Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (6 page)

“Could we talk about your project proposal, Professor Kinsella?”

“Certainly, what would you like to know?  You’ve read the proposal?”

“Yes, I have.”  He reached up and fingered the gold chain on his right shoulder.  “Do you know what this is?”

“That indicates you are an aide-de-camp to the President of the United States,” the professor responded with alacrity. 

“My boss has read your proposal.  Obviously, several questions come immediately to mind.”

“Like how can this possibly be true?” Professor Kinsella agreed.  “I can’t imagine that the Washington science crowd was particularly enthused about it.  I’m sure they were only too happy to answer any and all questions — in the negative.”

John shook his head.  “This isn’t about them; this is about your proposal.”

“Did you read the math?  Did you understand it?”

“I read it; about half of it made sense.  I picked up some of the rest from context; it’s way out of my league.”

She laughed.  “Captain, nine out of ten graduate mathematicians top out about there.  I understand some of my professional peers went to visit your boss last week.”

“Yes, they were very persuasive.  I was surprised though that no one brought up the group of scientists that went to FDR before World War II to convince him of the importance of nuclear power and weapons.”

“I am, Captain, a prodigy in mathematics and physics.  Close to that in chess.  Of all of the things I’ve done to date, the one day-to-day thing that I feel I do best is teach.

“As a teacher, and, not so long ago, as a student, I’ve considered the value of homework.  I assign it, Captain, but I do not grade it.  I can tell fairly quickly after the first test, who’s done the work and understands and who has not.  The majority of my students are undergraduates, and not all of them are up to the task.”

She took, John thought, a rather long and round about way of saying, “I assume you did your homework.”  Was that because she was fond of waxing prolix?  Do you get to be a doctor of physics at sixteen and a full professor five years later by wasting time?  No, you don’t; in which case, there was something else in her words.

“I was wondering if I could trouble you for a tour of your facilities?” he asked.

“You want to see it work,” she said simply, and he nodded.

“That I can arrange.”  She smiled at him.  “Stan Benko and Johnny Chang keep the original apparatus up to snuff for visitors.”

John blinked again.  Those were the two who discovered this.  Yet, the entire project design was Professor Kinsella’s.  What function did those two play?

She finished his thought, as accurately as John’s wife could have.  “Benko and Chang are two amiable guys.  They are more intelligent than most people walking down the street; they are nearly incompetent theoretical physicists.”

John stared at her, sure that he’d just taken delivery of another multi-tiered message.

She smiled.  “Captain, there are two main branches of physics, and a raft of sub-branches.  Theoretical and applied physics.”

John met her eyes.  “I understand your father majored in the latter at MIT,” John said, revealing a little of his homework results.

There was a trace of a smile on her face.  “Like Benko and Chang, my father’s true worth was in another field.  In his case, finance.  In their case — well, I hope they find direction soon.”

“How do incompetent physicists make such an important discovery?”  John asked.

“The same way a person off the street wins the lotto when they stop in at their local Circle K and buy a ticket.   Individually, a foolish choice, and a patent waste of money.  However, inevitably, someone wins.  Benko and Chang won, they got lucky.”

“We’re off message here,” John said, trying to faze her.

Stephanie shook her head.  “These days Benko and Chang have nothing more important on their daily docket than to insure the apparatus works for visiting firemen.”

John wasn’t sure what Benko and Chang had done to piss off Professor Kinsella, but they’d done it.  And she was, indeed, pissed.  “When can I see it?”

“Now’s good for me.  How about you?” she said, standing up.  “Oh, one thing.  Neither Stan nor Johnny ever get here much before eight.”

He followed her downstairs, across a bit of green space, into a hallway, then into a lab.  A girl in a white lab coat, older than Professor Kinsella, looked up.

“All set, Professor.”

“One minute, Peggy.”  The girl in the lab coat nodded in response to Stephanie Kinsella.

The professor gestured at a go-cart with what looked like a small gas turbine mounted on the frame.  “I remind all visitors of the basics: that we will be running the turbine at ninety percent of max power.  That gives a MTBF, mean-time-between-failure, of roughly a thousand years.”

He looked at it, and then at her.  “You use this as a wimp detector as well?”

“Actually, I’m more interested in finding out who doesn’t have a clue what ‘failure’ would mean.”

