"H. Beam Piper - Day of the Moron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

"Mr. Melroy, we're not going to stand for this," he began, as soon as he came into the room. "You're
using these so-called tests as a pretext for getting rid of Mr. Koffler and Mr. Burris because of their
legitimate union activities."

"Who gave you that idea?" Melroy wanted to know. "Koffler and Burris?"

"That's the complaint they made to me, and it's borne out by the facts," Crandall replied. "We have on
record at least half a dozen complaints that Mr. Koffler has made to us about different unfair
work-assignments, improper working conditions, inequities in allotting overtime work, and other
infractions of union-shop conditions, on behalf of Mr. Burris. So you decided to get rid of both of them,
and you think you can use this clause in our contract with your company about persons of deficient
intelligence. The fact is, you're known to have threatened on several occasions to get rid of both of them."

"I am?" Melroy looked at Crandall curiously, wondering if the latter were serious, and deciding that he
was. "You must believe anything those people tell you. Well, they lied to you if they told you that."

"Naturally that's what you'd say," Crandall replied. "But how do you account for the fact that those two
men, and only those two men, were dismissed for alleged deficient intelligence?"

"The tests aren't all made," Melroy replied. "Until they are, you can't say that they are the only ones
disqualified. And if you look over the records of the tests, you'll see where Koffler and Burris failed and
the others passed. Here." He laid the pile of written-test forms and the summary and evaluation sheets on
the desk. "Here's Koffler's, and here's Burris'; these are the ones of the men who passed the test. Look
them over if you want to."

Crandall examined the forms and summaries for the two men who had been discharged, and compared
them with several random samples from the satisfactory pile.

"Why, this stuff's a lot of gibberish!" he exclaimed indignantly. "This thing, here: ... five Limerick oysters,
six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers, seven hundred Macedonian warriors in full battle array, eight golden
crowns from the ancient, secret crypts of Egypt, nine lymphatic, sympathetic, peripatetic old men on
crutches, and ten revolving heliotropes from the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute!' Great Lord, do you actually mean
that you're using this stuff as an excuse for depriving men of their jobs?"

"I warned you that you should have brought a professional psychologist along," Melroy reminded him.
"And maybe you ought to get Koffler and Burris to repeat their complaints on a lie-detector, while you're
at it. They took the same tests, in the same manner, as any of the others. They just didn't have the mental
equipment to cope with them and the others did. And for that reason, I won't run the risk of having them
working on this job."

"That's just your word against theirs," Crandall insisted obstinately. "Their complaint is that you framed
this whole thing up to get rid of them."

"Why, I didn't even know who either of them were, until yesterday morning."

"That's not the way they tell it," Crandall retorted. "They say you and Keating have been out to get them
ever since they were hired. You and your supervisors have been persecuting both of those men
systematically. The fact that Burris has had grounds for all these previous complaints proves that."

"It proves that Burris has a persecution complex, and that Koffler's credulous enough to believe him,"