Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  Elshawe lowered his brows in a thoughtful frown. "Name's familiar. Wait a second. Wasn't he the guy that was sent to prison back in 1979 for sending up an unauthorized rocket?"

  Winstein nodded. "That's him. Served two years of a five-year sentence, got out on parole about a year ago. I just got word from a confidential source that he's going to try to send up another one."

  "I didn't know things were so pleasant at Alcatraz," Elshawe said. "He seems to be trying awfully hard to get back in."

  "Not according to what my informant says. This time, he's going to ask for permission. And this time, he's going to have a piloted craft, not a self-guided missile, like he did in '79."

  "Hoho. Well, there might be a story in it, but I can't see that it would be much of one. It isn't as if a rocket shoot were something unusual. The only thing unusual about it is that it's a private enterprise shoot instead of a Government one."

  Winstein said: "Might be more to it than that. Do you remember the trial in '79?"

  "Vaguely. As I remember it, he claimed he didn't send up a rocket, but the evidence showed overwhelmingly that he had. The jury wasn't out more than a few minutes, as I remember."

  "There was a little more to it than that," Winstein said.

  "I was in South Africa at the time," Elshawe said. "Covering the civil war down there, remember?"

  "That's right. You're excused," Winstein said, grinning. "The thing was that Malcom Porter didn't claim he hadn't sent the thing up. What he did claim was that it wasn't a rocket. He claimed that he had a new kind of drive in it--something that didn't use rockets.

  "The Army picked the thing up on their radar screens, going straight up at high acceleration. They bracketed it with Cobra pursuit rockets and blew it out of the sky when it didn't respond to identification signals. They could trace the thing back to its launching pad, of course, and they nabbed Malcom Porter.

  "Porter was furious. Wanted to slap a suit against the Government for wanton destruction of private property. His claim was that the law forbids unauthorized rocket tests all right, but his missile wasn't illegal because it wasn't a rocket."

  "What did he claim it was?" Elshawe asked.

  "He said it was a secret device of his own invention. Antigravity, or something like that."

  "Did he try to prove it?"

  "No. The Court agreed that, according to the way the law is worded, only 'rocket-propelled missiles' come under the ban. The judge said that if Malcom Porter could prove that the missile wasn't rocket-propelled, he'd dismiss the case. But Porter wanted to prove it by building another missile. He wouldn't give the court his plans or specifications for the drive he claimed he'd invented, or say anything about it except that it operated--and I quote--'on a new principle of physics'--unquote. Said he wouldn't tell them anything because the Government was simply using this as an excuse to take his invention away from him."

  Elshawe chuckled. "That's as flimsy a defense as I've heard."

  "Don't laugh," said Winstein. "It almost worked."

  "What? How?"

  "It threw the burden of proof on the Government. They thought they had him when he admitted that he'd shot the thing off, but when he denied that it was a rocket, then, in order to prove that he'd committed a crime, they had to prove that it was a rocket. It wasn't up to Porter to prove that it wasn't."

  "Hey," Elshawe said in admiration, "that's pretty neat. I'm almost sorry it didn't work."

  * * * * *

  "Yeah. Trouble was that the Army had blown up the evidence. They knew it was a rocket, but they had to prove it. They had recordings of the radar picture, of course, and they used that to show the shape and acceleration of the missile. They proved that he'd bought an old obsolete Odin rocket from one of the small colleges in the Midwest--one that the Army had sold them as a demonstration model for their rocket engineering classes. They proved that he had a small liquid air plant out there at his place in New Mexico. In other words, they proved that he had the equipment to rebuild the rocket and the fuel to run it.

  "Then they got a battery of high-powered physicists up on the stands to prove that nothing else but a rocket could have driven the thing that way.

  "Porter's attorney hammered at them in cross-examination, trying to get one of them to admit that it was possible that Porter had discovered a new principle of physics that could fly a missile without rockets, but the Attorney General's prosecutor had coached them pretty well. They all said that unless there was evidence to the contrary, they could not admit that there was such a principle.

