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 education.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociates, and financed it with his own money.

It ran deep in the red, but Porter didn't mind; Porter Research a.s.sociates 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 p.r.o.nouncements 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.

n.o.body who had had any training in science could work long with a man like that, even if the pay had been high, which it wasn't. The only people who could stick with him were the skilled workers--the welders, tool-and-die men, electricians, and junior engineers, who didn't care much about theories as long as they got the work done. They listened respectfully to what Porter had to say and then built the gadgets he told them to build. If the gadgets didn't work the way Porter expected them to, Porter would fuss and fidget with them until he got tired of them, then he would junk them and try something else. He never blamed a technician who had followed orders. Since the salaries he paid were proportional to the man's "ability and loyalty"--judged, of course, by Porter's own standards--he soon had a group of technician-artisans who knew that their personal security rested with Malcom Porter, and that personal loyalty was more important than the ability to utilize the scientific 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 an accidental 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 by the scientific journals, and those he had had published himself were on a 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 be worth watching. Elshawe was a rocket buff; he'd watched a dozen or more moon shots in his life--everything from the automatic supply-carriers to the three-man pa.s.senger rockets that added to the personnel of Moon Base One--and he never tired of watching the bellowing monsters climb up skywards on their white-hot pillars of flame.

And if nothing happened, Elshawe decided, he'd at least get a laugh out of the whole episode.

After nearly two hours of driving, Bill Rodriguez finally turned off the main road onto an asphalt road that climbed steeply into the pine forest that surrounded it. A sign said: _Double Horseshoe Ranch--Private Road--No Trespa.s.sing_.

Elshawe had always thought of a ranch as a huge spread of flat prairie land full of cattle and gun-toting cowpokes on horseback; a mountainside full of sheep just didn't fit into that picture.

After a half mile or so, the station wagon came to a high metal-mesh fence that blocked the road. On the big gate, another sign proclaimed that the area beyond was private property and that trespa.s.sers would be prosecuted.

Bill Rodriguez stopped the car, got out, and walked over to the gate. He pressed a b.u.t.ton in one of the metal gateposts and said, "Ed? This's Bill. I got Mr. Skinner and that New York reporter with me."

After a slight pause, there was a metallic click, and the gate swung open. Rodriguez came back to the car, got in, and drove on through the gate. Elshawe twisted his head to watch the big gate swing shut behind them.

After another ten minutes, Rodriguez swung off the road onto another side road, and ten minutes after that the station wagon went over a small rise and headed down into a small valley. In the middle of it, shining like bright aluminum in the sun, was a vessel.

_Now I know Porter is nuts_, Elshawe thought wryly.

Because the vessel, whatever it was, was parallel to the ground, looking like the fuselage of a stratojet, minus wings and tail, sitting on its landing gear. Nowhere was there any sign of a launching pad, with its gantries and cranes and jet baffles. Nor was there any sign of a rocket motor on the vessel itself.

As the station wagon approached the cl.u.s.ter of buildings a hundred yards this side of the machine, Elshawe realized with shock that the thing _was_ a stripped-down stratojet--an old Grumman _Supernova_, _circa_ 1970.

"Well, Elijah got there by sitting in an iron chair and throwing a magnet out in front of himself," Elshawe said, "so what the h.e.l.l."

"What?" Rodriguez asked blankly.

"Nothing; just thinking out loud. Sorry."

Behind Elshawe, Mr. Skinner chuckled softly, but said nothing.

When the station wagon pulled up next to one of the cl.u.s.ter of white prefab buildings, Malcom Porter himself stepped out of the wide door and walked toward them.

Elshawe recognized the man from his pictures--tall, wide-shouldered, dark-haired, and almost handsome, he didn't look much like a wild-eyed crackpot. He greeted Rodriguez and Skinner rather peremptorily, but he smiled broadly and held out his hand to Elshawe.

"Mr. Elshawe? I'm Malcom Porter." His grip was firm and friendly. "I'm glad to see you. Glad you could make it."

"Glad to be here, Dr. Porter," Elshawe said in his best manner. "It's quite a privilege." He knew that Porter liked to be called "Doctor"; all his subordinates called him that.

But, surprisingly, Porter said: "Not 'Doctor,' Mr. Elshawe; just 'Mister.' My boys like to call me 'Doctor,' but it's sort of a nickname.

I don't have a degree, and I don't claim one. I don't want the public thinking I'm claiming to be something I'm not."

"I understand, Mr. Porter."

Bill Rodriguez's voice broke in. "Where do you want me to put all this stuff, Doc?" He had unloaded Elshawe's baggage from the station wagon and set it carefully on the ground. Skinner picked up his single suitcase and looked at Porter inquiringly.

"My usual room, Malcom?"

"Yeah. Sure, Sam; sure." As Skinner walked off toward one of the other buildings, Porter said: "Quite a load of baggage you have there, Mr.

Elshawe. Recording equipment?"

"Most of it," the reporter admitted. "Recording TV cameras, 16mm movie cameras, tape recorders, 35mm still cameras--the works. I wanted to get good coverage, and if you've got any men that you won't be using during the take-off, I'd like to borrow them to help me operate this stuff."

"Certainly; certainly. Come on, Bill, let's get this stuff over to Mr.

Elshawe's suite."

The suite consisted of three rooms, all very nicely appointed for a place as far out in the wilderness as this. When Elshawe got his equipment stowed away, Porter invited him to come out and take a look at his pride and joy.

"The first real s.p.a.ceship, Elshawe," he said energetically. "The first real s.p.a.ceship. The rocket is no more a s.p.a.ceship than a rowboat is an ocean-going vessel." He gestured toward the sleek, shining, metal ship.

"Of course, it's only a pilot model, you might say. I don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend; I had to make do with what I could afford. That's an old Grumman _Supernova_ stratojet. I got it fairly cheap because I told 'em I didn't want the engines or the wings or the tail a.s.sembly.

"But she'll do the job, all right. Isn't she a beauty?"

Elshawe had his small pocket recorder going; he might as well get all this down. "Mr. Porter," he asked carefully, "just how does this vessel propel itself? I understand that, at the trial, it was said that you claimed it was an antigravity device, but that you denied it."

"Those idiots!" Porter exploded angrily. "n.o.body understood what I was talking about because they wouldn't listen! Antigravity! _Pfui!_ When they learned how to harness electricity, did they call it anti-electricity? When they built the first atomic reactor, did they call it anti-atomic energy? A rocket works against gravity, but they don't call _that_ antigravity, do they? My device works _with_ gravity, not against it."

"What sort of device is it?" Elshawe asked.

"I call it the Gravito-Inertial Differential Polarizer," Porter said importantly.