Chapter 7

Panit had been invited to attend the emergency board meeting, but not as a principal; he sat with others in the back of the boardroom. Only members of the board had seats at the long table.

Old business had been dispensed with, then had come the announcement that a new business proposal had been presented to the company. Sol stood as soon as the secretary finished the routine preliminary announcements and sat down. “Thank you for attending, gentlemen. I’ll get right to the point. We’ve been approached by a man who claims to have invented a new, and different, propulsion system. I emphasize that it’s a revolutionary discovery, not an improvement on the kind of thing we already do. I see this as risky. We need to decide whether to invest in this device, and if we do, how much money we’re prepared to put into developing it. As I see it, we have two options. Should we decide to go ahead, we can approve a budget to explore the proposal. Or we can send him away, but if we do someone else might decide to back him. I can perhaps stall him for a time, but he’s impatient. We need to decide quickly, yes or no.”

“What sort of development costs, Sol?” Frenchy asked.

“Part of it involves an up-front payment to the inventor. He’s got a price in mind that we can’t meet, so if he’s not open to negotiation then there’s nothing we can do. But even if he’s willing to come down on what he’s asking, I don’t know that we want to get involved; as I see it, he’s got an untried system. That’s why it seems like such a risk to me.

“I suspect he came to us because he thought we had the manufacturing capability to produce the item he’s invented. What he doesn’t know is that we’re currently using all our facilities. Our employees are tied up on other projects, meaning that we’d have to hire a lot more people to work on his concept. Which, by the way, is nowhere near perfected. He himself admitted that a lot of developmental work would need to be done. Add to that, we’re looking at years before his device is ready to be marketed. I estimate at least five years, but because it’s so new and untried it may take longer. There will undoubtedly be licensing issues and patent searches, just for starters. He says it’s revolutionary, but is it really? And we’ll need reliability data before we could take the device to market. As a comparison, just look at how long it’s taken Tesla to begin selling their electric cars!”

“Will we have to take on more debt, Sol?” asked Frenchy. “If bringing this device to market takes as long as you anticipate, the debt will have to be serviced. Meaning that adding substantially to our current debt load will cause stock prices to fall, at least in the short term.”

“So they will, Frenchy. You’re interested in stock appreciation, as we all are, but I should mention that the possible payoff is very large. That’s why I thought the board should consider the issue.”

“How large is large, Sol? I’m sure I speak for all of us,” Frenchy glanced around at the other members. “We expect gains commensurate with the risks we’re taking! The longer we have to wait, the larger the potential gains have to be if the investment is worthwhile. We’re already making money and stock prices are reflecting that, so that’s an issue too. Why should we take on something so risky? Our foreign sales of heavy equipment are particularly healthy, even if domestic sales haven’t fully recovered yet. We also have development costs for our new models to consider, they’ve been somewhat higher than expected, and we’ve got to absorb those. The recalls—well, we’re all familiar with that, and the lawsuits haven’t helped either. Can we really afford to take on something expensive that might pay off slowly, if ever?”

“I brought Mr. Jindae here to explain that, Frenchy. Panit?”

Panit stood up and swallowed nervously. “The proposal before us is to develop and market this new propulsion system. I doubt it will ever be useful for passenger vehicles, but it might work for long-haul tractors, the ones that pull those huge trailers, but it might better be suited for railroad applications. It would definitely be a significant improvement over current marine propulsion systems. I believe that submarines might be one of the early adoptees, because they wouldn’t need propellers.”

“Panit, we don’t build submarines. We don’t build ships either,” grumbled Jerome Stokes.

“No, Mr. Stokes, and that’s not what the proposal is about; Mr. Sneyd suggests that we build the power plants and lease them to shipbuilders. Trains would use different versions, but the idea is the same, to manufacture and lease the power units. In my opinion, airplanes would be the natural market, possibly our largest market in the long term. Each application would require a different version of the device, of course.”

“And you think there are advantages to leasing rather than selling?” Stokes asked. “Will the government even consider that? Offhand, I don’t believe they lease anything, and certainly not warships! They buy them outright and only accept completed units. For that matter, airlines buy aircraft too.

“The advantage to us is security, Mr. Stokes. According to Sneyd, we might not be able to patent the devices. He suggested instead that we would withhold the core knowledge of how the devices work in order to maintain secrecy. But leasing would be only a means to an end; we’d be in on the ground floor for the big prize.”

“And what big prize is that, Panit?”

“Potentially, the entire solar system, Mr. Stokes, and possibly even more than that.”

The buzz around the table created by this announcement took a long time to die away. Frenchy took no part in it. He simply leaned back and waited.

For the moment, that was his only option. The proposal had been to this company. The company might decide to accept it. Risky, to be sure; but as Panit had said, enormously profitable if the gamble paid off. But if the board decided it was too risky...

He’d done what he could to discourage the others. Sol was convinced, but the board might overrule him. It had happened before, but this board? They were as conservative as Sol!

“Come in, Mr. Sneyd. Coffee?”

“I already had two cups this morning, Mr. Panit. Can we get on with the horse trading?”

“Very well. I attended a meeting of the board of directors, Mr. Sneyd. Your invention is interesting, I can’t deny that. The idea of flying a demonstrator up and waving in my window definitely got my attention! Anyway, I presented your ideas to the board just as you provided them to me. The fact is, Mr. Sneyd, the company can’t afford to develop your invention. We have contracts we can’t cancel, projects in development, patents we own ... what you’re asking us to do is abandon the business we’ve spent years developing. In some cases, we would be competing with our own divisions! You say you aren’t interested in selling your discovery—is that still your position?”

“Yep. I don’t intend to have this stuffed into a file and ignored. Humanity needs this! What if one of them dinosaur-killin’ meteors is sighted? Then what? I want money, I told you that, but my main concern is developing the impeller propulsion system. Humanity needs the impeller drive!”

“Yes, of course. But do you have any concept of how much money you’re asking us to commit? At a minimum, it would require an entire new division, new workshops, new design departments, experiments to find the best materials, teams of scientists and engineers, and even if we committed the millions needed we couldn’t count on seeing a profit anytime soon, maybe for as much as twenty years! You may have built your flyer in your garage as you said, but you can’t build an interplanetary craft that way! Even the other uses, railways, aircraft, those won’t pay off for years, if ever. And what if your device can’t be scaled up? What would happen then? We’d be facing bankruptcy or begging the government for another bailout!