  "When the prosecutor presented his case to the jury, he really had himself a ball. I'll give you a transcript of the trial later; you'll have to read it for yourself to get the real flavor of it. The gist of it was that things had come to a pretty pass if a man could claim a scientific principle known only to himself as a defense against a crime.

  "He gave one analogy I liked. He said, suppose that a man is found speeding in a car. The cops find him all alone, behind the wheel, when they chase him down. Then, in court, he admits that he was alone, and that the car was speeding, but he insists that the car was steering itself, and that he wasn't in control of the vehicle at all. And what was steering the car? Why, a new scientific principle, of course."

  Elshawe burst out laughing. "Wow! No wonder the jury didn't stay out long! I'm going to have to dig the recordings of the newscasts out of the files; I missed a real comedy while I was in Africa."

  Winstein nodded. "We got pretty good coverage on it, but our worthy competitor, whose name I will not have mentioned within these sacred halls, got Beebee Vayne to run a commentary on it, and we got beat out on the meters."

  "Vayne?" Elshawe was still grinning. "That's a new twist--getting a comedian to do a news report."

  "I'll have to admit that my worthy competitor, whose name et cetera, does get an idea once in a while. But I don't want him beating us out again. We're in on the ground floor this time, and I want to hog the whole thing if I can."

  "Sounds like a great idea, if we can swing it," Elshawe agreed. "Do you have a new gimmick? You're not going to get a comedian to do it, are you?"

  "Heaven forbid! Even if it had been my own idea three years ago, I wouldn't repeat it, and I certainly won't have it said that I copy my competitors. No, what I want you to do is go out there and find out what's going on. Get a full background on it. We'll figure out the presentation angle when we get some idea of what he's going to do this time." Winstein eased himself off the corner of Elshawe's desk and stood up. "By the way--"

  "Yeah?"

  "Play it straight when you go out there. You're a reporter, looking for news; you haven't made any previous judgments."

  Elshawe's pipe had gone out. He fired it up again with his desk lighter. "I don't want to be," he said between puffs, "too cagey. If he's got ... any brains ... he'll know it's ... a phony act ... if I overdo it." He snapped off the lighter and looked at his employer through a cloud of blue-gray smoke. "I mean, after all, he's on the records as being a crackpot. I'd be a pretty stupid reporter if I believed everything he said. If I don't act a little skeptical, he'll think I'm either a blockhead or a phony or both."

  "Maybe," Winstein said doubtfully. "Still, some of these crackpots fly off the handle if you doubt their word in the least bit."

  "I'll tell you what I'll do," Elshawe said. "He used to live here in New York, didn't he?"

  "Still does," Winstein said. "He has a two-floor apartment on Central Park West. He just uses that New Mexico ranch of his for relaxation."

  "He's not hurting for money, is he?" Elshawe asked at random. "Anyway, what I'll do is look up some of the people he knows and get an idea of what kind of a bird he is. Then, when I get out there, I'll know more what kind of line to feed him."

  "That sounds good. But whatever you do, play it on the soft side. My confidential informant tells me that the only reason we're getting this inside info is because Malcom Porter is sore about the way our competition treated him
four years ago."

  "Just who is this confidential informant, anyway, Ole?" Elshawe asked curiously.

  Winstein grinned widely. "It's supposed to be very confidential. I don't want it to get any further than you."

  "Sure not. Since when am I a blabbermouth? Who is it?"

  "Malcom Porter."

  * * * * *

  Two days later, Terrence Elshawe was sitting in the front seat of a big station wagon, watching the scenery go by and listening to the driver talk as the machine tooled its way out of Silver City, New Mexico, and headed up into the Mogollon Mountains.

  "Was a time, not too long back," the driver was saying, "when a man couldn't get up into this part of the country 'thout a pack mule. Still places y'can't, but the boss had t' have a road built up to the ranch so's he could bring in all that heavy equipment. Reckon one of these days the Mogollons 'll be so civilized and full a people that a fella might as well live in New York."

