Free Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) by Gina Marie Wylie Page A

President, eh?”
    “Yes, the main man.  The big guy himself.”
    “Well... I do want to catch him on a good day.”
    John Gilly smiled.  “You already did.  Now, let’s get this show on the road.”
    He reached down and rapped a nice wooden drink holder down, flat on the table.  It made a loud sound and the conversation died away.
    “My name is John Gilly, Captain, US Navy.  I am the Naval Aide to the President of the United States.  I’m here at his behest today and I want to remind you all that no matter how informal this meeting seems, it is Top Secret.  I imagine Mr. Taverner has his own classifications, and I can imagine it’s at least that secret for your company as well.”
    “Oh, at least,” Brian Taverner said mildly.  The people in the room laughed.
    “Monday morning of this week I showed up for work in the White House.  The President called me in and showed me several things.  One of them I’m going to show you now.  I see it’s about eleven thirty, Mr. Taverner.  Did I hear something about lunch?  Will it be here within the hour?”
    “Oh, yes.  This plant has supported generations of pizza and Chinese take-out restaurants.”
    “Good.  I will give you a short presentation on proof-of-principle.  Professor Kinsella, a tenured professor at Caltech, will have some information then on how it was done.  Do you have copies of the patent application, Professor?”
    “Sure.  I never leave home these days without them,” she said, smiling.
    “Enough for all these fine people?”
    “And their wives, kids, dogs and cats.”
    There were more chuckles.  John was aware of a lot of eyes directed at Stephanie, trying to digest the “tenured professor of physics” description.
    He pulled out his laptop and set it on the conference table.  “I need a connection to the room’s projector.”  That took about a second.  He booted the computer and while it was coming up he spoke.
    “Professor Kinsella overheard some graduate students discussing an unusual effect that the grad students had noticed in an experiment they were running.  One thing led to another and now we’re here.
    “Ladies and gentleman, Professor Kinsella’s web site.”
    There was the picture of the Professor, Benko and Chang, her grad students and a couple of techs, all smiling at the camera in the VW Bug.  Of course, you couldn’t see that it was a Bug in the first picture.
    Stephanie realized that he’d edited the clip and was going to do things his way.
    “When I first saw this picture I thought I was looking at a bunch of grad students having a car wash.  The President thought the same thing.  Sitting where you are now, you probably realize that there is a cuckoo’s egg in there with the grad students.”
    While he was talking the picture flipped, and was now looking at the Bug.
    “A VW Bug, a sixties vintage.”
    “Sixty-five,” Stephanie said, speaking out.  “We decided that there was no way on earth to make any car airtight, so we went with the cheapest and funkiest.”
    Then the scene shifted to the VW lifting away.
    “What the hell?” someone in the room said.
    “Good CGI,” someone else opined.
    The Bug vanished into the sky, then the scene cut to one of the lunar surface shots.
    “No!  Not possible,” another voice said.  “Fake, all fake!”
    Captain Gilly shook his head.  “Right now the government has angered every major radio-telescope we could lay our hands on.  For nearly a week now we’ve been monitoring the signal.  You’ll notice Earth in the background of the shot.  The signal comes from the moon; there is absolutely no doubt about it.  The cloud patterns on the Earth are correct.  We’ve been told that the planetary level cloud patterns would be relatively easy to fake, but there is no way to fake the signal origin.
    “You will hear about it in the near future.  The President is rearranging his science team at the cabinet level.  Last week the Presidential