Disc (7 page)

“A spacesuit is supposed to have to fit really well.”

“Spacesuit! Really?! You’re gonna fit me for a spacesuit? Where are we going?”

She grinned at him, “
Now
you’re excited.”

“Duh! Of course I’m excited. Are you gonna tell me what you’ve got in mind?”

She shrugged, “Well, you said you wanted to be an astronaut, and I told my dad I didn’t want to turn the saucer over to NASA until I’d been to Mars
I’ve been to Mars
. I thought maybe we should stop at the moon on the way, what do you think?”

Nolan could practically feel the ecstatic expression stretching his face. “I think that’d be awesome!” He frowned, “Where are you going to get the spacesuits?”

“Don’t know, I haven’t worked that out yet. Maybe NASA?”

“I think that’d be good,” he said slowly. “But I don’t think we should try to just get one off the shelf and use it without any training. I’ll bet if you offered to take a couple of their astronauts along on the trip, they’d loan you the spacesuits and provide the training.” He paused for a moment, “I’d feel a lot better if we had some fully trained astronauts with us if we’re actually going to get out of the saucer into vacuum.”

“Good idea, why don’t you call Sophie and see if she can run interference for us?”

“Can I offer to tell NASA that she has to be one of the astronauts that goes with us?”

“Sure…”

***

Jong looked over the men who’d been assigned to him. They had all lived here in the United States for at least four years. Since there weren’t that many agents of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea present in the States, the number of them that had been assigned to him spoke to the importance the supreme leader had placed on this mission. Jong had received stern directions not to
waste
the agents assigned to him, but to let
nothing
stand between him and the capture of the Gettnors.

Speaking English to remind them of its importance to their mission, Jong addressed them, “We have several tasks we must complete to carry out this extremely important mission. First, we must capture Gettnor and his daughter—this is problematic because it seems the man rarely leaves his house. We must prepare plans to capture them
if
they leave the house, but we must also have a plan to break into their home and extract them. Next, our intelligence suggests that Gettnor himself is quite combative and resourceful. In order to overcome these issues we’ll need methods to control him quickly and sedate him during transport. Finally, we must arrange transportation out of the country. You will all review the information I have collected and
each
of you will come up with your
own
proposal for dealing with the three problems I’ve mentioned. We’ll mix and match those solutions to produce our final strategy...”

***

Fred Yount rapped on the door frame and said, “Mr. Anderson, you wanted to see me?” He felt a frisson of excitement and dread run over him. Being called before one of the founding partners of their venture capital firm could represent a great opportunity. On the other hand, there was always the possibility that he’d made a mistake somewhere and was being called on the carpet.

Anderson looked up, “Come in Fred, have you been following the news about this flying saucer everyone’s so excited about?”

“Um, no sir.” Fred turned his ignorance to a positive by blaming it on hard work. “I saw a little something, but we had a really busy day yesterday so I haven’t looked at it in detail.”

“Damn, Fred, you need to keep up. This is a
huge
technological advance! I suppose you’re not aware it was developed right here in the Triangle?” Seeing Fred shake his head, Anderson continued, “Yeah, they figured it out in the physics lab over at UNC, but it was actually built in Raleigh!” Anderson glanced at his screen, “From what I’ve read, it doesn’t sound like these guys are funded yet. I want you to figure out how we can network in so that
we’re
there when they need to be capitalized. If we’re the ones to bring
this
technology to market, it could make everyone at Axel rich!”

“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.”