She gestured a few feet away to a heavy wall, one that looked like something out of an x-ray lab that the technician steps behind to take an x-ray,  only heavier.

John watched the go-cart run around in circles for half an hour, but after five minutes it was gilding the lily.  He spent a few minutes checking the go-cart for obvious things like electric motors to move the wheels, even electrical cables or batteries that supplied the motive power.  There might have been, but he didn’t think so.

Two hours later Stan Benko and Johnny Chang appeared.  It was very weird.  Even though they’d been told he’d seen the demonstration, Stan Benko repeated everything John had seen earlier.

The Navy captain grew steadily more frustrated.  Worse, Stephanie Kinsella stood at his elbow, a bright grin on her face.

Finally, he could take it no more.  He held up his hand and Stan Benko stopped in mid-spiel, like a tape-recorder put on pause.  “Mr. Benko, what is it that you’ve done to piss off Professor Kinsella?”

Evidently that wasn’t in the universe of expected questions.  His mouth opened to start speaking, but no words came out.

Johnny Chang spoke first.  “Professor Kinsella has been very helpful.  She’s worked with us on the paper we’re going to submit — punctuation and grammar, which neither of us does well, and she’s helped us with the University lawyers, on the patent applications.”

There was a moment of silence in the room.  John was aware that one of Professor Kinsella’s grad students was stifling laughter.  There was an awkward pause.  Evidently no one wanted to go there.

“It is, Captain, rather simple,” Professor Kinsella said, breaking the silence.  “Mr. Benko, could I please borrow your wallet?”

John Gilly saw the confusion on the young man’s face.  Still, Stan Benko pulled out his wallet and proffered it to the professor.  She opened it, flipped through some loose papers and pulled two pieces of cardboard from it and handed them to Captain Gilly.

Lottery tickets.  His eyebrows furrowed, and then comprehension dawned.  The tickets had yesterday’s date on them.

He nearly dropped the tickets in stunned shock.  Without a word he handed them back to Stephanie Kinsella.  She put them back in the wallet and returned it to Stan Benko.

Frustration tinged Stan’s voice.  “What?  Look, my wife works two jobs.  Being a grad assistant doesn’t even pay enough to eat on!  We sweat for what we have!  Don’t you dare make fun of our dreams!”

John Gilly met Professor Kinsella’s eyes.  The message was as clear as if it had been written in letters a foot tall, blazing in fire.  It takes very little imagination to buy a lottery ticket.

“Well, how would you like to take a little trip, courtesy of the United States, Mr. Benko?  The President of the United States would like the pleasure of your company at a meeting in Washington, DC next Monday.  We would pay your expenses and a per diem.  You too, Mr. Chang, plus we’ll pay for any immediate family members to accompany you, although they won’t be at the meeting.”

“Trina works, she can’t get off,” Stan said.

John Gilly smiled.  “If the President of the United States called her employer and asked on her behalf, do you suppose they might give her the time off?”

Stan nodded, obviously stunned.

“Good!  Get me the phone number by the end of the day, and he’ll make the calls in the next couple of days.  Obviously, I don’t dictate his schedule.  Plan on a Saturday morning departure.”

Johnny Chang spoke up.  “There’s just me.”

“No problem,” John told him.

He turned to Stephanie.  “You, of course, are also invited, plus your grad students and their immediate family members.”

“There’s just the three of us,” Stephanie told him.  “We’re ready to go as needed.”

“Good.”

He paused and looked at Johnny Chang.  “Mr. Chang, could you assuage my curiosity?  You talked about patents.  How are the rights to those patents to be divided?”

The young man grinned.  “Caltech has a program of encouraging researchers to file patents on their work.  They usually split the proceeds 50-50, but since it’s Stan and me, we’ll split half.  They also gave Professor Kinsella ten percent from their part.”

“The lawyers came in and watched Stan and Johnny’s demonstration,” Professor Kinsella said, a wicked gleam of humor in her eyes.  “They didn’t have any trouble giving me ten percent from the University’s portion of the pie.”

It took twenty-five years of professional training for Captain Gilly not to break out in laughter.  Then he sobered up.  She was letting people run around in circles and jump off cliffs because they were too stupid to figure out what was going on.  Not to mention they were lacking in imagination!

The clear inference was don’t go there!

Later that afternoon he was sitting at the desk in his hotel room and dialed the cell phone.  “Howie?” John asked.

