He didn’t laugh, but then, neither did she. When Angela saw her, she motioned for her to come over. Bubber was playing with graduated metal cones on the floor, and was rocking. On the monitor, Sunny saw Fred Phillips, his face filling the whole screen. Angela put out her hand and grabbed Sunny’s hand. She was a genuine blonde, with tiny shoulders and a soft baby voice.
The voice of Fred, slightly buzzing through the speakers, said, “Sweetie, tell me something. Tell me anything.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Angela. “Everything will be all right. You’ll be home before you know it.”
“Actually it’s not,” said Fred, rolling a wild eye. “Actually that’s not true. So tell me something else, anything else. Tell me what the kids had for breakfast today.”
“The kids are asleep, Fred,” said Angela. “I left them at my mother’s.”
“I want to see my kids,” Fred said, and his voice choked. They saw him, on the monitor, grab at his mouth, and shake his head. “What the hell, Angie,” he sobbed.
There was a delay in transmission, so it was hard for them to communicate. They would talk over each other, and then wait too long, and then someone would start talking, then the other would wait.
“Fred, Sunny’s here,” said Stanovich, leaning over Angela’s shoulder. “Wanna get Dr. Mann on the feed there? Thanks.”
“Sure thing, Stan,” said Fred. “Here you go, Genius, time to cry and die.”
Angela stood and let Sunny sit down in the chair in front of the wooden desk while Fred seemed to levitate out of the seat he was in, and Maxon seemed to levitate in. Sunny sat perfectly still as she saw his head come into focus. He made sure he was sitting in exactly the right spot, and then he looked at her. She stared back at him, at the wide, bold lines of his face, his precious mouth, his ears, his curls. She wasn’t sure what kind of picture she was seeing, but she saw him very clearly, and it made her want to cry. He smiled his standard, formal smile, and then he leaned closer, peering into his screen. Sunny saw his face change from formal and public, to hungry, the way he looked when he really needed to eat something immediately. He had seen her bald head.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m probably going to have to eat Phillips first,” Maxon said.
“Oh yeah?” she said.
“Yeah, Gompers is such a nice guy, and Tom Conrad is made out of silicon, so…”
“Rethink, Maxon, rethink.”
She reached her hand out and touched the line of his nose, the curve of his cheekbone, the angle of his jaw on the monitor. He was quiet. She wanted to force him to see her, confirm that he knew. She wanted to tell him what to say, write it down for him, hand him a piece of paper with letters on it that he could truly understand. He was quiet. Was she telling him? Was the message getting through? Was she sending him all he needed, to survive? She wanted to say,
She picked up a piece of paper from the desk and folded it, and a Sharpie that was sitting there, and she wrote on the paper in very thick letters: I AM SORRY. Then she held it up in front of her head, so that her face was covered. When she took it down and looked at him, she was certain he understood.
“Sunny, do you want me to come home?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said clearly. “I want you to come home.”
“Great, okay,” he said. “Put Bubber on.”
Sunny retrieved Bubber from the floor and put him on her lap, a smooth metal cone clutched in each fist. He was making noises, like sound effects, and rocking. She knew he was far away in his mind.
“Hey, buddy,” said Maxon. Bubber did not look up. “Whatcha got there?”
“Can you show Daddy your cones?” Sunny prompted. “Tell Dad what you have there.”
Bubber lifted the cones in the air but did not look at the monitor. He continued to beep and shriek quietly, little sci-fi noises.
“Bubber, look right here where Mommy is pointing,” said Sunny, but Bubber wouldn’t look up.
“Sorry,” said Sunny. She saw Maxon lean down and get something. He was clutching something in his lap, his eyebrows up and his head shaking back and forth.
“It’s okay. He looks great,” said Maxon.
“He knows you’re there,” said Sunny. “It’s just that—”
Now Maxon was holding up a sign, too. On a clean page in his notebook he had written I LOVE YOU. He had gone over the letters several times so that they could really see it. He held it up to his chest, over his heart.
“Bubber,” said Sunny, pressing her lips into his ear, “I really need you to look where Mommy is pointing right now. Just look where Mommy’s finger is pointing.”
Bubber looked, just one glance; then he turned back to lean on Sunny and click the cones together. Sunny smiled at Maxon and said, “He saw.”
But Maxon kept on holding up the sign. And she knew it was for her, too. She tried to memorize the sight, so she could hold on to it forever, him there framed in the screen, wearing his white turtleneck, holding that sign over his heart.
“I gotta go, Sunny,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. But I’m going to go ahead and land this thing.”
“Maxon,” Stanovich broke in, “it’s too dangerous. Not without the starboard boosters.”
“Yeah, I gotta switch this thing off, Stan. See ya.”
And then the monitor went black. Immediately, from inside Bubber a wail went up. It came from the back of his throat but it sounded like it came from his toes. She knew from experience that this was the beginning of a meltdown, possibly an epic one, definitely not for public consumption. She wanted to get him out of the room, let him scream and rail and arch and foam and smack at her in the hallway, but first she had to get those cones out of his hand.
“No, honey,” she said. “No, no. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She began to pry his fingers from around the cone.
“We have to go,” she said urgently. “Come on, Bubber, put down the cone.”
But that was the wrong thing to do. The screaming peaked. Red-faced and spurting tears, Bubber fell to the floor, clutching the cones to his body. He rolled along the floor, kicking anything in his way, until he was wedged under a desk, where he stuck. Sunny went stumping after him, so wide and awkward. It would be very hard to deal with Bubber in this way. She couldn’t even pick him up, if he was trying to get away. She wasn’t strong and balanced enough. She started to get down on her knees, to try and talk him out, but Stan put a hand on her arm.
“It’s okay,” he said to her. “Let him keep the cones. In fact, you all can stay here if you want to, for a while.”
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “This is…”
“Sunny, it’s fine,” he said. “I have a boy with Asperger’s myself. And Rogers over there too. I mean, he is autistic, not his kid.”
“Really?” she said.
“Really,” said Stan. “You might say it kind of runs in the family. The NASA family.”
Sunny and Bubber stayed in Stanovich’s office at Langley for the rest of the night. In fact, when Sunny took a blanket and pillow into the lounge to get some sleep, Bubber stayed in the office with the other men. He was perfectly happy to play with the robot parts, finger the machines, and say absolutely nothing to anyone.
Up in the rocket, Maxon had laid out his plans for landing the rocket and the robots on the moon. Gompers hesitated.
“I don’t know, Mann,” he said. “We’re going to do it, but only because there’s nothing else to do.”
Phillips said, “Hey, Genius, who told you it was okay for you to do my job?”
“Shut up, Phillips,” said Gompers. “Unless you have another plan.”
“Phillips,” said Maxon kindly, “of course I can do your job. If I couldn’t do your job and everyone else’s job up here, I wouldn’t have come.”
Phillips stared.