  Elshawe, who hadn't seen another human being for fifteen minutes, felt that the predicted overcrowding was still some time off.

  "'Course," the driver went on, "I reckon folks have t' live some place, but I never could see why human bein's are so all-fired determined to bunch theirselves up so thick together that they can't hardly move--like a bunch of sheep in a snowstorm. It don't make sense to me. Does it to you, Mr. Skinner?"

  That last was addressed to the other passenger, an elderly man who was sitting in the seat behind Elshawe.

  "I guess it's pretty much a matter of taste, Bill," Mr. Skinner said in a soft voice.

  "I reckon," Bill said, in a tone that implied that anyone whose tastes were so bad that he wanted to live in the city was an object of pity who probably needed psychiatric treatment. He was silent for a moment, in obvious commiseration with his less fortunate fellows.

  Elshawe took the opportunity to try to get a word in. The chunky Westerner had picked him up at the airport, along with Mr. Samuel Skinner, who had come in on the same plane with Elshawe, and, after introducing himself as Bill Rodriguez, he had kept up a steady stream of chatter ever since. Elshawe didn't feel he should take a chance on passing up the sudden silence.

  "By the way; has Mr. Porter applied to the Government for permission to test his ... uh ... his ship, yet?"

  Bill Rodriguez didn't take his eyes off the winding road. "Well, now, I don't rightly know, Mr. Elshawe. Y'see, I just work on the ranch up there. I don't have a doggone thing to do with the lab'r'tory at all--'cept to keep the fence in good shape so's the stock don't get into the lab'r'tory area. If Mr. Porter wants me to know somethin', he tells me, an' if he don't, why, I don't reckon it's any a my business."

  "I see," said Elshawe. And that shuts me up, he thought to himself. He took out his pipe and began to fill it in silence.

  "How's everything out in Los Angeles, Mr. Skinner?" Rodriguez asked the passenger in back. "Haven't seen you in quite a spell."

  Elshawe listened to the conversation between the two with half an ear and smoked his pipe wordlessly.

  He had spent the previous day getting all the information he could on Malcom Porter, and the information hadn't been dull by any means.

  Porter had been born in New York in 1949, which made him just barely thirty-three. His father, Vanneman Porter, had been an oddball in his own way, too. The Porters of New York didn't quite date back to the time of Peter Stuyvesant, but they had been around long enough to acquire the feeling that the twenty-four dollars that had been paid for Manhattan Island had come out of the family exchequer. Just as the Vanderbilts looked upon the Rockefellers as newcomers, so the Porters looked on the Vanderbilts.

  For generations, it had been tacitly conceded that a young Porter gentleman had only three courses of action open to him when it came time for him to choose his vocation in life. He could join the firm of Porter & Sons on Wall Street, or he could join some other respectable business or banking enterprise, or he could take up the Law. (Corporation law, of course--never criminal law.) For those few who felt that the business world was not for them, there was a fourth alternative--studying for the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. Anything else was unheard of.

  So it had been somewhat of a shock to Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Porter when their only son, Vanneman, had announced that he intended to study physics at M.I.T. But they gave their permission; they were quite certain that the dear boy would "come to his senses" and join the firm after he had been graduated. He was, after all, the only one to carry on the family name and manage the family holdings.

  But Vanneman Porter not only stuck to his guns and went on to a Ph.D.; he compounded his delinquency by marrying a pretty, sweet, but not overly bright girl named Mary Kelley.

  Malcom Porter was their son.

  * * * * *

  When Malcom was ten years old, both his parents were killed in a smashup on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the child went to live with his widowed grandmother, Mrs. Hamilton Porter.

  Terry Elshawe had gathered that young Malcom Porter's life had not been exactly idyllic from that point on. Grandmother Porter hadn't approved of her son's marriage, and she seemed to have felt that she must do everything in her power to help her grandson overcome the handicap of having nonaristocratic blood in his veins.

