Day of the Moron
H >> Henry Beam Piper >> Day of the MoronMelroy swore disgustedly. "All right. Gather up all our private papers,
and get Steve and Joe, and come on out. We only work here--when we're
able."
* * * * *
Doris Rives was waiting on the street level when Melroy reached the new
Federal Building, in what had formerly been the Greenwich Village
district of Manhattan, that evening. She had a heavy brief case with
her, which he took.
"I was afraid I'd keep you waiting," she said. "I came down from the
hotel by cab, and there was a frightful jam at Fortieth Street, and
another one just below Madison Square."
"Yes, it gets worse every year. Pardon my obsession, but nine times out
of ten--ninety-nine out of a hundred--it's the fault of some fool doing
something stupid. Speaking about doing stupid things, though--I did one.
Forgot to take that gun out of my overcoat pocket, and didn't notice
that I had it till I was on the subway, coming in. Have a big flashlight
in the other pocket, but that doesn't matter. What I'm worried about is
that somebody'll find out I have a gun and raise a howl about my coming
armed to a mediation hearing."
The hearing was to be held in one of the big conference rooms on the
forty-second floor. Melroy was careful to remove his overcoat and lay it
on a table in the corner, and then help Doris off with hers and lay it
on top of his own. There were three men in the room when they arrived:
Kenneth Leighton, the Atomic Power Authority man, fiftyish, acquiring a
waistline bulge and losing his hair: a Mr. Lyons, tall and slender, with
white hair; and a Mr. Quillen, considerably younger, with plastic-rimmed
glasses. The latter two were the Federal mediators. All three had been
lounging in arm-chairs, talking about the new plays on Broadway. They
all rose when Melroy and Doris Rives came over to join them.
"We mustn't discuss business until the others get here," Leighton
warned. "It's bad enough that all three of us got here ahead of them;
they'll be sure to think we're trying to take an unfair advantage of
them. I suppose neither of you have had time to see any of the new
plays."
Fortunately, Doris and Melroy had gone to the theater after dinner, the
evening-before-last; they were able to join the conversation. Young Mr.
Quillen wanted Doris Rives' opinion, as a psychologist, of the mental
processes of the heroine of the play they had seen; as nearly as she
could determine, Doris replied, the heroine in question had exhibited
nothing even loosely describable as mental processes of any sort. They
were still on the subject when the two labor negotiators, Mr. Cronnin
and Mr. Fields, arrived. Cronnin was in his sixties, with the
nearsighted squint and compressed look of concentration of an old-time
precision machinist; Fields was much younger, and sported a Phi Beta
Kappa key.
Lyons, who seemed to be the senior mediator, thereupon called the
meeting to order and they took their places at the table.
* * * * *
"Now, gentlemen--and Dr. Rives--this will be simply an informal
discussion, so that everybody can see what everybody else's position in
the matter is. We won't bother to make a sound recording. Then, if we
have managed to reach some common understanding of the question this
evening, we can start the regular hearing say at thirteen hundred
tomorrow. Is that agreeable?"
It was. The younger mediator, Quillen, cleared his throat.
"It seems, from our information, that this entire dispute arises from
the discharge, by Mr. Melroy, of two of his employees, named Koffler and
Burris. Is that correct?"
"Well, there's also the question of the Melroy Engineering Corporation's
attempting to use strike-breakers, and the Long Island Atomic Power
Authority's having condoned this unfair employment practice," Cronnin
said, acidly.
"And there's also the question of the I.F.A.W.'s calling a Pearl Harbor
strike on my company," Melroy added.
"We resent that characterization!" Cronnin retorted.
"It's a term in common usage; it denotes a strike called without warning
or declaration of intention, which this was," Melroy told him.
"And there's also the question of the I.F.A.W. calling a general strike,
in illegal manner, at the Long Island Reaction Plant," Leighton spoke
up. "On sixteen hours' notice."
"Well, that wasn't the fault of the I.F.A.W. as an organization," Fields
argued. "Mr. Cronnin and I are agreed that the walk-out date should be
postponed for two weeks, in accordance with the provisions of the
Federal Labor Act."
"Well, how about my company?" Melroy wanted to know. "Your I.F.A.W.
members walked out on me, without any notice whatever, at twelve hundred
today. Am I to consider that an act of your union, or will you disavow
it so that I can fire all of them for quitting without permission?"
