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Once it was established that time travel was efficacious, the team had a number of decisions to make. As Rick wrote the reports on his original research to fulfill the grant requirements for the NIH, he of course left out the accidental by product he had discovered. He was struck by the several things:

• The applications of this technology were limitless.
• The technology was worth billions, perhaps trillions.
• In the wrong hands or used inappropriately, the technology presented world ending dangers.

It is impossible to get the Genie back in the bottle though. The dangers gave the team pause. After much reflection is was decided that the discovery should be kept highly secret, out of the military's hands, and privately funded. Though it was supported by the President and his team, the President decreed that there could be no funding attached to the research and said, "I'm sure you are creative enough to figure something out."

Once the grants dried up from the original gamma research and with no government funding forthcoming, the problem of financing reared its head. So the team took the President's advice and decided to be creative.

Many ideas were tossed around and after much discussion and many sleepless nights pouring over possibilities, the old adage; "If you have money you can make money" seemed to be the best starting point. They needed to have some money to make the money to fund the project. Literally a million ways to make that happen were wrestled with but unanimously they agreed that they could do nothing illegal, nothing to arouse suspicion, and nothing to change the time line. The plan they developed as a result was rather ingenious.

Because so much land was not "owned" in the west in the first half of the 19th century, the team searched land records in California. After diligent research of the public records dating back to the first settlers in California, the team traveled back to 1842 and filed claims in the land office for all the land adjacent to Sutter's Fort and Sutter's Mill. When John Marshall, an employee of John Sutter at the mill, discovered the first gold nugget on January 24, 1848, the team already owned all the surrounding land. It was a simple matter for the team to pop in the same day, reassert their claim of land ownership with the land office, and hire workers in 1848 dollars to work the claims. The resulting panning and mining resulted in a net yield of just over $675,000 in the first year.

Communication and transportation being what is was in 1848, it took the better part of a year for the "Gold Rush" to grow to full bloom. So in 1849 the team sold the claims to the Gold Rush "49ers" and pocketed an additional $50,000 making the total deal worth $725,000.

Phase One complete.

Once the team had $725,000 in gold, they researched the longest lived bank in continuous operation in the U.S. and deposited the money in the State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston on the day it opened, January 1, 1792. The bank was instructed to pay the simple interest rate of two percent into the account each year on January 1st and let it compound. A team member popped into the bank periodically to check on the account and make sure the bank knew it was not abandoned. The account quietly accrued interest for 83 years in real time.

Early in 1875 Rick traveled to New York City to meet a businessman named Thomas Sanders. He wined and dined Mr. Sanders and offered a partnership for investing and funding new inventions and ventures. Mr. Sanders jumped at the chance to risk less of his own money as venture capital. They shook on the deal and in May, 1875, Rick and Mr. Sanders had a series of meetings with an obscure inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. Mr. Bell was hard at work on a new type of telegraph. Rick and Thomas Sanders offered to fund Mr. Bell's research in exchange for 40% (20% each for Mr. Sanders and the team) of any future profits.

On March 3, 1885, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was officially incorporated. Time Corp having grown its savings by 1885 to over $1.9 million at State Street Bank and Trust Co. in Boston, now owned 20% of AT&T. By 1975 the $1.9 million investment was worth approximately $4.3 billion and Time Corp was set.

The most wonderful part of the whole deal, besides being legal, non-harmful to the time line, and arousing no suspicion, was the fact that it was replicable. Infinitely replicable.

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