"Ho_ho_. Well, there might be a story in it, but I can't see that it would be much of one. It isn't as if a rocket shoot were something unusual. The only thing unusual about it is that it's a private enterprise shoot instead of a Government one." Winstein said: "Might be more to it than that. Do you remember the trial in '79?" "Vaguely. As I remember it, he claimed he didn't send up a rocket, but the evidence showed overwhelmingly that he had. The jury wasn't out more 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 civil war down there, remember?" "That's right. You're excused," Winstein said, grinning. "The thing was that Malcom Porter didn't claim he hadn't sent the thing up. What he did claim was that it wasn't a rocket. He claimed that he had a new kind of drive in it--something that didn't use rockets. "The Army picked 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." * * * * *