"And how about the action of members of your union, acting on
instructions from Harry Crandall, in re-packing the Number One
Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactor at our plant, after the plutonium and
the U-238 and the neutron-source containers had been removed, in order
to re-initiate a chain reaction to prevent Mr. Melroy's employees from
working on the reactor?" Leighton demanded. "Am I to understand that the
union sustains that action, too?"
"I hadn't known about that," Fields said, somewhat startled.
"Neither had I," Cronnin added. "When did it happen?"
"About sixteen hundred today," Melroy told him.
"We were on the plane from Oak Ridge, then," Fields declared. "We know
nothing about that."
"Well, are you going to take the responsibility for it, or aren't you?"
Leighton insisted.
Lyons, who had been toying with a small metal paperweight, rapped on the
table with it.
"Gentlemen," he interrupted. "We're trying to cover too many subjects at
once. I suggest that we confine ourselves, at the beginning, to the
question of the dismissal of these men, Burris and Koffler. If we find
that the I.F.A.W. has a legitimate grievance in what we may call the
Burris-Koffler question, we can settle that and then go on to these
other questions."
"I'm agreeable to that," Melroy said.
"So are we," Cronnin nodded.
"All right, then. Since the I.F.A.W. is the complaining party in this
question, perhaps you gentlemen should state the grounds for your
complaints."
Fields and Cronnin exchanged glances: Cronnin nodded to Fields and the
latter rose. The two employees in question, he stated, had been the
victims of discrimination and persecution because of union activities.
Koffler was the union shop-steward for the men employed by the Melroy
Engineering Corporation, and Burris had been active in bringing
complaints about unfair employment practices. Furthermore, it was the
opinion of the I.F.A.W. that the psychological tests imposed on their
members had been a fraudulent pretext for dismissing these two men, and,
in any case, the practice of compelling workers to submit to such tests
was insulting, degrading, and not a customary condition of employment.
With that, he sat down. Melroy was on his feet at once.
"I'll deny those statements, categorically and seriatim," he replied.
"They are based entirely upon misrepresentations made by the two men who
were disqualified by the tests and dropped from my payroll because of
being, in the words of my contract with your union, 'persons of unsound
mind, deficient intelligence and/or emotional instability.' What
happened is that your local official, Crandall, accepted everything they
told him uncritically, and you accepted everything Crandall told you, in
the same spirit.
"Before I go on," Melroy continued, turning to Lyons, "have I your
permission to let Dr. Rives explain about these tests, herself, and tell
how they were given and evaluated?"
* * * * *
Permission granted by Lyons, Doris Rives rose. At some length, she
explained the nature and purpose of the tests, and her method of scoring
and correlating them.
"Well, did Mr. Melroy suggest to you that any specific employee or
employees of his were undesirable and ought to be eliminated?" Fields
asked.
"Certainly not!" Doris Rives became angry. "And if he had, I'd have
taken the first plane out of here. That suggestion is insulting! And for
your information, I never met Mr. Melroy before day-before-yesterday
afternoon; I am not dependent upon him for anything; I took this job as
an accommodation to Dr. Karl von Heydenreich, who ordinarily does such
work for the Melroy company, and I'm losing money by remaining here.
Does that satisfy you?"
"Yes, it does," Fields admitted. He was obviously impressed by mention
of the distinguished Austrian psychologist's name. "If I may ask Mr.
Melroy a question: I gather that these tests are given to all your
employees. Why do you demand such an extraordinary level of intelligence
from your employees, even common laborers?"
"Extraordinary?" Melroy echoed. "If the standards established by those
tests are extraordinary, then God help this country; we are becoming a
race of morons! I'll leave that statement to Dr. Rives for confirmation;
she's already pointed out that all that is required to pass those tests
is ordinary adult mental capacity.
"My company specializes in cybernetic-control systems," he continued.
"In spite of a lot of misleading colloquial jargon about 'thinking
machines' and 'giant brains', a cybernetic system doesn't really think.
It only does what it's been designed _and built_ to do, and if somebody
builds a mistake into it, it will automatically and infallibly repeat
that mistake in practice."
"He's right," Cronnin said. "The men that build a machine like that have
got to be as smart as the machine's supposed to be, or the machine'll be
as dumb as they are."
Fields turned on him angrily. "Which side are you supposed to be on,
anyhow?" he demanded.
"You're probably a lawyer," Melroy said. "But I'll bet Mr. Cronnin's an
old reaction-plant man." Cronnin nodded unthinkingly in confirmation.
