Elshawe, who hadn't seen another human being for fifteen minutes, felt that the predicted overcrowding was still some time off. "'Course," the driver went on, "I reckon folks have t' live some place, but I never could see why human bein's are so all-fired determined to bunch theirselves up so thick together that they can't hardly move--like a bunch of sheep in a snowstorm. It don't make sense to me. Does it to you, Mr. Skinner?" That last was addressed to the other passenger, an elderly man who was sitting in the seat behind Elshawe. "I guess it's pretty much a matter of taste, Bill," Mr. Skinner said in a soft voice. "I reckon," Bill said, in a tone that implied that anyone whose tastes were so bad that he wanted to live in the city was an object of pity who probably needed psychiatric treatment. He was silent for a moment, in obvious commiseration with his less fortunate fellows. Elshawe took the opportunity to try to get a word in. The chunky Westerner had picked him up at the airport, along with Mr. Samuel Skinner, who had come in on the same plane with Elshawe, and, after introducing himself as Bill Rodriguez, he had kept up a steady stream of chatter ever since. Elshawe didn't feel he should take a chance on passing up the sudden silence. "By the way; has Mr. Porter applied to the Government for permission to test his ... uh ... his ship, yet?" Bill Rodriguez didn't take his eyes off the winding road. "Well, now, I don't rightly know, Mr. Elshawe. Y'see, I just work on the ranch up there. I don't have a doggone thing to do with the lab'r'tory at all--'cept to keep the fence in good shape so's the stock don't get into the lab'r'tory area. If Mr. Porter wants me to know somethin', he tells me, an' if he don't, why, I don't reckon it's any a my business." "I see," said Elshawe. _And that shuts_ me _up_, he thought to himself. He took out his pipe and began to fill it in silence. "How's everything out in Los Angeles, Mr. Skinner?" Rodriguez asked the passenger in back. "Haven't seen you in quite a spell." Elshawe listened to the conversation between the two with half an ear and smoked his pipe wordlessly. He had spent the previous day getting all the information he could on Malcom Porter, and the information hadn't been dull by any means. Porter had been born in New York in 1949, which made him just barely thirty-three. His father, Vanneman Porter, had been an oddball in his own way, too. The Porters of New York didn't quite date back to the time of Peter Stuyvesant, but they had been around long enough to acquire the feeling that the twenty-four dollars that had been paid for Manhattan Island had come out of the family exchequer. Just as the Vanderbilts looked upon the Rockefellers as newcomers, so the Porters looked on the Vanderbilts.