Chapter 5

I heard George Hartworth’s name being called over the Centennial Airport speakers. Centennial Airport was about twenty miles southeast of Denver. Rock and I waited by the gate until Hartworth strode toward me, leading his wheeled carry-on bag. Behind us was the sleek jet painted in blue and white, with ‘Spirit of the Hunter’ splashed across the body of the plane.

“Mr. Hartworth?” I walked forward, my hand outstretched.

He shook my hand. “Lexi? I’m George Hartworth.” He was a tall bloke, about six and a half feet. I was trying to go with the Hong Kong thing, hence the ‘bloke’ description. He was a light skinned black man, bald headed, with a broken nose that had a bandage across the bridge.

“Yes. Glad to meet you. I hope the flight home won’t bother your nose?” I waved in the general direction of his face.

“What? Oh, no. I’m healing up right nicely, thanks. Bit of a holdover from an amateur boxing match. ‘Twon’t be a problem at all,” he replied. “‘Spirit of the Hunter,’ eh? I guess that’s our transport?”

“Yes. Company plane. We can go out and take off for Arizona, as soon as we’re on board.” We went out to the plane and Rob Yar met us at the door. Rob was Cap’s co-pilot. He secured the door and went up to the cockpit. Rock took care of the luggage and seated himself. George and I took seats on opposite sides of a table.

After we’d leveled out on the way to the Whirlwind South Airport, I pulled out some papers from my bag, which was large enough to double as a briefcase of sorts. “We have to have some NDA paperwork first. That okay with you?”

“I expected nothing less,” he said. He signed. I signed. Rock signed as a witness. We didn’t really need Rock’s or my signature, but it was designed to make George feel better. It always made ME feel better when I wasn’t the only one signing something.

We glugged down some non-alcoholic drinks, and I told a shortened version of my story, excluding the Chas part. Nobody gets to know what Chas is here for.

I explained in some detail about the 1024 chip and our association with Intel.

“A processor that deals with 1024 bits? That’s a joke!” he exclaimed.

“Joke or no joke, Intel has built it using my designs. I’m on the patent. Now, I can show you a working model built on a PC sized base. My PC guy has got it jerry-rigged to a CoCo 2 to handle all the graphics and I/O.”

“What is Intel planning on doing with the kilo chip?” he asked.

“The kilo chip?”

“Yes. 1024 is 2 to the 10^th power. In computers, as you may know, that’s a kilobit. So ... a kilo chip. In fact, I may call it the KiloPC when – or if – Worth builds it. Or maybe a KPC.”

Right. I knew all that stuff because I was the expert who designed the chip. Yeah, sure.

He’s a little bit ahead of himself, I think. “Uh huh.” I nodded. “To get back to your question. Intel is concentrating on getting mainframes and minicomputers with the k-chip. Bigger initial sales.” If he’s willing to think about building it, I was willing to use his nomenclature: I shortened it to the k-chip.

“They’re wrong. The PC market will dwarf the mainframes,” he said. “That’s if they ever build out ARPANET into a world wide net.”

I agreed with him. I was really ready for that World Wide Web. Hmmm. Maybe we should trademark that WWW thing.

The rest of the trip was spent discussing finances. I didn’t know diddly-squat about finances, except what I had managed to glean from the dozens of tomes that Red had downloaded into my brain. I perused them – ‘read’ wasn’t the right term for something that was just in my brain – several times. I sure hoped that those books told the truth and weren’t just pie in the sky.

[They’re not, Lexi. If you get to a place where you have some questions, remember that I’m still here.]

I told him how we’ve structured Spirit of the Hunter. The voting stock, which was controlling the direction of the company and had a smaller portion of the profits, and the non-voting stock, which the public could own and had a larger portion of the profits. I suggested that Worth could have the same kind of setup. I roughed out a financial structure that would allow ‘us’ to take over all his debt, own roughly a third of the voting stock and could eventually trade the debt for a hunk of the non-voting stock. In exchange, ‘we’ would give him a big chunk of the operating cash he’d need, and of course, the right to develop the PC with the k-chip based on Gerry’s motherboard.

‘Us’ and ‘we’ was really ‘me.’

From his answers and the way his eyes glossed over at the financial details, I knew that he didn’t really grok the money part of the business. He was a ‘bits and bytes’ guy. Fortunately, he had a money guy on board back in Denver. But the bits and bytes would decide it for him.

He changed the subject. “I must say, you are very young to be running such a large business.”

“Well, it’s not so large as all that. We’re just getting off the ground. I just had a vision of what the k-chip looked like, and I got in touch with Intel, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

“Pretty nice transportation for a startup,” he said.

“I’ve had some good advisors along the way.” WHAT AN UNDERSTATEMENT!

“What’s the two factories for?” he asked.

“We’re producing much more efficient solar panels. They generate electricity about four times better than the standard ones.”

“How do they do that?”

“It’s a secret.” I put my finger over my lips. “If I told you...”

“I know ... you’d have to kill me,” he laughed.

On we flew to Whirlwind South – I cleaned it up for George and called it Burnside North Airport. When we flew over the factories, I pointed them out to George as we were coming in for our landing. He didn’t say much.

Once we recovered our multicolored Bronco, Rock drove us over to Factory 2.

“Factory #1 is where you do all the magic for the solar panels,” George guessed.

“Exactly. Would you like some for YOUR new factory? Huh?” I asked, half-kidding.