"All right, then. Ask him what those Doernberg-Giardanos are like. And
then let me ask you: Suppose some moron fixed up something that would go
wrong, or made the wrong kind of a mistake himself, around one of those
reactors?"
It was purely a rhetorical question, but, much later, when he would have
time to think about it, Scott Melroy was to wonder if ever in history
such a question had been answered so promptly and with such dramatic
calamitousness.
Three seconds after he stopped speaking, the lights went out.
* * * * *
For a moment, they were silent and motionless. Then somebody across the
table from Melroy began to say, "What the devil--?" Doris Rives, beside
him, clutched his arm. At the head of the table, Lyons was fuming
impatiently, and Kenneth Leighton snapped a pocket-lighter and held it
up.
The Venetian-screened windows across the room faced east. In the flicker
of the lighter, Melroy made his way around to them and drew open the
slats of one, looking out. Except for the headlights of cars, far down
in the street, and the lights of ships in the harbor, the city was
completely blacked out. But there was one other, horrible, light far
away at the distant tip of Long Island--a huge ball of flame, floating
upward at the tip of a column of fiery gas. As he watched, there were
twinkles of unbearable brightness at the base of the pillar of fire,
spreading into awesome sheet-flashes, and other fireballs soared up.
Then the sound and the shock-wave of the first blast reached them.
"The main power-reactors, too," Melroy said to himself, not realizing
that he spoke audibly. "Too well shielded for the blast to get them, but
the heat melted the fissionables down to critical mass."
Leighton, the lighter still burning, was beside him, now.
"That's not--God, it can't be anything else! Why, the whole plant's
gone! There aren't enough other generators in this area to handle a
hundredth of the demand."
"And don't blame that on my alleged strike-breakers," Melroy warned.
"They hadn't got security-cleared to enter the reactor area when this
happened."
"What do you think happened?" Cronnin asked. "One of the
Doernberg-Giardanos let go?"
"Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it's his bad luck," Melroy
said grimly. "Last night, while Fred Hausinger was pulling the
fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a
big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter CM. I don't know what was done
with it, but I do know that Crandall had the maintenance gang repack
that reactor, to keep my people from working on it. Nobody'll ever find
out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved
things in any old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have
got back in, and the breeding-cans, which were pretty ripe by that time,
must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know
how fast those D-G's work. It just took this long to build up CM for a
bomb-type reaction. You remember what I was saying before the lights
went out? Well, it happened. Some moron--some untested and undetected
moron--made the wrong kind of a mistake."
"Too bad about Crandall. He was a good kid, only he didn't stop to think
often enough," Cronnin said. "Well, I guess the strike's off, now;
that's one thing."
"But all those people, out there!" Womanlike, Doris Rives was thinking
particularly rather than generally and of humans rather than
abstractions. "It must have killed everybody for miles around."
Sid Keating, Melroy thought. And Joe Ricci, and Ben Puryear, and Steve
Chalmers, and all the workmen whom he had brought here from Pittsburgh,
to their death. Then he stopped thinking about them. It didn't do any
good to think of men who'd been killed; he'd learned that years ago, as
a kid second lieutenant in Korea. The people to think about were the
millions in Greater New York, and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, and as
far south as Trenton, caught without light in the darkness, without heat
in the dead of winter, without power in subways and skyscrapers and on
railroads and interurban lines.
He turned to the woman beside him.
"Doris, before you could get your Board of Psychiatry and Neurology
diploma, you had to qualify as a regular M.D., didn't you?" he asked.
"Why, yes--"
"Then you'd better report to the nearest hospital. Any doctor at all is
going to be desperately needed, for the next day or so. Me, I still have
a reserve major's commission in the Army Corps of Engineers. They're
probably calling up reserve officers, with any radios that are still
working. Until I hear differently, I'm ordering myself on active duty as
of now." He looked around. "Anybody know where the nearest Army
headquarters is?"
"There's a recruiting station down on the thirty-something floor,"
Quillen said. "It's probably closed, now, though."
"Ground Defense Command; Midtown City," Leighton said. "They have a
medical section of their own; they'll be glad to get Dr. Rives, too."
Melroy helped her on with her coat and handed her her handbag, then
shrugged into his own overcoat and belted it about him, the weight of
the flashlight and the automatic sagging the pockets. He'd need both,
the gun as much as the light--New York had more than its share of
vicious criminals, to whom this power-failure would be a perfect
devilsend. Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm.
Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and
the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had
suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all
its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any
blundering foot.
THE END