Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 7

Roberts knew his business. He had sat quietly through Rhea's presentation with a bland half-smile on his face, but his eyes didn't miss anything. Rhea could almost hear the wheels turning as she made her key points. When the final slick multimedia spot had come to an end and Rhea had laid down her pointer, he leaned forward and pulled a small penscreen from his jacket pocket. "Very impressive, Ms. Samuels. Now if you can tell me what I really want to know, we can make sure this time is productive for both of us."

"Gladly," Rhea said. "And I'm sure you'll want to have the details in hard copy. I can have printouts of any figures you need before you leave the building."

Roberts made a note on his pad. "You run a very efficient operation, then." It wasn't exactly a question, but it was more than a comment.

"I keep it that way," Rhea said. "Look," she keyed an organizational chart up onto the big screen, "we've got thirty people in our core group here in the Triangle, and two more at our Manteo office. We don't try to do everything—I can contract out the construction work easily, so I always know exactly what all our people are doing. We don't have to deal with a bloated middle management structure like NASA or the main-line aerospace firms."

"And you can design and field a manned spaceship with thirty people?"

"I can," Rhea stated, "and I have. The design is complete, and our spaceframe is under construction at Manteo. It should be done in forty-five days. We're not like NASA—we don't have to invent ten new things before breakfast each morning. Our ship uses off-the-shelf hardware and we build to shipyard tolerances, not picometers."

Roberts made another note on his penscreen. Rhea looked closely and saw that it said not picometers. The one above that read bloatless, and the first said nice tits, with the nice underlined twice. She relaxed just a little; he was obviously using the penscreen as a prop. The realization made him seem a little more human to her.

He put the pen down and looked up at her again. "If it's so easy, Ms. Samuels, why aren't McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing building spaceships?"

Rhea smiled. "I said we don't need to invent ten new things everyday. We did have to invent one new thing—our MULE drive. They don't have that because they don't have me."

"You know what our physicists tell me about your MULE? They say it's fundamentally impossible for it to work." Roberts reached into his pocket again. "I have a signed statement here from one of them, promising to pay me one million dollars if it ever lifts so much as a feather."

"Hold on to that," Rhea told him.

"Oh, I intend to," Roberts said, "but the fact remains that the keystone of your whole structure seems a little loose."

Rhea shrugged, "What can I tell you? The MULE is a trade secret and I'm not going to explain it. I will say that we've seen a lot of things here in North Carolina over the past two years that are 'fundamentally impossible,' and that once you know something can be done, duplicating it gets a lot easier. You can check my publication record. Anyone without an ax to grind will tell you I do brilliant physics."

"I have, and they did. That's the only reason I'm here today—the quality of you and your people." He put down his pen. "Okay, let's take success as a given. What's the business case? You aren't offering stock—how is TRITEL going to make money by flying around in a spaceship?"

Rhea sighed. He'd watched the presentation, and she knew full well he'd been paying attention. Now he wanted to hear her sell, to know that she could pull in other investors. She couldn't blame him, but that didn't make the thousandth sales pitch any more fun.

"Let's start with satellites," she said. "With the communications and Net explosions, there are whole continents severely underserved with comsats."

"You can cover the world with four birds in Clarke orbits," Roberts said.

Rhea sat forward. He was feeding her lines. Was he already sold? "And two plus two equals five, for large instances of two. Just being able to see the birds doesn't say anything about capacity. Clarke orbits are too damned high. It's absolutely critical for voice traffic and even for lots of data traffic to keep transit delay to a minimum. The phone company that can offer satellite shots where you don't talk on top of each other is going to clean up. We need little birds in low orbits, and we need lots of them."

"Well, why don't I just contract with NASA, the French, or the Russians to place them for me?"

"How much does a satellite cost?"

"Well—"

"Too much. Too much because you have to build in quadruple redundancy, and you know you can't fix anything. We will go up there with a screwdriver if that's what it takes. Invest in us and you get cheap satellites and free launches."

He held up a hand to stop her. "Okay. Satellites. What else?"

"Crystals, semiconductors, superconductors, drugs, raw materials from the asteroids, tourism . . ."

"Pretty blue-sky stuff," he said.

Rhea dropped her guard a fraction. She was nearly sure he wanted to be convinced. "We sell the facilities, the rest will follow. We will make money on it, and—" She paused.

"And?"

"And it will save the world," she said quietly.

He studied her, his expression, for just a fleeting instant, open and quizzical and startled. "Have you ever sold the moon, Ms. Samuels?"

"What?"

"Never mind."

He made one more note on his penscreen, full of herself . . . justified?, then closed it with a snap. "Why don't you show me around your facility."

 

Back | Next
Framed