Zane introduced everybody else around the table. The government types were from the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Commerce.
Commerce? Was this bald, sallow-faced, cranky-looking old scarecrow Sam’s pigeon in the Commerce Department? He sure didn’t give me any reason to think so. He squinted at me like an undertaker taking measurements.
“Before we begin,” said the Rockledge guy, Pierre D’Argent, “I’d like to ask Mr. Johansen for a clarification.”
Zane peered at him through the top half of his bifocals. “You’re here to answer questions, Mr. D’Argent, not ask them.”
He beamed a smile toward the head of the table. “Yes, I understand that. But I believe we all have the right to know exactly who we are dealing with here.”
He turned his handsome face to me. “VCI is a new firm in this field. I think we’d all like to know a bit more about your company’s financial backing and management structure.”
I knew right away what he wanted. He wanted me to tell them all that Sam Gunn was the man behind VCI.
I gave him the standard spiel that Sam had drummed into me, like a POW reciting name, rank, and serial number: “VCI is a privately held company. I am the president and Chief Executive Officer. While our staff is small and elite we have an extensive list of consultants who can provide world-class technical, management and financial expertise on every aspect of our program. VCI’s principal financial backer is the First Federal Bank of Utah. Our accounting firm is Robb and Steele, of Merritt Island, Florida.”
D’Argent smiled at me with all his teeth. “And what role does Mr. Gunn play in VCI?”
“Who?” My voice squeaked a little.
“Sam Gunn,” D’Argent said.
I looked up the table. Zane was scowling at me through his wire-frame glasses. He knew Sam, that was for sure.
Never lie to the government, Sam had instructed me, when there’s a good chance that they’ll catch you at it.
“Mr. Gunn is the founder of VCI,” I said.
“His name doesn’t appear in your proposal,” Zane practically snarled.
“Yes it does, sir,” I corrected him. “On page four hundred and sixty-three.” That was back in the boilerplate section where we were required to put in a history of the company. Ordinarily nobody read the boilerplate, but now I knew that Zane and his three harpies would go over it with electron microscopes. How Sam managed to produce forty-seven pages of history about a company that wasn’t even forty-seven weeks old was beyond me.
Zane gave D’Argent a glance, then asked me, “Is Sam Gunn going to be actively involved in the project—if you should be fortunate enough to win one of the contracts?”
“We have no intention to actively involve him in the day-to-day work,” I said. It was pretty close to the truth.
Zane looked as if he didn’t believe a word of it. I figured we had been shot down before we even got off the runway. D’Argent gave me another one of his shark smiles, looking pleased with himself.
But the bald scarecrow from Commerce cleared his throat and rasped, “Are we here to discuss the competing proposals or to conduct a witch hunt? Sounds to me like a cult of personality.”
Zane huffed through his pinched nose and started the official proceedings.
The one thing we had going for us was our technical approach. I quickly saw that all three of our giant corporate competitors had submitted pretty much the same proposaclass="underline" the old Nerf ball idea. You know, launch a balloon and blow it up to full size once it’s in orbit. The balloon’s surface is sort of semi-sticky. As it runs into debris in space it bounces them into orbits that spin down into the atmosphere, where the junk burns up. The idea had been around for decades. It was simple and would probably work—except for sizable chunks of debris, like discarded pieces of rocket stages or hand tools that got away.
It also required a lot of launches, because the Nerf ball itself got slowed down enough after a few orbits to come spiraling back into the atmosphere. The Nerfs could be launched with small unmanned boosters pretty cheaply, or ride piggyback on bigger boosters. They could even be tucked into spare corners of shuttle payload bays and injected into orbit by the shuttle crews.
Our proposal was different. See, the junk hanging around up there picked up an electrical charge after a couple of orbits. From electrons in the solar wind, if I remember correctly. Sam’s idea was to set up a big electromagnetic bumper on the front end of space station Freedom and deflect the debris with it, neatly clearing out the orbit that the station was flying through. Kind of like the cowcatcher on the front of an old locomotive, only instead of being made of steel our bumper was an invisible magnetic field that stretched hundreds of meters into space out in front of the station.
“The equipment we need is small enough to fit into a shuttle’s student experiment canister,” I explained. “The bumper itself is nothing more than an extended magnetic field, generated by a superconducting coil that would be mounted on the forward-facing side of the space station.”
“The costs …” Zane started to mutter.
“The program will cost less than a continuing series of Nerf ball launches,” I said before he could turn to the relevant pages in our proposal. “And the elegant thing is that, since this program’s primary aim is to keep Freedom’s orbit clear of debris, we will be doing exactly that.”
“And nothing else,” D’Argent sniped.
I smiled at him for a change. “Once Freedom’s orbit has been cleared we could always detach the equipment, mount it in an orbital maneuvering vehicle, and clean out other orbits. The equipment is very portable, yet durable and long-lasting.”
We went into some really heavy-duty arguing, right through lunch (a plate of soggy sandwiches and cans of soda brought in to us by a delivery boy who had dirt under every one of his fingernails) and all through the long afternoon.
“I’ve got to admit,” Zane finally said as it started to get dark outside, “that VCI’s technical proposal is extremely interesting.”
“But can a newly hatched company be expected to carry through?” D’Argent asked. “I mean, after all, they have no track record, no real financial strength. Do you really trust Sam Gunn, of all people, to get the job done?”
I held onto my temper. Partly because Sam had drilled it into me that they’d drop our proposal if they thought I was as flaky as he was. But mostly because I heard Sam’s four magic words.
“Small business set-aside.”
They were spoken by the cadaver from Commerce. Everything stopped. The room fell so quiet I could hear the going-home traffic from out on the streets below even through the double-paned sealed windows of the office.
“This program has a small business set-aside provision,” the Commerce scarecrow said, his voice crackling as if it was coming over a radio link from Mars. “VCI is the only small business firm to submit a proposal. Therefore, if their proposal is technically sound—which we all agree that it is—and financially in line, we have no choice but to award them one of the two contracts.”
D’Argent’s handsome chin dropped to his expensive rep tie. Zane glared at his crony from Commerce. The others muttered and mumbled to themselves. But there was no way around it. Decades earlier the Congress had set up a system so that little companies could compete against the big guys. Sam had found that old government provision and used it.
Later, when I told Sam how things had gone, he whooped and danced on my desktop. Nothing made him happier than using the government’s own red tape to his advantage.