Captain Gilly got out of the aircraft and held the door open for Professor Kinsella, then waved towards the closest building. “I assume then, since Benko and Chang wrote the paper, there’s nothing much beyond what they’ve seen before.”
“You’d be surprised what physicists can see even in a minor little factor out on the end of a long equation. The relativistic effects on Mercury’s orbit, for instance. Accurate measurements of Mercury’s orbit were the first observational evidence that Einstein was right and Newton was incomplete.”
Two men in suits waited for them, and there were introductions and handshakes.
“I must say, Captain Gilly, we don’t get many requests like the one we got yesterday. Some of our people are still a little stunned,” the head suit said.
“The President wants Professor Kinsella to see the true state of the art in aerospace engineering.”
“Well, considering who asked, we’re quite prepared to show off what we’ve done. We don’t get many chances to do it, you understand, and there’s a certain amount of pride and eagerness to talk about it when we can.”
They went in the building, received security badges and then were escorted through several doors, through progressively tighter security.
Finally they were in a gallery above a hangar. Beneath them was a gleaming white aircraft that was very long, perhaps two hundred feet. There were tiny wings, swept back.
“This is the XA-4,” the lead suit said. “That’s XA for Extra-atmospheric. It has several modes of operation, but now mostly we let it take off on its own power, then it flies up to 40,000 feet, tanks and then she goes on from there to orbit. It has a crew of two and can carry two payload specialists.
“When Columbia went down, we were devastated; everyone in manned flight was. If we’d have known about the damage, we have the capability of launching the XA-4 on two days notice. We have the capability of a quick launch of a fuel supply rocket. The XA-4 could have gone up, mated with the Columbia, taken off three people, flown them to the ISS, and then repeated until everyone was off. Four or five days and they’d have been safe on the ISS.”
John Gilly whistled. “So that’s why NASA ignored most of the repair requirements of the Columbia accident report! They knew they could count on you guys in a pinch.”
The suit nodded soberly.
Stephanie waved at the aircraft. “How much did it cost?”
The suit looked uncomfortable. “I’d rather not say.”
Captain Gilly smiled. “It’ll take me one phone call to the White House. The Man will call the Air Force Chief of Staff and tell him to get it done. The Chief of Staff will call your liaison and the next thing you’ll know you’ll be called away from here and told to do it... and you’ll have wasted an hour of everyone's time.”
“Well, you understand that accounting on projects like this is murky? Let’s take the simplest case. If we wanted to build a second one, we just quoted a price of two and a half billion dollars to the Air Force. This vehicle was about four billion, give or take, but that includes a lot of the development costs. The overall XA project budget has run to about ten billion over the years.”
John Gilly saw the predatory gleam in Stephanie Kinsella’s eyes.
“Tell me,” she asked the suit, “there are two ways to run a tour like this. Start with something other than the best, saving the best for last, or starting with the best, and letting the gosh-wow types down gently after that.”
“As per the request, we started with the best,” he told Stephanie.
“Then let’s save everyone a lot of time,” Stephanie replied. “I don’t suppose you have a dozen or two aerospace engineers that I could borrow for the rest of the day?”
John Gilly guffawed; the corporate suit smiled politely.
“We laid on something like that for this afternoon. We have a conference room reserved for later. I don’t think that we could justify that kind of interruption to work schedules just now for what you ask.”
“Humor her,” Captain Gilly told him. “Think about this: consider it gathering some goodwill with the President of the United States. Because, barring a miracle, the government is going to cancel just about every project you currently have going on here, including the XA project. Maybe a week, maybe two, is all you have left.”
“And any time your people spend working on their current projects would have been better spent on something else,” Stephanie added.
A half dozen satellites appeared, trailing a single man who headed towards them. The man in front was wearing a tweed jacket, not a suit coat; he had no tie, and Stephanie was sure that it was a pipe she saw sticking out of his jacket pocket.
“Professor Kinsella,” the newcomer said, extending his hand to Stephanie, “I’m Brian Taverner, the Engineering Department head.”
“Stephanie Kinsella, sir,” she replied shaking his hand.
“Just call me Brian. Have my people been treating you right?”
“Fine, sir. I’d like to get together a meeting of some of your best engineers,” Stephanie told him, “but there is some concern about work schedules.”
Brian Taverner turned to one of his minions. “Go get Conference A set up. Three dozen chairs. Tell Sherrie to get some lunch in. Chinese, some pizza, that kind of stuff.” That man hurried off and Taverner turned to another. “Tell Earl and Bernard I want to see them and the best half dozen idea guys they’ve got in A, right away. Nothing’s more important.”
“Yes, sir!” And he too was gone.
“Sir,” the suit Stephanie and Captain Gilly had been with spoke up, “Captain Gilly was intimating that the government is going to cancel all our aerospace contracts.”
“Yes. Have one of your people get the dozen best and brightest from your shop, Steve.”
“Is it true?” the suit pressed.
