Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (11 page)

The President interrupted.  “Enough, Professor.”

“Yes, sir,” she didn’t sound very contrite.

“Captain Gilly, I believe you have something to say.”

Captain Gilly actually stood, which no one had done for a while.  “Mr. President, a young lieutenant on my staff came up to me over the weekend.  He’d been reading Professor Kinsella’s proposal and remembered something he’d read long ago.  He found a story in a science fiction magazine, sir, and brought it to my attention.  I know, I know, you have to consider the source.  Not to mention the story was written in the sixties.  In the story the Danes discovered a space drive...  You have to remember that this was before Apollo landed on the moon.

“In order to beat the Americans to the moon, the Danes couldn’t wait to build a proper spaceship so they got the idea to use a surplus World War II submarine.  In the story it worked — mostly.

“The question we face is two-fold, and we’ve already heard the answer to the first part: there is nothing theoretically difficult about achieving the mission Professor Kinsella has described.  I can't believe there is any serious objection as to whether or not it should be done.

“The question then becomes, how do we want to go about it?  Is the project so urgent we should use any means necessary to achieve it?  Why would the project be urgent?  What are the risks?  There are a thousand questions that a project like this has to address.”

Stephanie interrupted.  “Mr. President, I beg your leave and Captain Gilly’s pardon for breaking in.”

“Go ahead, Professor,” the President told her.

“Sir, a few months ago the Space Shuttle
Discovery
overran the runway at Cape Canaveral and damaged its landing gear.  With only two shuttles remaining in the NASA fleet, and both of them scheduled to be withdrawn from service within a year, the resupply missions to the International Space Station have once again fallen almost exclusively on the Russians.  The Russians are now charging market prices for their launches and the only way NASA can afford them is to kill more scientific missions to the solar system.”

Stephanie turned to Anna, “A copy of the other proposal, please.”

Anna dipped down and put the half-inch stack of paper in front of Stephanie.

“Mr. President, I have here another proposal.  Only this time, I want to add a personal element.  I personally wish to contract with the United States to provide limited support and crew replacement on the ISS.  I’ve heard from Lockheed and they are working on a heavy supply vessel for low earth orbit; they say six months before it’s ready.

“My proposal, sir, is to fit a half dozen Gulfstream aircraft with docking adaptors for the ISS, as well as provide them with Benko-Chang turbines.  Each vehicle would be able to carry from six to ten passengers to orbit, plus a couple of tons of cargo.  I would be willing to commit to keeping one of these vehicles in orbit as a rescue vessel.

“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, every 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.