Produced by Greg Weeks, Bruce Albrecht, Stephen Blundelland the Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttps://www.pgdp.net
BY PROXY
By DAVID GORDON
_It's been said that the act of creation is a solitary thing--that teams never create; only individuals. But sometimes a team may be needed to make creation effective...._
Illustrated by Van Dongen
Mr. Terrence Elshawe did not conform to the mental picture that popsinto 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 TVscreen. No matter which news service one subscribes to, the reportersare all pretty much of a type. And Terrence Elshawe simply wasn't thetype.
The confusion arises because thirty-odd years of television has resultedin specialization. If you run up much Magnum Telenews time on yourmeter, you're familiar with the cultured voice and rugged good looks ofBrett Maxon, "your Magnum reporter," but Maxon is a reporter only in thevery literal sense of the word. He's an actor, whose sole job is to makeMagnum news sound more interesting than some other telenews service,even though he's giving you exactly the same facts. But he doesn't goout and dig up those stories.
The actual leg work of getting the news into Maxon's hands so that hecan report it to you is done by research reporters--men like TerrenceElshawe.
Elshawe was a small, lean man with a large, round head on which grewclose-cropped, light brown hair. His mouth was wide and full-lipped, andhad a distinct tendency to grin impishly, even when he was trying tolook serious. His eyes were large, blue, and innocent; only when thelight hit them at just the right angle was it possible to detect thecontact lenses which corrected an acute myopia.
When he was deep in thought, he had a habit of relaxing in his deskchair with his head back and his eyes closed. His left arm would beacross his chest, his left hand cupping his right elbow, while the righthand held the bowl of a large-bowled briar which Elshawe puffedmethodically during his ruminations. He was in exactly that positionwhen 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 poselike that, there would be a flurry of sudden action on the part of theemployee as he tried frantically to look as though he had only pausedfor a moment from his busy work. Elshawe's only reaction was to open hiseyes. 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 agood spot. See what you think."
If Elshawe didn't conform to the stereotype of a reporter, so much lessdid Oler Winstein conform to the stereotype of a top-flight TV magnate.He was no taller than Elshawe's five-seven, and was only slightlyheavier. He wore his hair in a crew cut, and his boyish face made himlook more like a graduate student at a university than the man who hadput Magnum Telenews together with his own hands. He had an office, buthe couldn't be found in it more than half the time; the rest of thetime, he was prowling around the Magnum Building, wandering into studiosand offices and workshops. He wasn't checking up on his employees, andnever gave the impression that he was. He didn't throw his weightaround and he didn't snoop. If he hired a man for a job, he expected thejob to be done, that was all. If it was, the man could sleep at his deskor play solitaire or drink beer for all Winstein cared; if the workwasn't done, it didn't matter if the culprit looked as busy as ananteater at a picnic--he got one warning and then the sack. The onlyreason for Winstein's prowling around was the way his mind worked; itwas forever bubbling with ideas, and he wanted to bounce those ideas offother people to see if anything new and worthwhile would come of them.
He didn't look particularly excited, but, then, he rarely did. Even themost objective of employees is likely to become biased one way oranother if he thinks his boss is particularly enthusiastic about anidea. Winstein didn't want yes-men around him; he wanted men who couldand would think. And he had a theory that, while the tenseness of anemergency 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-outwork. He saved that kind of pressure for the times that he needed it, sothat it was effective because of its contrast with normal procedure.
* * * * *
Elshawe took his heavy briar out of his mouth as Winstein sat down onthe corner of the desk. "You have a gleam in your eye, Ole," he saidaccusingly.
"Maybe," Winstein said noncommittally. "We might be able to worksomething out of it. Remember a guy by the name of Malcom Porter?"
Elshawe lowered his brows in a thoughtful frown. "Name's familiar. Waita second. Wasn't he the guy that was sent to prison back in 1979 forsending 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 confidentialsource that he's going to try to send up another one."
"I didn't know things were so pleasant at Alcatraz," Elshawe said. "Heseems to be trying awfully hard to get back in."
"Not according to what my informant says. This time, he's going to askfor permission. And this time, he's going to have a piloted craft, not aself-guided missile, like he did in '79."
"Ho_ho_. Well, there might be a story in it, but I can't see that itwould be much of one. It isn't as if a rocket shoot were somethingunusual. The only thing unusual about it is that it's a privateenterprise shoot instead of a Government one."
Winstein said: "Might be more to it than that. Do you remember the trialin '79?"
"Vaguely. As I remember it, he claimed he didn't send up a rocket, butthe evidence showed overwhelmingly that he had. The jury wasn't outmore 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 civilwar down there, remember?"
"That's right. You're excused," Winstein said, grinning. "The thing wasthat Malcom Porter didn't claim he hadn't sent the thing up. What he didclaim was that it wasn't a rocket. He claimed that he had a new kind ofdrive in it--something that didn't use rockets.
"The Army picked the thing up on their radar screens, going straight upat high acceleration. They bracketed it with Cobra pursuit rockets andblew 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, andthey nabbed Malcom Porter.
"Porter was furious. Wanted to slap a suit against the Government forwanton destruction of private property. His claim was that the lawforbids unauthorized rocket tests all right, but his missile wasn'tillegal 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, orsomething 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 ifMalcom Porter could prove that the missile wasn't rocket-propelled, he'ddismiss the case. But Porter wanted to prove it by building anothermissile. He wouldn't give the court his plans or specifications for thedrive he claimed he'd invented, or say anything about it except that itoperated--and I quote--'on a new principle of physics'--unquote. Said hewouldn't tell them anything because the Government was simply using thisas 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."
&n
bsp; "What? How?"
"It threw the burden of proof on the Government. They thought they hadhim when he admitted that he'd shot the thing off, but when he deniedthat it was a rocket, then, in order to prove that he'd committed acrime, they had to prove that it _was_ a rocket. It wasn't up to Porterto prove that it _wasn't_."
"Hey," Elshawe said in admiration, "that's pretty neat. I'm almost sorryit didn't work."
* * * * *
"Yeah. Trouble was that the Army had