“I had a call today from someone I know in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He asked me if I’d read any good patent applications lately. I told him no, I have assistants who do that. He told me to fire them and gave me a number. I asked just what exactly what was he trying to say? He said that the government had stopped playing around on the edges of space and was going into the wholesale side of the business. If we didn’t move today, we’d be too late.
“I looked at that patent application myself, and there were four names: Caltech, Stan Benko, Johnny Chang and Dr. Stephanie Kinsella. That was, I thought, a little curious, because they usually list things like doctorates, and they list the names by patent ownership participation.
“That patent application contained some very esoteric math, Steve. Get your people to A, right now.”
The suit, Steve, turned and said something and his minion dashed away.
“I called our people in Washington,” Taverner went on, talking now to Stephanie and Captain Gilly. “I wanted to know about our contracts. I kind of slipped and had a half dozen senior management on the line when I made the call. I asked about each of our contracts and was told they are ‘under review.’ When I asked what type of review, our guy in Washington told me he couldn’t say.”
The suit looked at his boss. “The cost of canceling even one contract would be prohibitive for the government.”
Brian Taverner smiled slightly. “Did you know my old man worked for GE, back in the day? We lived in Phoenix and GE had a big computer manufacturing plant just north of town, back in the fifties. One day, one of the engineers came in with a hot tip from a friend who’d seen the patent application that Texas Instruments filed on integrated circuits.
“The engineers gathered round and read it. They realized that the machine they were building was junk. It was the size of a grand ballroom, used more vacuum tubes than Carter’s has liver pills, and more electricity than Burbank. They went to management and said, ‘Hey, our computer is dead! We need to cancel it and start working on something with integrated circuits.’”
He stared at the suit, obviously expecting a question.
“I guess I’m supposed
to say I didn’t know GE ever made computers,” the suit volunteered reluctantly.
“Once upon a time, a very long time ago, they used to. However their management decided to ignore their engineers, because the company had sunk so much money into development of their new machine. Two weeks later the order list went to zero as everyone canceled. Three months later they shuttered the plant. Eventually the plant was sold to Honeywell where they did make computers — with integrated circuits.”
He smiled at Stephanie. “I’m here to kiss some serious bootie, because I’m not going to make the same mistake the managers at GE made. I’m not sure why you’ve graced us with your presence just now, but I have a feeling God loves us.”
Captain Gilly was more practical. “I wanted the Professor to see what the state of the current art is. Was. In exchange, she’s willing to discuss the patent at length, and, so long as we don’t get into a particular area that she’s the lead on, we can also discuss applications.”
Brian nodded and turned back to the suit. “Do you know how my story about GE ends? My father and the other engineers quit GE in disgust the day after management told them they were going to continue the vacuum tube project. At one time the computer company they formed was a household name in IT, before they sold out for big bucks. And, surprise! Their first computer was the size of a piano and had four times the memory than the one they’d been working on for GE, and you could run it on standard 220V service available in most commercial buildings. They sold a lot of them.”
He waved back towards the front of the building. “Now, if you will, let’s go talk.”
A few minutes later, they were in the conference room, already filled with people. There was an excited buzz of conversation; this wasn’t how meetings were typically called.
John Gilly stood next to Stephanie. “Do you suppose you could let me toot your horn first? To sort of smooth the way?”
She looked at him steadily. “Are you saying they might decide I’m a little young and a woman to boot and decide to ignore me?”
John waved around the table. Among the three dozen engineers and managers present, there were only two other women. “This is too important to get off on the wrong foot.”
“This is important to you,” she told him, “although I’m not sure why. It’s not important to me. I stand on my own two feet, and if dingbats and morons don’t get it... well, I leave them behind.”
“Professor, please. I’d like to think we’ve become something like friends in the last few days. Besides, I’m only going to repeat the same speech the President gave me, and he’d never seen you. Trust me, okay?”
She stared at him for a second. “The President, eh?”
“Yes, the main man. The big guy himself.”
“Well... I do want to catch him on a good day.”
John Gilly smiled. “You already did. Now, let’s get this show on the road.”
He reached down and rapped a nice wooden drink holder down, flat on the table. It made a loud sound and the conversation died away.
“My name is John Gilly, Captain, US Navy. I am the Naval Aide to the President of the United States. I’m here at his behest today and I want to remind you all that no matter how informal this meeting seems, it is Top Secret. I imagine Mr. Taverner has his own classifications, and I can imagine it’s at least that secret for your company as well.”
“Oh, at least,” Brian Taverner said mildly. The people in the room laughed.
“Monday morning of this week I showed up for work in the White House. The President called me in and showed me several things. One of them I’m going to show you now. I see it’s about eleven thirty, Mr. Taverner. Did I hear something about lunch? Will it be here within the hour?”
“Oh, yes. This plant has supported generations of pizza and Chinese take-out restaurants.”
“Good. I will give you a short presentation on proof-of-principle. Professor Kinsella, a tenured professor at Caltech, will have some information then on how it was done. Do you have copies of the patent application, Professor?”
