“As prime minister? Truly?” MinChao asked.
“Truly,” Milbank said. “MinChao, Dr. Huenemann has his own power base in the House and the Chamber. Even in my own party. I can’t overrule him on a technical judgment call. I suspect I can’t even remove him if the project fails.”
“Why not, Rob?” Jessica asked.
“Because he’ll figure out some other reason why the probe must have failed. The field generator burned out just as he feared, for example, and it couldn’t transition back. He will want more money for a new probe, with a stouter field generator. Which he will also program to turn off the field generator after transition to hyperspace. And I can’t do anything about it. The House and Chamber will overrule me.”
“Rob, that’s infuriating,” MinChao said.
“Tell me about it, MinChao. About the only thing I could do is cancel the whole project as an expensive boondoggle and fire the lot of them. And I’m tempted. But it’s too important. If hyperspace is out there, Arcadia needs to have a part of it. But I don’t see any way to make it happen.”
MinChao and Jessica looked at each other, then back to the prime minister.
“There may be a way, Rob,” Jessica said.
Milbank looked back and forth between them.
“Well, if there is, I wish you’d enlighten me, because I sure as hell don’t see it.”
“Cancel the project,” MinChao said. “Fire them all. Expensive boondoggle, as you said. Then sell off the project as scrap.”
“Who would buy it?”
“We would,” Jessica said. “The Chen family.”
Milbank’s eyes grew wide, and he looked back and forth between them.
“You would carry it through?” he asked.
“Yes,” MinChao said. “And we have Chen JieMin.”
“It would mean we own it, though, Rob,” Jessica said.
Milbank waved that away.
“I don’t have any concern about that, Jessica,” he said. “What would you do with it? Sell hyperspace ships, of course. Ship freight interstellar, too, I imagine. All good things, from my point of view, and unlikely to happen as long as the bureaucracy has a lock on the space program. Commercial success is just not one of their mission parameters. Success for them is bigger budgets.”
Milbank emerged from the Chen apartment building on Market Street to find his cars waiting there within a circle of his security standing around trying to look important. He chuckled and got into the limousine.
“Did you have a good meeting, sir?” his aide asked.
“Excellent. Just excellent.”
“Wonderful. Back to Government Center, then, sir?”
“No. It’s pretty late. Ask the driver to drop me off at the house on the way back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Karl Huenemann was feeling pretty pleased with himself this afternoon as well. It seemed he had gotten all the foofoo around the flight plan for the hyperspace probe pounded down at last.
He had had to do it by political methods, of course. He wasn’t in any position to argue the mathematics with guys like Chen JieMin. No one understood Chen’s hyperspace equations except for a few other ivory-tower types in the University of Arcadia’s math department.
Dreamers all, without any real world experience. Hothouse flowers, the sons of the elite. It had taken Huenemann thirty-one years out of undergraduate college to get to where he was. ‘Professor’ Chen JieMin was born around the time Huenemann started.
In any case, it had come down to one simple fact. It was Karl Huenemann’s call. His decision. Not Chen JieMin nor Rob Milbank nor anyone else could overrule him, and they all knew it.
For Huenemann himself, it all came down to the hyperspace field generator and its power supply. Sure, the power supply was a standard design the factories could knock out fairly easily. It was also a much larger power supply than the field generator needed.
Huenemann didn’t mind the large engineering margin on the power supply, but it just made more obvious the lack of anything like a reasonable margin on the field generator. That thing would be on the very edge of destruction, in his view. The math whizzes said it was fine, but Huenemann didn’t agree.
So the logical decision was to turn the field generator off in hyperspace, to preserve it against the return transition. What was hyperspace after all but a mirror of space-time? Once you got to the other side it was smooth sailing until you came back. That was obvious.
The claims by Chen and the other mathematics types that the energy density in hyperspace would prove to be greater than that in a supernova explosion seemed overwrought to Huenemann. That would mean hyperspace had an energy density millions or billions of times that of space-time. Nonsense.
And the claims that hyperspace was the origin from which space-time itself sprung seemed almost mystical.
All well and good, but Huenemann was a hard-nosed realist, and fevered speculation was something he would neither indulge nor indulge in.
Karl Huenemann and his cronies may not have been any good at the new branch of mathematics its developers were calling hyperspace geometry, but they expert at insider political maneuvering. The flight profile of the hyperspace probe was Huenemann’s decision. He was the director of Arcadia’s blossoming space program.
And he would stay there, whatever happened.
ChaoPing mentioned her day over dinner with the family that evening.
“The prime minister visited Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu today. I served them all tea.”
“Are you violating a confidence there, ChaoPing?” ChaoLi asked.
“No. It’s public knowledge. To anybody who saw him arrive or leave, that is. There was no attempt to hide his visit.”
“Well, make sure you don’t. Family business must sometimes be done behind closed doors.”
ChaoPing nodded.
“Oh, I understand. I don’t usually hear much anyway. I mean, I don’t listen to their conversations. I sit around the
