PAGE 2
By Proxy
by
He didn’t look particularly excited, but, then, he rarely did. Even the most objective of employees is likely to become biased one way or another if he thinks his boss is particularly enthusiastic about an idea. Winstein didn’t want yes-men around him; he wanted men who could and would think. And he had a theory that, while the tenseness of an emergency could and did produce some very high-powered thinking indeed, an atmosphere of that kind wasn’t a good thing for day-in-and-day-out work. He saved that kind of pressure for the times that he needed it, so that it was effective because of its contrast with normal procedure.
* * * * *
Elshawe took his heavy briar out of his mouth as Winstein sat down on the corner of the desk. “You have a gleam in your eye, Ole,” he said accusingly.
“Maybe,” Winstein said noncommittally. “We might be able to work something out of it. Remember a guy by the name of Malcom Porter?”
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.”