as silly as quoting
Aristotle, Plato, or St. Thomas Aquinas. The only authority he would
accept was Malcom Porter.

Nobody who had had any training in science could work long with a man
like that, even if the pay had been high, which it wasn't. The only
people who could stick with him were the skilled workers--the welders,
tool-and-die men, electricians, and junior engineers, who didn't care
much about theories as long as they got the work done. They listened
respectfully to what Porter had to say and then built the gadgets he
told them to build. If the gadgets didn't work the way Porter expected
them to, Porter would fuss and fidget with them until he got tired of
them, then he would junk them and try something else. He never blamed a
technician who had followed orders. Since the salaries he paid were
proportional to the man's "ability and loyalty"--judged, of course, by
Porter's own standards--he soon had a group of technician-artisans who
knew that their personal security rested with Malcom Porter, and that
personal loyalty was more important than the ability to utilize the
scientific method.

Not everything that Porter had done was a one-hundred-per cent failure.
He had managed to come up with a few basic improvements, patented them,
and licensed them out to various manufacturers. But these were purely an
accidental by-product. Malcom Porter was interested in "basic research"
and not much else, it seemed.

He had written papers and books, but they had been uniformly rejected by
the scientific journals, and those he had had published himself were on
a par with the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and George Adamski.

And now he was going to shoot a rocket--or whatever it was--to the moon.
Well, Elshawe thought, if it went off as scheduled, it would at least be
worth watching. Elshawe was a rocket buff; he'd watched a dozen or more
moon shots in his life--everything from the automatic supply-carriers to
the three-man passenger rockets that added to the personnel of Moon Base
One--and he never tired of watching the bellowing monsters climb up
skywards on their white-hot pillars of flame.

And if nothing happened, Elshawe decided, he'd at least get a laugh out
of the whole episode.

* * * * *

After nearly two hours of driving, Bill Rodriguez finally turned off the
main road onto an asphalt road that climbed steeply into the pine forest
that surrounded it. A sign said: _Double Horse