“Yes sir! I’m assuming you want me to prioritize this over my division’s other assignments?”
“Hell yes I do. I’m putting this ball in your court because you grew up here in Raleigh. Research it. I’m hoping you know some of the players. If it looks at all promising, we’ll have you shift the Allen project to Callaway. I hope I don’t have to tell you that success here could take this company to the next level. We might not even be big enough to fund this startup, but don’t let that scare you. I’ll recruit some VC partners if we need a bigger bankroll. In the next few hours I’m counting on you to figure out whether we have any way to get traction with the inventors. Figure you can call on any resource in the company to make it happen. Drop everything else, evaluate the situation and get back to me ASAP with what you learn.”
Fred headed back to his office, ecstatic that Anderson had put him in charge of what could be the most important project the company had ever had. I need to spend just a little time going over the news feeds to bring myself up to speed on this saucer. Then we’ll have a division meeting to get everyone working on it.
Fred stopped at his assistant’s desk, “Terry,” he said glancing out at the cubicles where his team sat, “we’ll need to have a team meeting in,” he glanced up at the time window in his AI’s viewscreen, “fifteen minutes. Call it for noon in the little conference room.”
Terry winced a little, “The team was going to Bixby’s for a morale builder lunch. Could we shoot for 1 o’clock?”
“Hell no! This is important! If these slackers prioritize going out to lunch over doing business they’re all gonna be out on their asses! That reminds me,” he said, looking out over the cubicles again, “where the hell is Dante Gettnor?!
“Um,” Terry said nervously, “he called in to take some personal leave.”
“I know! He called me directly and I told him to get his ass in here!”
“Yeah, he told me that. But he said to let you know he just couldn’t be here today.”
“On this day of all days! The company has its biggest opportunity since it was founded, we need everybody on board, but it’s Thursday and Gettnor’s working on a four day weekend! Call up HR, tell them that little prick is so fired,” Yount said furiously as he turned and stormed into his office.
Yount scanned the CNN report about the saucer on the big screen in his office. Appalled, he realized that the first news of this had broken on Wednesday. He was two days behind the curve! Those initial reports had come from Houston when the saucer landed unexpectedly at the NASA facility there. He scanned a summary of the press conference. Like Anderson had said, the technology had been invented at UNC, but apparently the working model of the saucer had been built here in Raleigh.
Excitedly, Fred realized that the working model hadn’t been built by some major aerospace company. From what he could tell, parts of it had been contracted out to Costa and Sons, a company Fred knew did prototyping for industry. He couldn’t find anything about financing, which must have been considerable since it was apparently powered by one of the new GE fusion plants. Do they already have backers? he wondered. Even if they do, hopefully those backers don’t have the kind of oomph it’ll take to industrialize a major new technology like this.
Next Fred started scanning for names, hoping some of the players in this venture might be people with whom he had some kind of association. The Yount family was very well-connected, and since Fred had entered the VC industry he’d worked assiduously to network with anyone important, as well as anyone who might become important. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, he thought to himself. Oh, he thought excitedly when he saw that there’d been a press conference at UNC, Chancellor Carver! Fred was pretty sure that one of his uncles knew the Chancellor. Haven’t heard of this physics professor, Eisner. Some of Eisner’s students were involved too. Let’s see, a Nolan Marlowe and a Tiona Gettnor. From what he saw, the students had actually made one or more discoveries that were critical to the technology.
Both names sounded a little familiar to him, but Fred thought “Marlowe” only sounded familiar because his dad played golf with a guy named Bob Marlowe. Gettnor, of course, sounded familiar because it was the same last name as the lazy SOB he’d just fired…
Ice water suddenly poured through Fred’s veins. He swallowed, Gettnor doesn’t sound like a very common name. Distantly, Fred heard his own voice trembling as he asked his AI to pull up info on Tiona Gettnor.
