Disc by Laurence E Dahners Page A

entered his office. Smiling, he said, “Hello Ms. Bautista, my secretary said that you had some good news for us?” He had felt quite relieved at the way Bautista had handled herself in the press conferences after the asteroid rescue. She had displayed confidence and represented NASA well. Most importantly, he hoped she might have some influence over the disposition of the technology he’d just been worrying about.
    “Yes Mr. Mehta, I was contacted by Nolan Marlowe. He implied that they plan to turn the saucer over to NASA, though they do have some requests.”
    “Great!” Raj said, feeling a wash of relief come over him. “What kind of requests?”
    “They’re planning to go to the moon and Mars themselves first. They don’t want to just fly there, but to be able to get out and walk around, so they’d like us to fit them with some spacesuits.” If Sophie noticed the tightening of Mehta’s expression, she didn’t react. Instead, she continued, “They’d also like to take along a couple of experienced astronauts to, quotes, ‘keep them out of trouble,’” she said, marking the quotes by wiggling her fingers in the air.
    “That’s… that’s impossible!” Mehta exploded. “Ridiculously dangerous! They can’t just…” He ran down, suddenly realizing that they could do pretty much whatever they wanted. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly, “obviously we can’t tell them what they can or can’t do, though I would certainly express my reservations about the safety of such an endeavor. What if their ship breaks down or someone gets injured?”
    Sophie gave him a little grin, “I believe the risk of the ship breaking down would be a lot less than it was with the Mars mission we were planning, wouldn’t it? In addition, one of the astronauts we send along could be a physician. Also, remember, they can get the injured person back to medical care here on earth way faster than any, and I mean any mission ever flown by NASA in the past.”
    Raj snorted, “Okay, I grant your point.” He leaned back in his chair to think about it a little bit, “This is NASA though. We’ll have to at least convene a committee to discuss this and try to come up with the safest way to do it. Are they going to make another one, so it could go along as a spare in case of a breakdown?”
    Sophie’s grin became a wide smile, “Yeah, they are building another one and they’d apparently like to sell that one to NASA too. It’s bigger, more of a workhorse, where the first one was kind of a touring car.”
    “A workhorse? How much bigger?”
    “A 500 ton, fifty meter diameter saucer! That’s over 20,000 square feet! It’ll generate 8 million pounds of thrust if you push it hard. Probably safer to run it at 4 million pounds, but even that’s one hell of a lot! It’ll be able to lift big things to orbit and move asteroids around with impunity… well, small ones anyway. Tiona suggested that their first official mission for us could be the final modification of Kadoma’s trajectory to put it into Earth orbit.”
    Raj sagged back in his chair, mind whirling with the implications. He gave Sophie a weak grin, “We’d better do whatever it takes to make them happy. NASA wants that thing!” After a moment he frowned, “Are they going to modify Kadoma’s trajectory for free?”
    “Um, no sir. They said they’d charge us 50 million for it.”
    “50 million!”
    “That’s only about half of what it would have cost you just to launch the vehicle you were going to capture it with. You’ll still be way under budget.”
    Raj looked at her for a moment, then gave her an abashed grin, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
     
    ***
     
    Tiona’s AI said, “You’ve got a call from the President.”
    “President of what?”
    “President of the United States.”
    “Oh! Put her on… Hello?”
    As Tiona expected, someone said, “Please hold for the President.”
    Tiona kept pondering her design for a personal flyer while she