Her voice was filled with anger.
"Business!" she shrieked. "And when I call you up, some cheap whore answers.
I suppose you're going to tell me it's your stepmother!"
"That's right!"
There was an angry click and the phone went dead in my hands.
I looked down at it for a moment, then began to laugh.
Everything was so right.
And so wrong.
7.
I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AT THE FIELD.
There were several planes warming up on the line, the red, white and blue ICA gleaming in the circle along their sides and under their wings.
I looked down at the planning board, then up at the designer.
Morrissey was young, even younger than I.
He had graduated from M.I.T., where he'd majored in aeronautical engineering and design.
He wasn't a flier; he was of a new generation that walked on the sky.
What he proposed was radical. A single-wing, two-motor plane that would outlift anything in the air.
He set his glasses lower on his nose. "The way I see it, Mr. Cord," he said in his precise manner, "is that by deepening the wings, we get all the lift we need and also increase our fuel capacity. Plus which, we have the added advantage of keeping our pilot in direct visual control."
"What I'm interested in is the payload and speed," I said.
"If my calculations are correct," Morrissey said, "we should be able to carry twenty passengers in addition to the pilot and copilot at a cruising speed of about two fifty. It should fly for about six hours before refueling."
"You mean we could fly from here to New York with only one stopover in Chicago?" Buzz asked skeptically. "I don't believe it!"
"That's what my calculations show, Mr. Dalton," Morrissey said politely.
Buzz looked at me.
"You can throw away your money on fool schemes like this," he said, "but not me.
I've been through too many of these pipe dreams."
"About how much would it take to build the first one?" I asked Morrissey.
"Four hundred, maybe five hundred thousand.
After we get rid of the bugs, we can produce them for about a quarter of a million."
Dalton laughed raucously. "A half million bucks for one airplane? That's crazy.
We'll never get our money out."
First-class passage coast to coast by train was over four hundred dollars. It took almost four full days.
Plus meals, it came to more than five hundred bucks per passenger.
A plane like this would have a payload of seven grand a trip, plus the mail franchise, which would bring it up to about eighty-five hundred dollars.
Flying five trips a week, in less than twenty weeks we could get all our costs back, plus operating expenses.
From there on in, it would be gravy.
Why, we could even afford to throw in free meals on the flight.
I looked down at my watch. It was almost nine o'clock.
I got to my feet. "I have to get down to the studio. They're shooting the first scene today."
Dalton's face turned red with anger.
"Come off it, Jonas.
Get down to business.
For the past month and a half, all you been doin' is spending time at that goddam studio.
While you're jerkin' off with that lousy picture, we got to find ourselves a plane to build.
If we don't, the whole industry will get ahead of us."
I stared at him, unsmiling.
"As far as I'm concerned," I said, "we have one."
"You're not- " he said incredulously, "you don't mean you're goin' to take a chance with this?"
I nodded, then turned to Morrissey.
"You can start building the plane right away."
"Wait a minute," Dalton snapped. "If you think ICA is going to foot the bill, you're crazy.
Don't forget I own half of the stock."