We had what we needed. There was some talk of going down to get more, but we didn't talk long. While returning with a pound of Rubyzin would have made us the toast of Titan, we now had almost ten pounds! We spent two days mothballing our deep atmosphere base, and then we jetted out heading for our orbiter. This was the most tedious part of the journey. Neptune's atmosphere is thick, and that limits how fast we can climb out. To avoid heat problems we have to fly subsonic, and to avoid running out of fuel on the way up, we have to rely on propellers and wing lift. It took us twenty hours to climb through cloud layer after cloud layer, and finally we saw stars. It was another five hours to get from seeing stars to where the air was thin enough that we could use rockets instead of turboprops and go supersonic. Finally, we made it to the orbiter, and it felt like getting home.
When we got to the orbiter, we sent the good news to Jason, our stay-at-home partner on Titan. Ten hours later, we got his reply. Given where Saturn and Neptune were in their orbits, Titan was four light-hours from us, so to hear from him in ten hours meant Jason saw the news and got his reply turned around lickety-split.
His face in the video was as bug-eyed as we expected:
"You guys are bringing back how much? Nine point seven pounds!
"...Christ! You know that REI produces only point-eight pounds a year. At current wholesale prices, you're bringing back more wealth than the nation of Korea produces in a year! Of course, the price will crash when the word gets out... But... Oh My Gosh!... If the word gets out!..."
He lowered his head and started thinking to himself and muttering... then he looked up and said to us. "Yeah, if the word gets out, there's really no telling what will happen! In particular, no telling what will happen to us! We could end up rich, but we could end up dead, or in prison! This thought hit you, too, I see.... Yeah, you did so well, we now have a real problem!"
He laughed nervously, "Let me think about this. This is just so much bigger than what we hoped for.... Frankly, I'd been practicing explaining to our investors why it was OK that you came back empty-handed. Instead you're going to be back on time, under budget, and with a whoooole chunkapuddin!! Hot Doggies!! This is incredible!
"Yeah, lets get a solution to this distribution issue. You said you thought about hiding the stuff, and I've thought about that possibility, too. But I think you're right: it's not a good solution. You aren't the only ones that can do this, and the Ruby is at it's most valuable right now. We need to get this sold, and sold soon. We need to turn this into conventional wealth before someone does something crazy to us.... I'll be working on this.... nine point seven... HOT DOGGIES!!" He jumped up and cheered as he signed off.
We started prepping for our return to Titan, that would take about three days of stowing the equipment we used for planetary exploring, and dusting off the equipment we would use for the interplanetary journey. Six hours after his first video, we got another from Jason.
"I've explained our problem to two of our investors. Whew! It's a good thing we picked those carefully! Dr. Langhorn and Jabe Kalanov both caught on to the problem instantly and we've had some good discussion on possible solutions. I'll video you more on those in a day or two. In the meantime, both agreed: you want to bring back something from a comet... like we said we were going to do when we publicized this journey in the first place. You remember: that was our cover story.
"So, before you come home, stop by somewhere and pick up a 'comet sundae.' Bye now." and the video ended.
"... Oh yeah. We did say that, didn't we." it was Cracker speaking for all of us.
"Cracker, you and I can find us a comet." said Hansley, and the two of them worked on that while Korliss and I continued stowing and unpacking. Picking a comet didn't take long. To give some cover to our tracks, they picked a comet that was not on an obvious path from Neptune.
We were twenty hours into our journey to the, newly named, Cracker-Hensley comet when Fillhorn videoed us again. "OK, I've sent you by data stream a spreadsheet outlining the numbers we have projected for various options. Let me summarize what we have come up with:
"Option #1: Deal with the devil: Kalanov has been talking to some high-level board people at REI, a couple of 'liberals' who are known by him to be uncomfortable with the company's monopoly position, and feel the company's anti-smuggling policies are not working well. He hinted that he may be able to put them onto a big cache, but he needed a quid pro quo. What he offered was a large and steady supply of Ruby, and what he got offered in return was REI stock. In a nutshell, in exchange for becoming a major supplier, we would get part ownership of the company. The disadvantage is that we become part of the establishment -- Boo! -- and the chunk of ownership they are offering is not nearly as much as I think they should offer. We are offering to more than double their supply of Ruby, and they are offering five percent ownership. I think forty or fifty percent would be more reasonable, but that's just me talking.