“You expecting the tooth fairy?” the familiar voice said.

“Just checking.  Sir, it’s real.”

“And?”

“And sir, Professor Kinsella isn’t your garden variety of professor.  She plays a very deep game.  She has her own agenda.”

“I read the report, Captain,” the President was acerbic.

“Yes, sir.  I know.”  He explained what he’d seen.

The President was silent for a moment.  “So, a player?”

“Sir, she could be a chess grand master if she wanted to spend the time.  She’s used to thinking rings around the opposition.  We’re going to want to be careful around her, sir.”

“Do you trust her?”

“Yes, sir.  But, like I said, she has her own agenda and she’ll go with us, so long as we’re helping her.”

“And that’s something unusual in this town?”

“No, sir, but I get the distinct impression it’s not the way things are done here.”

“Well, if she wants to run with the big dogs, she might have a surprise or two in store for her.”

John Gilly broke the connection.  Obviously, when you’re president, you exude confidence.  He had a terrible feeling that Stephanie Kinsella knew exactly what a snake pit Washington was and was fully prepared to deal with it.

Without a second thought, he hit redial on the phone.

“Oh ye of little faith!” the President said, before John could say anything.

“Actually, I’m hoping you have as much as I do.  I’d like to take her to Lockheed Thursday.  The ‘Skunk Works.’”

The President laughed.  “We shut that down years ago!  And what would be the point of the visit?”

“The topic of interest.”

“I always thought we fly-boys had more balls than brains.  Explain.”

“For Professor Kinsella, it will be a trip to heaven.  For Lockheed, a first look at something that, if it’s real, will get them salivating and solidly on your side.”

“That would be good.  Sure, go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, I have some questions I’d like to ask her.  Take this down on the computer, Captain.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”  He listened very closely to the questions he was supposed to ask.

Chapter 4 — Heaven

Captain Gilly gestured at the helicopter waiting for them, its rotors turning slowly.  “Have you ever ridden one of these before?”

“All the time,” Stephanie told him with a grin.

“Well, it’ll be a short flight,” he told her as they boarded.

“Captain, you can be as mysterious as you want.  I hate waiting.  I don’t like holidays like Christmas; I don’t like anniversaries or birthdays.  If I’m going to get a present, I want to know what it is now; I’ve never been fond of artificial delays.  I think I got that when I was a kid, watching some space launch and they said something about a ‘planned hold.’  They lost me right there.  That’s just PR fluff.  You figure the nominal time, factor that in your countdown, and at the critical time, if it’s not ready, then you hold.”

“It’s a difference in approach,” he told her, keeping his voice mild.

“Well, we’re approaching Burbank.  Are we going to Lockheed?”

“Yes,” he said, deciding not to bother trying to dissemble further.

“Cool!  I’ve always wanted to see what they’re doing.”

“They might be interested in what you’re doing, too,” he told her.

She give him a big grin.  “Would that be telling?”

“I don’t think so.  You’ve applied for a patent, right?”

“Well, not me personally.  Caltech has, Benko and Chang have.”

“Tell me, Professor, will Benko freak if I do that wallet stunt on him in front of the President?”

“I doubt it.  He thinks it’s a rich person/peon issue.  He thinks that I look down on him because he’s poor.”

“Do you?”

“What he does with his life is his business, as what I do with mine is mine.  If he wants to trade half of a can of baby formula for lottery tickets that will never amount to more than icing on a very large cake, no matter how much he wins, that’s his choice.”

“You don’t hold him in very high regard.”

“I’m a physicist, not a map-maker.  He needs a road map to find the way to the bathroom.”

“You’re critical of him because he’s not imaginative?”

“Heavens no!  Few people are.  Most people, though, would cheerfully admit they don’t have a creative bone in their body.  He doesn’t have a clue that there’s nothing in the cupboard.”

“And Johnny Chang?”

“His imagination is limited to the horizon.  His father owns a successful real estate and construction business in Singapore, and Johnny has been spending a lot of money talking to him.  He has, I believe the phrase is, ‘lawyered up.’”

“And you, have you done the same thing?” John Gilly asked.

She grinned.  “The first day, I called the best patent attorney in the country, and on the second I was sounding out the faculty patent committee about alternatives.  Our department head hates my guts and he ran the application around to a couple of his cronies.  Ditto Benko and Chang’s paper, for peer review.  As a result I know they didn’t understand it entirely and didn’t understand the implications, or just didn’t care.

