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  Dante noticed the Earth rolling up into the windscreen ahead, then over them. It was dark out over the ocean, but the lights of the cities outlined the East Coast and Florida. “Why are we tilting?” he asked nervously. The pressure holding him in his seat hadn’t changed, but it obviously wasn’t time to start heading down to the Bahamas yet.

  “The main thrust of the saucer comes from the big disc. So we fly the fastest in the direction that feels like it’s straight up to us. Now that we’ve reached the edge of space, we’re tilting forward to go to the Bahamas. We’ll be accelerating at one G for about six minutes which’ll get us up to about 8000 miles an hour. Then we’ll flip over and decelerate for six minutes and descend.”

  In Dante’s mind, things kind of flipped around until it felt to him like the saucer was stationary and the world was rolling by underneath him. Over the next few minutes he could tell it was rolling by faster and faster. After a bit the saucer turned over and the world began rolling away underneath him. Eventually, the world seemed to slow until it was hardly moving and the saucer began rotating back to horizontal. He felt his weight diminish as they began the drop back down to the earth.

  Finally, the horizon rose back up into the windows surrounding him. A few lights were visible in the distance. As they came down to rest on a tiny islet, Dante found himself expecting the sand to blow out around them from their exhaust even though the thrusters were nearly silent other than for the deep thrumming sound they made. Instead, even the leaves of the two small palm trees they landed next to didn’t billow away as he expected. “How the hell do these thrusters work? They don’t seem to be blowing anything away from us.”

  Tiona said, “We don’t know for sure. Our working theory is that they act like a jet engine for dark matter. In this case they’re sucking dark matter in the top of the saucer and blowing it out the bottom at a high velocity.”

  Dante frowned as he looked around, “So why isn’t all that dark matter blowing sand and leaves around out there?”

  Tiona shrugged as she got out of her seat, “Dark matter doesn’t interact with normal matter. So it doesn’t do anything to the sand or leaves.”

  Both Dante and Linda expressed the opinion that what Tiona had just said didn’t make any sense. Tiona spent quite a bit of time explaining how, even though there was a lot more dark matter than there was normal matter, the two didn’t interact, except in the strange case of their thruster membranes. Dante still felt like it didn’t make any sense, but confronted with the fact that it worked, he gave up trying to refute reality.

  By then they were standing in the pleasant island air on the back deck of the saucer. Dante was thinking that it was a long jump down to the ground, but then Tiona spoke to her AI and the saucer slowly tilted up so that the back deck came closer to the ground. They all hopped down onto the sand and the saucer flattened itself back down.

  “Wow,” Linda said as she walked in the soft warm sand down to the gently lapping waves. She looked up at the thickly strewn stars in the clear sky overhead, “It’s so dark, yet we can still see by all that starlight! And the weather’s so nice, too bad we didn’t bring our swimsuits.”

  “Come on,” Tiona exclaimed, “your swimsuit’s hardly different from your underwear, and it’s just us here in the dark.” She pulled off her T-shirt, kicked off her shoes, and started undoing her pants, “You can’t come all the way to the Bahamas and not get in the water!” A few seconds later she was high-stepping it out into the water.

  Linda shrugged and started unbuttoning her shirt. The light was dim, but even so she could see that her sister-in-law-to-be had a beautifully lithe body, too bad she covers it up with those ugly clothes so much of the time. She turned to Dante and saw he still had all of his clothes on, “Come on Dante, you can plan out your domination of the business world some other time.”

  ***

  To Jong’s disgust, Stillman Davis didn’t even notice the flying saucer come out of the garage on the house next to Gettnor’s and lift into the sky. Jong sent Davis on his way shortly after that, though he himself decided to wait until the saucer returned. While he waited, he placed hidden cameras at six locations around the Gettnor house. Back in his car, he reclined his seat and told his AI to wake him if the big garage door went up.

