“I envision that the first vehicle would be flying in sixty days. I envision a flight a week at first, and after that, perhaps as often as daily.
“This contract would be valid for one year. It would consist of an initial payment of twenty million dollars, then five million dollars a month for each vehicle flying, thereafter over the course of the contract. I estimate the total over the lifetime of the contract to total about two hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
“The personal element, sir, is that I will bet Mr. Michaels the following. He is, sir, married and has three children...”
“Keep my family out of this!” the NASA Administrator barked.
He was ignored. “The bet, sir, is that the first flight goes up to the ISS before sixty days from the date the contract is signed, and that my company flies at least one flight a week to the ISS during the following ten months. If I fail in this, I will pay for the Administrator, his wife and children to go to any city on Earth and have dinner in the restaurant of their choice — and afterwards return them home. If I achieve my goals, I would expect him to pay for me to go to the restaurant of my choice for dinner. Out of his personal pocket, not the government’s.”
Stephanie slid the proposal towards the President, and someone handed it to him.
Stephanie turned to the NASA Administrator. “I’m not sure how familiar you are with betting, but the technical name for this is: ‘five to one I win.’”
Stephanie turned to John Gilly to address his comment. “The reason for a purpose built ship is simply that an ad-hoc conversion of an existing vehicle will be, at maximum, about eighty percent as effective as a purpose-built. I don’t know about you, Captain, but when I’m traveling into unfamiliar territory, I’d take some comfort from the twenty percent plus edge.”
“Someone else may have gotten there first,” Captain Gilly warned.
“Nowhere in my proposal do you see anything about a race or getting there first. What you’ll read about is getting there and returning safely.
“It’s in my proposal, but it bears repeating. The costs and time frame are preconditioned on two assumptions. One, that normal government procurement procedures aren’t followed. The same goes ten times over for military procurement procedures. The second condition is that NASA has absolutely nothing to do with the project.”
The NASA Administrator exploded. “Oh, you are so full of yourself! Good grief, woman! You talk about gluing your spaceship together! How absurd is that?”
Stephanie looked at him and then at the President. “Sir, I’m going to rain on his parade.”
“So long as you don’t call him anything worse than ‘little old lady,’” the President responded.
This time half the people at the conference table chuckled.
“Administrator Michaels, I submit that you haven’t a clue. I don’t know if you read what I proposed and simply didn’t follow it closely or if someone else read the proposal for you. Someone who didn’t have your best interests in mind.
“Sir, for your information, the space shuttle uses that same epoxy to glue on the heat resistant tiles that keep it safe on reentry. Are you telling everyone here that method is not adequate or safe for spacecraft operating outside the Earth’s atmosphere?”
The NASA Administrator opened his mouth to speak, but words didn’t come out.
Stephanie decided that she did not need any more unalterable enemies than she already had. NASA was forever going to oppose her, but that didn’t matter.
“Imagine my surprise, Mr. President, to find out that the method I had envisioned of securing the hull of my proposed vessel was already patented. But my lawyers got with their lawyers and have already come to an agreement. Lego was wildly excited when they heard my plan.”
“Lego?” the President asked, not sure he’d heard what she said correctly.
“Yes, sir. The company in Denmark that markets Lego toys. I was going to use the same design methodology to create the hull for the ship. Titanium can be easily cast in small chunks, but larger pieces are more problematical. Something the size of a cinder block, with holes and posts, adequately glued seemed like a clever solution. I played with Legos as a small girl; I’m smart, sir, but not omniscient. It never occurred to me that they had the system patented.”
For hours the questions came fast and furious. Twice someone asked Benko and Chang questions. Stephanie was mildly amused, because both of the young men had, by then, realized that none of the politicians had their best interests at heart. They described their early testing, glossing over Stephanie’s students’ input that allowed significant improvements in function.
When the President called an hour break for dinner Anna turned to her boss. “Looking good, I think!”
Stephanie sighed. “You remember that one chance in ten thousand I was talking about?”
“Sure, but boss, you wowed ‘em!”
“Now is the time dice are rolling,” Stephanie told her. “I’m sure it’ll go my way, but waiting is hell!”
The President gestured for John Gilly and the others to sit. The Air Force and Navy Chiefs of Staff, and the NASA Administrator all promptly did just that.
“John, your candid opinion: is she going to do something stupid when I give this to the Air Force?”
Captain John Gilly, US Navy, looked at the President. “Sir, I’m more likely to do something stupid.”
“Captain, I don’t want to hear it.”
“Okay. But if you don’t want to hear my opinion on X, why do you want to hear it on Y?”
“Practice. What we were talking about the other day where I listen and decide and when it goes against you, you put your shoulder to the wheel and get it done.”
“This time you’re not just a little wrong, but altogether wrong, sir. Professor Kinsella put it down in her project plan: there is a difference in mindset between an Air Force commander on a two or three hour mission and a naval officer who is going to be on a mission for two or three months.”
