Back in our joint office by noon, Glenna taken care of for the moment, I prepared for a hum-drum day, made calls our CEO, Virgil Oliva, had nagged me to make for over a week. To say I hated the effort would be way, way too positive. I loathed it, I despised, it, I . . .
After two intensive, irritating exchanges, in which, for the second one, I had to threaten to pull all our business, I hung up the receiver with such a bang that Bobby, next door at his computer, looked up in surprise.
“Upset with Amiston Digital Electronics?” he asked mildly.
He’d been laboring all morning with a new goal in mind—diagnostic software to assist techs on field service calls to provide fixes faster and more cheaply. Kaley, the queen of field service, had asked him about diagnostic help, and Bobby, who loved her like his own sister, was quick to find time to help her out.
Oh, we had such software, and pretty good software at that. Bobby had written most of it, along with a couple of our software gurus, so it was decent. However, with business growing by leaps and bounds, we needed to make service calls shorter and more efficient, and more importantly, eliminate some. Bobby’s goal was to produce a software suite that would not only speed up calls, but help customers do on-the-spot diagnosis. Our only task would be to provide repair parts for their techs.
“I’ll tell you, first chance I get, Amiston will be eliminated from our list of subsystem and parts providers. We got maybe fifty companies begging to become preferred providers. One of them is going to get the chance.”
He paused, sat back from his keyboard, which gave him a chance to rest his knees. When you’re as tall as the second story of many buildings, your knees don’t fit under any normal-sized table or desk. He ambled over and sank into the sofa behind my desk that sat against the outer wall of the building.
“That’s two calls. How many more ya got today?”
I groaned. “Six, but I’ll kill myself after another three or four.”
“It’s lunch time, and we’re both frustrated. How about lunch at Billie Lou’s? I’m in the mood for a chili burger and poppers.” That was his go-to meal at Billie-Lou’s, an enormous, i.e., Bobby-sized, chili burger and a double order of jalapeno poppers. A “popper” was a fried cheese ball, full of chopped-up pickled jalapeno peppers, dipped in batter before deep frying. To me, they seemed to be a heart attack in waiting, but Bobby loved them. Since he only ate two meals a day, he could eat a prodigious amount when hungry, but frequently, he appeared indifferent to food, staying at his desk for hours on end. That indifference was especially true when he had dug deeply into the midst of a hot project.
“Sounds good to me,” I said. I reached for the office phone. “I’ll tell Margie—”
It cut me off by ringing as I bent toward it. I answered. “Charles Hays.”
“Scotty? This is Bill Overton. Are you busy this afternoon?”
I told him the same thing I had often said to his predecessor over the last few years. “Never too busy for our best customer.”
“I’ve got a meeting later that concerns a request you made .”
For the new exploration/settlement initiative, no doubt. “What time?”
“We’re still rounding up a couple of attendees, but I’d like to do it at fourteen hundred hours. Can you make it?”
“See you at thirteen fifty-nine,” I said, and we hung up.
“Let’s go,” I told Bobby. “We have time if we hurry, and I’d like a burger.”
Alex, my favorite behind-the-counter guy in the western hemisphere and the owner of Billie Lou’s, along with his wife, wasn’t in residence. The substitute, a young female I knew by sight but not name, said he had sinus problems, and would no doubt be back tomorrow. We ordered and ate, Bobby downing a double popper order. He left the young lady a nice tip, though not the enormous one he leaves Alex. In and out in under an hour.
We returned to the lab, dialed in the Fort Worth naval base, and walked into their largest fighter hangar, met by a bored Lt. JG, who doled out our visitor badges and escorted us into the main building and then to the designated conference room. We were the only room occupants for several minutes. The others straggled in, and as this was a meeting called by a two-star, they were commanders and above, the exceptions being a young full lieutenant with a tablet computer, the note-taker for Overton, and an even younger-appearing naval lieutenant commander with wings on her uniform, which made her an SF-77 pilot. All the meeting attendees were male except for the pilot.
Overton arrived last, as befit the head of our nation’s Intersolar Command. He seemed rushed, though not discombobulated, as though he had terminated his former meeting in order to make this one.
“Good afternoon. As you can see by our guests”—he meant us—“this special meeting concerns not only IC, but our primary portal vendor, S-Cubed. We have just received a charter from the office of the President of the United States to begin an exciting exploration of a newly discovered planet in another solar system. This will be our first intra-galactic exploration, and it will be a joint effort between IC and S-Cubed. Most of you in the room know our visitors, but let me introduce them.”
I had a passing acquaintance with most of them, especially the two captains and one of the commanders. I didn’t know the pilot or the meeting secretary, but everyone else seemed familiar.
Finished, Overton gestured toward me. “Dr. Hays will address the object of our exploration effort.”
I hadn’t expected that, but the spotlight didn’t bother me. I stood and related the invention of our single-ended portal generator, the initial exploration exercises across our galaxy, and the discovery of E2. I summarized our proposal to establish a base, validate the safety of the environment for humans, begin exploration, and establish colonies. I didn’t encourage questions, sitting when I finished.
Overton continued. “As one of his first actions as CNO, Admiral McKissack approached the secretary of defense and got an audience with him, the secretary of state, and the president. He laid out our joint proposal and today, we received tentative approval to proceed with this colonization initiative. Any questions?”
