CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A few days later, Sadou Maurie pulled the car to the curb beside a shabby but overpriced chalet outside the Douala airport. The compound’s doorman accepted a far too large tip from a gangly white guy in a badly fitting sport coat as he exited the air-conditioned gatehouse. The man’s thick glasses fogged and he smeared them with the tail of his dress shirt to clear them. This chalet directly under the airport’s primary flight path was owned by a cousin of the Douala Airport Information Services night shift desk clerk. Only the sort of person who didn’t plan ahead at all would end up staying here.
Maurie checked her comm for the notes written out by Fatima: “Philip Chao, of MIT, student of Dr. Ross (the two-time Hunsaker Award winner Ross), by-name hire recommendation from TCG. Ms. Maurie: DO NOT SCARE HIM OFF!!!” She suppressed a snort and got out of the car to make sure the young man was the right nerd. Usually someone unaware enough to end up staying at this place would not be a great hire, but Uncle Chummy’s assistant recommended him.
“Taxi? Taxi?” the man said, repeating himself louder and slowly. “I. Need. A. Taxi. Please?”
“Philip Chao?” she said and hoped it wouldn’t be.
He beamed at her in obvious relief. “Oh, of course, thank you. I need to go to, um—” He fumbled through pages in a plastic briefcase.
“You’re going for an interview with Sadou Moussa,” she said. Samson Young appeared not to have Uncle Chummy’s knack for choosing people. Grandpere could give this guy the bad news that they didn’t really need anybody like him. It was hot, though, and she had some sympathy for his sweating body. “Why don’t you get in the car?”
The remote-clicker thing to open the door didn’t work. She should have known Fatima would give her the lemon of the family vehicle fleet. She pressed the button on the outside of the door to open it for him.
Philip gave her a grateful glance and slid in quickly to sit, not in the seat next to the driver, but in the rear one as if she were a chauffeur.
Maurie shook her head and closed the door behind him. Definitely not a prime candidate. She got back into the car and started it going on autodrive. Fatima initiated a text chat on the driver’s console before she even turned around.
“Did you pick him up?” Fatima sent.
“Y,” Maurie replied.
“Um, thank you for the prompt pickup,” Philip said. A pale hand appeared over Maurie’s shoulder and dropped some crumpled bills.
Maurie checked the amount. “Is math not your forte?”
“He got a perfect score on the math section of the ACT just like Pascaline did,” Fatima typed. “I can hear you, so don’t think you can talk him into canceling the interview without anybody noticing.”
“Oh, it’s not enough?” Another wad of bills appeared.
Maurie folded them and stuffed them into a cubby in the dash. A transcript featuring a lot of A’s scrolled across Maurie’s screen along with a short résumé for a position called “Oil and Gas Production Manager’s Deputy.” That didn’t look right.
“Hey, do you mind if I practice my interview answers with you?” Philip said. “The job services office at school said it’d be a good idea to do it at the hotel…”
“At MIT. He should be emphasizing that he went to MIT. ‘At school’?!? He definitely needs to practice,” Fatima wrote.
“…but I got in really late, or really early, whatever it was, and all the aircraft noise made it hard to sleep, so I snoozed my alarm too many times this morning to get it done there. My messed-up comm said we have a half-hour drive, so, hopefully, I’ve a little time now. And, it’s okay, right?”
“Sure,” she said. This would be interesting.
“God, I hate interviews,” he said.
“Not the best start,” Maurie told him.
“Shut up, he’s practicing,” Fatima wrote.
“Oh, yeah.” Philip gulped. “Okay, thank you, sir, for the opportunity to talk to you about joining, uh, what company was it…”
Maurie let him flounder.
“Fuck, I hate this. These things always go horribly wrong. I mean, I get the internship or admission or whatever anyway because of course my test scores are good. I wish I could just hand somebody my transcript. Or Dr. Ross could write me a recommendation letter.”
“We have his transcript,” Fatima typed. “And at least he knows to name-drop Dr. Ross. She was on his references list and responded *herself* to our messages. She says he has, ‘my highest possible recommendation’ with a triple underline for highest.”
“What job are you applying for?” Maurie couldn’t help herself.
“I don’t remember,” he said. “I just need something in Africa so I can use the Eurail to pop over to Kilimanjaro and get time talking to actual lab people. I’m an aerospace guy. I should be working on launch vehicles and shit. I like the tweaks of the final design phase best, but I guess people don’t get to do much of that now that the elevator is going to be a thing. But maybe I can help out with the craft that they plan to use to lift the tether.”
