Mr. Terrence Elshawe did not conform to the mental picture that pops
into the average person's mind when he hears the words "news reporter."
Automatically, one thinks of the general run of earnest, handsome,
firm-jawed, level-eyed, smooth-voiced gentlemen one sees on one's TV
screen. No matter which news service one subscribes to, the reporters
are all pretty much of a type. And Terrence Elshawe simply wasn't the
type.
The confusion arises because thirty-odd years of television has resulted
in specialization. If you run up much Magnum Telenews time on your
meter, you're familiar with the cultured voice and rugged good looks of
Brett Maxon, "your Magnum reporter," but Maxon is a reporter only in the
very literal sense of the word. He's an actor, whose sole job is to make
Magnum news sound more interesting than some other telenews service,
even though he's giving you exactly the same facts. But he doesn't go
out and dig up those stories.
The actual leg work of getting the news into Maxon's hands so that he
can report it to you is done by research reporters--men like Terrence
Elshawe.
Elshawe was a small, lean man with a large, round head on which grew
close-cropped, light brown hair. His mouth was wide and full-lipped, and
had a distinct tendency to grin impishly, even when he was trying to
look serious. His eyes were large, blue, and innocent; only when the
light hit them at just the right angle was it possible to detect the
contact lenses which corrected an acute myopia.
When he was deep in thought, he had a habit of relaxing in his desk
chair with his head back and his eyes closed. His left arm would be
across his chest, his left hand cupping his right elbow, while the right
hand held the bowl of a large-bowled briar which Elshawe puffed
methodically during his ruminations. He was in exactly that position
when Oler Winstein put his head in the door of Elshawe's office.
"Busy?" Winstein asked conversationally.
In some offices, if the boss comes in and finds an employee in a pose
like that, there would be a flurry of sudden action on the part of the
employee as he tried frantically to look as though he had only paused
for a moment from his busy work. Elshawe's only reaction was to open his
eyes. He wasn't the kind of man who would put on a phony act like that,
even if his boss fired him on the spot.
"Not particularly," he said, in his slow, easy drawl. "What's up?"
Winstein came on into the office. "I've got something that might make a
good spot. See what you think."
If Elshawe didn't conform to the stereotype of a reporter, so much less
did Oler Winstein conform to the stereotype of a top-flight TV magnate.
He was no taller than Elshawe's five-seven, and was only slightly
heavier. He wore his hair in a crew cut, and his boyish face made him
look more like a graduate student at a university than the man who had
put Magnum Telenews together with his own hands. He had an office, but
he couldn't be found in it more than half the time; the rest of the
time, he was prowling around the Magnum Building, wandering into studios
and offices and workshops. He wasn't checking up on his employees, and
never gave the impression that he was. He didn't throw his weight
around and he didn't snoop. If he hired a man for a job, he expected the
job to be done, that was all. If it was, the man could sleep at his desk
or play solitaire or drink beer for all Winstein cared; if the work
wasn't done, it didn't matter if the culprit looked as busy as an
anteater at a picnic--he got one warning and then the sack. The only
reason for Winstein's prowling around was the way his mind worked; it
was forever bubbling with ideas, and he wanted to bounce those ideas off
other people to see if anything new and worthwhile would come of them.
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."
"Ho_ho_. 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."