Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (7 page)

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.

“I would like to amend the captain’s suggestion.  I already have a concept.  I will propose it in general terms; it’s mine, do you understand?  You can’t have it.  If Lockheed tries to do anything along the lines I suggest, it will be ugly.  Don’t do it.  On the other hand, I also have another concept that you’re welcome to, and it is in line with much of what you’ve done in the past.”

Stephanie knew all eyes were on her.  The only eyes she cared about were Brian Taverner’s.

“We live and die as a company, Professor, based on our intellectual property rights.  We won’t infringe on yours.”

“Fine.  Then, I’ll start.  The background for both concepts is identical.”  Stephanie looked around at those at the table before starting.

“As the Apollo moon landings were winding down, NASA began to consider what should be next.  They had built up an enormous stock of goodwill; they essentially had a blank check.  They cashed that check and called it the Space Shuttle.

“As a concept, the shuttle was a fine plan.  A space pickup truck.  In practice, it was like the pickup truck that Travis McGee drove — a Rolls Royce, with the rear end chopped off and made into a pickup bed.  A little extravagant, but it worked as a pickup truck.

“The problem NASA faced with their space pickup truck was that there wasn’t anything for it to do.  There were really no suitable missions.  Deep probes into the solar system needed large boosters and were large themselves — they didn’t fit in the shuttle.  Modern commercial communications satellites were also too large to fit inside the shuttle.

“NASA pushed ahead, anyway.  They started work on a space station design.  Most of the parts for the station were designed to go to orbit aboard the shuttle.

“Then
Challenger
died and, with it, America’s space flight innocence.  The public asked why those people died. 
Challenger
was on a science mission, but was also tasked to carry a NASA comsat into orbit.  True, the satellite had nothing to do with the accident or the deaths, but it was there.

“The International Space Station became impractical the moment
Challenger
exploded.  No large station crew was going to be permitted to be in space without a way back.  A shuttle cost too much to station permanently in orbit and there was considerable doubt a shuttle could stay aloft six months and safely return.

“Then
Columbia
died.  Again, irony.  It wasn’t tasked to the ISS, just science.  A space shuttle and crew died after engaging in what amounted to high school science fair projects.”

The room was silent; there were more than a few hostile glares.

“And now we come to today.  We have a shuttle fleet of three that NASA is hypersensitive about.  They won’t launch when there is frost on the lily or a cloud in the sky.  Launch windows are now tightly constrained so that down-range stations can visually examine a shuttle even before it reaches orbit.  They micromanage everything even more than before.  The launch crew has grown to nearly sixty thousand individuals.  Oh, and we’ve now had three shuttle launches in the last year, up from two in each of the three previous years.

“The bottom line is that it costs almost six hundred million dollars to send a can of soup to the ISS.  Oh, you can get quite a few cans of soup and many other things, but conceptually, that’s what the shuttle does these days.  It flies crews and supplies to orbit for more than a half billion dollars per flight.

“The Shuttle was due to be retired year before last, but they couldn't because the follow-on vehicle remains drawings on paper and few prototypes that don’t fly.  Now it's two years later and the replacement still isn't close to being ready.