ed 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."

Elshawe chuckled. "That's as flimsy a defense as I've heard."

"Don't laugh," said Winstein. "It almost worked."

"What? How?"

"It threw the burden of proof on the Government. They thought they had
him when he admitted that he'd shot the thing off, but when he denied
that it was a rocket, then, in order to prove that he'd committed a
crime, they had to prove that it _was_ a rocket. It wasn't up to Porter
to prove that it _wasn't_."

"Hey," Elshawe said in admiration, "that's pretty neat. I'm almost sorry
it didn't work."

* * * * *

"Yeah. Trouble was that the Army had blown up the evidence. They knew it
was a rocket, but they had to prove it. They had recordings of the radar
picture, of course, and they used that to show the shape and
acceleration of the missile. They proved that he'd bought an old
obsolete Odin rocket from one of the small colleges in the Midwest--one
that the Army had sold them as a demonstration model for their rocket
engineering classes. They proved that he had a small liquid air plant
out there at his place in New Mexico. In other words, they p