“What if they construct the DiamondWire at geosynch and lower it down instead?” Maurie said.
Philip laughed. “Geosynch, I love it, what a time to be alive! Even taxi drivers are keeping track of space developments. And, yeah, maybe they could. But there’s not much carbon up there already. And we don’t know if the nanotube construction process even works in low gravity.”
“Yes, we do,” Fatima wrote. “It actually works best in zero gee. One of the labs that verified the Kilimanjaro team’s work was TCG’s Luna One. That was in Uncle Chummy’s whole project overview info packet. So, whatever TCG’s super-secret manufacturing process is, it’s either not gravity dependent or centrifugal forces can substitute for it. And I resent that ‘even taxi drivers’ comment.”
“And if you have to lift it up anyway,” Philip continued, “why not turn the carbon into nanotubes before sending it up? That way if something goes wrong, you can fix it on-planet. Cheaper that way. I haven’t checked the math on the total uplift mass yet. I figure they must have a way to join segments of nanotube in low gravity or they’d be pouring research dollars into making a really fucking big rocket to lift the entire tether at once. Twenty-two thousand miles of the stuff, even if it is nano-thin, is going to be an impressive total payload. Say, have you ever seen a launch?”
“Wait, wait, I’m still stuck on his plan to use the Eurail to ditch us and go work on the elevator. What continent does he think this is?”
“I haven’t seen a launch in person,” Maurie said, ignoring Fatima.
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t want to be that close. You’d get roasted, but at safe standoff distance with hearing protection and cameras to observe all the closer-in stuff, it’s the best, the absolute best,” he said with conviction.
“What an amazing deep vocabulary, our geographically challenged opportunist has. Such a poet. I take it back, you can drop him off at the airport instead. It’s not like Grandpere doesn’t have enough else on his schedule.”
“So, launches are like poetry?” Maurie asked.
“Yeah, uh, no,” he said. “Not like English-class poetry. You know the ones where you have to look up all the words, and the teacher says they’ve got other meanings still besides those, and you end up wondering if you even speak English? Definitely not like that. It’s more like, um, the thrum of a rocket takeoff and the heartbreak of the failed test… I think that might really be ‘a window into the soul of human expression and the rawest hope for a better future.’” Philip blushed deep red. “Or at least I think so. That last bit was something Dr. Ross said once in a speech, and I wrote it down, because that is how it is, or how it should be.”
“She said that during her second Hunsaker Award acceptance speech. He really ought to have name-dropped the Hunsaker too.” Fatima’s next comment bubbled an “in progress” symbol with a delete and a renewed “in progress” bubble several times before she sent: “Okay, he’s *maybe* okay.”
“Ask him to say that again in Swahili,” Fatima added. “If he can, I’ll put him back on Grandpere Moussa’s schedule. His résumé claims moderate fluency in Swahili.”
“Do you speak Swahili?” Maurie asked.
“Not really. I dropped that class. But I can say, ‘Wapi bufuni ipo?’ That means, ‘Which way to the bathroom, please?’”
“What?!? He said, ‘where bathroom exist.’ The word choice is all wrong, and the grammar is awful. Nobody would say that. Seriously. Take him back to the airport.”
“We don’t speak Swahili,” Maurie typed back. “Why should we care if he’s a bad fit for East Africa?”
“If you always get the jobs anyway, why are you interviewing now?” Maurie said out loud. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready to defend your third doctorate or something?”
“Only the first doctorate, though I might have defended two related thesis projects. I wasn’t certain which one I wanted to do and was considering just working on the research for both.” Philip sighed. “But I failed the professional engineer’s exam.”
“No, he didn’t. He missed a single question.”
“The PE exam is usually this minor thing only relevant for folks who want to work in industry. The test score didn’t even count toward a grade in any of my classes, but your percentile ranking on the test compared to other applicants is part of what they look at for formal admission into the doctoral program I wanted.”
“There’s informal admission?”
Maurie typed back, “Sometimes profs let high-performing undergraduates take graduate courses. If some wunderkind appears to be headed toward becoming a lifelong academic but keeps failing a required language arts course needed for the bachelor’s and his tuition checks keep coming in…”
“Right,” Fatima replied, “they’ll take the boy’s money for as long as his family keeps handing it over.”
Philip groaned and laid his head back against the headrest. “I was such an idiot. I should’ve gone to the University of Florida for their space undergrad. They’ve got a decent enough program and then I could’ve gotten in to work with Dr. Ross for the PhD program as an outside applicant. But she only takes the top student from within the same school, and I didn’t get the highest score this time. There was a key, you know.”
