And ultimately, it didn’t matter. He had his trade right between his ears. There were labs, and there were lab workers everywhere.
She drove past the huge round buildings they jokingly called the brain tanks, and past the new accelerator. She drove past the building where Maxon had his materials tested, full of giant machines whose only job is to break things to make sure they’re strong. Many of the buildings at Langley were shoddy and brown, built in the seventies and never refurbished. It was always a surprise to step into the buildings and find everything so high-tech.
Sunny parked, gently eased Bubber out of the backseat. He cried a little bit, and blinked, and then, standing in the car still, said, “Where are we?”
“What a great question,” said Sunny. “We are at Daddy’s work. We are going to talk to Daddy.”
“Daddy is on the moon. The moon has a lava pipe. That’s where Daddy’s going to put the robot. The lava pipe.”
“Right,” said Sunny. “Should I carry you, or can you walk?”
“Walk,” said Bubber.
“That’s a good baby,” said Sunny. She kissed him and kissed him all over his face. He resisted her, as stony as if she had been kissing the back of the seat.
“I don’t care if you don’t want to be kissed and hugged, Bubber,” she said as she took his hand. “I’m going to kiss and hug you anyway.”
“Fine,” said Bubber.
“Let’s go.”
Stanovich met her at the door. The lobby of Maxon’s building was dimly lit.
“The gate guard called and said you were here,” he said. “Come on, right this way.”
He took her by the arm, and she took Bubber by his arm. They went to a part of the building she had never seen before. He pushed open several sets of brown metal doors and led her up a stairwell. The concrete on the stairs was chipped, the window dusty. Sunny stopped on the landing, waved for Stanovich to give her a second.
“I’m a little pregnant, Stan,” she said. “I can’t go galloping up stairs anymore.”
“Ah, right,” he said. He stood nervously, knocking the railing with his knuckle. Stanovich was a gray-haired man, but smooth and spry, maybe old enough to be Sunny’s father, or maybe forty. He had a thick mustache and thicker glasses, sunken eyes and bushy eyebrows, big ears. He always wore short-sleeved shirts with collars, black or navy pants. He was old-school NASA, and a professional. Maxon had a lot of respect for him, so Sunny did, too. And she liked him. He had a wife and kids in Newport News.
“Okay, I think I’ve caught my breath,” said Sunny. Catching sight of herself in a windowpane, she realized that Stan had not commented on her hair, or lack of it. She wondered if he was just that distracted, or if Maxon had told him. Maybe some late night, bent over difficult problem, or pacing back and forth in front of a whiteboard full of formulas, he’d spilled the beans.
“Bubber, you all right?” Stan said, poised to continue up the stairs.
Bubber, staring at the concrete blocks in the walls, gave him a thumbs-up. Stan leaped up the next flight and pushed open another metal door.
“This is my domain,” said Stanovich. “Welcome. Sorry not under better circumstances.”
“But these are great circumstances, right?” said Sunny. “They’re alive, they’re talking. They’ll make it.”
Stan was silent, moving down the gray hallway more slowly now.
“Stan,” said Sunny, grabbing him by the arm and stopping dead. “It is good news, right?”
“Sunny, now I don’t want to get you upset. But you should know the truth.”
“What’s the truth?” Sunny asked.
“The truth is they might still not make it back,” said Stan. Then he coughed, put his hand on his face, and smoothed his mustache. Sunny found herself crazily trying to decode this gesture, like maybe Maxon would have done. Was he shielding the pregnant lady? Overstating the danger? Itchy?
“What?” Sunny breathed.
“The meteor did more damage than we thought, honey. Once we established the link, Houston ran some diagnostics with them, and it’s not good. I can’t see how we down here can help them up there without the navigational stuff that they need to fix their orbit, to get to the surface, to fire the rockets … it’s just too much.”
Stan sounded like he was going to cry. “Maxon did a good thing fixing the comms. That was a really great thing. But, this might be the last you get to talk to him, honey. That’s why we called you here in the middle of the night. Do you understand?”
“Did they dock with the robots? Did they get that far?”
“Yes,” said Stan. “They have now docked with the robots. I don’t know how, because they shouldn’t have been able to, but somehow they did. Unfortunately, I think that’s as far as it’s going to go.”
“No,” said Sunny. “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he would go up there and get himself killed.”
Stan put his hand on a doorknob. Inside, through a pane of reinforced glass, Sunny could see people, hear voices.
“The meteor was something that no one could account for,” said Stan. “You can’t blame him. There was nothing he could have done.”
“But Maxon accounts for everything,” she said, pushing past him to throw the door open. “I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him right bloody now.”
The room was big, with shaded windows on one wall. There were benches and tables around the room littered with drills, pieces of metal, and mounted laser saws and fabricators. A poster on the wall proclaimed, “This is where we make the magic happen!” Angela Phillips had already arrived and was sitting in front of a big silver flat-screen monitor on a dirty old wooden desk. Of course she’d gotten there first; she lived in Hampton. Like any sensible person whose husband worked at Langley.
Sunny had demanded a Norfolk residence, for the opera house and the art museum. She was on the board of this and the committee of that, using Maxon’s money to buy their way into the social stratosphere of this old town. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She regretted everything. Where would Maxon die, in the cold of space? Would he fall into the moon? Or would he make it halfway home and then run out of air? Would he kill everyone on board? Would he? She saw her husband under layers, under the rocket, under the space suit, under the jumpsuit, down to the core of him, where he was breathing, low and strong, his pulse never rising above fifty. It was crazy. The doctors couldn’t explain it.
There were others in the room. A man she remembered having over to the house for dinner with his dowdy wife approached her. He was clearly not distracted enough to not notice the bald head.
“Sunny,” he said. “Are you all right? Are you … cancer?”
He trailed off, but Sunny firmly shook his hand and winked.
“Hey, Jim, you guys called me so early, I didn’t have time to brush my hair, so I just decided not to wear it, right?”
