Day of the Moron
H >> Henry Beam Piper >> Day of the MoronDAY OF THE MORON
BY H. BEAM PIPER
[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_It's natural to trust the unproven word of the fellow who's "on my
side"--but the emotional moron is on no one's side, not even his own.
Once, such an emotional moron could, at worst, hurt a few. But with the
mighty, leashed forces Man employs now...._
There were still, in 1968, a few people who were afraid of the nuclear
power plant. Oldsters, in whom the term "atomic energy" produced
semantic reactions associated with Hiroshima. Those who saw, in the
towering steam-column above it, a tempting target for enemy--which still
meant Soviet--bombers and guided missiles. Some of the Central
Intelligence and F.B.I. people, who realized how futile even the most
elaborate security measures were against a resourceful and suicidally
determined saboteur. And a minority of engineers and nuclear physicists
who remained unpersuaded that accidental blowups at nuclear-reaction
plants were impossible.
Scott Melroy was among these last. He knew, as a matter of fact, that
there had been several nasty, meticulously unpublicized,
near-catastrophes at the Long Island Nuclear Reaction Plant, all
involving the new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors, and that there
had been considerable carefully-hushed top-level acrimony before the
Melroy Engineering Corporation had been given the contract to install
the fully cybernetic control system intended to prevent a recurrence of
such incidents.
That had been three months ago. Melroy and his people had moved in, been
assigned sections of a couple of machine shops, set up an assembly shop
and a set of plyboard-partitioned offices in a vacant warehouse just
outside the reactor area, and tried to start work, only to run into the
almost interminable procedural disputes and jurisdictional wranglings of
the sort which he privately labeled "bureau bunk". It was only now that
he was ready to begin work on the reactors.
He sat at his desk, in the inner of three successively smaller offices
on the second floor of the converted warehouse, checking over a
symbolic-logic analysis of a relay system and, at the same time,
sharpening a pencil, his knife paring off tiny feathery shavings of
wood. He was a tall, sparely-built, man of indeterminate age, with
thinning sandy hair, a long Gaelic upper lip, and a wide, half-humorous,
half-weary mouth; he wore an open-necked shirt, and an old and shabby
leather jacket, to the left shoulder of which a few clinging flecks of
paint showed where some military emblem had been, long ago. While his
fingers worked with the jackknife and his eyes traveled over the page of
closely-written symbols, his mind was reviewing the eight different ways
in which one of the efficient but treacherous Doernberg-Giardano
reactors could be allowed to reach critical mass, and he was wondering
if there might not be some unsuspected ninth way. That was a possibility
which always lurked in the back of his mind, and lately it had been
giving him surrealistic nightmares.
"Mr. Melroy!" the box on the desk in front of him said suddenly, in a
feminine voice. "Mr. Melroy, Dr. Rives is here."
Melroy picked up the handphone, thumbing on the switch.
"Dr. Rives?" he repeated.
"The psychologist who's subbing for Dr. von Heydenreich," the box told
him patiently.
"Oh, yes. Show him in," Melroy said.
"Right away, Mr. Melroy," the box replied.
* * * * *
Replacing the handphone, Melroy wondered, for a moment, why there had
been a hint of suppressed amusement in his secretary's voice. Then the
door opened and he stopped wondering. Dr. Rives wasn't a him; she was a
her. Very attractive looking her, too--dark hair and eyes, rather
long-oval features, clear, lightly tanned complexion, bright red
lipstick put on with a micrometric exactitude that any engineer could
appreciate. She was tall, within four inches of his own six-foot mark,
and she wore a black tailored outfit, perfectly plain, which had
probably cost around five hundred dollars and would have looked severe
and mannish except that the figure under it curved and bulged in just
the right places and to just the right degree.
Melroy rose, laying down knife and pencil and taking his pipe out of his
mouth.
"Good afternoon," he greeted. "Dr. von Heydenreich gave me quite a
favorable account of you--as far as it went. He might have included a
few more data and made it more so.... Won't you sit down?"
The woman laid her handbag on the desk and took the visitor's chair,
impish mirth sparking in her eyes.
"He probably omitted mentioning that the D. is for Doris," she
suggested. "Suppose I'd been an Englishman with a name like Evelyn or
Vivian?"
Melroy tried to visualize her as a male Englishman named Vivian, gave
up, and grinned at her.
