extension of
to
extension of the pilot himself, and the pilot can do things he shouldn’t be able to. There was an air of cocky competence about the kid, now that he was behind the wheel, that was very like a good pilot’s too.
“That’s not cheap, fielding several teams—” Sam ventured.
“Three teams, each with several cars, and no, it isn’t cheap,” Tannim admitted cheerfully. “The founding families started out independently wealthy—inherited money that survived the ’20s crash—but they’ve been making racing pay for itself for a while now. Not just purses and adverts—they’ve been farming out their experts—” he grinned again “—like yours truly, and opening up their shops for modifications to whoever was willing to pay the price. But that could 引越し only go so far. Now we’d like to hit the bigtime. Indy-style, Formula One, that kind of thing. Getting right up there with the big boys—maybe even have the big boys come to us. But to do that, we have to have something better than just mods. We have to have original advances. That’s where you come in.”
He braked, briefly, and Sam caught the flash of a bird’s wings in the headlights. An owl; a big one. Most drivers wouldn’t have known it was going to cut across the car’s vector. Most drivers wouldn’t have bothered to avoid it.
“Maybe,” Sam replied, feeling his way. “I don’t know; this sounds like it could be very risky business. . . .”
“Your part won’t be,” Tannim promised. “Fairgrove will pay half your consultation fee up front, before you even pin on a badge, and put the other half in escrow in your bank.” Then he named a figure that would have given Sam cardiac trouble, if not for watching his diet and cholesterol. It was considerably more than his salary at Gulfstream had been. Of course, one of the disadvantages of staying with a firm for years was that your salary didn’t keep pace with the going rate for new-hires with similar experience, but—this was ridiculous; they couldn’t want him that badly! Could they?
“What about disclosure?” he asked, when he could speak again.
“We’ve got a tentative non-disclosure clause in your contract, but we can modify it if you feel really strongly about it,” Tannim said. “We based it on the non-disclosure clause at Gulfstream, but we made one modification, and that’s in the area of Research and Development in safety. Anything that’s a significant advance in safety is immediately released, and patents won’t be enforced. Think you can live with that? Even if it means a loss of income?”
Si 自動車 買取 nce that was the one area where Sam had himself had several heated arguments with his own bosses over the years, he nodded. “Some things should be common knowledge,” he said grimy. “That’s in a Mercedes ad, but it’s true for all of that.”
He asked many more questions over the course of the next fifteen minutes, and although Tannim never refused to answer any of them, he kept getting the feeling that the young man was doing a kind of verbal dance the whole time—carefully steering him away from something. It wasn’t where the money was coming from; at least, this wasn’t the kind of youngster or the kind of operation Sam would have associated with money laundering and organized crime. And car-racing wasn’t the kind of operation that would lend itself to that sort of thing anyway. It wasn’t what he would be expected to accomplish. It was nothing that he was able to put a finger on. But there was some skillful verbal maneuvering going on here, and Sam wished strongly