  Before he fell asleep, he spent some time instructing his AI. It would monitor the cameras and notify him whenever anyone came or went from Gettnor’s house or the house next door. Two of the cameras had been placed so that they should allow him to identify who left by vehicle from either of the houses.

  His AI woke him up when the big garage door opened and he watched as the saucer silently slipped inside. The garage door closed and about ten minutes later two people left the house, got in the car parked in front of Gettnor’s house and drove away. He watched for another hour, but nothing else happened.

  Jong headed for his motel.

  ***

  Dante and Linda talked about the prospects all the way home, then lay awake talking about it long after they should have been asleep. In the morning, when their alarms went off, they felt exhausted, but still in need of further discussion and evaluation. Linda called into her work and took a personal day.

  Dante called his supervisor at Axel VC as well. “Hello Mr. Yount, I’ve run into some issues here at home and need to take a personal day.”

  “What, you’re sick or something?”

  “Um, no, I just have some things to work out.”

  “Did your house burn down?”

  “No.” Dante wondered if he should tell Mr. Yount that the Tiona Gettnor who flew the saucer out to the asteroid was his sister. His impression of Young was that the man was so focused on moving up in the company he might not have even seen the news story on the asteroid rescue. “I have a lot of things to think about. I’d really rather not talk about it right now.”

  Tightly, Yount said, “You young people today. No dedication, no work ethic, just taking days off any time you feel like it! It makes me sick…” Gratingly he said, “I’ll tell you what, if you want to have a job tomorrow, you’ll get your ass in here ASAP.” He cut the connection.

  Dante stood staring out the window of his condo and thinking about what a jerk Yount was. Not just today, but every day. Yount can’t even be fifteen years older than I am, he thought. But, I suppose that all the way back to the time of the Egyptians, older guys have been complaining about how lazy the young guys are. He snorted, Back as far as caveman times probably.

  For a few minutes he considered trying to rush in to work, but eventually turned to Linda, “Well, I’ve just had some help making up my mind.”

  ***

  Liz Costa stood on the high platform that let her look out over the interior of their cavernous custom manufacturing building. You could put a football field inside of it with room to spare, but the huge fifty meter diameter disc they were building for Gettnor filled a lot of it. Especially since, right now, it consisted of the top half of the disc laid out upside down, beside the bottom half of the disc right side up. Side by side they essentially filled an entire football field’s worth of space.

  Her company had been building things for Gettnor for some time now and he was a great customer. Like other customers, Gettnor often wanted his projects done on a rush, priority triple-shift basis, but unlike the others he was willing to pay, and pay well, for the privilege.

  However, Gettnor was extremely secretive. Only on seeing the news the day before yesterday had she realized that Costa and Sons’ last project for Gettnor had been the eight meter disc and the superstructure of a flying saucer. There’d been plenty of pictures of it in the story about the rescue of the astronauts. It didn’t take a mental giant to realize that this fifty meter disc she was looking at represented a much bigger version of the flying saucer.

  Two young men stepped up next to her on the platform, leaning out over the rail with her. One of them said, “Well Mom, what do you think?”

  She shook her head slowly,
then turned to look into their eyes. “I don’t know. The company’s going to belong to you guys pretty soon. Do you want to try to expand it into the big leagues? Or should we keep going like we’ve been?”

  Mark said, “We want to at least try for it.” He glanced at Pete, “We probably can’t compete with somebody like Boeing, but if we don’t even try we might regret it for the rest of our lives.”

  “Okay,” Liz said turning to look back out at the enormous disc. “Gettnor messaged me that his daughter would be coming out to ‘precipitate the membranes’ in this big disc when we were ready for them. Gettnor himself is almost impossible to talk to and difficult to message with. I’d suggest we all try to be here to talk to his daughter when she comes. We’re supplying crew and equipment for the precipitation, the daughter is just bossing and adding the correct chemicals. It’s probably some kind of trade secret, since Gettnor and his daughter did the whole thing themselves for the small saucer.” She turned back to her sons, “Meanwhile, you guys had better start figuring out how you’re going to ramp this company up to compete with somebody like Boeing. We’ll need a lot more clean buildings to lay saucers out in if we’re going to construct them in volume. We’ll need land and financing, lots of it.”

