Chapter Fourteen

The Big Day arrived. Mayan and Korsinski showed up at nine o'clock. I wore a tie. It felt like a noose.

Mac put on a clean shop coat.

Len and I entertained Mayan and Korsinski while we waited for the contingent from corporate headquarters to arrive.

"I suspected as much," Mayan observed when I told him about the problems we had matching various types of loads to the sky hook. "Every object in the universe is essentially unique. I doubt if there are even two photons alike. Even two supposedly identical automobiles made at the same time on the same production line will be different in small ways ..."

"That is just the result of variations in tolerances of parts," Korsinski pointed out. "But I think we can say, to some extent, that your observation holds true down to the subatomic level, at any rate. The proper statement of that is perhaps inherent in the Heisenberg Principle."

"Just because you can hang a name on it, Serge, doesn't mean that you can explain or even understand it," Mayan fired back.

I could see that Mayan was playing his usual role of "hairshirt." If it bothered Korsinski, who seemed to be considerably more straight-laced and proper as a scientist, the Stevens professor didn't let it show. He appeared to be unflappable. I knew he wasn't, because I had watched him become flapped when he first saw the sky hook work. But Korsinski was a man very much in control of himself and very conscious of the fact that, in the presence of his peers, he had to maintain image-even though beneath that image lay a mind and an imagination at least the equal of Mayan's.

Mayan would make a fantastic undergraduate physics prof, the kind who would be able to inspire and excite his students, the sort of teacher who made science and technology out as something fascinating and full of wonder.

On the other hand, Korsinski would be the perfect thesis advisor, capable of leading the now-jaded graduate student through the maze of erudition and buzz-worded jargon of an acceptable oral and thesis.

They made a perfect pair to advise us on the sky hook. I had grown to respect and to listen carefully to both of them.

Korsinski, true to form, wanted to know how the Model Twenty-Two Thruster project was coming. "For a three-ton gross weight aircraft with a reasonable wing-loading, we'll need only about two hundred horsepower," I reported. "I'll fly the bird always at the maximum lift-over-drag configuration, right at the bottom of the power curve, which means I'll be almost at full stall all the way."

"But why are you worried about Mach-One?" Mayan wanted to know. "You'll be flying up at a constant subsonic indicated airspeed."

"True," I explained, "but you must remember that the air density falls off with altitude and temperature. Thus although indicated airspeed remains the same, true airspeed increases. No matter which subsonic air-frame I use, I'll be pushing the limiting Mach number of the airframe shape somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand feet ..."

"I see! Which means you're going to get some rather nasty changes in the flow field around the plane. Have you calculated what it will take to ram the airframe past Mach-One?"

"A lot of extra horsepower," I remarked, "if the plane doesn't come apart around me ... if I don't get all sorts of control reversals ... if I don't run into a whole series of other problems that face any subsonic airframe trying to get through Mach-One."

"Why not buy a supersonic airframe to begin with?"

"Occasionally, I see an F-86 Sabrejet advertised in Trade-A-Plane, but I've never seen a supersonic aircraft available," I told him. "We can forget supersonic, although that may be the way to go eventually."

The corporate delegation showed up with Osbourne and Vic shortly after ten. We took them into the dynamics lab, where Carl and I put the sky hook through its paces pushing loads of various masses, sizes, and materials. We explained that we could now design a sky hook to push or to lift any load provided we knew what the load was. Grant Halden, Hayward Newcomb, and Bob Destry appeared impressed with the progress made in a few short weeks. I couldn't tell from Sanatella's face what he was thinking, but I was very careful not to make any remark that harked of smugness on my part for getting the sky hook to produce useful work in accordance with Sanatella's previous demands. That was not the way to handle that twerp.

Professor Serge Korsinski added after we concluded our demonstration, "Gentlemen, I am speaking from the purely scientific standpoint, and I realize that you have economic factors in mind. Nevertheless, what we have seen this morning amounts to one of the most significant technical breakthroughs of this century. This could well lead to a Nobel Prize for those who participated in its development. I am not an experienced industrialist, and I therefore hesitate to express an opinion outside my field of expertise. But I would venture to say that this device and its developments will have profound effects upon the industrial world."

Bill Osbourne added to that, "According to John Whiteside, NEMECO is in a good situation to hold the basic patents."

Mayan was hunkered down near the front end of the sky hook. "Mike, there's one experiment that I want to try. It won't give you much data, but it will convince me and nearly everyone else who tries it that there's no trickery involved here ... and that's one of the first things that will enter the minds of any scientific review panel. Mike, will you set this up so that it will give about a five kilogram push on my bare palm?"

I swallowed. Here was another unanticipated experiment. "We'll try," I gulped. After all, we now had the load compensator in the circuit. It should be able to handle the phasing involved with a five kilo push on a colloidal mass resting on the ground.

