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

automatically and infallibly repeat that mistake in practice."

"He's right," Cronnin said. "The men that build a machine like that have got to be as smart as the
machine's supposed to be, or the machine'll be as dumb as they are."

Fields turned on him angrily. "Which side are you supposed to be on, anyhow?" he demanded.

"You're probably a lawyer," Melroy said. "But I'll bet Mr. Cronnin's an old reaction-plant man." Cronnin
nodded unthinkingly in confirmation. "All right, then. Ask him what those Doernberg-Giardanos are like.
And then let me ask you: Suppose some moron fixed up something that would go wrong, or made the
wrong kind of a mistake himself, around one of those reactors?"

It was purely a rhetorical question, but, much later, when he would have time to think about it, Scott
Melroy was to wonder if ever in history such a question had been answered so promptly and with such
dramatic calamitousness.

Three seconds after he stopped speaking, the lights went out.
For a moment, they were silent and motionless. Then somebody across the table from Melroy began to
say, "What the devilтАФ?" Doris Rives, beside him, clutched his arm. At the head of the table, Lyons was
fuming impatiently, and Kenneth Leighton snapped a pocket-lighter and held it up.




The Venetian-screened windows across the room faced east. In the flicker of the lighter, Melroy made
his way around to them and drew open the slats of one, looking out. Except for the headlights of cars, far
down in the street, and the lights of ships in the harbor, the city was completely blacked out. But there
was one other, horrible, light far away at the distant tip of Long IslandтАФa huge ball of flame, floating
upward at the tip of a column of fiery gas. As he watched, there were twinkles of unbearable brightness
at the base of the pillar of fire, spreading into awesome sheet-flashes, and other fireballs soared up. Then
the sound and the shock-wave of the first blast reached them.
"The main power-reactors, too," Melroy said to himself, not realizing that he spoke audibly. "Too well
shielded for the blast to get them, but the heat melted the fissionables down to critical mass."

Leighton, the lighter still burning, was beside him, now.

"That's notтАФGod, it can't be anything else! Why, the whole plant's gone! There aren't enough other
generators in this area to handle a hundredth of the demand."

"And don't blame that on my alleged strike-breakers," Melroy warned. "They hadn't got security-cleared
to enter the reactor area when this happened."

"What do you think happened?" Cronnin asked. "One of the Doernberg-Giardanos let go?"

"Yes. Your man Crandall. If he survived that, it's his bad luck," Melroy said grimly. "Last night, while
Fred Hausinger was pulling the fissionables and radioactives out of the Number One breeder, he found a
big nugget of Pu-239, about one-quarter CM. I don't know what was done with it, but I do know that
Crandall had the maintenance gang repack that reactor, to keep my people from working on it.
Nobody'll ever find out just what happened, but they were in a hurry; they probably shoved things in any
old way. Somehow, that big subcritical nugget must have got back in, and the breeding-cans, which were