Day of the Moron

Day of the Moron, by Henry Beam Piper

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Title: Day of the Moron
Author: Henry Beam Piper
Release Date: July 31, 2006 [EBook #18949]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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DAY 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