Pillar to the Sky (11 page)

Franklin smiled but didn’t say anything.

“You grew up in the South, didn’t you, sir?” Gary asked.

“From now on it’s ‘Franklin,’ though I prefer ‘Frank’ with my friends,” he replied. “And I hope ‘Gary’ is OK with you.”

“Victoria,” Eva said, looking at her daughter, “Mr. Smith grew up when schools were segregated.”

Victoria looked at him and blushed a bit.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Sorry I grew up in a segregated world?” he asked.

“Well, I meant about how stupid my question was.”

“There is never a stupid question, young lady, when it comes from a heart that wants to learn. As to my school, I didn’t know any different; you don’t when everyone is just like you and you don’t see how the other half lives. But I was blessed with teachers who loved us; a school librarian who urged me to study math; a preacher who encouraged me but also taught me that I was part of a far bigger world and had a responsibility to that world; a kindly old man, a refugee to America, who would fish through his bins of discarded electronic parts at his store, explain what they were, their function and how I could put them together into something useful … I actually built a television for my family when I was in tenth grade—first one we had.”

He sighed as if looking off to a distant memory.

“And now? Well, let’s just say I was blessed with loving parents, same as you, and a country where I could fulfill my dreams after all. So there is nothing to be sorry about.”

He reached over and patted her reassuringly on the shoulder.

“Anytime you want to learn more about what it was like growing up then, you just ask. I am proud of where I came from … and where we are going.”

“You’ve said ‘we’ several times now,” Eva interjected.

“Oh, we’ll get to contracts and all that at some point.”

“Ask for a million apiece for starters plus some royalties—gross, not net profits,” Erich grumbled. “Hell, he can afford it!”

“Are you their agent?” Franklin asked in mock horror. “God save me from patent lawyers and agents.”

“Better than that: I’m their mentor.”

Eva smiled at that, and reached across the aisle to squeeze Erich’s hand.

“I will not discuss what my retainer in all of this is,” he said with a smile.

“I am certain we’ll come to a satisfactory arrangement before we finish this leg of the journey,” Franklin replied, nonplussed by Erich. “So, let’s talk a little business first, then I’m up to the cockpit to do some flying, if I can drag the copilot out of his seat. Victoria, there is a jump seat up forward. I suspect you’d get a kick out of giving me a hand.”

She grinned with delight, nodding eagerly. Gary said nothing, and Eva just looked straight ahead. In spite of their dreams of where they hoped to one day go—the riskiest venture in the history of aviation and space exploration—both were less than enthusiastic about their daughter’s obsession with learning to fly. Several years back, the young son of one of their friends had “augered in” while still a student pilot, trying to show off over his girlfriend’s house by attempting an aileron roll.

“While we’re up front having fun, you two will find the usual contracts, nondisclosure forms, W-4s, incorporation papers; it’s several hundred pages’ worth on your iPads,” Franklin continued. “You can go over them at your leisure. If you should desire, you can be referred to several lawyers in Seattle who are contract experts to go over the paperwork, though I hope that, as is, it meets with your satisfaction. We got plenty of time later to talk details, and, yes, I know Erich will act as your agent.”

“Without charging them the usual agency fee, I might add,” Erich muttered, drifting back into sleep as the double Scotch took effect.

“But for now, let me give you what we used to call in ancient times ‘the CliffsNotes version.’”

Gary laughed at that, though Victoria and even Eva seemed a bit confused.

“Back in the old days,” Gary explained to them, “when we used to listen to music from black disks that spun around on what was called a turntable and televisions came with rabbit ears sticking out of them, the way to get around your English and history course readings was to buy something called CliffsNotes. All the works of Shakespeare explained in thirty pages. Plato and all those other Greek guys in thirty pages. Stuff like that. Problem was, the professors read them as well.”

“You mean, like Wikipedia today?” Victoria asked.

“Sorta like that.”

“Got it.”

“That is infamous that you did that, Gary. I never knew that,” Eva exclaimed, genuinely upset. “I read every word of Pushkin and Tolstoy assigned to me, even if they were Russian and not Ukrainian.”