A summary page came up on the big screen. Absently, Fred noted that the young woman looked smoking hot in the NASA jumpsuit she wore at the press conference. His eyes slid lower on the page, Parents: Vaz and Lisanne Gettnor, Yount’s sphincters clinched, Sibling: Dante Gettnor…
Anderson stuck his head in Fred’s door. He washed his hands together excitedly, “Yount! We’ve got an in! I just realized that one of the guys on your team is related to the girl that flew the saucer out to the asteroid!” Henderson glanced back over his shoulder, then turned back to Fred, “Name’s Dante Gettnor, where’s his desk?”
Acid roiled in Fred’s stomach as he stood on trembling knees, “Called in sick today. Probably all caught up in the excitement.”
“Well, reach out to him man, see if we can get in on the ground floor!”
“Yes sir,” Fred said.
Anderson left and Fred’s assistant Terry leaned in the door, “The team’s waiting in the conference room Boss.”
Fred closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and looked at Terry, “You haven’t talked to HR about Gettnor yet, have you?”
“Yes sir. As soon as you told me to.”
Hoping he didn’t sound desperate, Fred said, “Call them back. Tell them I overreacted and not to do anything.” When Terry just looked at him uncomprehendingly, he barked, “Now!”
Terry vanished. Fred pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and headed for the conference room…
***
Dante and Tiona met for lunch in downtown Raleigh so that Dante could get more up to speed on the saucers before he fully committed. As they waited to be seated, Tiona winked at Dante, “You keeping the receipt for this lunch?”
Dante purposefully widened his eyes, “You aren’t buying?”
“I am but a jobless college graduate. Surely you’re going to feed me lunch?”
“A jobless college graduate who’s due a big royalty stream from her new invention!” he said, trying to look appalled.
“Surely you’re going to deduct this lunch as a business expense as soon as you found this new company of yours?”
Dante rolled his eyes, “Okay, okay, I’ll buy you lunch, but it’s really irritating how you science people have one good idea and then expect to suck at the corporate teat for the rest of your lives.”
The siblings grinned at each other as they sat and ordered. They went over what the prototype saucers had cost. Dante was astonished to realize that the first one, the one which had flown out to Kadoma and rescued the two astronauts, had only cost 10 million dollars, even being built as a rush job. A small corporate jet cost 30-80 million dollars! A single unmanned launch to orbit cost $50 million! The 50 meter saucer had been estimated at $90 million by Costa and Sons while new jetliners were costing 250 million plus. “My God, Tiona can these figures be right? We can’t really build spacecraft for less than a tenth of what an airplane costs can we?”
“Hmmm, and here I thought they were pretty expensive. I hadn’t compared them to products already on the market.” She tilted her head, “Though, these are pretty rough. Well, not ‘rough,’ that’s not the word I’m looking for. I guess I mean that they’re not polished specimens of a designer’s art. If you’re going to build passenger ships to compete with the big airlines, you’ll probably need to spend some bucks making them look pretty. Comfortable seats, food service, etc.”
“Hah! I did some research. Did you know that a flight from New York to Perth with a single connection takes 24 hours?! And you’re saying we can do it in about
an hour?! Hell there won’t even be time for food service!”
Tiona shrugged, “It’s still going to be a lot more expensive than what we’re building right now. These prototypes probably don’t comply with all kinds of federal aviation regulations. There’ll probably be hell to pay getting them certified. The airline industry is going to be bucking you every step of the way. You might have a lot less of a fight if you leased saucers to the carriers. They’ve already got the infrastructure to run the flights. At least at first, jets will still fly people to hubs where saucers will take them sub orbital to the truly distant destinations.”
“OMG!” Dante grinned at her, “You just called them saucers!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m acquiescing to the fact that you philistines are going to call them saucers no matter what.”
Dante gave a little frown, “What do you mean, ‘at least at first?’ You explained last night that the big differences are with long flights where you can get suborbital. It’s not all that much better to fly a saucer on short flights since they’d need to go through the atmosphere, right?”