  Her sons looked at one another, then Pete said, “We’ve already been talking about it, but we’ll start getting serious now.”

  ***

  Nolan knocked on Dr. Eisner’s door. When Eisner looked up, he said, “Have you heard anything? Any chance she’s coming back?”

  Eisner shook his head wearily, “No, damn the chancellor anyway. I talked to her this morning and she says she’s decided to work on it there in her dad’s basement. I got the feeling that they’re planning to make good on their threat to build thrusters themselves rather than letting the University license them out.”

  Nolan felt a mixture of sadness over the way Tiona had been treated and joy over the way things were probably going to turn out for her. He desperately wanted to call her, but had been holding off for fear of seeming overeager. What if she decided he was gold digging? To Dr. Eisner, he said, “I’m a little bit at loose ends here. The paper on graphene precipitation is ready to send in, but on hold while we’re waiting for the patent. I’ve turned in my thesis, but they haven’t set a date for my defense yet. I’ve been thinking about ways to mass-produce the multi-monolayer graphene, but we aren’t really set up to test any of my ideas out. Is there anything you’d like me to be working on?”

  Eisner leaned back in his chair, “What are you planning to do, once you get that shiny new PhD?”

  Nolan gave a little laugh, “Well, like I said while we were riding around in Tiona’s saucer, I had been thinking about applying to be an astronaut. That was back a week or so ago when getting to be an astronaut was going to be really hard.” With a soft little snort, he continued, “Now that it isn’t going to be all that hard to get a ride to another planet, I find that I’m not as interested.”

  Eisner gave him a grin, “You know, major scientific discoveries like multi-monolayer graphene and dark matter thrusters aren’t actually a dime a dozen like you might think from working in this lab recently. If you want to do something difficult, I suggest you try to discover one more thing just as important. Most people spend their entire lives without making any truly significant progress.”

  “Yeah, I know you’re right. But it seems like sometimes, when you achieve something you’ve been working on for a long time, there’s something of a letdown…”

  Nolan walked thoughtfully back down the hall to the lab. He pulled open the door, “Tiona!”

  She was wrapping the wires to one of her little speakers into a bundle. His heart skipped a beat. Wearing snug jeans and a spaghetti strap shirt, she looked… amazing. “Hey Nolan,” she said, setting the speaker in a big box and reaching for the other one. “I just came back to collect my crap.” She raised an eyebrow, “Feel like having lunch?”

  At first Nolan had felt dismayed that she was packing up her things, but at the invitation he perked up. “Sure! When do you want to go?”

  “Soon as I’ve filled my box here,” she grinned. “My ulterior motive is to get you to haul it for me.”

  He lifted an eyebrow, “Okaay, but then you’ve got to buy my lunch.”

  She snorted, “Seems only fair after all the times you bought lunch for me.”

  As they walked down to Franklin St., Tiona’s car pulled up and she put the box in it. At first Nolan thought they were going to get in for the two block ride, but the car pulled away again, leaving them to keep walking. Nolan saw several guys’ heads swivel to watch Tiona walk by. If he gave them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they recognized her as the girl they’d seen in the news. In actuality, as good as she looked, he knew that his eyes would’ve been tracking her too, recognized or not.

  She took him to Spanky’s. Once they’d ordered she said, “So, I need your dimensions. How tall are you?”

  “You need my dimensions?! What for?”

  She gave him a serene look, “If you’re going to be my boyfriend, you’re going to need to be a lot less paranoid.”

  Boyfriend?! he thought. “Six-foot one,” he answered.

