Day of the Moron | Page 4

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