And I will rule it. Call me crazy if you like. If I'd met you in college and told you I was going to be worth twenty billion dollars in fifteen years, you'd have called me crazy then, too. So now who's flying the Learjet?
I was smiling at these happy thoughts when the phone chimed. I picked up. "John Watson here."
"Warren Burbridge." The voice was urbane and cultured, controlled, calmly inflected. The voice of a career beaurocrat. "Mr. Watson, I'm calling on behalf of William McCool." I felt something crawling on my spine. William McCool was chairman of the SEC. More importantly, he was firmly in the pocket of Dynacore, who had been vying for access to the split-ring convolver technology for some time now.
"And what can we do for the Security and Exchanges Commission today, Mr. Burbridge?" I already knew, of course, but the call had to play itself out.
"Well, quite frankly we have some concerns about your licensing arrangement with Beijing Semiconductor." Of course they did.
"And these concerns are?" I asked the question with wide-eyed innocence.
"Specifically we feel it's anticompetitive."
I smiled sardonically. "It's an exclusive deal, if that's what you mean."
"That's exactly what we're concerned about. Prior to this you had the technology licensed to a number of firms. We would be more comfortable if you continued that policy." There was a certain smugness to his voice, the certainty of the mailed fist held back as he delivered the velvety smooth demand with careful reasonableness.
I shrugged. The gloves were coming off and he was deluding himself if he thought otherwise. "Those agreements are expired. We've negotiated with several firms. Beijing paid high for the exclusivity deal. They have the Halcion processor in the works, and it relies on split-ring technology. That makes it more advanced than anything else on the market, and they want to protect their edge."
"Exactly. We can reasonably expect that Halcion will be the dominant processor over the next five years, and with this agreement you've signed with them nobody else will be able to build anything remotely similar. They'll have a complete monopoly." He was still trying to be reasonable.
"Shouldn't you be concerned about their monopolistic practices instead of ours then?"
"Beijing Semiconductor is not under the jurisdiction of the SEC, Mr. Watson. You are." There was an edge in his voice now.
"Would you feel better if we negotiated a deal with the Taiwanese Technology Consortium?" I was baiting him now, trying to see how much he'd reveal.
He kept his voice carefully neutral. He was playing on the edge of his authority and wasn't going to let me push him over. "Processor chips are a strategically important market. I think we'd prefer it if an American company remained a player in the field."
"Dynacore, just for instance?" I almost laughed, enjoying myself as I called the tune he'd dance to.
"They are one potential candidate, yes."
"They are the only domestic processor-chip manufacturer left, aren't they?"
"I wouldn't know about that."
Time to stop playing around. I leaned forward, -putting some force behind my words. "Well, you should, Mr. Burbridge, because it's your job to understand the competitive environment we're discussing here, seeing as you're accusing us of anticompetitive practices. Let's not pretend this isn't about what it's about."
The velvet left his voice. "Let me be clear, Mr. Watson. You are exporting a key technology to a foreign power whose interests may not be in line with those of the American government. We are not comfortable with that and we will take whatever action is necessary to correct the problem. I hope that action is limited to this call, but it doesn't have to be."
"I thought the question of the legality of technology exports belonged to the Export Control Commission."
"Don't play games with me." The edge in his voice was getting dangerous.
"Then don't play them with me." I let my own voice get hard. In my position I'm not used to being pushed, and I don't respond well to it. "I recognize that William McCool is going to run for president, and I recognize that Dynacore is one of his major backers. And I am sure the current administration of the SEC, the ECC, the Pentagon and every other branch of our government would rather not see a Chinese or even an Australian corporation holding an exclusive license to the chip technology that's going to run the world in the next five years. However that sad fact is that due to three decades of short-sighted, if not actually blind mismanagement of this nation, the American economy has lost the manufacture of everything from consumer electronics to civil aircraft to Europe and the Pacific Rim. That's not the fault of Baker Technologies. Right now we have a legally binding agreement with Beijing Semiconductor, an agreement I might add that was approved by your department. In case 'legally binding' doesn't make sense down at the SEC, it means I couldn't change that even if I wanted to, so there is absolutely no point in your calling to pressure me to do so. If you'd like to see American technology stay in America then I suggest you call your pals in Congress and suggest they develop a few incentives for American innovators to stay home. I'd like to see a program to fund the commercialization of deep space myself." I leaned back and waited for the reaction.
"I'm sorry you're taking that attitude." He rang off, sounding frustrated, which I found satisfying. I put the phone down and spun around in my office chair, thinking over what to do next. I'd had fun taunting Burbridge, but the SEC was a serious threat. I needed a plan to address it. After a few minutes I called Julie and asked her to come in. Five minutes later she was there.
Julie is my wife, my friend, my partner in crime, a lissome figure with flowing scarlet hair and a razor-sharp mind behind big blue eyes. Her background is engineering, which makes a useful counterbalance to my strictly legalistic view of the world. I quickly outlined the details of my conversation with Burbridge.
"You actually hit him up for innovation incentives?" She laughed. We were one of the major forces behind the global market doctrine of deregulation that made it possible to develop products here and build them overseas where labor was cheap and annoying laws much scarcer.