"Let this be a lesson," he said. "Inferences are to be drawn from
objects, or descriptions of objects; never from verbal labels. Do you
initial your first name just to see how people react when they meet
you?"
"Well, no, though that's an amusing and sometimes instructive
by-product. It started when I began contributing to some of the
professional journals. There's still a little of what used to be called
male sex-chauvinism among my colleagues, and some who would be favorably
impressed with an article signed D. Warren Rives might snort in contempt
at the same article signed Doris Rives."
"Well, fortunately, Dr. von Heydenreich isn't one of those," Melroy
said. "How is the Herr Doktor, by the way, and just what happened to
him? Miss Kourtakides merely told me that he'd been injured and was in a
hospital in Pittsburgh."
"The Herr Doktor got shot," Doris Rives informed him. "With a charge of
BB's, in a most indelicate portion of his anatomy. He was out hunting,
the last day of small-game season, and somebody mistook him for a
turkey. Nothing really serious, but he's face down in bed, cursing
hideously in German, English, Russian, Italian and French, mainly
because he's missing deer hunting."
"I might have known it," Melroy said in disgust. "The ubiquitous
lame-brain with a dangerous mechanism.... I suppose he briefed you on
what I want done, here?"
"Well, not too completely. I gathered that you want me to give
intelligence tests, or aptitude tests, or something of the sort, to some
of your employees. I'm not really one of these so-called industrial
anthropologists," she explained. "Most of my work, for the past few
years, has been for public-welfare organizations, with subnormal
persons. I told him that, and he said that was why he selected me. He
said one other thing. He said, 'I used to think Melroy had an obsession
about fools; well, after stopping this load of shot, I'm beginning to
think it's a good subject to be obsessed about.'"
Melroy nodded. "'Obsession' will probably do. 'Phobia' would be more
exact. I'm afraid of fools, and the chance that I have one working for
me, here, affects me like having a cobra crawling around my bedroom in
the dark. I want you to locate any who might be in a gang of new men
I've had to hire, so that I can get rid of them."
* * * * *
"And just how do you define the term 'fool', Mr. Melroy?" she asked.
"Remember, it has no standard meaning. Republicans apply it to
Democrats, and vice versa."
"Well, I apply it to people who do things without considering possible
consequences. People who pepper distinguished Austrian psychologists in
the pants-seat with turkey-shot, for a starter. Or people who push
buttons to see what'll happen, or turn valves and twiddle with
dial-knobs because they have nothing else to do with their hands. Or
shoot insulators off power lines to see if they can hit them. People who
don't know it's loaded. People who think warning signs are purely
ornamental. People who play practical jokes. People who--"
"I know what you mean. Just day-before-yesterday, I saw a woman toss a
cocktail into an electric heater. She didn't want to drink it, and she
thought it would just go up in steam. The result was slightly
spectacular."
"Next time, she won't do that. She'll probably throw her drink into a
lead-ladle, if there's one around. Well, on a statistical basis, I'd
judge that I have three or four such dud rounds among this new gang I've
hired. I want you to put the finger on them, so I can bounce them before
they blow the whole plant up, which could happen quite easily."
"That," Doris Rives said, "is not going to be as easy as it sounds.
Ordinary intelligence-testing won't be enough. The woman I was speaking
of has an I.Q. well inside the meaning of normal intelligence. She just
doesn't use it."
"Sure." Melroy got a thick folder out of his desk and handed it across.
"Heydenreich thought of that, too. He got this up for me, about five
years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French Surete test
for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests
for judgment and discrimination, semantic reactions, temperamental and
emotional makeup, and general mental attitude."
She took the folder and leafed through it. "Yes, I see. I always liked
this Surete test. And this memory test is a honey--'One hen, two ducks,
three squawking geese, four corpulent porpoises, five Limerick oysters,
six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers....' I'd like to see some of these
memory-course boys trying to make visual images of six pairs of Don
Alfonso tweezers. And I'm going to make a copy of this word-association
list. It's really a semantic reaction test; Korzybski would have loved
it. And, of course, our old friend, the Rorschach Ink-Blots. I've always
harbored the impious suspicion that you can prove almost anything you
want to with that. But these question-suggestions for personal interview
are really crafty. Did Heydenreich get them up himself?"