Gary shrugged, a bit embarrassed.

“Franklin, maybe you better dig in and give us the straight line now, to save me from my wife’s wrath.”

Franklin got up and poured himself a soda water, no Scotch. He motioned to Gary’s glass—which Gary put a hand over as a refusal after a sharp glance from Eva and Victoria—then sat down again.

“I am proposing that we build the Pillar.”

No one else spoke; the only sound in the plane other than the engines and the occasional brief chatter on the radio channel, which was still open, was that of Erich’s gentle snoring.

“I have followed your work ever since your dissertations. I met Erich”—he paused to look affectionately at the old man, fast asleep in his seat on the other side of the aisle—“when I first visited Goddard years ago to discuss some computer hardware designs for one of the Mars orbiters which my company was bidding for.

“Not many people realize that Goddard does the hard research, has people like you two working, dreaming, but then it is people like me who take those dreams and build them and make them work. Erich fired me up on my old childhood dream of the Tower of Babel; that was when he first mentioned that he had two young assistants working on the concept. You could say it seemed so insane that I could not help but be captivated by it.

“So, years back, I quietly created a corporation within my corporations tasked with seeing on our own if the idea was feasible and, if so, how we would do it.

“I assumed all along, political currents being what they were, that ultimately you would face the heartbreak of rejection you endured today.”

Eva muttered something in Ukrainian that Gary and Victoria understood, but Franklin did not, and Gary was glad he did not.

“I felt morally bound to sit back to see what the government would do. You who labor at Goddard, Langley, Houston, and elsewhere under the NASA umbrella are like monks at times. You labor, intent on your dreams of a better future for all humanity. Your work is, as is said in the business, public domain, meaning it is free to anyone around the world to learn of and, dare I say, seize hold of and even build with the appropriate rights of patent attached to them. It might seem mercenary to some, but all benefit in the long run. Look at all the spin-offs of Apollo that private companies seized upon to enrich our lives.”

He looked at the three staring at him and, a bit nervously, cleared his throat.

“My company within a company used material you two first pioneered, along with that of others, such as the NASA team at White Sands, who actually ran tests using laser-beamed energy to power an ‘elevator climber.’ Nice try, but I felt not feasible.

“That being said, I will have Mr. McMullen up front turn the plane around, we’ll go back to D.C., I’ll go with you to the patent office, and you can see where my company has quietly, and without any fanfare, filed scores of patents which originated in research you two have done—which, as you were government employees of our nation, was research free and open for any to use.”

“Somehow what you said seems troubling to me,” Eva replied.

“It is the beauty of our system in this country. NASA has created thousands of wonders that impact all our lives, from that iPad you have in front of you to some hospital tonight using imaging systems to save a child who needs surgery to clear out blood clots in their veins because of a birth defect that forty years ago would have been fatal. Without companies like mine to build on your research and make it viable, scientific progress would be at a crawl. It is what made America preeminent in the twentieth century, and my hope is to see it continue in that position in the twenty-first based upon ideas hatched at NASA that people like me then pick up and run with. That has always frustrated me more than anything else: how few in our country realize how much NASA has made their lives better and, in the case of millions now, saved their lives.

“Without companies like mine to take that basic research, which opened a door first cracked open by NASA, how different our world would be today, and how much poorer our quality of life.”

Gary nodded in agreement. “Regarding the Pillar,” he said, “I think we should focus on why we are on board this flight with you this evening and save the philosophical side for later.”

Franklin smiled and cleared his throat.

“I have the plans in place to build it,” he said, as if this were just a matter of simple fact that should not surprise them in the slightest. “The Japanese are years ahead of us in carbon nanotube technology research, but…”

And he grinned.

“… I put quite a few billion into becoming the major stockholder of that company. We’ve developed, in secret, the technology to spin out not just a few millimeters of carbon-60 nanotubes. We have in place the ability to produce threads, continuous threads of whatever length you desire.”

“Forty thousand kilometers’ worth?” Eva asked with incredulous delight.