“Sure. I never leave home these days without them,” she said, smiling.
“Enough for all these fine people?”
“And their wives, kids, dogs and cats.”
There were more chuckles. John was aware of a lot of eyes directed at Stephanie, trying to digest the “tenured professor of physics” description.
He pulled out his laptop and set it on the conference table. “I need a connection to the room’s projector.” That took about a second. He booted the computer and while it was coming up he spoke.
“Professor Kinsella overheard some graduate students discussing an unusual effect that the grad students had noticed in an experiment they were running. One thing led to another and now we’re here.
“Ladies and gentleman, Professor Kinsella’s web site.”
There was the picture of the Professor, Benko and Chang, her grad students and a couple of techs, all smiling at the camera in the VW Bug. Of course, you couldn’t see that it was a Bug in the first picture.
Stephanie realized that he’d edited the clip and was going to do things his way.
“When I first saw this picture I thought I was looking at a bunch of grad students having a car wash. The President thought the same thing. Sitting where you are now, you probably realize that there is a cuckoo’s egg in there with the grad students.”
While he was talking the picture flipped, and was now looking at the Bug.
“A VW Bug, a sixties vintage.”
“Sixty-five,” Stephanie said, speaking out. “We decided that there was no way on earth to make any car airtight, so we went with the cheapest and funkiest.”
Then the scene shifted to the VW lifting away.
“What the hell?” someone in the room said.
“Good CGI,” someone else opined.
The Bug vanished into the sky, then the scene cut to one of the lunar surface shots.
“No! Not possible,” another voice said. “Fake, all fake!”
Captain Gilly shook his head. “Right now the government has angered every major radio-telescope we could lay our hands on. For nearly a week now we’ve been monitoring the signal. You’ll notice Earth in the background of the shot. The signal comes from the moon; there is absolutely no doubt about it. The cloud patterns on the Earth are correct. We’ve been told that the planetary level cloud patterns would be relatively easy to fake, but there is no way to fake the signal origin.
“You will hear about it in the near future. The President is rearranging his science team at the cabinet level. Last week the Presidential Science Advisor’s resignation was accepted. Yesterday, all three of NASA’s Assistant Directors were fired. If any of you should ever get into a top policy position with the government, don’t do what those NASA managers did. The President asked them why he could get good pictures of Mars, but not of the moon.
“NASA told him that’s because the moon wasn’t important.”
There were guarded chuckles around the room. NASA was a known problem to the engineers in the room. A few of the top NASA brass had been allowed to visit, but not many.
“Two weeks ago, Professor Kinsella and her students dropped that VW Bug onto the moon, in a controlled landing. As you can see, the landing was soft enough that the camera didn’t break.”
“It’s a standard web cam,” Stephanie explained. “We put an optically neutral lens over the real lens, then cast the whole thing in epoxy, then did a few other things to keep the whole shooting match from evaporating in the vacuum of space. We think it’s a credit to off-the-shelf electronics that we still have a picture after this long. However, the area is about to fall into shadow and that will, undoubtedly, end that.” Stephanie told the assembled engineers.
“It’s now close to lunch,” John told them. “Professor Kinsella will pass out copies of the patent so you have some light reading as you eat. We’ll reconvene in forty minutes or so.”
Actually, once
Stephanie passed out the patent application, the meeting never un-convened. Instead she was peppered with a steady barrage of questions about the patent. While none of the engineers were up to snuff on all of the mathematics, combined, they were.
It was Brian Taverner who got things back on track. “I must say, Professor Kinsella, that the patent is an interesting read. I’ve already faxed copies to some of our physicists, who, I’m told, are now walking around in circles, banging their heads against walls saying, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”
Stephanie shrugged.
“I said it before, I’ll say it again. Why are you here, Professor? I mean, aside from the fact that you just jerked the rug out from under our feet, the fact that you’re here has to mean something.” He nodded to Captain Gilly.
“Captain, I know what you said earlier, but there has to be more to it than that.”
Captain Gilly sighed. “I’m going to upset the Professor, but I think this is important. You people in this room, you’re down-in-the-trenches engineers. You’ve taken ideas and turned them into reality. Then you took that reality and made it work. I flew tankers when I was in the Navy, and while that’s not as sexy as flying fighters or being a test pilot, I certainly learned to appreciate people like you because every year I flew my job grew easier and safer.
“Professor Kinsella has proposed a project. An ambitious project. She has, however, no practical engineering experience to speak of. She went through her schooling at a gallop, got her doctorate and hit the road running, aiming to get where she is today.
“I’d like to turn this into a brainstorming session. I’d like to find a simple concept and have us come up with a concept statement, preliminary designs... and then I’d like you to give Professor Kinsella the benefit of your expertise and experience, to give her some idea of what the project manager would face between concept and roll out.”
“No,” Stephanie’s voice was harder than her expression.
“The problem, Captain Gilly, with haring off on your own is that sometimes you find yourself close to the right place, but not quite there.
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