it came to nucleonics, he was bored. Anything less than a
thermonuclear bomb wasn't any fun."

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 principal 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 Associates, and financed it with his own money.
It ran deep in the red, but Porter didn't mind; Porter Research
Associates 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 pronouncements
of authorities," which meant that any recourse to the theories of
Einstein, Pauli, Dirac, Bohr, or Fermi was