Bill was apprehensive. "Ted, we're not sure what the GI radiation might do to your hand."

"Well, let's find out. You certainly haven't detected any gravitational radiation coming from this thing yet! And I'm perfectly willing to act as the human guinea pig."

"If you get hurt ..." Hayward Newcomb began.

"If I get hurt, I'll waive damages. Get me the required papers to sign."

"Go ahead, Dr. Mayan," Grant Halden put in. "If something goes wrong, NEMECO will take care of things. But please use your left hand!"

"No, I'll use my right. I'm left-handed!" Mayan replied.

This was the first time the sky hook had pushed against a human subject. Mayan was just the sort of wild card who would want to do something like this, and I should have anticipated it.

We set things up, but I insisted that Mayan wear an insulating vinyl glove because of the possibility of some high-voltage leakage that we had not anticipated. I pointed out the high-frequency electromagnetic radiation leakage that might cause some heating effects, but Vic made a rapid calculation and determined that it would not exceed the accepted industrial maximums for a single exposure.

Everything was ready. "Okay, Dr. Mayan, put your palm against the front of the sky hook. We're coming up with the drive frequency ..." 

Mayan's face lit up in a broad smile. "It's pushing! I can feel it pushing my hand! That's the most convincing instrumentation in the world! Serge, come try it!"

In the next few minutes, all of us tried it. There were no apparent ill effects and no strange sensations, just the feeling that the sky hook was pushing hard. It was there. It was real. It was a force that could be felt.

"Very convincing!" was Halden's accolade.

Even Bob Destry had to admit that this was not some far-out Buck Rogers gadget and that it could really do something.

We retired to the conference room.

Bill did not stand up as he began the presentation. He had taken the seat at the far end of the conference table from Grant Halden. The rest of us were scattered down both sides of the table, seated in no particular order. I did make a point not to sit near Phil Sanatella.

"We've reached the stage where basic research on the sky hook is nearly concluded," Osbourne began. "Our scientific consultants, Dr. Mayan and Professor Korsinski, have carefully monitored the scientific aspect of our work and have done an excellent job of guiding us in the proper theoretical directions. We've instituted all the necessary patent filing actions through John Whiteside. We have a unit that can perform in a predictable fashion within the limitations of its size, design, and power handling capabilities. It will push a load, as we've all witnessed in a very dramatic fashion this morning. It's now a matter of design to make a sky hook that will not only lift itself straight up, but also do it with a load. We can design a unit to meet nearly any requirement ... but we cannot design a universal unit that will do everything! It must be designed for a job, for a specific load or a specific range of loads." The research director paused and looked at both Grant Halden and Hayward Newcomb. "Gentlemen, we are now ready to develop to a market. Where do we go from here? What do you want the sky hook to do? This is a marketing function outside our responsibility although we've thought about it and are prepared to make some concrete recommendations about markets."

It was obvious that the president of NEMECO was enthusiastic and excited. The vice-president, Dr. Hayward Newcomb, managed, as usual, to keep his emotions under control as he had learned to do so well in the Air Force.

"We have here," Newcomb began in terse, clipped tones, "a force-generating device that does not produce a reaction force. It appears that we have two options open to us vis-a-vis products that will have some sort of fit with our existing lines ..."

I noticed that Sanatella was making notes frantically.

Newcomb went on in his terse yet quiet tone, "We have a potential propulsion device. One first thinks of it as a replacement for the rocket propulsion system, but I would like to voice a strong opinion that we do not attempt to market it in this fashion until after we have received issued patents that cannot be classified under a secrecy order from the Department of Defense."

"This leaves out the possibility of a potential product for the Marine Engineering Division in New London," Halden put in.

"Correct. This would also eliminate any involvement by the Airborne Controls Division in Tempe for an aircraft or spacecraft propulsion system."

"That leaves my division," Destry added, "and Max Keller's Heavy Construction Equipment Division. Why not give pushers to one of us and lifters to the other?"

"I'm not sure at this stage that we can make that sort of an arbitrary division between functions," Osbourne pointed out.

"Well, we've certainly got a pusher," Destry went on. "Why not give me a crack at turning it into a product? If we spin off some other products with different applications, we can certainly bring Max into the act."

Destry moved quickly and smoothly! I could see how he figured that this would help him consolidate his bid for Halden's job.

"You've certainly developed a workable arrangement with Corporate Research on the shot-alloying process," Halden mused, thinking about the implications of what Destry had suggested. But Halden was no fool. "I'd like to see Max brought in at this point, however. He may have some inputs from his people that could be very important. As a matter of fact, I want to bring this before the Board at our meeting in a few weeks."

