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

"Well, I apply it to people who do things without considering possible consequences. People who pepper
distinguished Austrian psychologists in the pants-seat with turkey-shot, for a starter. Or people who push
buttons to see what'll happen, or turn valves and twiddle with dial-knobs because they have nothing else
to do with their hands. Or shoot insulators off power lines to see if they can hit them. People who don't
know it's loaded. People who think warning signs are purely ornamental. People who play practical
jokes. People whoтАФ"

"I know what you mean. Just day-before-yesterday, I saw a woman toss a cocktail into an electric
heater. She didn't want to drink it, and she thought it would just go up in steam. The result was slightly
spectacular."

"Next time, she won't do that. She'll probably throw her drink into a lead-ladle, if there's one around.
Well, on a statistical basis, I'd judge that I have three or four such dud rounds among this new gang I've
hired. I want you to put the finger on them, so I can bounce them before they blow the whole plant up,
which could happen quite easily."
"That," Doris Rives said, "is not going to be as easy as it sounds. Ordinary intelligence-testing won't be
enough. The woman I was speaking of has an I.Q. well inside the meaning of normal intelligence. She just
doesn't use it."

"Sure." Melroy got a thick folder out of his desk and handed it across. "Heydenreich thought of that, too.
He got this up for me, about five years ago. The intelligence test is based on the new French S├╗ret├й test
for mentally deficient criminals. Then there's a memory test, and tests for judgment and discrimination,
semantic reactions, temperamental and emotional makeup, and general mental attitude."

She took the folder and leafed through it. "Yes, I see. I always liked this S├╗ret├й test. And this memory
test is a honeyтАФ'One hen, two ducks, three squawking geese, four corpulent porpoises, five Limerick
oysters, six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers....' I'd like to see some of these memory-course boys trying to
make visual images of six pairs of Don Alfonso tweezers. And I'm going to make a copy of this
word-association list. It's really a semantic reaction test; Korzybski would have loved it. And, of course,
our old friend, the Rorschach Ink-Blots. I've always harbored the impious suspicion that you can prove
almost anything you want to with that. But these question-suggestions for personal interview are really
crafty. Did Heydenreich get them up himself?"

"Yes. And we have stacks and stacks of printed forms for the written portion of the test, and big cards to
summarize each subject on. And we have a disk-recorder to use in the oral tests. There'll have to be a
pretty complete record of each test, in caseтАФ"




The office door opened and a bulky man with a black mustache entered, beating the snow from his
overcoat with a battered porkpie hat and commenting blasphemously on the weather. He advanced into
the room until he saw the woman in the chair beside the desk, and then started to back out.

"Come on in, Sid," Melroy told him. "Dr. Rives, this is our general foreman, Sid Keating. Sid, Dr. Rives,
the new dimwit detector. Sid's in direct charge of personnel," he continued, "so you two'll be working
together quite a bit."

"Glad to know you, doctor," Keating said. Then he turned to Melroy. "Scott, you're really going through
with this, then?" he asked. "I'm afraid we'll have trouble, then."