"Just in case he was recording the conversation for posterity."
"So how serious do you think the threat is?"
"On the one hand, they're way out on a limb. Export controls really aren't their department, and we do have SEC signed off on this deal, as well as the export people and everyone else. The President actively supports increased trade with China, to reduce the chance of war on the Pacific Rim if nothing else. They'll be hard pressed to make it stick."
"And on the other hand?"
"It isn't that we can't beat them." Julie knew all about the asteroid mining plan of course. She knew I was going to ask Brian about the possibility of building the drive I needed. I told her about Straughn and the nine-billion-dollar performance bond I'd just agreed to. She listened attentively, pursed her lips as I finished.
"Bad timing."
"Very bad timing. If McCool does this it won't be on the SEC's authority, because they don't have it. He'll bring in the military, FBI, CIA, whoever he can get to play the National Security angle and have it taken extralegal."
"And we're going to need friends in government to get the approvals to get our ships launched, once we build them."
"Exactly."
She pursed her lips, thinking for a moment. "Call up Dynacore, tell them you'd like to explore some options with them."
"It would buy some time, but not much."
"At least give us time to develop a better -strategy."
"We really have nothing to negotiate with. We're contractually bound to Beijing Semiconductor. The SEC is getting heavy-handed for nothing." I drummed my fingers on the desk. The government is used to playing fast and loose with its own rules. It forgets that the rest of us are more constrained.
"So we'll use that as our back-out option. Maybe they'll come to their senses."
"Maybe. There's nothing else we can do." I pondered some more and remem
bered my experience driving back from Brian's. Maybe he was making me paranoid, maybe they really were out to get me. After Julie had left I called Mark Stuller, our head of security. Mark is British, ex-Parachute Regiment, ex-SAS, one time bodyguard to the Royal Family, veteran of a dozen or more secret non-wars, nasty little covert clashes that both sides deny ever happened. I set him on the task of finding out if anyone really was following me around, confident that if there was anything to find his team would find it.
The suspicion turned out to be self-fulfilling. My estate is guarded of course, and security at Baker Technologies is tight, but now there really was someone watching me everywhere I went. No matter where I went Stuller's countersurveillance team was there before I was, looking to see who came in after I did, recording license plate numbers, getting a feel for my movements, looking for individuals who were too alert, dressed too heavily, in too much of a hurry or not enough. After a week I was heartily sick of the whole operation, but I let it go on. They swept the estate for wireline taps, wireless taps, frequency hoppers, powerline modulators, burst transmitters, laser links, microwave flood resonators and every other piece of privacy invasion hardware right down for looking for cockroaches with microvocodor chips epoxied to their shells. After hours and in total silence they took my office apart down to the walls, swept it, installed Tempest-rated electromagnetic shielding—a high-priced version of Brian's chicken wire, isolated every line coming in or out and declared it secure. They had a body double take my car on long drives through back country lanes to drag any trackers through prepositioned checkpoints to positively identify them. They did a lot more that I'm sure I never knew about, and at the end of a month the results were negative.
Well, almost negative. There was the possibility that there had been someone following me in the first couple of days, but that had stopped immediately. There was a small but non-zero chance that whoever it was had picked up the countersurveillance and shut down their operation to avoid being busted. There was a car, a blue Ford. They had traced the registration, found it was a rental, traced the couple who had rented it to Alexandria, Virginia, found nothing unusual in their records but had been unable to find them, which was itself unusual. Stuller had bribed an employee at the rental company to hand over the vehicle's GPS satellite tracking records and found they were simply missing. Unusual again, but nothing was conclusive.
I racked my brain trying to remember the color and description of the vehicle that had driven by me coming back from Brian's, but I couldn't. I left the problem in Stuller's capable hands, authorizing him to use any means necessary to resolve the question, which meant he could break the law if he needed to so long as it never, ever came back to haunt either me or Baker Technologies. Julie and I had to fly the Lear out to Washington for a presidential gala, an opportunity to put in some influence to get a veto on a tax bill that would have cost me a billion dollars a year. I got some face time with the Man after the speeches, and in return for the tacit promise of a five-million-dollar campaign contribution I got the tacit promise of a veto on the bill. Nothing was said directly of course, because everything had to remain deniable. Quid pro quo at this level isn't guaranteed by contracts or even direct deals. It's a gentleman's club, and you stand or fall on your reputation for living up to agreements you never quite make.
While we were talking, my phone buzzed in my pocket annoyingly and I ignored it. POTUS and I had moved on to casual conversation, an excellent opportunity to develop an important lever of power. The issue of Dynacore and William McCool was pressing and rapidly coming to a head—we could only stall them through negotiation for so long, and that time was up. It was going to take some heavy-duty power play to put McCool back on the leash. The phone kept buzzing insistently and I grew concerned. Only a small and select group of people have that number, and all of them knew exactly where I was and what I was doing. If they were calling so persistently it must be something of critical importance. Disaster scenarios flashed through my mind unbidden as POTUS rambled aimlessly on about the situation in the Pacific and the role of Indonesia. Not a particularly smart man, our great leader, but he sure looks good on television.