There’s always one in every group. The older captain, jumped in, saying, “Plopping down on a new planet seems to be a bit precipitate. How certain are we the planet has no intelligent life? And even if it doesn’t, how do we know we won’t affect the planetary ecosystems with a colony? Besides, how do we know the planet is safe from the viewpoint of microbial life, either potentially allowing import of dangerous life or perhaps export of our own pathogens?”
Overton nodded to me, and I answered. “Dr. Taylor and I have spent hours exploring the world, and our employees many additional hours to-date in scanning land masses down to bald atolls. There are three main continents, four medium-sized continents, twelve medium to large islands, and perhaps ten thousand smaller islands, including two island chains near a pair of continents. Substantial examination has revealed no evidence of intelligent life.”
“What about possible contamination of either environment?” he shot back. He was a slender, ramrod-straight African-American, his hue about matching Bobby’s chocolate brown, his face and attitude severe.
I’d met him several times. “Captain Lee, you know me, and you’re familiar with my record at Triple-S. Do you think I’d barge into a new environment, about which we have no information so far about the flora, fauna, potential pathogens, or bacterial and viral life, without careful sampling, exploration, and isolation of the two environments from each other?”
He muttered to himself. Then, “Okay, I’ll give you that. You know what you’re doing.”
“Thanks. We’ll approach this new colonization with all the care you, and we, have used in spreading out from Earth to the rest of the solar system. It will be months after the first portal is established before a human sets foot on the planet without complete environmental protection in place.”
He nodded and my answer appeared to have satisfied him.
“Anything else?” Overton scanned the conference room.
“What’s the timetable?” one of the commanders asked.
“There are complete packages sent to your personals” Overton told them. “Schedules are included. We hope to have space-suited explorers on the planet in a few weeks. They will build standard regular and jumbo portals, so we can bring in equipment and scientific instruments to begin detailed studies. Crews will begin residence to study, evaluate suitability for colonization, and establish full biological analysis capabilities.”
“What about the UN and its reaction?” Lee followed up.
“We don’t plan any announcement to the UN,” Overton said. “In answer to your question, we are not claiming the planet as a US possession. Colonization efforts will be shared with interested nations, and we will guarantee all requests to initiate settlements will be treated equally.”
“What does our portal vendor get out of this?” another commander asked.
“Of course, they get a very nice contract for the exploration,” Overton said, tossing me a smile. “In addition, they have asked, once the US has staked a claim to a portion of the planet, for rights to a land area, with the view to selling portions when the planet is officially open to settlement. Assuming it is. If it is not, they won’t get anything, so they’re gambling as well.”
The official meeting didn’t last much longer. Most attendees were as excited as I was, although they were cautioned that, at present, the proceedings were under lock and key. An officer I knew less well, Commander Callen, was designated as official liaison to SSS for the project, and the other attendees left, although Overton buttonholed Bobby and me before we could sneak away. He motioned us to sit near him at the end of the table.
“I need to cover one more thing,” he said.
We sat. “McKissack really went to bat for you,” he told us. “I’m not sure how the president felt about land rights on a brand-new planet even before we settle. He was more ‘let’s make a few vague promises and then give a few rewards if we ever actually start a settlement effort.’ McKissack was adamant, as you discovered the planet, and as you invented the vehicle to make such discoveries, we needed to see you get your just desserts, so to speak.
“The president agreed, but he had some conditions.”
I began to feel uneasy. “Uh-oh.”
Overtone grinned. “They’re not that bad. Our glorious leader felt, if you were leading the initiative, both the navy and the US needed a bit more control over you and the company, to assure the so-called ‘best interests’ of IC and the US are being served.”
I felt worse . “You’re being so polite, it must be bad,” I commented.
He got a good laugh out of that. “I doubt it you’ll love the main condition, but the president wouldn’t budge. If it’s a deal breaker, let me know. But otherwise, I think he’ll instruct the navy—IC, that is—to take over the project.”
Inside, I groaned. “Hit me.”
“You will be recalled to service, Admiral. A flag-level officer needs to head the effort up, so it makes sense. Not permanently, just six months to start. After that, it depends on how things go.”
From his point of view, that was reasonable. Further, it could be an advantage. During the Bug war, I had been promoted, and I had to admit that an admiral in the US Navy, even a meager one-star, could move things along pretty quickly when need be—a lot faster than than a civilian supplier trying to speed up an operation through the normal channels. It could, I admitted to myself, have been worse.
“I don’t want to relocate here,” I insisted.
“No problem. You’ll be on-site at SSS headquarters, and wherever you choose to set up the new portals. Where do you anticipate that to be?”
I shook my head. “No idea. What does Triple-S get out of this?”
He grinned. “Spoken like a true businessman. Here’s your carrot. Five million acres for development on the continent or continents you choose, no more than two million on coast lines. Two medium-sized islands and twenty small islands of your choosing. Sound good?”
It sounded fantastic. So fantastic I wasn’t certain our glorious chief executive could swing it, especially when it came to dealing with the UN. However, it showed he was serious and appreciated the work we’d done in the past, and the fact we’d saved the world’s ass a couple of times.
I sighed. “I may regret this, but I’m in.”
He laughed a satisfied chortle. “I thought you would. Now let’s get started and surprise the heck out of everybody by having that colony going in record time.”
Bobby stood. “Hell, yes!” He pumped his fist, gave Overton a high five, and we went back to headquarters.