Bewilderment

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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.