The demonstration scheduled for major equipment manufacturers never happened.
“What about patents?” Daniel asked.
“Provisional filings.”
“Some abandoned.”
“Some sold.”
“To who?”
Michael shrugged.
“The bankruptcy mess was ugly.”
“Prairie Dynamics folded.”
“Assets got scattered.”
“XP-1 was dismantled.”
“And this?”
“We were told XP-2 was dismantled too.”
Daniel looked at the machine.
“Clearly not.”
“No.”
Michael walked toward the welded compartment.
“There was something inside this frame.”
Daniel followed.
“What?”
“A control module?”
“Partly.”
Michael pointed.
“Keene didn’t trust offices.”
“He kept backup drawings.”
“Test results.”
“Calibration notes.”
“You mean documents?”
“Yes.”
“Inside the machine?”
Michael nodded.
“He built a sealed document compartment here after someone broke into the engineering office.”
Daniel stared.
“Was he paranoid?”
“Extremely.”
“Was he wrong?”
Michael gave a humorless smile.
“Not always.”
Daniel touched the weld.
“Someone sealed it.”
“After I left.”
Michael’s face changed.
“The compartment originally had an access plate.”
“This was welded over later.”
Daniel thought of the auction.
The modified hydraulics.
The old man.
The warning.
“Who was Thomas Keene?”
Michael looked toward the locked shop door.
“The old man who talked to you.”
Daniel went still.
“You know what he looks like now?”
“I saw him about eight years ago.”
“Gray mustache?”
“Yes.”
Daniel’s heartbeat accelerated.
“He was at the auction.”
Michael sat heavily.
For several moments neither spoke.
“Why would he tell me not to bring it here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why wouldn’t he just buy it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s becoming a theme.”
Michael looked irritated.
“You think I’ve been hiding a treasure map for thirty years?”
“No.”
“I think you know more than you told me.”
His father’s face tightened.
“That’s fair.”
Daniel waited.
Michael finally said:
“Prairie Dynamics didn’t fail only because we were broke.”
There it was.
The deeper story.
The company’s founder, Walter Greene, had funded the project using outside investors and several development loans.
As money disappeared, accusations started.
Some investors believed Greene had misrepresented expenses.
Others claimed Keene was wasting money building technology with no commercial market.
Keene accused executives of trying to sell incomplete intellectual property before testing was finished.
Then somebody removed data from the engineering office.
Keene became convinced the project was being stripped before bankruptcy.
Michael was twenty-three and newly married.
He wanted no part of lawsuits.
When Prairie Dynamics missed three paychecks, he left.
Two months later, the company collapsed.
“I spent years thinking that project was the smartest thing I’d ever helped build and the dumbest thing I’d ever believed in,” Michael said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because failure gets less romantic when you’re the one who lived through it.”
Daniel looked at him.
“Did it work?”
“Yes.”
“Then it wasn’t a failure.”
Michael smiled sadly.
“You’re nineteen.”
“That’s exactly what nineteen-year-olds say.”
They waited until the next morning before opening the welded compartment.
Michael insisted.
Daniel wanted the grinder immediately.
His father refused.
“We photograph everything first.”
“Why?”
“Because if Keene hid documents here, we’re not going to destroy something and then guess what it looked like.”