“Captain, put a cork in it! No offense, but you and I both know the Navy hates me. They have since before I took my oath of office. They’ll be hating me on the day I leave, no matter what I do. The Air Force has been loyal since Day One.”
John Gilly shrugged. “And the rest?”
“She can have the project. That’s win-win for me. If she can do it, I get the credit. If she fails, I get the credit for letting her try, then more kudos for putting it right.”
“Sir, if you see this as you versus her, she’ll eat you for lunch.”
“I’ve always admired your loyalty, Captain. Of course, that was when I thought I was the one you were loyal to.”
“Sir, I’m loyal to the office, I’m loyal to the man or woman sitting behind the desk. I’m not loyal to someone doing something I think is wrong.”
“Well, it’s a judgment call. Do you understand judgment calls?”
“Sure, I’m just fine with them. I have lot of experience in that area, thank you very much. Sir, you have to be fair.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
John Gilly held the President’s eye for a few seconds.
“Captain, I’ll give you one last minute to make your case.”
“Sir, she thinks we’re incompetent idiots. The only reason she is here with her hat in hand is that there is just no other way she’s going to get her hands on a working naval nuclear reactor. She can go home to daddy and have a ship a third the size of the one she wants us to pay for that will cost about a tenth of what she’s asked for, but it’ll be chemically powered. Sir, if she doesn’t have to deal with us, that ship will lift in less than a year.”
“We’ll ban it,” the NASA Administrator said; the first of the others to offer an opinion.
The President rounded on him. “Are you just stupid or what? What part of five to one you lose, didn’t you understand? We can ban her building a ship here. What if she goes to France? Hell, what if she goes to Togo? If we don’t give her the money, ever
y other damn country on the planet is going to wave greenbacks under her nose!”
“Arrest her,” the Air Force Chief of Staff suggested.
“Her father is a billionaire,” John Gilly told them. “The only way to stop her is to kill her. And there is no one in this room who could survive having a hand in that.”
“Not to mention if I even think someone is contemplating ‘Final Solutions,’” the President said, “I’ll contemplate returning to our cold war strategy: massive overkill.”
The President glared around the room. “Now, one last time. Focus on the matter at hand. Rational choices.”
“Give it to the Navy,” John Gilly repeated.
“That’s not going to happen,” the President remonstrated. “I will, however, agree to her suggestion that the ship be built in Hawaii.”
John couldn’t help himself. “Mostly a Navy billet.”
The President smiled, understanding that the crisis had passed.
John shook his head. “And the rest?”
“Whatever she wants. She’ll have either enough rope to hang herself or to accomplish her heart’s desire.”
John Gilly sighed, looking at the President sadly. “Did you understand anything of what she said?”
The President bridled. “Every last jot and tittle!”
“No, sir, nothing close. You heard from a lot of people talking about how much the infrastructure would cost and how long it would take to put in place. Sir, you weren’t listening, and they didn’t read Stephanie’s plan carefully.”
“I missed something?” the President grinned wolfishly. “I’ve read the damn plan twenty times!”
“Sir, sometimes the devil is in the details not written down. Sometimes you have to be able to add two and two and come up with the right answer.”
The President looked at his Naval advisor for a long second. “I know I’m going to regret this. What did we miss?”
“Every last thing, sir. It’s just that simple. She wants to build a spaceship. In order to fly between planets, it needs to be air-tight.”
The President waved his hand. Of course!
“Sir, she plans on building her ship in the ocean. No infrastructure, no nothing. If it sinks, someone screwed up. I’m betting it won’t sink.
“Office space? Sir, please! She mentioned ‘temporary quarters.’ Those are manufactured buildings, sir. You can buy them off the shelf and have them set up on the same day. Steel buildings for warehouses go up in a week to ten days, counting the site preparation. Give her the go ahead and she will do just that. Within a week the first contracts will be signed, and at the end of the first month the ship will be under construction.
“Sir, it wouldn’t matter who else you gave it to, not the Navy, NASA or the Air Force — they would spend months just getting their ducks in a row. There might be a hard-nose engineer in charge of the actual construction, but he’ll be working under the thumb of a half dozen bureaucrats.
“It is my professional opinion she’ll have the ship ready early and under budget. It will work just as advertised. To give it to someone else at that point would be... unwise.”
The President’s eyes widened.
Captain Gilly pressed on. “Right now the Space Shuttle Discovery is in the body and fender shop, having overrun its last landing. That was due to turbulence on its final approach. Sir, you can go into any room with a half dozen pilots who’ve made a thousand landings and ask who has had turbulence blow a landing. Sir, every last one will raise a hand. You hit the throttles and go around again and try to do it right the second time. There are no throttles on the shuttle, at least none that work in the landing mode.
“Do you know what happens if her ship lands in the ocean a little hot? It will generate a wave a meter and two tenths, instead of a meter high. The ship goes to a depth of sixteen meters instead of fourteen. The water where Stephanie Kinsella is building her ship is five thousand meters deep. Sir, there’s a very large margin of error there, where there’s none on a runway.”
