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.

[Illustration]

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
b