Tài liệu Day of the Moron pdf

Day of the Moron

Piper, Henry Beam

Published: 1951

Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org

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About Piper:

Henry Beam Piper (March 23, 1904 – c. November 6, 1964) was an

American science fiction author. He wrote many short stories and sever￾al novels. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future His￾tory series of stories and a shorter series of "Paratime" alternate history

tales. He wrote under the name H. Beam Piper. Another source gives his

name as "Horace Beam Piper" and a different date of death. His grave￾stone says "Henry Beam Piper". Piper himself may have been the source

of part of the confusion; he told people the H stood for Horace, encour￾aging the assumption that he used the initial because he disliked his

name. Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Piper:

• Little Fuzzy (1962)

• The Cosmic Computer (1963)

• Time Crime (1955)

• Four-Day Planet (1961)

• Genesis (1951)

• Last Enemy (1950)

• A Slave is a Slave (1962)

• Murder in the Gunroom (1953)

• Omnilingual (1957)

• Time and Time Again (1947)

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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 se￾mantic 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 In￾telligence and F.B.I. people, who realized how futile even the most elab￾orate security measures were against a resourceful and suicidally de￾termined 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-cata￾strophes 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 al￾most 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 pen￾cil, 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 mil￾itary emblem had been, long ago. While his fingers worked with the

jackknife and his eyes traveled over the page of closely-written symbols,

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