"Do you think that it's wise at this point, Grant?" Newcomb asked. "It could present a conflict of interest to some of the Board members ... and we may want to license some of this to, say, Consolidated Industries' Great Western Aero down the line. The Federal Trade Commission might get upset if there were any record of revealing the sky hook to Hettinger or Mather ahead of a public announcement. Technically, from the patent point of view, it's unwise to reveal this at all until we are certain of the patent position."

"But that could be years!" Bill Osbourne pointed out.

"True," the NEMECO president said, nodding. "I don't want to wait that long before getting a return on our investment. The Board will certainly ask questions long before that."

"Gentlemen!" Dr. Ted Mayan boomed. "Excuse me, but you don't have any time to spare! You may not even have a year!"

"What do you mean?" Halden asked.

"The history of science and technology is rife with examples of parallel developments," the generalist explained, waving his arms. One thing for certain: When Ted Mayan wanted the attention of everyone in the room, he certainly knew the histrionics required. "Both Newton and Liebnitz worked out the calculus independently. People think that Darwin was responsible for the Theory of Evolution, but Wallace actually preceded Darwin into publication! In more recent times, Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen were not the only persons working on solid-state electronic devices, which were actually invented and patented years previously ... but they were the first to announce. Give me a few minutes and I can present you with a list of several dozen developments in the past decade that have been carried out in complete isolation independent of one another, and yet were nearly identical in scope and content.

"Mark my words: Somewhere, at this very moment, there is a high probability that someone else is working on this! I don't know who it is. I don't know the approach they're taking. But if the basic anomalies of the universe were there for Bill Osbourne, Vic Aboud, Len Marshall, and Mike Call to see and work with, they are there for others to see and work with too!"

"Dr. Mayan is quite correct in his assessment," Professor Korsinski broke in with his quiet, measured, slightly accented tones. "Once the basic patent applications have been submitted, you must move at once to make a public disclosure."

Hayward Newcomb suddenly began to nod in agreement. "Grant, I believe that our consultants are right."

"Do you have any suggestions, gentlemen?" Halden asked.

"Both Dr. Mayan and I can arrange for suitable early publication, if not in Physical Review Letters, then at one of the New York Academy's many symposia. This would be coordinated, of course, with the submittal of the significant patent applications."

"This still wouldn't prevent the Department of Defense from coming in and slapping a secrecy order on our work ... and from stopping the publication of any articles," Newcomb observed with some agitation. "If there is anything that I would not want to see, it's government security classification of this work!"

"But that wouldn't necessarily mean that NEMECO couldn't make any money from sky hook work," Robert Destry pointed out. "There will undoubtedly be contracts available to do further work on the principle if the government classifies it."

"Bob, listen to me and believe me," Newcomb told him. "I used to work for those people. I know them well. NEMECO might get some government contract money, but more as a sop to keep us quiet and under control. The big money would go to their bosom buddies in the aerospace industry whom they've supported for a couple of decades now."

Bill Osbourne added, "I can second that and add something as well. If it happens, the sky hook work will take back seat to other propulsion work because the aerospace firms involved in propulsion activities— turbojets, ramjets, and rockets, for example—will be given time to write off their capital investments in those areas and to retire their engineers who are specialists in those fields. In twenty years we might see the sky hook mature into something more than we've got now. There would be more than a hundred and twenty tons of very expensive research reports to show for it, if you could get access to them, much less read all of them."

"But, gentlemen, if the security of this nation is at stake ..." Destry began.

"That statement has been used to cover a multitude of sins, Bob," Newcomb said, interrupting him. "Naturally, there will be some aspects of the sky hook work that will be of interest to the Department of Defense," Grant Halden remarked, "and NEMECO is certainly not unpatriotic in that regard. Applications that might be useful in weapons technology would certainly be discussed thoroughly with the government and if necessary, turned over to them for their use in national security."

"Mr. Halden!" Mayan thundered. "I don't wish to seem impertinent. I know that NEMECO holds no government contracts whatsoever and acts only as an OEM supplier to firms working on government contracts. But, sir, if you believe that the federal government will simply come in and calmly discuss with you those aspects of this work it feels will affect national security, you'll find that they'll appropriate it all just to be on the safe side! I've been down this road. I've seen some of my colleagues fall prey to the same rationale, and I've seen it destroy them. Fortunately, I have the inclination to run like hell shouting loudly when such things happen to me."

"I would tend to agree with my colleague," Professor Korsinski added quietly.

"Do you have any suggestions regarding what we might be able to do?" Halden asked.

