“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?” he said. “A complete self-sufficient ecology, man-made, inside a twenty-kilometer cylinder.”
“Quite a sight,” she murmured.
Putting the glass down on the little cocktail table between them, Jade forced herself to return to the subject at hand. “You were talking about leaving the agency to go to work for Sam.”
“Oh, yeah,” Johansen replied, deftly ordering a new round of drinks with a hand signal to their robot waiter.
Sam had two problems to wrestle with: how to raise the money to make VCI more than a bundle of paper, and how to get the government to award us one of the two contracts for the experimental phase of the junk removal program.
Sam raised the money, just barely. He got most of it from a banker in Salt Lake City who had a daughter that needed marrying. And did that cause trouble later on! Let me tell you.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
We rented a dinky office on the second floor of a shopping mall, over a women’s swimwear shop. Sam spent more time downstairs than he did in the office. At least, when the stores were open. Nights he worked with me writing our proposal. He seemed to work better after the sun went down. Me, I worked night and day. Writing a proposal was not easy for me.
Sam went out and hired a wagonload of big-time consultants from academia and industry, guys with fancy degrees and lists of publications longer than a gorilla’s arm.
“Gee, Sam, how can we afford all these fancy pedigrees?” I asked him.
He just grinned. “All we need ’em for is to put their names on our letterhead and their resumes in our proposal. That doesn’t cost a damned thing. They only get paid when we ask them to consult with us, and we don’t have to ask ’em a thing once we win the contract.”
That sounded a little shady to me, but Sam insisted our proposal needed some class and I had to agree with him there. Our only real employees were two bright kids who were still students at Texas A&M, and four local technicians who were part-time until we got the government contract. We leased or borrowed every piece of office equipment. Most of the software our Texas kids invented for us or pirated from elsewhere. We really needed that impressive list of consultants.
Those two youngsters from Texas had come up with a great idea for removing debris from orbit. At least, it looked like a great idea to me. On paper. I knew enough engineering to get by, but these kids were really sharp.
“How’d you find them?” I asked Sam.
“They wrote a paper about their idea,” he said. “Published it in an aerospace journal. Their professor put his name on it, just like they all do, but I found those two kids who did the real work and put ’em on the payroll.”
I was impressed. I had never realized that Sam kept up with the technical journals.
Well, we finished writing the proposal and e-mailed it up to Washington just under the deadline. You know how the government works: you could have the greatest invention since canned soup but they won’t look at it if it isn’t in their hands by “close-of-business” on the day they specify. Thank god for the Internet. We just barely made it.
Then we waited. For weeks. Months.
I got nervous as hell. Sam was as cool as liquid hydrogen. “Relax, Mutt,” he told me a thousand times during those months. “It’s in the bag.” And he would smile a crooked little smile.
So there I sat, behind a rented desk in a dinky office, while the days ticked by and our money ran out. I was president of a company that was so close to bankruptcy I was starting to think about moonlighting as a spare pilot for Federal Express.
Then we got the letter from Washington. Very official, with a big seal on it and everything.
We were invited to send a representative to a meeting in Washington to defend our proposal against a panel of government experts. The letter said that there were four proposals being considered. The four companies were Rockledge International, Lockwood Industries, Texas Aerospace, and VCI—us.
“Holy Christmas!” I said when I read the letter. “We’re never going to get a contract. Look at who the competition is: three of the biggest aerospace corporations in the world!”
Sam made like a Buddha. He folded his hands over his little belly and smiled enigmatically.
“Don’t worry about it, Mutt,” he said for the thousand-and-first time. “It’s in the bag. If there’s any real problem, I’ve got four magic words that will take care of everything.”
“What did you say?”
“Four magic words,” Sam repeated.
I did not share his confidence. In fact, I thought he had gone a little nutty under the pressure.
I was nervous as a kid on his first solo as I flew to Washington on the appointed day. I had spent every day and night since we’d received that letter cramming every bit of technical and financial data into my thick skull. We had even flown over to College Station for a week, where our two bright Texas A&M youngsters stuffed all their info into me directly.
I was surprised to see that one of Sam’s two young geniuses was female. Sort of round and chubby, but she had huge dark soulful Mediterranean eyes that followed Sam wherever he moved like twin radar dishes locked onto a target. I figured that maybe Sam had met her before he had read their paper in that journal.
Anyway, there I was, stepping into an office in some big government building in Washington, my head bursting with facts and figures. As offices go, it wasn’t much bigger or better furnished than our own little place in Florida. Government-issue desk, table and chairs. Metal bookcases on one side. Faded pastel walls, hard to tell what color they were supposed to be originally. Everything looked kind of shabby.
I was the last one to arrive. Representatives of our three competitors were already sitting side-by-side on one end of the long table that took up most of the room. They sure looked well-off, knowledgeable, slick and powerful. I felt like an intruder, an outsider, well beyond my depth.
But Sam had given me those four magic words of his to use in an emergency, and I whispered them to myself as I took the last chair, at the foot of the table.
Sitting at the head of the table was a guy from the agency I had met once, when he had visited the Cape for the official ceremonies when we opened space station Freedom. That had been years ago, and I hadn’t seen him anywhere around the working parts of the agency since then. On his right-hand side sat three more government types: old suits, gray hair or none at all, kind of pasty faces from being behind desks all their lives.
The three industry reps were dressed in much better suits: not flashy, but obviously expensive. Two of them were so young their hair was still all dark. The third, from Rockledge International, was more my own age. His hair was kind of salt-and-pepper; looked like he spent plenty on haircuts, too. And tanning parlors. He was the only one who smiled at me as I sat down and introduced myself. I didn’t know it right at that moment, but it was the kind of smile a shark gives.
“We’re glad you could make it, Mr. Johansen,” said the guy at the head of the table. The others sort of snickered.
“My flight was delayed in Atlanta,” I mumbled. In those days, when you flew out of Florida, even if you died and were sent to hell you had to go by way of Atlanta.
He introduced himself as Edgar Zane. Thin hair, thin lips, thin nose, and thin wire-frames on his bifocals. But his face looked round and bloated, too big for his features. Made him look like a cartoon character, almost. From what I could see of his belly behind the table, that was bloated too.