"Option #2: Work the black market on Titan: The trouble is the huge quantity: no existing 'fence' can process more than a few ounces safely -- take more than that from us, and they risk exposure and jail time. So, we would have to spread our wares through dozens of dealers. This creates a lot of problems: it's tedious, each transaction brings its own risks, and I can't think of a faster way to get believable rumors of a new Ruby source flying. Once that rumor takes hold, the black-market price will crash, and we have to look for plausible deniability -- there aren't that many ships launching that might bring back Ruby from a new source, so we would have some explaining to do.
"Option #3: Come out in the open: Set up our own Rubyzin distribution organization. This sounds obvious, but it's likely to be the slowest and least profitable way to go... at least in the short run. First, setting up our own shop means bending and breaking laws -- which isn't so bad to do in Titan Colony -- but Earthlings will have a hissyfit. The only people who will back us on setting up our own shop are those willing to risk a Third Siege of Titan. Some people will do that, but they must be richly rewarded. Second, we've run the numbers on setting up a distribution network, and... whew! I learned! Even if it was totally legit, it's not quick or cheap. But, then again, ten pounds of Ruby can pay for a lot of express service, so doing it ourselves is a possibility.
"Those are the options we've come up with here. Talk about them, come up with your own if you have any, and send me back an answer. At this point there is no particular rush on things, but the more time we have for whatever plan we choose, the better." and the video ended.
We looked over the spreadsheet Fillhorn sent us -- looked over it as a group, then individually. We're all numbers-liking guys, so we all spent another half day twiddling the numbers and looking at "what if"'s. And in the process we argued. We had lots of time, so the arguing was not rushed, and we covered lots of ground.
o What if before we revealed the ruby, we formed some kind of investment group and bought 51% of REI, and then opened it up to become a distributor for all ruby pirates, including us?
o What if we started the rumor of an alternate supply and crashed the price. Would that bankrupt REI, and expose that those guys are not making money hand-over-fist like they promised everyone they would? Nor are they providing much Rubyzin, which is also what everyone wanted them to do. Would they take their marbles, and run away home to Earth, and not bother us independents anymore?
o What if we set up a distribution company on Mars instead of in Titan Colony? The Martians like making money as much as the next guy, and they don't mind giving Earth "the bird" every so often?
These were the kinds of things we talked about. After two days of this, we sent a message back to Fillhorn, outlining some of the ideas we'd come up with. We sent ideas, not recommendations, because we didn't have enough information on the ship to sort out good ideas from bad ones. We were lighthours away from civilization of any sort, so it was expensive and slow to query from the ship. We would let Fillhorn do the research.
Then we sat around and twiddled our thumbs. You do a lot of that on outer planet flights. We thought some more, planned some more, and just to break the monotony, we thought about what we should take off of Comet Cracker-Hensley. If we brought back something that we called, "Oh, just dirty snow and ice", then that wouldn't help our cover much.
~~~~~
We were in the break room three days later. It was meal time. Cracker was sitting down with his meal saying, "Man, this is shit." That wasn't worth remembering, he was always saying that.
Korliss stopped eating long enough to say, "It's just incredible... seven people controlling the destiny of a package of wealth the equivalent of a medium-size nation."
Cracker replied, "If this is the best we can eat, we don't control shit."
I said, "Yeah, you're a billionaire when you complain like Cracker, and a dozen people start running around saying (I switched to my falsetto), 'Oh my goodness, sir, what can I do to make you feel better, sir!'...(switched back to regular) and they mean it. Then you're a billionaire."
"Hmm..." says I, "That may be our ticket to dealing with our Ruby." Cracker and Korliss looked up.
"We need to spread this wealth around. We need to be thinking about getting a lot of people rich, not just us."
"You mean like charity?" said Korliss.
"No. I mean like... if, say, a hundred people are going to become millionaires from this load of Ruby, then we have a hundred people rooting for us to solve this problem quick and well. ...rooting in their most sincere and creative ways. If those hundred people are already hundred-millionaires, then they already have a lot of clout."
"... It's a good point." was the last Korliss had to say about the subject at that time. He went back to eating, and was clearly doing some thinking, too.
We all thought about it, and in two days we had all come around to thinking that spreading the wealth should be the heart of whatever plan we decided on. We messaged Fillhorn with our new thoughts.
Three days later, we got a back a message from Jabe Kalanov, not Fillhorn. "Gentlemen, I have bad, bad news. Jason has been kidnapped. I got a ransom demand that the Rubyzin be handed over in exchange for Jason. That's all I have for now. Jabe, out."