"Yes!" Mayan stated flatly. "The thing that they will not want is publicity! They will not be able to classify it once it becomes public knowledge ... and I don't mean publication in some obscure journal of a scientific society where it can be conveniently hidden and forgotten for a quarter of a century or more. Therefore, if I were in your shoes, President Halden, I would get Bill Osbourne and his crew of inventive geniuses working at once on some manner of airborne or space vehicle in which someone like Mike would orbit the world in the blinding light of publicity. And I would do it immediately after your attorneys file the patent applications ... immediately afterward! Professor Korsinski and I will follow up at once with a special symposium on the sky hook at NYU, Stevens, or the New York Academy of Sciences."

Serge Korsinski was nodding in agreement.

I sat there dumbly. Mayan was getting away with it! If Osbourne or I had approached Newcomb or Halden with the proposal, it might have been our necks. But Mayan could get away with it, and he was doing it! And with the full support of Korsinski!

Halden turned to Osbourne. "Bill, how about it?"

"We can do it."

"How quickly? What will it cost?"

"Can I give you an answer Friday? And, Grant, I think it may cost considerably less than we think."

"Give me a verbal report on Friday morning," Hilden told him. I could see that the proposal had struck home with the NEMECO president. It was just the sort of romantic activity that he would enjoy ... and Mayan had given him the full rationale for doing it and justifying it to the Board of Directors and the stockholders.

"If we're going to lock this up for ourselves and also gain all this fine publicity," Bob Destry put in carefully, "I think we should also be prepared to move on the product end as quickly as possible and firm up as many of the industrial applications as we can."

"Quite true," Newcomb remarked. "But this may set us up for a raid, Grant. And it will certainly send our stock value sky-high ..."

"Especially since there is so little of it available on the market," Destry added.

"We'll be ready for that," Halden said quietly. "Hay, once this meeting is over, we'll get together with the other officers and staff at headquarters. In the meantime: products. Phil, how about it?"

It was the first time Phil Sanatella had spoken. He had been watching and listening carefully. I could almost feel the man's mind working, trying to determine the best way that he could profit from this. "Sir?"

"Bill and his people have had some thoughts on applications," Halden told him. "Please get with him. Also get with Bob Destry and his people. If you want to call in Max Keller, check with me first. I want an analysis of the potential markets for the various industrial applications of the sky hook as both a pusher/puller and as a lifter."

"No defense applications?" the little man asked.

"No, we'll get those for free as soon as this breaks," Newcomb reminded him.

"How soon do you want it, Grant?" the marketing man asked.

"As quickly as you can get the numbers together."

"I could give you some market analysis on a superficial level in a couple of weeks after I get the chance to come up to speed on the implications of this, but I can't give you any analysis in depth quickly."

"Phil, I brought you in on this early so that you could get up to speed on it," Halden pointed out, looking directly at the marketing man. "I want some preliminary market estimates of the various immediately obvious applications by next week. By the time of the next Board meeting, I want in-depth analyses."

Sanatella may have been slightly cowed by that attack, but he didn't show it, and he bounced right back. "You'll have it, Grant! Bill, can I get with you and your people starting right after this meeting? And, Bob, will you have some of your people available in a few days ... say, by Friday?"

"We'll talk to you any time, Phil," Osbourne told him. "We're right here, and you know how to find us."

"Give me a call," Destry told Sanatella.

"Very well!" Halden looked around the table. "Do we have our ducks set up on this? Bill?"

"Plan and cost estimate for a dramatic public operation to you by Friday!" We had most of it already!

"Dr. Mayan? Professor Korsinski?"

"We will be in touch with Bill regarding suitable forums and publications, but we will want to coordinate thoroughly with Bill regarding the timing. It is most important!" Korsinski pointed out.

"Phil?"

"Yes, sir! Preliminary marketing plan to you by a week from Friday. In-depth marketing studies before the next Board meeting!"

"Good. Hay, I want you to monitor the patent aspect of this thing with John Whiteside."

"I think I should also evaluate some options in case we happen to be stymied by DOD. I know that game fairly well."

The president of NEMECO looked around the conference room, "I want to thank you, Bill, and the rest of you here at Corporate Research. You have done an outstanding job on what I consider to be one of the most significant pieces of pure industrial research of our time. I have always had faith that Hay Newcomb and Bill Osbourne would produce, given the people and the facilities to do so. The results have far exceeded my most sanguine expectations. And, Dr. Mayan and Professor Korsinski, I'm encouraged to know that there are two academicians who are real scientists." He paused and looked around. "You all have my full support and that of NEMECO. But I cannot emphasize the extreme importance of moving rapidly with the tightest possible security. Bill, you always were a space cadet. Now you've got your chance!"

"Not me," Osbourne said. "Mike Call ... star gazer and airplane driver. This is exactly what I brought him aboard to do! Fortunately, he has turned out to be more than I bargained for!"