"Yes. And we have stacks and stacks of printed forms for the written
portion of the test, and big cards to summarize each subject on. And we
have a disk-recorder to use in the oral tests. There'll have to be a
pretty complete record of each test, in case--"
* * * * *
The office door opened and a bulky man with a black mustache entered,
beating the snow from his overcoat with a battered porkpie hat and
commenting blasphemously on the weather. He advanced into the room until
he saw the woman in the chair beside the desk, and then started to back
out.
"Come on in, Sid," Melroy told him. "Dr. Rives, this is our general
foreman, Sid Keating. Sid, Dr. Rives, the new dimwit detector. Sid's in
direct charge of personnel," he continued, "so you two'll be working
together quite a bit."
"Glad to know you, doctor," Keating said. Then he turned to Melroy.
"Scott, you're really going through with this, then?" he asked. "I'm
afraid we'll have trouble, then."
"Look, Sid," Melroy said. "We've been all over that. Once we start work
on the reactors, you and Ned Puryear and Joe Ricci and Steve Chalmers
can't be everywhere at once. A cybernetic system will only do what it's
been assembled to do, and if some quarter-wit assembles one of these
things wrong--" He left the sentence dangling; both men knew what he
meant.
Keating shook his head. "This union's going to bawl like a branded calf
about it," he predicted. "And if any of the dear sirs and brothers get
washed out--" That sentence didn't need to be completed, either.
"We have a right," Melroy said, "to discharge any worker who is, quote,
of unsound mind, deficient mentality or emotional instability, unquote.
It says so right in our union contract, in nice big print."
"Then they'll claim the tests are wrong."
"I can't see how they can do that," Doris Rives put in, faintly
scandalized.
"Neither can I, and they probably won't either," Keating told her. "But
they'll go ahead and do it. Why, Scott, they're pulling the Number One
Doernberg-Giardano, tonight. By oh-eight-hundred, it ought to be cool
enough to work on. Where will we hold the tests? Here?"
"We'll have to, unless we can get Dr. Rives security-cleared." Melroy
turned to her. "Were you ever security-cleared by any Government
agency?"
"Oh, yes. I was with Armed Forces Medical, Psychiatric Division, in
Indonesia in '62 and '63, and I did some work with mental fatigue cases
at Tonto Basin Research Establishment in '64."
Melroy looked at her sharply. Keating whistled.
"If she could get into Tonto Basin, she can get in here," he declared.
"I should think so. I'll call Colonel Bradshaw, the security officer."
"That way, we can test them right on the job," Keating was saying. "Take
them in relays. I'll talk to Ben about it, and we'll work up some kind
of a schedule." He turned to Doris Rives. "You'll need a wrist-Geiger,
and a dosimeter. We'll furnish them," he told her. "I hope they don't
try to make you carry a pistol, too."
"A pistol?" For a moment, she must have thought he was using some
technical-jargon term, and then it dawned on her that he wasn't. "You
mean--?" She cocked her thumb and crooked her index finger.
"Yeah. A rod. Roscoe. The Equalizer. We all have to." He half-lifted one
out of his side pocket. "We're all United States deputy marshals. They
don't bother much with counterespionage, here, but they don't fool when
it comes to countersabotage. Well, I'll get an order cut and posted. Be
seeing you, doctor."
* * * * *
"You think the union will make trouble about these tests?" she asked,
after the general foreman had gone out.
"They're sure to," Melroy replied. "Here's the situation. I have about
fifty of my own men, from Pittsburgh, here, but they can't work on the
reactors because they don't belong to the Industrial Federation of
Atomic Workers, and I can't just pay their initiation fees and union
dues and get union cards for them, because admission to this union is on
an annual quota basis, and this is December, and the quota's full. So I
have to use them outside the reactor area, on fabrication and assembly
work. And I have to hire through the union, and that's handled on a
membership seniority basis, so I have to take what's thrown at me.
That's why I was careful to get that clause I was quoting to Sid written
into my contract.
"Now, here's what's going to happen. Most of the men'll take the test
without protest, but a few of them'll raise the roof about it. Nothing
burns a moron worse than to have somebody question his fractional
intelligence. The odds are that the ones that yell the loudest about
taking the test will be the ones who get scrubbed out, and when the test
shows that they're deficient, they won't believe it. A moron simply
cannot conceive of his being anything less than perfectly intelligent,
any more than a lunatic can conceive of his being less than perfectly
sane. So they'll claim we're framing them, for an excuse to fire them.