Tiona shrugged, “Flying them in the saucer would be better for the planet than flying them in a jet, if for no other reason than that you wouldn’t be burning any fossil fuels. But, as a businessman, it’d once again be better because you won’t be burning expensive jet fuel. Power from a fusion plant is way cheaper, but it can’t push a jet.” She got a distant look in her eyes, “wait a minute. For short flights you’d like an aerodynamic shape for your craft since it won’t be getting outside the atmosphere. I’ll bet you could take existing commercial jets and remove the engines. Put thrusters in the back of the main cabin and in the engine nacelles and keep flying the jet bodies using a fusion plant for power. Cheaper, less pollution… and less industrial waste because you’d be reusing/recycling.”
Dante stared at her, “Freakin’-A,” he whispered, “it isn’t just going to be the airlines that hate us; aircraft manufacturers are goin’ to hate us too.”
Tiona eyed him, “Just like you may want to lease saucers to the existing airlines, you might want to have them manufactured by Boeing and its competitors.”
Dante gave her a sour look, “You’re talking about spoiling all my fun. How am I going to go into the business of world domination if I let other people play in my sandbox?”
She lifted an eyebrow, “You go into the business of solar system domination. You build the spaceships, the space stations, the hotels on the moon and Mars, and found Interplanetary Spacelines. Leave the world to the peons.”
Dante broke into a full belly laugh, “I’ll never again accuse you of thinking small!”
Dante paused at a chime from his AI, “You’ve got a call from the HR department at Axel VC.”
“I’ll take it… Hello.”
“Mr. Gettnor?”
“Yes.”
“I’m calling from HR to let you know that you’ve been terminated from your position at Axel VC. You may come in tomorrow morning, any time after eight to pick up your personal effects. Stop at the security desk and someone will escort you to your desk.”
Dante gave a little giggle at the absurdity of it all, “Okay, I’ll try to make it.”
Tiona gave him a questioning look.
“You’re not gonna believe this…” He explained what was going on.
Tiona gave him a sly grin, “I’ve got a little idea for you…”
***
Sophie Bautista, Zack White, and Ralph Abbott were in another meeting with NASA brass. They’d been in one yesterday until Zack and Ralph had demanded that they be allowed to rest. They still hadn’t acclimatized to a full gravity field. Today the brass had started the meeting with a couple of stretchers in the room for the astronauts to lie down on.
Some of the questions they were being asked were so pointed that you might think the saucer was a problem rather than a salvation of the space program. “Ms. Bautista,” one of the men by the name of Jacobson asked, an edge in his voice, “I’d like to ask just what sorts of navigational aids and orbital computational hardware and software was available on this… this, ‘spacecraft?’”
“Um, Dr. Gettnor uploaded Kadoma’s orbit to the saucer’s AI, so we knew where we were trying to go. He said that near Earth the AI used GPS data to determine the position of the saucer. He told us that once we were far enough out that we couldn’t use GPS anymore, the saucer’s AI could compute position fairly accurately from the position of the stars and planets in its cameras. It also computed position from the distance signal transmitted by NASA’s Space-NAV satellite in combination with x-ray signals from several pulsars. As I understand it, it piggybacked onto ‘X-NAV.’”
“An AI? Are you saying that it was just a commercially-available high-end computer with AI software installed on it?”
“Um, yes sir, I believe so.”
Jacobson sounded aghast. “Not radiation hardened?! Surely you know that commercially available high-end electronic equipment has a significantly shortened lifespan in the radiation environment out there?”
“Um, yes sir, but the saucer goes fast enough that we wouldn’t be out there very long. Besides, the AI is redundant.”
Jacobson blinked, “Redundant?”
“Yes sir, there are two more AIs on board in case one fails.”
He rolled his eyes, “Also standard, commercially-available I suppose.”
“I expect so sir.”
“So, without any more thought than that, you set off into deep space in a home built spacecraft, using a commercially-available AI for navigation?! Have you any idea of the kind of precision navigation and orbital calculation that’s required to reach an asteroid?!”
