By Proxy
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course--_never_ criminal law.) For those few whofelt that the business world was not for them, there was a fourthalternative--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 whentheir only son, Vanneman, had announced that he intended to studyphysics at M.I.T. But they gave their permission; they were quitecertain that the dear boy would "come to his senses" and join the firmafter he had been graduated. He was, after all, the only one to carry onthe 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 notoverly bright girl named Mary Kelley.
Malcom Porter was their son.
* * * * *
When Malcom was ten years old, both his parents were killed in a smashupon the New Jersey Turnpike, and the child went to live with his widowedgrandmother, Mrs. Hamilton Porter.
Terry Elshawe had gathered that young Malcom Porter's life had not beenexactly idyllic from that point on. Grandmother Porter hadn't approvedof her son's marriage, and she seemed to have felt that she must doeverything in her power to help her grandson overcome the handicap ofhaving nonaristocratic blood in his veins.
Elshawe wasn't sure in his own mind whether environment or heredity hadbeen the deciding factor in Malcom Porter's subsequent life, but he hada hunch that the two had been acting synergistically. It was likely thatthe radical change in his way of life after his tenth year had as muchto do with his behavior as the possibility that the undeniably brilliantmental characteristics of the Porter family had been modified by thegenes of the pretty but scatter-brained wife of Vanneman Porter.
Three times, only his grandmother's influence kept him from beingexpelled from the exclusive prep school she had enrolled him in, and hisfinal grades were nothing to mention in polite society, much less boastabout.
In her own way, the old lady was trying to do her best for him, but shehad found it difficult to understand her own son, and his deviationsfrom the Porter norm had been slight in comparison with those of hisson. When the time came for Malcom to enter college, Grandmother Porterwas at a total loss as to what to do. With his record, it was unlikelythat any law school would take him unless he showed tremendousimprovement in his pre-law courses. And unless that improvement was ageneral one, not only as far as his studies were concerned, but in hishandling of his personal life, it would be commercial suicide to put himin any position of trust with Porter & Sons. It wasn't that he wasdishonest; he simply couldn't be trusted to do anything properly. He hada 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 thathe was going to study physics, as his father had done.
The relief didn't last long. By the time Malcom was in his sophomoreyear, he was apparently convinced that his instructors were dunderheadsto the last man. That, Elshawe thought, was probably not unusual amongcollege students, but Malcom Porter made the mistake of telling themabout it.
One of the professors with whom Elshawe had talked had said: "He actedas though he owned the college. That, I think, was what was his troublein his studies; he wasn't really stupid, and he wasn't as lazy as somesaid, but he didn't want to be bothered with anything that he didn'tenjoy. The experiments he liked, for instance, were the showy,spectacular ones. He built himself a Tesla coil, and a table with hiddenAC 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 athermonuclear bomb wasn't any fun."
The trouble was that he called his instructors stupid and dull for beinginterested in "commonplace stuff," and it infuriated him to be forced tostudy such "junk."
As a result, he managed to get himself booted out of college toward theend of his junior year. And that was the end of his formal education.
Six months after that, his grandmother died. Although she had marriedinto the Porter family, she was fiercely proud of the name; she had beenborn a Van Courtland, so she knew what family pride was. And therealization that Malcom was the last of the Porters--and a failure--wasmore than she could bear. The coronary attack she suffered should havebeen cured in a week, but the best medico-surgical techniques on Earthcan't help a woman who doesn't want to live.
Her will showed exactly what she thought of Malcom Porter. The Porterholdings were placed in trust. Malcom was to have the earnings, but hehad no voice whatever in control of the principal until he was fiftyyears of age.
* * * * *
Instead of being angry, Malcom was perfectly happy. He had an incomethat exceeded a million dollars before taxes, and didn't need to worryabout the dull details of making money. He formed a small corporation ofhis own, Porter Research Associates, and financed it with his own money.It ran deep in the red, but Porter didn't mind; Porter ResearchAssociates was a hobby, not a business, and running at a deficit savedhim plenty in taxes.
By the time he was twenty-five, he was known as a crackpot. He had amotley crew of technicians and scientists working for him--some withPh.D.'s, some with a trade-school education. The personnel turnover inthat little group was on a par with the turnover of patients in amaternity ward, at least as far as genuine scientists were concerned.Porter concocted theories and hypotheses out of cobwebs and becamefurious with anyone who tried to tear them down. If evidence came upthat 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 thisparticular bit of evidence was an exception. He insisted that "the basisof science lies in the experimental evidence, not in the pronouncementsof authorities," which meant that any recourse to the theories ofEinstein, Pauli, Dirac, Bohr, or Fermi was as silly as quotingAristotle, Plato, or St. Thomas Aquinas. The only authority he wouldaccept was Malcom Porter.
Nobody who had had any training in science could work long with a manlike that, even if the pay had been high, which it wasn't. The onlypeople who could stick with him were the skilled workers--the welders,tool-and-die men, electricians, and junior engineers, who didn't caremuch about theories as long as they got the work done. They listenedrespectfully to what Porter had to say and then built the gadgets hetold them to build. If the gadgets didn't work the way Porter expectedthem to, Porter would fuss and fidget with them until he got tired ofthem, then he would junk them and try something else. He never blamed atechnician who had followed orders. Since the salaries he paid wereproportional to the man's "ability and loyalty"--judged, of course, byPorter's own standards--he soon had a group of technician-artisans whoknew that their personal security rested with Malcom Porter, and thatpersonal loyalty was more important than the ability to utilize thescientific method.
Not everything that Porter had done was a one-hundred-per cent failure.He had managed to come up with a few basic improvements, patented them,and licensed them out to various manufacturers. But these were purely anaccidental by-product. Malcom Porter was interested in "basic research"and not much else, it seemed.
He had written papers and books, but they had been uniformly rejected bythe scientific journals, and those he had had published himself were ona par with the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and George Adamski.
And now he was going to shoot a rocket--or whatever it was--to the moon.Well, Elshawe thought, if it went off as scheduled, it would at least beworth watching. Elshawe was a rocket buff; he'd watched a dozen or moremoon shots in his life--everything from the automatic supply-carriers tothe three-man passenger rockets that added to the personnel of Moon BaseOne--and he never tired of watching the bellowing monsters climb upskywards on their white-hot pillars of flame.
And if nothing happened, Elshawe decided, he'd at least get a laugh outof the whole episode.
* * * * *
After near
ly two hours of driving, Bill Rodriguez finally turned off themain road onto an asphalt road that climbed steeply into the pine forestthat surrounded it. A sign said: _Double Horseshoe Ranch--PrivateRoad--No Trespassing_.
Elshawe had always thought of a ranch as a huge spread of flat prairieland full of cattle and gun-toting cowpokes on horseback; a mountainsidefull of sheep just didn't fit into that picture.
After a half mile or so, the station wagon came to a high metal-meshfence that blocked the road. On the big gate, another sign proclaimedthat the area beyond was private property and that trespassers would beprosecuted.
Bill Rodriguez stopped the car, got out, and walked over to the gate. Hepressed a button in one of the metal gateposts and said, "Ed? This'sBill. I got Mr. Skinner and that New York reporter with me."
After a slight pause, there was a