“I’m giving this to the Air Force. The Navy and NASA will provide any advice that Professor Kinsella asks of them.”
The President gestured at John. “The original question. Is she going to do something stupid?”
John bit back the response that she didn’t need to bother — the President had beat her to it. “Sir, she will accept the project management position. She’ll get to appoint a deputy. After that, sir, she’s going to be evaluating just how trustworthy we are. I don’t think I want to know what she’ll do if she thinks we’re not trustworthy.”
“I’m giving the project to the Air Force,” the President said patiently. “They will let her lead, give her enough rope, they think, to hang her. Once she’s off-track someone with proper management skills can come along and get things going right. And if things do work out, she can come along for the ride.”
John Gilly looked at his boss and sighed. “Sir, that is about the single worst decision you’ve made in your career. She’ll be coming back from that mission, I’m sure of it. She’s sure your leaders will be proved incompetent morons, which will allow her to step in and save the day for everyone. You are, sir, handing her her heart’s desire on a platter.”
“Then she should like it, eh?” the President quipped.
“About as much as you will, sir.”
Stephanie watched them file back into the room. She turned to Anna. “Well, number two, I hope you are prepared for the crap they will throw at us. Me and you.”
Anna Sanchez laughed. “Boss, it’s called shit. I knew it was coming before I agreed to help. You’ll pardon me if someday I’ll want to rub a lot of that shit in a lot of asshole faces. Today isn’t a good day for that, though.”
“I am, my mother tells me, a lady. She’d never agree to words like those. So, I watch my language.”
The two women traded grins.
Later they sat at Blair House contemplating the bottom of their beverage glasses.
“The Air Force?” Anna asked.
“No surprise there. It’s better than NASA, but the Navy would have been a better institutional choice. It doesn’t matter, because within a year they will have to develop a separate space service. Nothing else will work.”
“You knew they were giving space flight to the Air Force and not the Navy or NASA?”
“The President was in the Air Force out of college; when he was a congressman he consistently voted to cut Navy budgets and voted for every new Air Force project that came up.”
Anna Sanchez shook her head. “How do you have the time to learn all this stuff?”
“I stay up late at night and get up early.”
Anna looked at her boss and laughed. “Yeah, I guess that works.”
Stephanie reached into her purse and pulled out a couple of pages stapled together and handed them to Anna.
“Have you read this?”
Anna looked at it. “The patent? Dumb and dumber wrote it. No.”
“I helped them with it, if you’ll recall.”
Anna lofted the pages. “So you’re saying you put something in it? What do they call that?”
“A cuckoo’s egg. One of my favorite metaphors, courtesy of Captain Gilly. It’s there in the section on ‘Additional Areas of Gravitational Theory Covered in the General Patent.’”
Anna flipped to the section and started reading. After a few minutes she looked up. “A restatement of string theory, considering the new math. We worked that in the first couple of days.”
“Cuckoo egg!” Stephanie reminded her. “Equations 438 through 441.”
Anna started reading. After a few seconds she pursed her lips. Then her brow furrowed, then she stopped reading, massaging her temples. “I’m going crazy here, boss!”
“A different way of looking at things.”
“You blew the ‘many worlds’ theory right out of the universe.”
“Not entirely. Seven appears to be the right number. Next equation please.”
>
Anna read it and then looked up. “That’s so convoluted I’m not sure what I’m reading.”
“When my father was in school, back in the dawn of computers, they used to have a contest to write an obscure C program in one line. The C programming language seems to have been designed with that intent in mind. I just applied some of the same philosophy to that equation.” She pulled another piece of paper from her purse and handed it to Anna. “Here’s a rather more straight-forward rendition.”
Anna read it, and then looked up, a curious look on her face. “It can’t be that simple.”
“Well, trust me, it’s not all that simple. Oh, the broad strokes are, but the devil’s in the details. That equation is the result of almost forty CPU hours on the biggest supercomputer I could steal time on. Three of the universe’s dimensions are rolled up into little balls, none larger than an electron. A fourth is us. Two are intractable to math as it is today; they look like singularities. The last is not only much smaller than ours, but it is gravitationally malleable... you can bend it far more readily than you can bend our space. Further, it has the odd property that it’s congruent with our universe, point for point... except there the points are closer together and you can bend them even more and make them closer yet. Don’t you just love quantum mechanics?”
“This is... bigger than the other.”
“Only in the sense that an eighteen wheeler is larger than a pickup truck.”
“And you’re not going to tell anyone?”
Stephanie Kinsella grinned and waved at the patent application. “It’s all right there, covered in the basic patent. Who can complain if I didn’t draw little pictures for the great and powerful? And why should I tell them my intentions? They take positive glee in believing their actions are unexpected and not subject to objective analysis in advance. They certainly aren’t telling me all of their intentions.”
She smiled at Anna. “Thus, the good Captain Gilly has secrets and top secrets, even confidential secrets and code word secrets. Now, I have the same. A new security classification: Top Secret Kinsella.”
“And what do you want me to do?”
Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) Page 10