The Project Gutenberg EBook of Day of the Moron, by Henry Beam Piper

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Title: Day of the Moron

Author: Henry Beam Piper

Release Date: July 31, 2006 [EBook #18949]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DAY OF THE MORON

BY H. BEAM PIPER

[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science
Fiction September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the copyright on this publication was renewed.]

_It's natural to trust the unproven word of the fellow who's "on my
side"--but the emotional moron is on no one's side, not even his own.
Once, such an emotional moron could, at worst, hurt a few. But with the
mighty, leashed forces Man employs now...._

There were still, in 1968, a few people who were afraid of the nuclear
power plant. Oldsters, in whom the term "atomic energy" produced
semantic reactions associated with Hiroshima. Those who saw, in the
towering steam-column above it, a tempting target for enemy--which still
meant Soviet--bombers and guided missiles. Some of the Central
Intelligence and F.B.I. people, who realized how futile even the most
elaborate security measures were against a resourceful and suicidally
determined saboteur. And a minority of engineers and nuclear physicists
who remained unpersuaded that accidental blowups at nuclear-reaction
plants were impossible.

Scott Melroy was among these last. He knew, as a matter of fact, that
there had been several nasty, meticulously unpublicized,
near-catastrophes at the Long Island Nuclear Reaction Plant, all
involving the new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors, and that there
had been considerable carefully-hushed top-level acrimony before the
Melroy Engineering Corporation had been given the contract to install
the fully cybernetic control system intended to prevent a recurrence of
such incidents.

That had been three months ago. Melroy and his people had moved in, been
assigned sections of a co