“The papers came back marked as technically adequate, and they estimated the license fees from the patent at about a half million dollars a year, ten years out.”

Captain Gilly started coughing.  “And you didn’t tell them that they were wrong?”

“They are full professors of physics and most of them have been since before I was born.  If I tried to tell them the time of day, they’d have dismissed it unless they could check it for themselves.”

He shook his head as the helicopter was coming in to land in front of a large set of hangers to one side of Burbank airport.

“What can I tell these people?  I don’t want to step on any toes back at your home office,” Stephanie asked the naval officer.

“The project proposal you have submitted is secret.  After the meeting next Monday, expect it to be leaked six ways from Sunday, although the leaks will start Wednesday.  This President, like Bush the Second, is big on making sure no one leaks before he says they can leak.  And of course, anyone who leaks before next Wednesday is going to be wasting his or her breath because every eye on the country is going to be on the election results.

“The patent and the paper are all fair game.”

“I can’t talk about the paper,” she told him.  “I’m a third author, and until it’s either rejected or published, it’s embargoed.”

“When will you know about that?”

“We suggested referees to ‘Science.’  Since that list was a Who’s-Who of modern theoretical physics, the editor called up a couple of them who salivated at the chance to review the paper.  They just want to see if there’s any new work, so their own teams can take advantage of it.  It’s the hottest research topic in the country right now.”

Captain Gilly got out of the aircraft and held the door open for Professor Kinsella, then waved towards the closest building.  “I assume then, since Benko and Chang wrote the paper, there’s nothing much beyond what they’ve seen before.”

“You’d be surprised what physicists can see even in a minor little factor out on the end of a long equation.  The relativistic effects on Mercury’s orbit, for instance.  Accurate measurements of Mercury’s orbit were the first observational evidence that Einstein was right and Newton was incomplete.”

Two men in suits waited for them, and there were introductions and handshakes.

“I must say, Captain Gilly, we don’t get many requests like the one we got yesterday.  Some of our people are still a little stunned,” the head suit said.

“The President wants Professor Kinsella to see the true state of the art in aerospace engineering.”

“Well, considering who asked, we’re quite prepared to show off what we’ve done.  We don’t get many chances to do it, you understand, and there’s a certain amount of pride and eagerness to talk about it when we can.”

They went in the building, received security badges and then were escorted through several doors, through progressively tighter security.

Finally they were in a gallery above a hangar.  Beneath them was a gleaming white aircraft that was very long, perhaps two hundred feet.  There were tiny wings, swept back.

“This is the XA-4,” the lead suit said.  “That’s XA for Extra-atmospheric.  It has several modes of operation, but now mostly we let it take off on its own power, then it flies up to 40,000 feet, tanks and then she goes on from there to orbit.  It has a crew of two and can carry two payload specialists.

“When
Columbia
went down, we were devastated; everyone in manned flight was.  If we’d have known about the damage, we have the capability of launching the XA-4 on two days notice.  We have the capability of a quick launch of a fuel supply rocket.  The XA-4 could have gone up, mated with the
Columbia
, taken off three people, flown them to the ISS, and then repeated until everyone was off.  Four or five days and they’d have been safe on the ISS.”

John Gilly whistled.  “So that’s why NASA ignored most of the repair requirements of the
Columbia
accident report!  They knew they could count on you guys in a pinch.”

The suit nodded soberly.

Stephanie waved at the aircraft.  “How much did it cost?”

The suit looked uncomfortable.  “I’d rather not say.”

Captain Gilly smiled.  “It’ll take me one phone call to the White House.  The Man will call the Air Force Chief of Staff and tell him to get it done.  The Chief of Staff will call your liaison and the next thing you’ll know you’ll be called away from here and told to do it... and you’ll have wasted an hour of everyone's time.”

“Well, you understand that accounting on projects like this is murky?  Let’s take the simplest case.  If we wanted to build a second one, we just quoted a price of two and a half billion dollars to the Air Force.  This vehicle was about four billion, give or take, but that includes a lot of the development costs.  The overall XA project budget has run to about ten billion over the years.”

John Gilly saw the predatory gleam in Stephanie Kinsella’s eyes.

