Comet! (an Ell Donsaii story #5 ) (2 page)

Phil pulled her to him so she wouldn’t see his tears, “Hey yourself,” he said around the frog in his throat. “Thanks… from, from the bottom of my heart! I’ll expect a visit from my favorite ‘googly eyed girl’ sometime soon.”

“You bet!” Ell said and Phil let go, turned and climbed the stairs into the little jet.

Over on the patio Roger watched Ell saying goodbye to Phil with a crushing sense of loss.
It seemed inconceivable that
he could compete with the handsome ex-Olympic wrestler
for her affection
. Handsome,
and
an astronaut in training, Phil seemed to hold all the cards. Roger shook his head mournfully and turned back to the cooler to get himself another Guinness.

Reggae
music
gently throbbed over the patio at the big house as the sun set over the sea
. Ell was excited to see the people from D5R getting along
so
well
. A big group was
dancing. One of the local staff brought out a broom for a limbo contest and Ell gleefully joined in
,
purposefully losing to Sheila
with the stick still at
what
seemed
to her
a surprisingly high level.

Sheila danced around excitedly, “I beat an Olympic athlete!”

Ell held Sheila’s hand high and mugged for
peoples’
recordings. She looked around for Ro
ger, hoping to dance with him. At length s
he found him in a big chair overlooking the sea, asleep with an empty Guinness by his hand. She started to wake him, then with dismay noticed four more empty bottles under the chair.
I’ve never seen Roger drunk!
she thought,
I wonder what
’s
got
ten
into him?

In the morning Ell made her way back out to the patio where a
n
island breakfast
buffet
was
laid out
. Ell saw Sheila checking it over, “Hey Sheila, great job setting all this up!”

Sheila smiled, “
Evelyn, the lady that watches
the houses on the island
,
ha
s
a lot of experience setting up parties for the rich folks that
used to own the island
.
Pretty much all I have to do is give her some idea what you want and she brings in people and supplies from
nearby
islands to set stuff up.”

Ell filled a plate as she spoke, “Well she sounds great, but you’re doing a terrific job of lining up exactly what I want with
very
little effort on my part. It’s like you can read my mind!” Ell narrowed her eyes, “You can’t can you?”

Sheila laughed, “You’re just an open book!” She frowned
down at Ell’s plate
, “How many people are you feeding with that?!”

“Just me and my tapeworm.” Ell said
,
looking around. She saw Ben Stavos and Robert Braun sitting at the edge of the patio and headed that way. “Hey, guys. Can I sit with you? Or are you talking about really serious stuff
? You
look
like you’re discussing world affairs.
”

“Yeah, yeah, please sit down
!
We
are
talking serious stuff, but it’s stuff we want to talk to you about.”

Ell raised a questioning eyebrow as she sat.

Ben said, “D5R has agreed to license its tech to other space launch companies right?”

“Yeah, President Teller put on some pressure and the majority shareholders agreed to do so.”
Ell
felt weird talking about “majority shareholders” when she herself owned 9
6
% of the company. The
only
other shareholders were the employees who each got some shares when they were hired. But
,
she was determined to maintain the fiction that she was just a working girl with
a few
royalties from her patent for the
PGR
chips. She
desperately wanted
to keep anyone from finding out that the royalties amounted to billions of dollars per year
for fear that everyone would start treating her differently. She’d had a long talk with Steve from her security team about how
the team
sh
ould
fade into the background so
most
people wouldn’t even realize that she had guards following her around.
She smiled at Ben and Rob,
“You guys should be in line to get some kind of income stream from the licensing when it happens.”

Braun waved his hand dismissively. “The fees will be nice, but Ben and I want to
found
our own company and buy a license ourselves.”

“Really?! Cool!
What’s your company going to do?
”

“Cool,”
Ben thought,
it
isn’t
so hard to remember this genius is just a teenager
when
she says something like that! “
Rob and I want to capture an asteroid and
bring
it
back
to earth orbit for mining. We’re
really
hoping that the investors
who
funded D5R might be willing to provide start up funding
. Could you set us up a meeting?
”

Ell’s eyebrows rose, but she held up a finger
for a pause
because her mouth was full.

Rob looked at her heaped plate and wondered if she really thought she could eat all of that?
He glanced at Ben, wondering what the chances were that
the D5R investors would fund them. They seemed pretty loose with their cash, flying all the D5R employees to the island like this and giving them days off just so they could avoid hassles with the press.

Ell
swallowed
, “That’s great! What kind of asteroid are you going after?”