And the union will have to back them up, right or wrong, at least on the
local level. That goes without saying. In any dispute, the employer is
always wrong and the worker is always right, until proven otherwise. And
that takes a lot of doing, believe me!"
"Well, if they're hired through the union, on a seniority basis,
wouldn't they be likely to be experienced and competent workers?" she
asked.
"Experienced, yes. That is, none of them has ever been caught doing
anything downright calamitous ... yet," Melroy replied. "The moron I'm
afraid of can go on for years, doing routine work under supervision, and
nothing'll happen. Then, some day, he does something on his own
lame-brained initiative, and when he does, it's only at the whim of
whatever gods there be that the result isn't a wholesale catastrophe.
And people like that are the most serious threat facing our civilization
today, atomic war not excepted."
Dr. Doris Rives lifted a delicately penciled eyebrow over that. Melroy,
pausing to relight his pipe, grinned at her.
"You think that's the old obsession talking?" he asked. "Could be. But
look at this plant, here. It generates every kilowatt of current used
between Trenton and Albany, the New York metropolitan area included.
Except for a few little storage-battery or Diesel generator systems,
that couldn't handle one tenth of one per cent of the barest minimum
load, it's been the only source of electric current here since 1962,
when the last coal-burning power plant was dismantled. Knock this plant
out and you darken every house and office and factory and street in the
area. You immobilize the elevators--think what that would mean in lower
and midtown Manhattan alone. And the subways. And the new endless-belt
conveyors that handle eighty per cent of the city's freight traffic. And
the railroads--there aren't a dozen steam or Diesel locomotives left in
the whole area. And the pump stations for water and gas and fuel oil.
And seventy per cent of the space-heating is electric, now. Why, you
can't imagine what it'd be like. It's too gigantic. But what you can
imagine would be a nightmare.
"You know, it wasn't so long ago, when every home lighted and heated
itself, and every little industry was a self-contained unit, that a fool
couldn't do great damage unless he inherited a throne or was placed in
command of an army, and that didn't happen nearly as often as our
leftist social historians would like us to think. But today, everything
we depend upon is centralized, and vulnerable to blunder-damage. Even
our food--remember that poisoned soft-drink horror in Chicago, in 1963;
three thousand hospitalized and six hundred dead because of one man's
stupid mistake at a bottling plant." He shook himself slightly, as
though to throw off some shadow that had fallen over him, and looked at
his watch. "Sixteen hundred. How did you get here? Fly your own plane?"
"No; I came by T.W.A. from Pittsburgh. I have a room at the new Midtown
City hotel, on Forty-seventh Street: I had my luggage sent on there from
the airport and came out on the Long Island subway."
"Fine. I have a room at Midtown City, myself, though I sleep here about
half the time." He nodded toward a door on the left. "Suppose we go in
and have dinner together. This cafeteria, here, is a horrible place.
It's run by a dietitian instead of a chef, and everything's so
white-enamel antiseptic that I swear I smell belladonna-icthyol ointment
every time I go in the place. Wait here till I change clothes."
* * * * *
At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionage--neither
the processes nor the equipment used there were secret--but the
countersabotage security was fantastically thorough. Every person or
scrap of material entering the reactor area was searched; the
life-history of every man and woman employed there was known back to the
cradle. A broad highway encircled it outside the fence, patrolled night
and day by twenty General Stuart cavalry-tanks. There were a thousand
soldiers, and three hundred Atomic Power Authority police, and only God
knew how many F.B.I, and Central Intelligence undercover agents. Every
supervisor and inspector and salaried technician was an armed United
States deputy marshal. And nobody, outside the Department of Defense,
knew how much radar and counter-rocket and fighter protection the place
had, but the air-defense zone extended from Boston to Philadelphia and
as far inland as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
The Long Island Nuclear Power Plant, Melroy thought, had all the
invulnerability of Achilles--and no more.
The six new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors clustered in a circle
inside a windowless concrete building at the center of the plant. Beside
their primary purpose of plutonium production, they furnished heat for
the sea-water distillation and chemical extraction system, processing
the water that was run through the steam boilers at the main power
reactors, condensed, redistilled, and finally pumped, pure, into the
water mains of New York. Safe outside the shielding, in a corner of a
high-ceilinged room, was the plyboard-screened on-the-job office of the
Melroy Engineering Corporation's timekeepers and foremen. Beyond, along
the far wall, were the washroom and locker room and lunch room of the
workmen.