“Tell me,” she asked the suit, “there are two ways to run a tour like this.  Start with something other than the best, saving the best for last, or starting with the best, and letting the gosh-wow types down gently after that.”

“As per the request, we started with the best,” he told Stephanie.

“Then let’s save everyone a lot of time,” Stephanie replied.  “I don’t suppose you have a dozen or two aerospace engineers that I could borrow for the rest of the day?”

John Gilly guffawed; the corporate suit smiled politely.

“We laid on something like that for this afternoon.  We have a conference room reserved for later.  I don’t think that we could justify that kind of interruption to work schedules just now for what you ask.”

“Humor her,” Captain Gilly told him.  “Think about this: consider it gathering some goodwill with the President of the United States.  Because, barring a miracle, the government is going to cancel just about every project you currently have going on here, including the XA project.  Maybe a week, maybe two, is all you have left.”

“And any time your people spend working on their current projects would have been better spent on something else,” Stephanie added.

A half dozen satellites appeared, trailing a single man who headed towards them.  The man in front was wearing a tweed jacket, not a suit coat; he had no tie, and Stephanie was sure that it was a pipe she saw sticking out of his jacket pocket.

“Professor Kinsella,” the newcomer said, extending his hand to Stephanie, “I’m Brian Taverner, the Engineering Department head.”

“Stephanie Kinsella, sir,” she replied shaking his hand.

“Just call me Brian.  Have my people been treating you right?”

“Fine, sir.  I’d like to get together a meeting of some of your best engineers,” Stephanie told him, “but there is some concern about work schedules.”

Brian Taverner turned to one of his minions.  “Go get Conference A set up.  Three dozen chairs.  Tell Sherrie to get some lunch in.  Chinese, some pizza, that kind of stuff.”  That man hurried off and Taverner turned to another.  “Tell Earl and Bernard I want to see them and the best half dozen idea guys they’ve got in A, right away.  Nothing’s more important.”

“Yes, sir!” And he too was gone.

“Sir,” the suit Stephanie and Captain Gilly had been with spoke up, “Captain Gilly was intimating that the government is going to cancel all our aerospace contracts.”

“Yes.  Have one of your people get the dozen best and brightest from your shop, Steve.”

“Is it true?” the suit pressed.

“I had a call today from someone I know in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He asked me if I’d read any good patent applications lately.  I told him no, I have assistants who do that.  He told me to fire them and gave me a number.  I asked just what exactly what was he trying to say?  He said that the government had stopped playing around on the edges of space and was going into the wholesale side of the business.  If we didn’t move today, we’d be too late.

“I looked at that patent application myself, and there were four names: Caltech, Stan Benko, Johnny Chang and Dr. Stephanie Kinsella.  That was, I thought, a little curious, because they usually list things like doctorates, and they list the names by patent ownership participation.

“That patent application contained some very esoteric math, Steve.  Get your people to A, right now.”

The suit, Steve, turned and said something and his minion dashed away.

“I called our people in Washington,” Taverner went on, talking now to Stephanie and Captain Gilly.  “I wanted to know about our contracts.  I kind of slipped and had a half dozen senior management on the line when I made the call.  I asked about each of our contracts and was told they are ‘under review.’  When I asked what type of review, our guy in Washington told me he couldn’t say.”

The suit looked at his boss.  “The cost of canceling even one contract would be prohibitive for the government.”

Brian Taverner smiled slightly.  “Did you know my old man worked for GE, back in the day?  We lived in Phoenix and GE had a big computer manufacturing plant just north of town, back in the fifties.  One day, one of the engineers came in with a hot tip from a friend who’d seen the patent application that Texas Instruments filed on integrated circuits.

“The engineers gathered round and read it.  They realized that the machine they were building was junk.  It was the size of a grand ballroom, used more vacuum tubes than Carter’s has liver pills, and more electricity than Burbank.  They went to management and said, ‘Hey, our computer is dead!  We need to cancel it and start working on something with integrated circuits.’”

He stared at the suit, obviously expecting a question.

“I guess I’m supposed to say I didn’t know GE ever made computers,” the suit volunteered reluctantly.

“Once upon a time, a very long time ago, they used to.  However their management decided to ignore their engineers, because the company had sunk so much money into development of their new machine.  Two weeks later the order list went to zero as everyone canceled.  Three months later they shuttered the plant.  Eventually the plant was sold to Honeywell where they did make computers — with integrated circuits.”