“Um, yes sir, I am a couple of years into astronaut training after all, but I must point out some…”
The man interrupted, “You put the lives of yourself, two civilians, and astronauts Abbot and White at risk! Going out in untested equipment and navigating practically by the seat of your pants!”
“Um, excuse me,” Ralph Abbott said, “I’d like to point out that Zack and I were essentially dead if she didn’t come after us. She hardly put our lives at risk.”
“She could have come to us for authorization of this flight. We could have done some testing of the craft, then placed experienced astronauts on board with proper navigation equipment!”
Zack White raised himself onto one elbow, “If you’ve heard the real, ‘non-official’ story about why they flew the mission, you’d know they’d tried to talk to people here at NASA, but got blown off. Besides, if she’d tried to run it through official channels, we’d have been dead before you assholes untwisted your shorts!”
“Mr. White,” Jacobson said shaking his head patiently, “I know you’re distraught after the experience you’ve been through, but you must realize that what she did was exceedingly dangerous. It’s incredibly lucky she actually managed a transfer orbit with such primitive equipment!”
Sophie’d had enough, “I’d like to point out that we could have flown there by the seat of our pants!” She pointed a finger at Jacobson, “You’re stuck in the old frame of reference where there’s no fuel to spare, where a perfect transfer orbit is necessary to even have a chance. That saucer had so much power that we could just drive around out there looking for Kadoma, as long as we had some vague idea where to look.”
“What if you hadn’t found it?!”
“Well then, we could’ve just flown back to earth and asked for directions!” Her eyes flashed, “With so much acceleration it’s more like going out in your car to look for a grocery store than it is any kind of high precision navigation and orbital transfer exercise.”
The man looked like he might have a stroke. He raised an admonishing finger, but then Sophie got a chime from her AI, “You have a call from Nolan Marlowe.” She raised a halting hand at Jacobson, saying “I’ll take it.”
Jacobson said, “You’ll tell whoever it is to call you back!”
Sophie r
aised an eyebrow at him as she said, “Hello Nolan, how’s the saucer? Did you get it home in one piece?” She knew that no one in NASA would want to antagonize the people with the saucers. Her nemesis did indeed shut up and look attentive.
In Sophie’s ear, Nolan laughed, “Hey Sophie. Yeah we got it home in one piece. I wanted to say thank you so much for all your help.”
“So what can I do for you guys?”
“Well, Tiona wants to take a trip to the moon and Mars before we turn the saucer over to NASA. We’d love for you to go with us. You think you could help us rustle up some spacesuits and a couple of experienced astronauts to keep us from making any dumb mistakes? We probably need training in the suits or something.”
A grin split Sophie’s face from ear to ear, “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, eyeing Jacobson. “Some people here at NASA can be pretty small minded and bureaucratic, but I’ll bet we can talk them into it… If not, I’m pretty sure we can find some retired astronauts to help. One of the guys I’m thinking of doesn’t like NASA’s vacuum suits and has been working on his own version. Can I get back to you?”
“Sure, anytime.”
“What was that about?” Jacobson asked suspiciously.
Sophie raised an eyebrow, “A moon mission… and a Mars mission. You think NASA wants to play a part in them?”
Zack barked a laugh, “You bet your ass they do. And Jacobson, if you don’t think NASA wants to be a part of it, we’ll just talk to somebody above your pay grade…”
***
Fred Yount’s AI said, “I have Ms. Tiona Gettnor on the line.”
Fred sighed in relief. He’d tried all afternoon yesterday and had been trying ever since he got in to work this morning to reach her or her brother. Neither one had responded to messages. Just a few minutes ago the big men themselves, managing partners Wallace and Anderson, had stopped by his office together to ask him if he’d met with Dante Gettnor yet. Unfortunately, all he could claim was that he was still working on it. He’d tried Tiona’s father, Vaz Gettnor, but Gettnor’s AI had only said that Fred should speak to Tiona or Dante. Fred had also tried Dr. Eisner and the other student on the project, a Nolan Marlowe, but their AIs had only taken messages while informing him that their owners were currently swamped with messages.
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