Fortunately at that moment Julie came up and joined the conversation. I gave her a signal that meant "take over" and gave her a minute to catch his interest—not a hard job for a woman with the presence that she has. When she had him engaged I answered the phone.
It was Brian. "John! I've got it, I've got the launch solution!"
"That's great John—"
"Yah! Like I said, it was a materials problem, so I was thinking about metal foams at first, for strength, but then I realized—"
"Brian I'm with the President—"
"Cool! Tell him to fund more astronomy. There's a real need to understand cosmic rays at high energy. That's something else we have to address is shielding, but I solved that too, but I just mean academically—"
"Brian, I have to go!" Alan Dortmunder, the consumer products magnate, had spotted the opening and was heading to take my place in the conversation.
" . . . there are some incredible breakthroughs just waiting to happen."
I cut him off. "I'll be down tomorrow to see you, okay?" I clicked the phone shut. The President looked up from Julie's megavolt smile and saw Dortmunder.
"Alan! Good to see you." He shook hands with the newcomer. Face time was over. I ground my teeth.
There was no point in getting angry with Holmes of course. He was the way he was and it would be too much to expect him to either remember or care that I was talking with the President when he'd made a discovery he was excited about. He has a good point too—from his perspective he already has more money than he could ever spend, and far more power than he would ever know what to do with. What does he care about politicians? Still, I let Julie fly us home, I was too upset to be trusted at the controls. I wanted McCool and Dynacore flattened from a great height, and I'd missed my opportunity to make that happen by seconds.
Brian had made progress on the launch problem though, and that was important. Concentrated as I had been on the Dynacore situation I hadn't noticed time slipping by. Three months of the six I'd told Straughn the drive development would take had vanished and I hadn't noticed. I had to have a test ship in orbit in nine months or pay a nine-billion-dollar penalty. Viewed in that light, perhaps his call was more important than chitchat with the President.
I drove up to the Wild Oaks plantation the next day. When I pulled in next to the butchered VW van I found Holmes' entire house was covered by a chaotic framework of two-by-fours with chicken wire nailed over it, as though the mess in his lab had somehow overgrown his house. Pandora opened the house's beautiful solid-oak door for me and welcomed me in her sultry way, but I had to open the rickety chicken-wire door through the framework myself. I found Holmes in the kitchen, peering intently at a small video screen and wearing an oversized set of headphones.
"What's with the chicken wire? More big magnets?" I was half afraid he'd say yes.
He shook his head, not taking his eyes off the screen. "No, it's to block electromagnetic radiation. I don't want them listening to me or reading my computer screens, and I couldn't stay in the main lab all the time."
"Them? Who are 'them'?"
Holmes looked around furtively and lowered his voice. "The government! Didn't you hear the warnings on the road?"
I looked at him blankly, wondering if his mind had finally snapped. "You mean the voice in my car? 'Beware—the government is watching you'?"
He nodded. "Did you see the lines?"
"What lines?"
"In the pavement. I wondered if they might be too obvious."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"You saw the rig on the back of the van? That's a cutting laser. I record my voice and Pandora converts it into a series of lines, like a washboard pattern with variable spaces between the grooves. I load that pattern into the computer in the van and drive down the road at a set speed. The
hydraulics swings the laser back and forth as I drive and it cuts the line pattern into the road. The grooves make the tires of your car vibrate like a record player needle, and you hear my voice." He leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially. "I couldn't tell you last time because I didn't have the shields up then."
I blinked. "Brian, nobody is watching you. I just had Mark Stuller do an exhaustive clearance of my entire life because of that, and he found exactly nothing. Stop doing this stuff before I start thinking you're clinically paranoid. Or before you make me clinically paranoid."
"Oh no? Look at this." He showed me the video monitor. A grainy black and white image was jouncing up and down as the camera pursued a couple of people running through a peach orchard that could only be the back acreage of the Grafton plantation.
"Who are they?"
"They're FBI agents."
I ignored that. "Who's chasing them with the camera?"
"Pandora is. That's the camera on the garden bot."
Pandora broke in with her sultry dulcetto. "Brian, I have further remote units positioned to prevent them from escaping."
"Not yet, Pandora." Brian didn't look up from the screen. "We don't want to give away all our capabilities."
I looked aghast as the panicked couple fled through the orchard, trailing picnic supplies. "They're just out to enjoy the peaches and you're scaring them half to death." I felt a sinking feeling. I have always known that someday Brian would need hospitalization. A brain as brilliant as his simply can't be stable.
He shook his head. "They're FBI agents."
"Brian, you're starting to worry me. The FBI does not send people poking around in other people's back gardens. If they were watching the house they'd be doing it from a remote drone or a satellite. You'd be the last person to know." Of course it had to be now that his mind snapped, with a hundred-billion-dollar program, the key to my dream of world conquest, riding on his faculties. I could almost hear Fate laughing at me. Maybe if I got Stuller to set up a secure perimeter it would make him feel safe enough to concentrate on his work.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 24