Part 11 (2/2)

Perry nodded. ”There you have it -- roommate-ware for homeless people, a great and untapped market.”

Suzanne c.o.c.ked her head and looked at him. ”You're sounding awfully commerce-oriented for a pure and unsullied engineer, you know?”

He ducked his head and grinned and looked about twelve years old. ”It's infectious. Those little kitchen gnomes, we sold nearly a half-million of those things, not to mention all the spin-offs. That's a half-million *lives* -- a half-million *households* -- that we changed just by thinking up something cool and making it real. These RFID things of Lester's -- we'll sign a couple million customers with those. People will change everything about how they live from moment to moment because of something Lester thought up in my junkyard over there.”

”Well, there's thirty million of us living in what the social workers call 'marginal housing,'” Francis said, grinning wryly. He had a funny smile that Suzanne had found adorable until he explained that he had an untreated dental abscess that he couldn't afford to get fixed. ”So that's a lot of difference you could make.”

”Yeah,” Perry said. ”Yeah, it sure is.”

That night, she found herself still blogging and answering emails -- they always piled up when she travelled and took a couple of late nights to clear out -- after nine PM, sitting alone in a pool of light in the back corner of Lester's workshop that she had staked out as her office. She yawned and stretched and listened to her old back crackle. She hated feeling old, and late nights made her feel old -- feel every extra ounce of fat on her tummy, feel the lines bracketing her mouth and the little bag of skin under her chin.

She stood up and pulled on a light jacket and began to switch off lights and get ready to head home. As she poked her head in Tjan's office, she saw that she wasn't the only one working late.

”Hey, you,” she said. ”Isn't it time you got going?”

He jumped like he'd been stuck with a pin and gave a little yelp. ”Sorry,” he said, ”didn't hear you.”

He had a cardboard box on his desk and had been filling it with his personal effects -- little one-off inventions the guys had made for him, personal fetishes and tchotchkes, a framed picture of his kids.

”What's up?”

He sighed and cracked his knuckles. ”Might as well tell you now as tomorrow morning. I'm resigning.”

She felt a flash of anger and then forced it down and forcibly replaced it with professional distance and curiosity. Mentally she licked her pencil-tip and flipped to a blank page in her reporter's notebook.

”Oh yes?”

”I've had another offer, in Westchester County. Westinghouse has spun out its own version of Kodacell and they're looking for a new vice-president to run the division. That's me.”

”Good job,” she said. ”Congratulations, Mr Vice-President.”

He shook his head. ”I emailed Kettlewell half an hour ago. I'm leaving in the morning. I'm going to say goodbye to the guys over breakfast.”

”Not much notice,” she said.

”Nope,” he said, a note of anger creeping into his voice. ”My contract lets Kodacell fire me on one day's notice, so I insisted on the right to quit on the same terms. Maybe Kettlewell will get his lawyers to write better boilerplate from here on in.”

When she had an angry interview, she habitually changed the subject to something sensitive: angry people often say more than they intend to. She did it instinctively, not really meaning to psy-ops Tjan, whom she thought of as a friend, but not letting that get in the way of the story. ”Westinghouse is doing what, exactly?”

”It'll be as big as Kodacell's operation in a year,” he said. ”George Westinghouse personally funded Tesla's research, you know. The company understands funding individual entrepreneurs. I'm going to be training the talent scouts and mentoring the financial people, then turning them loose to sign up entrepreneurs for the Westinghouse network. There's a compet.i.tive market for garage inventors now.” He laughed. ”Go ahead and print that,” he said. ”Blog it tonight. There's compet.i.tion now. We're giving two points more equity and charging half a point less on equity than the Kodacell network.”

”That's amazing, Tjan. I hope you'll keep in touch with me -- I'd love to follow your story.”

”Count on it,” he said. He laughed. ”I'm getting a week off every eight weeks to scout Russia. They've got an incredible culture of entrepreneurs.h.i.+p.”

”Plus you'll get to see your kids,” Suzanne said. ”That's really good.”

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