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

Melroy rose, laying down knife and pencil and taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"Good afternoon," he greeted. "Dr. von Heydenreich gave me quite a favorable account of youтАФas far
as it went. He might have included a few more data and made it more so.... Won't you sit down?"

The woman laid her handbag on the desk and took the visitor's chair, impish mirth sparking in her eyes.

"He probably omitted mentioning that the D. is for Doris," she suggested. "Suppose I'd been an
Englishman with a name like Evelyn or Vivian?"

Melroy tried to visualize her as a male Englishman named Vivian, gave up, and grinned at her.

"Let this be a lesson," he said. "Inferences are to be drawn from objects, or descriptions of objects;
never from verbal labels. Do you initial your first name just to see how people react when they meet
you?"

"Well, no, though that's an amusing and sometimes instructive by-product. It started when I began
contributing to some of the professional journals. There's still a little of what used to be called male
sex-chauvinism among my colleagues, and some who would be favorably impressed with an article
signed D. Warren Rives might snort in contempt at the same article signed Doris Rives."
"Well, fortunately, Dr. von Heydenreich isn't one of those," Melroy said. "How is the Herr Doktor, by the
way, and just what happened to him? Miss Kourtakides merely told me that he'd been injured and was in
a hospital in Pittsburgh."

"The Herr Doktor got shot," Doris Rives informed him. "With a charge of BB's, in a most indelicate
portion of his anatomy. He was out hunting, the last day of small-game season, and somebody mistook
him for a turkey. Nothing really serious, but he's face down in bed, cursing hideously in German, English,
Russian, Italian and French, mainly because he's missing deer hunting."

"I might have known it," Melroy said in disgust. "The ubiquitous lame-brain with a dangerous
mechanism.... I suppose he briefed you on what I want done, here?"

"Well, not too completely. I gathered that you want me to give intelligence tests, or aptitude tests, or
something of the sort, to some of your employees. I'm not really one of these so-called industrial
anthropologists," she explained. "Most of my work, for the past few years, has been for public-welfare
organizations, with subnormal persons. I told him that, and he said that was why he selected me. He said
one other thing. He said, 'I used to think Melroy had an obsession about fools; well, after stopping this
load of shot, I'm beginning to think it's a good subject to be obsessed about.'"

Melroy nodded. "'Obsession' will probably do. 'Phobia' would be more exact. I'm afraid of fools, and the
chance that I have one working for me, here, affects me like having a cobra crawling around my
bedroom in the dark. I want you to locate any who might be in a gang of new men I've had to hire, so
that I can get rid of them."




"And just how do you define the term 'fool', Mr. Melroy?" she asked. "Remember, it has no standard
meaning. Republicans apply it to Democrats, and vice versa."