Sixty or seventy men, mostly in white coveralls and all wearing
identification badges and carrying dosimeters in their breast pockets
and midget Geigers strapped to their wrists, were crowded about the
bulletin-board in front of the makeshift office. There was a hum of
voices--some perplexed or angry, but mostly good-humored and bantering.
As Melroy and Doris Rives approached, the talking died out and the men
turned. In the sudden silence, one voice, harshly strident, continued:
"... do they think this is, anyhow? We don't hafta take none of that."
Somebody must have nudged the speaker, trying without success to hush
him. The bellicose voice continued, and Melroy spotted the
speaker--short, thick-set, his arms jutting out at an angle from his
body, his heavy features soured with anger.
"Like we was a lotta halfwits, 'r nuts, 'r some'n! Well, we don't hafta
stand for this. They ain't got no right--"
Doris Rives clung tighter to Melroy's arm as he pushed a way for himself
and her through the crowd and into the temporary office. Inside, they
were met by a young man with a deputy marshal's badge on his flannel
shirt and a .38 revolver on his hip.
"Ben Puryear: Dr. Rives," Melroy introduced. "Who's the mouthy character
outside?"
"One of the roustabouts; name's Burris," Puryear replied. "Wash-room
lawyer."
Melroy nodded. "You always get one or two like that. How're the rest
taking it?"
Puryear shrugged. "About how you'd expect. A lot of kidding about who's
got any intelligence to test. Burris seems to be the only one who's
trying to make an issue out of it."
"Well, what are they doing ganged up here?" Melroy wanted to know. "It's
past oh-eight-hundred; why aren't they at work?"
"Reactor's still too hot. Temperature and radioactivity both too high;
radioactivity's still up around eight hundred REM's."
"Well, then, we'll give them all the written portion of the test
together, and start the personal interviews and oral tests as soon as
they're through." He turned to Doris Rives. "Can you give all of them
the written test together?" he asked. "And can Ben help
you--distributing forms, timing the test, seeing that there's no
fudging, and collecting the forms when they're done?"
"Oh, yes; all they'll have to do is follow the printed instructions."
She looked around. "I'll need a desk, and an extra chair for the
interview subject."
"Right over here, doctor." Puryear said. "And here are the forms and
cards, and the sound-recorder, and blank sound disks."
"Yes," Melroy added. "Be sure you get a recording of every interview and
oral test; we may need them for evidence."
He broke off as a man in white coveralls came pushing into the office.
He was a scrawny little fellow with a wide, loose-lipped mouth and a
protuberant Adam's apple; beside his identity badge, he wore a two-inch
celluloid button lettered: I.F.A.W. STEWARD.
"Wanta use the phone," he said. "Union business."
Melroy gestured toward a telephone on the desk beside him. The newcomer
shook his head, twisting his mouth into a smirk.
"Not that one; the one with the whisper mouthpiece," he said. "This is
private union business."
* * * * *
Melroy shrugged and indicated another phone. The man with the union
steward's badge picked it up, dialed, and held a lengthy conversation
into it, turning his head away in case Melroy might happen to be a lip
reader. Finally he turned.
"Mr. Crandall wants to talk to you," he said, grinning triumphantly, the
phone extended to Melroy.
The engineer picked up another phone, snapping a button on the base of
it.
"Melroy here," he said.
Something on the line started going _bee-beep-beep_ softly.
"Crandall, executive secretary, I.F.A.W.," the man on the other end of
the line identified himself. "Is there a recorder going on this line?"
"Naturally," Melroy replied. "I record all business conversations;
office routine."
"Mr. Melroy, I've been informed that you propose forcing our members in
your employ to submit to some kind of a mental test. Is that correct?"
"Not exactly. I'm not able to force anybody to submit to anything
against his will. If anybody objects to taking these tests, he can say
so, and I'll have his time made out and pay him off."
"That's the same thing. A threat of dismissal is coercion, and if these
men want to keep their jobs they'll have to take this test."
"Well, that's stated more or less correctly," Melroy conceded. "Let's
just put it that taking--and passing--this test is a condition of
employment. My contract with your union recognizes my right to establish
standards of intelligence; that's implied by my recognized right to
dismiss any person of 'unsound mind, deficient mentality or emotional
instability.' Psychological testing is the only means of determining
whether or not a person is classifiable in those terms."