When he knocked on the office door it was a formality. It was open and the young woman whose picture John recognized was sitting at a desk, typing into a computer. The monitor was outsize with eighty percent of the screen taken up with graphs and equations; only one small window was devoted to what the doctor was typing.
“Doctor Kinsella?” John asked, and she nodded. “I’m Captain John Gilly, USN. If you have a few minutes you could spare, I’d like to talk to you.”
She looked at him, and then ostentatiously leaned to her left. “An impressive chest full of medals, Captain! Some of them, I believe, you didn’t get commanding a desk.”
“While a number of officers have certainly spent their careers avoiding blue water, I’m not one of them. You know why I’m here?”
She nodded. “Come from da’ man. Gonna see what the lil gul done made.”
“Would you prefer I call you ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor’ Kinsella?” John asked, ignoring her comment.
She looked at him, smiling slightly. “Some of my colleagues have considerable difficulty using my first name. Getting my doctorate was cookie cutting and was never in doubt. Not so my collegial title. Use that; I love the sound of it.”
“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 confu
sion 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 talk
ing 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.”
Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) Page 5
