Day of the Moron | Page 2

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