  Elshawe wasn't sure in his own mind whether environment or heredity had been the deciding factor in Malcom Porter's subsequent life, but he had a hunch that the two had been acting synergistically. It was likely that the radical change in his way of life after his tenth year had as much to do with his behavior as the possibility that the undeniably brilliant mental characteristics of the Porter family had been modified by the genes of the pretty but scatter-brained wife of Vanneman Porter.

  Three times, only his grandmother's influence kept him from being expelled from the exclusive prep school she had enrolled him in, and his final grades were nothing to mention in polite society, much less boast about.

  In her own way, the old lady was trying to do her best for him, but she had found it difficult to understand her own son, and his deviations from the Porter norm had been slight in comparison with those of his son. When the time came for Malcom to enter college, Grandmother Porter was at a total loss as to what to do. With his record, it was unlikely that any law school would take him unless he showed tremendous improvement in his pre-law courses. And unless that improvement was a general one, not only as far as his studies were concerned, but in his handling of his personal life, it would be commercial suicide to put him in any position of trust with Porter & Sons. It wasn't that he was dishonest; he simply couldn't be trusted to do anything properly. He had a tendency to follow his own whims and ignore everybody else.

  The idea of his entering the clergy was never even considered.

  It came almost as a relief to the old woman when Malcom announced that he was going to study physics, as his father had done.

  The relief didn't last long. By the time Malcom was in his sophomore year, he was apparently convinced that his instructors were dunderheads to the last man. That, Elshawe thought, was probably not unusual among college students, but Malcom Porter made the mistake of telling them about it.

  One of the professors with whom Elshawe had talked had said: "He acted as though he owned the college. That, I think, was what was his trouble in his studies; he wasn't really stupid, and he wasn't as lazy as some said, but he didn't want to be bothered with anything that he didn't enjoy. The experiments he liked, for instance, were the showy, spectacular ones. He built himself a Tesla coil, and a table with hidden AC electromagnets in it that would make a metal plate float in the air. But when it came to nucleonics, he was bored. Anything less than a thermonuclear bomb wasn't any fun."

  The trouble was that he called his instructors stupid and dull for being interested in "commonplace stuff," and it infuriated him to be forced to study such "junk."

  As a result, he managed to get himself booted out of college toward the end of his junior year. And that was the end of his formal educatio
n.

  Six months after that, his grandmother died. Although she had married into the Porter family, she was fiercely proud of the name; she had been born a Van Courtland, so she knew what family pride was. And the realization that Malcom was the last of the Porters--and a failure--was more than she could bear. The coronary attack she suffered should have been cured in a week, but the best medico-surgical techniques on Earth can't help a woman who doesn't want to live.

  Her will showed exactly what she thought of Malcom Porter. The Porter holdings were placed in trust. Malcom was to have the earnings, but he had no voice whatever in control of the principal until he was fifty years of age.

  * * * * *

  Instead of being angry, Malcom was perfectly happy. He had an income that exceeded a million dollars before taxes, and didn't need to worry about the dull details of making money. He formed a small corporation of his own, Porter Research Associates, and financed it with his own money. It ran deep in the red, but Porter didn't mind; Porter Research Associates was a hobby, not a business, and running at a deficit saved him plenty in taxes.

  By the time he was twenty-five, he was known as a crackpot. He had a motley crew of technicians and scientists working for him--some with Ph.D.'s, some with a trade-school education. The personnel turnover in that little group was on a par with the turnover of patients in a maternity ward, at least as far as genuine scientists were concerned. Porter concocted theories and hypotheses out of cobwebs and became furious with anyone who tried to tear them down. If evidence came up that would tend to show that one of his pet theories was utter hogwash, he'd come up with an ad hoc explanation which showed that this particular bit of evidence was an exception. He insisted that "the basis of science lies in the experimental evidence, not in the pronouncements of authorities," which meant that any recourse to the theories of Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Bohr, or Fermi was as silly as quoting Aristotle, Plato, or St. Thomas Aquinas. The only authority he would accept was Malcom Porter.