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

"They're going to claim that it isn't a strike. They're going to call it a 'spontaneous work-stoppage.'"

"Aah! I hope I can get Crandall on record to that effect; I'll fire every one of those men for leaving their
work without permission and absence from duty without leave. How many of our own men, from
Pittsburgh, do we have working in these machine shops and in the assembly shop here? About sixty?"

"Sixty-three. Why? You're not going to use them to work on the reactor, are you?"

"I just am. They're all qualified cybernetics technicians; they can do this work better than this gang we've
had to hire here. Just to be on the safe side, I'm promoting all of them, as of oh-eight-hundred this
morning, to assistant gang-foremen, on salaries. That'll take them outside union jurisdiction."

"But how about our contract with the I.F.A.W.?"

"That's been voided, by Crandall's own act, in interfering with the execution of our contract with the
Atomic Power Authority. You know what I think? I think the I.F.A.W. front office is going to have to
disavow this. It'll hurt them to do it, but they'll have to. Crandall's put them in the middle on this."

"How about security clearance for our own men?"

"Nothing to that," Melroy said. "Most of them are security-cleared, already, from the work we did
installing that counter-rocket control system on the U.S.S. Alaska, and the work we did on that
symbolic-logic computer for the Philadelphia Project. It may take all day to get the red tape unwound,
but I think we can be ready to start by oh-eight-hundred tomorrow."




By the time Keating had rounded up all the regular Melroy Engineering Corporation employees and
Melroy had talked to Colonel Bradshaw about security-clearance, it was 1430. A little later, he was
called on the phone by Leighton, the Atomic Power Authority man.

"Melroy, what are you trying to do?" the Power Authority man demanded. "Get this whole plant struck
shut? The I.F.A.W.'s madder than a shot-stung bobcat. They claim you're going to bring in
strike-breakers; they're talking about picketing the whole reactor area."

"News gets around fast, here, doesn't it?" Melroy commented. He told Leighton what he had in mind.
The Power Authority man was considerably shaken before he had finished.

"But they'll call a strike on the whole plant! Have you any idea what that would mean?"

"Certainly I have. They'll either call it in legal form, in which case the whole thing will go to mediation and
get aired, which is what I want, or they'll pull a Pearl Harbor on you, the way they did on me. And in that
case, the President will have to intervene, and they'll fly in technicians from some of the Armed Forces
plants to keep this place running. And in that case, things'll get settled that much quicker. This Crandall
thinks these men I fired are martyrs, and he's preaching a crusade. He ought to carry an advocatus
diaboli on his payroll, to scrutinize the qualifications of his martyrs, before he starts canonizing them."

A little later, Doris Rives came into the office, her hands full of papers and cards.