  She proceeded to quiz him on his weight, sleeve length, inseam, waist size, hat size, shoe size, and glove size! For the glove size she had to settle for the fact he wore “large” disposable nitrile gloves since he didn’t know his exact size. “Hmm,” she said, looking up at the screen of her AI, “they have glove sizes in numbers right down to half sizes. AI, order some seven and a half’s, eights, eight and a half’s, and nines.” She looked up at Nolan, “We’ll have you try them on so we know for sure.”

  Nolan frowned, “Are you sure you need to know my glove size that accurately?”

  “A spacesuit is supposed to have to fit really well.”

  “Spacesuit! Really?! You’re gonna fit me for a spacesuit? Where are we going?”

  She grinned at him, “Now you’re excited.”

  “Duh! Of course I’m excited. Are you gonna tell me what you’ve got in mind?”

  She shrugged, “Well, you said you wanted to be an astronaut, and I told my dad I didn’t want to turn the saucer over to NASA until I’d been to Mars. I thought maybe we should stop at the moon on the way, what do you think?”

  Nolan could practically feel the ecstatic expression stretching his face. “I think that’d be awesome!” He frowned, “Where are you going to get the spacesuits?”

  “Don’t know, I haven’t worked that out yet. Maybe NASA?”

  “I think that’d be good,” he said slowly. “But I don’t think we should try to just get one off the shelf and use it without any training. I’ll bet if you offered to take a couple of their astronauts along on the trip, they’d loan you the spacesuits and provide the training.” He paused for a moment, “I’d feel a lot better if we had some fully trained astronauts with us if we’re actually going to get out of the saucer into vacuum.”

  “Good idea, why don’t you call Sophie and see if she can run interference for us?”

  “Can I offer to tell NASA that she has to be one of the astronauts that goes with us?”

  “Sure…”

  ***

  Jong looked over the men who’d been assigned to him. They had all lived here in the United States for at least four years. Since there weren’t that many agents of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea present in the States, the number of them that had been assigned to him spoke to the importance the supreme leader had placed on this mission. Jong had received stern directions not to waste the agents assigned to him, but to let nothing stand between him and the capture of the Gettnors.

  Speaking English to remind them of its importance to their mission, Jong addressed them, “We have several tasks we must complete to carry out this extremely important mission. First, we must capture Gettnor and his daughter—this is problematic because it seems the man rarely leaves his house. We must prepare plans to capture
them if they leave the house, but we must also have a plan to break into their home and extract them. Next, our intelligence suggests that Gettnor himself is quite combative and resourceful. In order to overcome these issues we’ll need methods to control him quickly and sedate him during transport. Finally, we must arrange transportation out of the country. You will all review the information I have collected and each of you will come up with your own proposal for dealing with the three problems I’ve mentioned. We’ll mix and match those solutions to produce our final strategy...”

  ***

  Fred Yount rapped on the door frame and said, “Mr. Anderson, you wanted to see me?” He felt a frisson of excitement and dread run over him. Being called before one of the founding partners of their venture capital firm could represent a great opportunity. On the other hand, there was always the possibility that he’d made a mistake somewhere and was being called on the carpet.

  Anderson looked up, “Come in Fred, have you been following the news about this flying saucer everyone’s so excited about?”

  “Um, no sir.” Fred turned his ignorance to a positive by blaming it on hard work. “I saw a little something, but we had a really busy day yesterday so I haven’t looked at it in detail.”

  “Damn, Fred, you need to keep up. This is a huge technological advance! I suppose you’re not aware it was developed right here in the Triangle?” Seeing Fred shake his head, Anderson continued, “Yeah, they figured it out in the physics lab over at UNC, but it was actually built in Raleigh!” Anderson glanced at his screen, “From what I’ve read, it doesn’t sound like these guys are funded yet. I want you to figure out how we can network in so that we’re there when they need to be capitalized. If we’re the ones to bring this technology to market, it could make everyone at Axel rich!”