Rob said,
“That depends.
At first we were thinking of a comet or icy asteroid to supply orbital habitats. But with ports it’s cheaper to bring water
and air
up to orbit from Earth itself.
So
now
we’re thinking w
e’d like a metal rich asteroid. One of those should be loaded with precious metals
that would
improve the return on the investment.
And the iron could be used to build
space
habitat.
” He shrugged, “To tell the truth
we’d probably take any asteroid that didn’t mass too much and had
a trajectory
that could easily be modified to put it into
Earth orbit.
”

Ben put in, “No matter
what
the main content
of the asteroid is,
it’s thought
that most of them will
have plenty of metals in them. First thing is to
send little rockets
out there prospecting the ones
that could be reasonably captured with minimum delta V and
find out what they do have in them.”

Eyes wide, Ell swallowed, “Space miners! I like it. So you’d
bring
the precious metals
back down here to sell
and keep the cheaper stuff in space to build habitat?”

The guys nodded.

“Are you going to build habitat yourself or turn the materials over to someone else?”

Braun said, “I’d like to do it all! But I think first we’ve got to go after the raw materials. If that produces good cash flow, and no one else was building habitat, we’d start on that next.
”

Ell pointed a fork at them, “Aren’t you going to get hassled by the folks who think you might miscalculate and run that asteroid into the Earth?
Extinction of the human race
w
ould be a pretty big ‘my bad!’
”

Braun shrugged, “There’s always a lot of short sighted people out there. We’ll have to deal with it as we go along. We’ll
need
some PR people to help convince them that the benefits are worth the risk.”

Ell grinned her trademark crooked smile back and forth at them, “Those ‘short sighted people’ might be thinking that
they’re
taking the risks and you’re collecting the benefits?”

Indignantly Braun said, “The
entire
planet will benefit from the availability of
those kinds of
resources!”

Ell winked, “Might be hard for them to see that nebulous benefit?”

Ben exclaimed, “You’re the last person I would have thought wouldn’t
see
the
huge
upside to this!”

Ell grinned again, “Oh, don’t
worry;
I’m
on
your
side. I’m just pointing out that you might have a real uphill battle with the
‘
people
’
and the ‘powers that be.’”

Rob
sighed and tilted his head back to stare
at the clear sky
overhead
, “Yeah, we know it’s a problem. But I think if we get ahead of public opinion with a good PR company, we can control it.”

“Or?” Ell said, raising her eyebrows.

“Or what?”

“Or, you might just
use Ben’s macromanipulators to
do your mining
in situ
, then send that asteroid back here
through a port
a little bit at a time?”

Ben
squinched
his eyes
shut
, then slapped his forehead. “
Oh
Jeez
!
I can’t believe w
e
’ve been so focused on
details like
how to stop rotation and apply thrust
that we
forgot to
step back and
ask if there was an easier way!
”

Braun said, “
My God
! W
e
could
just port the better ores out of the asteroid,
to the orbit we want
,
without the risks of moving the whole thing
!
”

Ell said, “There will still be substantial challenges to building a robotic miner that can remove material from your asteroid in sizes that it can send home through a port. Especially if it’s going to continue
mining
for months and years. But I think it will still be easier to do
that than
move
the entire asteroid
.
A
nd
you
shouldn’t meet so much political back pressure.”

Excitedly Ben said, “Yeah, but that’s the kind of stuff we already have skills for. Do you think D5R
’
s investors would be interested?”

Ell grinned, “I do. If you guys will do a little prototyping and prospecting and get me a business plan to show them, I’m pretty sure they’ll go for it. Depends on how much money you think you’ll need of course.”

“Thanks!” the two men said at the same time, then bent their heads together to begin some enthusiastic planning.

Ell had almost finished eating when Vivian showed up with a big mug of coffee and a bagel. “Ell, have you talked to Fred yet?”

“Nope. What about?”

“Well, he and I and Brian are wanting to float an idea past you and see if you think D5R’s investors might be interested?”

Ell glanced at Ben and Rob to see if they’d noticed that they had competition for “D5R’s” investors
but they were so intent on their own conversation that she doubted they’d notice anything
quieter
than a gunshot. She turned back to Viv and saw that she was waving Fred and Brian over.

Sitting down next to Viv, Fred said, “What does she think?”

“I haven’t talked to her yet. I was just asking her if you’d
waved
our spark of genius
in front of
her yet.”

Ell said, “Well, come on! You’ve got me all curious now?”

Viv said, “We want to form a company to
make
the ports that everyone else
will use
when they license from D5R. The three of us each know different parts of the
port fabrication
e
lephant. We
think we could be really competitive.”