“What key? The wunderkind has gone cryptic again.”
“The test’s answers type of key?” Maurie asked.
“Yeah, yeah, it was Lucas, my roommate and my lab partner for every year except freshman year. His mom works at the company that administers the exam. He always gets intense test anxiety. So, she slipped him an early copy. I mean, he offered me a look and wanted me to double-check the answers the group of them had worked out over the course of the weeks they’d been practicing with it. But, eh, it’s not like I thought I needed to, you know?”
“This, I did not have in his record,” Fatima wrote. “But I bet the TCG people knew it.”
“So, yeah, give me a time machine, and I’d definitely take Lucas up on it. He applied to five different graduate schools instead of just the one. If I’d just taken one look at it, I’m sure I’d have passed too. I memorized pi to two hundred places in elementary school just to see if I could do it. I can still remember out to fifty places now. Yeah, next time, I’m definitely going to do the right thing and cheat.”
There’s no one in the whole world who is this bad at interviewing, Fatima wrote.
“That sounds like exactly the sort of thing you should tell a future employer,” Maurie said.
Philip made a noise between a snort and a laugh. “Oh yeah, I should get back to practicing. Ask me about where I see myself in five years.”
“Working in a TCG lab,” Maurie replied.
“Or dead in a ditch.” Philip rubbed his face with his hands and groaned. “This sucks so much. Okay. What I should say is, that I hope to be ready to apply for whatever the next level up is at the company. Shit. I really need to figure out what the position I’m applying for is. My comm junked itself on the trip over here. I restarted the thing three times, and it insists I’m in West Africa. Everyone knows the Kilimanjaro site is on the east side of the continent.”
“Sadou Corp will supply you with a company comm. Don’t sweat that part,” Maurie reassured him.
“Oh, that’s right, I’m interviewing with Sadou Corporation! And the guy I’m interviewing with is Sadou Moussa. My lab partner freshman year was a Tchami-Sadou; I wonder if he knows her?”
“You should tell him,” Fatima wrote. “Really this taxi driver farce is letting him make too much of a fool of himself.”
Maurie considered telling him, but he was just sharing so much.
Philip turned bright red before she could speak and started talking fast. “I didn’t mean that. I know. I know. It’s a big continent, of course not everyone from some place in Africa knows everyone else on the continent. I did not fail the Ethics and Diversity Inclusion for Engineers class! Pascaline was the one who was getting a D in that before she dropped it to keep it off her transcript. She was supposed to retake it the next semester.”
“You were Pascaline’s lab partner?”
“Well, yeah, but just freshman year. I’d’ve stuck with her too, but that asshole family of hers—”
“Asshole?”
“Oh yeah, the biggest assholes ever. They stopped paying tuition and what with them being these oil gazillionaires the scholarships and financial assistance reps for the school wouldn’t even talk to her.” He blew out a breath and made an exasperated face. “Now if she’d taken the spot as Dr. Ross’ next PhD candidate instead of Lucas, I’d’ve seen it coming. Pascaline was smart.”
“Her family stopped paying tuition,” Maurie repeated, trying to hide her shock. That can’t be public. “You’re certain?”
“If he can’t keep his mouth shut, I’ve got to put him on an airplane out of here,” Maurie typed.
Fatima didn’t reply.
“Yeah.” Philip shook his head. “She showed up again for a summer internship we’d both gotten into at a Luxembourg satellite builder, and she took classes remotely whenever somebody could slip her a login code, but there’s no substitute for being there for the lab work.”
“Somebody, meaning you?” Maurie said.
Philip blushed again and shrugged.
“Does the university see that as cheating?”
“It’s not like anyone else loses anything by someone who belongs in the class and was even formally admitted getting to keep learning.” Philip hugged himself. “That’s going to be me next, I’m just going to vanish.”
“Don’t you dare vanish him.” Fatima typed, “We’ll keep him away from the Bakweri. Ms. Pascaline needs him.”
Maurie closed her eyes. Pascaline did have a lot more aerospace engineering education than she’d realized. But the Sadou family still did not have an aerospace engineer credential, and if they hired Philip, he might talk to the wrong person.
“Fatima, you will erase the transcript and any recordings of this interview.”
“Yes, Ms. Maurie.” Fatima typed back.
But Pascaline needed him.
“Philip,” Maurie said, “you’re hired.”
“What?”
“And watch your mouth about Pascaline or you’ll never work in any space-related industry ever again.”