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“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.