“Two hundred years ago, what was then called ‘spring steel’ could only be made by specialists, a few pounds at most in a pour. Fifty years later someone named Bessemer was making it by the thousands of tons. So, yes, Eva, I can give you—can give us—any length we want. And my goal was to be able to mesh together threads 40,000 kilometers in length, a means of fusing them together in a vacuum and low- or zero-gravity environment.”

“My God,” Eva whispered in Ukrainian.

“It is all in your pad computers. Now, to cut to the chase, as they used to say. I want to incorporate with you. This started out as your dream. It is now time to translate that into reality. You two”—he smiled, nodding to Victoria—“and when she is eighteen, your daughter as well, will be partners in this venture. To be blunt, since you were working for Goddard with nearly all your research, your efforts are public domain. I think my team, in secret, as is common in this business, such as the legendary ‘skunk works’ of the 1950s and ’60s, has improved on the practical aspects and patented many of your initial efforts.”

“If so, why do you need us?” Eva asked, and after her initial enthusiasm, with a touch of cynicism now.

“I know this sounds like a line but I believe in honesty and fair play,” Franklin replied. “You two thought up most of this, though others had a role as well. If you want me to sound pragmatic and not sentimental, there is a lot more to be done to transfer this from theory to practice, and at this moment I feel you are the two most valuable people on this planet to make my dream come true, and thus I want you on my side.”

“With that said,” Erich muttered, obviously not fully asleep, “to hell with a million dollars: ask for ten million a year.”

“I thought you were asleep,” Franklin said, looking over at the old man half curled up on the double-wide seat.

“Old habit from the war: always sleep with one eye and ear open,” Erich whispered.

They could not help but laugh.

“I think we need each other, my friends,” Franklin said, nodding toward Erich as well. “You are the brilliant minds who dreamed of this. I am asking for you to partner with me to build that dream, because I have the resources to do it.”

Gary, Eva, and Victoria, who together had felt so defeated less than a dozen hours ago, just looked at him in stunned disbelief.

“Tell them what you are willing to put into this,” Erich muttered.

Franklin was silent for a moment.

“I think it was Andrew Carnegie, reflecting on his accomplishments, who said that the pleasure of life was, in the first half to build his empire, and in the second half to give nearly all his earnings away … that he who died rich, ultimately died poor.”

“How much?” Erich grumbled.

Franklin’s features were now fixed with intensity.

“I’m putting up everything I own. At last count it was something like fifty billion dollars.”

Eva actually gasped. Victoria looked at him wide-eyed. Only Gary could respond.

“Not enough,” he sighed, “regardless of what the dreamers—of which I am one—would say. It will be a hundred billion or more to have a fully operational tower viable not just for exploration but commercial use as well.”

“What is fifty billion more or less?” Franklin said, and there was a look of complete earnestness in his eyes. “I’ll find the money; it is out there from my generation who created the computer revolution. Men and women like Branson, Rutan, and others, when they see we are dead serious about this, will be knocking on our door. And that is where you, my friends, come in. With your names attached to this, they will come. You might have led a somewhat cloistered life at Goddard, but believe me, your work is known where it matters and thus another reason I want you on my team. You carry the respect of more than you know with you.

“Together, we will build it. We will create a new American dream for the twenty-first century, and though some shortsighted types in our government lag behind, the work of NASA will shine forth again as it did with Apollo and
Curiosity
, which still roams the plains of Mars. Believe me, they will come and we will build our Pillar to the Heavens.”

As he spoke, it was as if Franklin were standing before an assembly of others like him, making his pitch. The force of his personality was such that none could ever disagree.

And Gary could not help but believe.

“This flight is only the first leg of our journey. Three days from now I look forward to showing you something that will prove my point. But, for now, look through the contracts on your computers. I am certain, of course, dear Dr. Rothenberg will want certain addendums to your contracts, and I’ll be frank. There was an old Western movie I loved where the main character said, more than once, ‘Make a deal that is fair to the buyer and fair to us.’ Feel free to tell me any concerns.”