11
BOARD MEETING
Thrasher sat at the head of the conference room’s long, polished table while Sid Ornsteen droned through his treasurer’s report. Board meeting, Thrasher said to himself. It ought to be spelled b-o-r-e-d.
The corporation had rented the conference room from the Marriott Residence Inn in downtown Houston. It was cheaper to rent the hotel facility than to maintain a conference room in the corporate office suite that was only used four times a year.
Ornsteen made no mention of the recent run-up on the corporation’s stock. Whoever had bought the shares was apparently content, for the moment. The stock’s price had settled back to where it had been before the run.
Who would do that? Thrasher wondered. Why? It didn’t make sense.
Looking down the long table at the assembled directors, he noted that every one of them was here for this meeting. That’s unusual. Last meeting half of them didn’t bother to show up. Is one of them behind the stock run? We’ll find when we get to new business, I suppose.
White hair and bald pates. Q-Tips and bowling balls. Which one of you is trying to muscle me out of control?
Thrasher turned slightly to glance at Linda, seated against the side wall, recording the proceedings. She looks tense, he thought. Probably she senses that something’s in the wind.
The meeting dragged on. No problems, no arguments, no gasbags giving long-winded speeches to satisfy their egos.
At last he was able to say, “Okay. The last item on the agenda is new business.” He made himself smile as he looked down the table again. “Anybody?”
Nels Bartlett cleared his throat. “I’m not sure this falls under the heading of new business,” he began in his reedy, nasal voice, “but I think you should tell the board about your plans for a Mars mission. After all, you’ll probably want to sink a good deal of the corporation’s assets into this.”
Heads nodded. Directors fidgeted in their chairs, waiting for a reply. Thrasher made himself smile. So it begins, he thought.
“Yes, what about this Mars business?” asked one of the more prominent Q-Tips. “How will it affect the corporation?”
“Positively,” said Thrasher.
“I think you owe the board a more detailed explanation,” Bartlett said dryly.
“I’m planning to send a half-dozen human explorers to the planet Mars,” Thrasher began. “The goddamned government isn’t going to do it, so I think it’s up to American free enterprise to step up to the challenge.”
Uta Gelson said firmly, “I agree.”
“I’ve already bought into your program,” Bartlett said, “but what I want to know—as a director of Thrasher Digital—is how this is going to affect this corporation.”
“It’s going to soak up a great deal of our assets, in the short term. We’re going to be a major supplier of electronics components and communications systems for the spacecraft and the ground-control facilities.”
“Without a profit, I presume?” grumbled one of the bowling balls.
“That’s right. For the short term, we’ll show no profit from the program.”
“What about our stock dividends?”
Thrasher fought down the urge to squirm in his chair. “We’ll try to continue giving dividends, of course . . . but it might not be possible, for the near term.”
“Then why should we—”
“You said for the near term,” Sid Ornsteen said, as if this were all new to him. “What about the long term?”
Good boy, Sid, Thrasher praised silently.
All eyes were on him. The boardroom was so quiet Thrasher could hear a chair squeak when one of the directors shifted in it.
“When I said we planned to send six explorers to Mars I misspoke,” he started to explain. “In reality we’ll be sending a million or more.”
“A million?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember at our last board meeting I reported on our virtual reality program?”
“That simulation stuff. It’s for kids’ games, isn’t it?”
“That’s only a part of the market for VR. The armed services use virtual reality to train their personnel. Big industries are buying VR rigs to train their people, especially technicians and field crews that have to work in extreme environments. With virtual reality they can experience the situations they’ll be facing: see, hear, feel what they would come up against in the real world.”
“It’s a growing market,” Ornsteen commented.
“For the porn industry,” said one of the bowling balls—with a sly grin.
The woman beside him frowned, then turned to Thrasher. “So you’ll use VR systems to train the people who’ll go to Mars. “That won’t make much of an impression on our bottom line.”
Thrasher smiled broadly. “The sale of several million VR sets will affect our bottom line very nicely, don’t you think?”
“How on earth—”
“I get it!” exclaimed the woman sitting at the foot of the table. “People here on Earth will be able to link in to the people on Mars.”
Thrasher bowed his head graciously. “Through virtual reality, people safe in their own homes—or in gaming arcades—will be able to walk on the rust-red sands of Mars. To all intents and purposes, they’ll be on Mars. How much do you think that’ll be worth?”
“Will they be able to interact with the astronauts on Mars?”
Thrasher shook his head. “The time lag is too long, as much as half an hour most of the time. But they’ll see and feel and hear everything the astronauts are doing, just as if they were actually on Mars.”
“How many sets do you think we could sell?”
“We’ll start doing VR sessions from the spacecraft as it goes out to Mars,” Thrasher explained. “The publicity from that ought to ramp up sales nicely. By the time they actually set foot on Mars, we should have sold several million sets, at least.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
Thrasher waggled a hand. “Six, maybe eight or nine months. The tech guys will figure that out for us.”
“That will be a good time to build up the market, I agree.”
“We’ll have to ramp up production. Don’t want to be caught short-handed.”
“That’s going to cost a lot, isn’t it?”
Thrasher nodded. “Yes indeed. As I said, we’ll be sinking a good deal of the corporation’s assets into this and the other aspects of the Mars program.”
Thrasher’s public relations chief, a former anchorwoman for Global News Network, suggested, “We should give VR sets to the major news nets, for free. Good PR.”
“And schools!” shouted one of the directors. “Selected schools.”
“Major universities.”
“Ghetto schools.”
The directors babbled on enthusiastically. Thrasher sat back, smiling. But in his mind he was still wondering, which one of you is trying to take over my corporation?