Lyons, who seemed to be the senior mediator, thereupon called the meeting to order and they took their places at the table.
* * * *
“Now, gentlemen—and Dr. Rives—this will be simply an informal discussion, so that everybody can see what everybody else’s position in the matter is. We won’t bother to make a sound recording. Then, if we have managed to reach some common understanding of the question this evening, we can start the regular hearing say at thirteen hundred tomorrow. Is that agreeable?”
It was. The younger mediator, Quillen, cleared his throat.
“It seems, from our information, that this entire dispute arises from the discharge, by Mr. Melroy, of two of his employees, named Koffler and Burris. Is that correct?”
“Well, there’s also the question of the Melroy Engineering Corporation’s attempting to use strike-breakers, and the Long Island Atomic Power Authority’s having condoned this unfair employment practice,” Cronnin said, acidly.
“And there’s also the question of the I.F.A.W.’s calling a Pearl Harbor strike on my company,” Melroy added.
“We resent that characterization!” Cronnin retorted.
“It’s a term in common usage; it denotes a strike called without warning or declaration of intention, which this was,” Melroy told him.
“And there’s also the question of the I.F.A.W. calling a general strike, in illegal manner, at the Long Island Reaction Plant,” Leighton spoke up. “On sixteen hours’ notice.”
“Well, that wasn’t the fault of the I.F.A.W. as an organization,” Fields argued. “Mr. Cronnin and I are agreed that the walk-out date should be postponed for two weeks, in accordance with the provisions of the Federal Labor Act.”
“Well, how about my company?” Melroy wanted to know. “Your I.F.A.W. members walked out on me, without any notice whatever, at twelve hundred today. Am I to consider that an act of your union, or will you disavow it so that I can fire all of them for quitting without permission?”
“And how about the action of members of your union, acting on instructions from Harry Crandall, in re-packing the Number One Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactor at our plant, after the plutonium and the U-238 and the neutron-source containers had been removed, in order to re-initiate a chain reaction to prevent Mr. Melroy’s employees from working on the reactor?” Leighton demanded. “Am I to understand that the union sustains that action, too?”
“I hadn’t known about that,” Fields said, somewhat startled.
“Neither had I,” Cronnin added. “When did it happen?”
“About sixteen hundred today,” Melroy told him.
“We were on the plane from Oak Ridge, then,” Fields declared. “We know nothing about that.”
“Well, are you going to take the responsibility for it, or aren’t you?” Leighton insisted.
Lyons, who had been toying with a small metal paperweight, rapped on the table with it.
“Gentlemen,” he interrupted. “We’re trying to cover too many subjects at once. I suggest that we confine ourselves, at the beginning, to the question of the dismissal of these men, Burris and Koffler. If we find that the I.F.A.W. has a legitimate grievance in what we may call the Burris-Koffler question, we can settle that and then go on to these other questions.”
“I’m agreeable to that,” Melroy said.
“So are we,” Cronnin nodded.
“All right, then. Since the I.F.A.W. is the complaining party in this question, perhaps you gentlemen should state the grounds for your complaints.”
Fields and Cronnin exchanged glances: Cronnin nodded to Fields and the latter rose. The two employees in question, he stated, had been the victims of discrimination and persecution because of union activities. Koffler was the union shop-steward for the men employed by the Melroy Engineering Corporation, and Burris had been active in bringing complaints about unfair employment practices. Furthermore, it was the opinion of the I.F.A.W. that the psychological tests imposed on their members had been a fraudulent pretext for dismissing these two men, and, in any case, the practice of compelling workers to submit to such tests was insulting, degrading, and not a customary condition of employment.
With that, he sat down. Melroy was on his feet at once.
“I’ll deny those statements, categorically and seriatim,” he replied. “They are based entirely upon misrepresentations made by the two men who were disqualified by the tests and dropped from my payroll because of being, in the words of my contract with your union, ‘persons of unsound mind, deficient intelligence and/or emotional instability.’ What happened is that your local official, Crandall, accepted everything they told him uncritically, and you accepted everything Crandall told you, in the same spirit.
“Before I go on,” Melroy continued, turning to Lyons, “have I your permission to let Dr. Rives explain about these tests, herself, and tell how they were given and evaluated?”
* * * *
Permission granted by Lyons, Doris Rives rose. At some length, she explained the nature and purpose of the tests, and her method of scoring and correlating them.
“Well, did Mr. Melroy suggest to you that any specific employee or employees of his were undesirable and ought to be eliminated?” Fields asked.
“Certainly not!” Doris Rives became angry. “And if he had, I’d have taken the first plane out of here. That suggestion is insulting! And for your information, I never met Mr. Melroy before day-before-yesterday afternoon; I am not dependent upon him for anything; I took this job as an accommodation to Dr. Karl von Heydenreich, who ordinarily does such work for the Melroy company, and I’m losing money by remaining here. Does that satisfy you?”
“Yes, it does,” Fields admitted. He was obviously impressed by mention of the distinguished Austrian psychologist’s name. “If I may ask Mr. Melroy a question: I gather that these tests are given to all your employees. Why do you demand such an extraordinary level of intelligence from your employees, even common laborers?”
“Extraordinary?” Melroy echoed. “If the standards established by those tests are extraordinary, then God help this country; we are becoming a race of morons! I’ll leave that statement to Dr. Rives for confirmation; she’s already pointed out that all that is required to pass those tests is ordinary adult mental capacity.
“My company specializes in cybernetic-control systems,” he continued. “In spite of a lot of misleading colloquial jargon about ‘thinking machines’ and ‘giant brains’, a cybernetic system doesn’t really think. It only does what it’s been designed and built to do, and if somebody builds a mistake into it, it will 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 devil—?” 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 Island—a 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 not—God, 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 pretty ripe by that time, must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know how fast those D-G’s work. It just took this long to build up CM for a bomb-type reaction. You remember what I was saying before the lights went out? Well, it happened. Some moron—some untested and undetected moron—made the wrong kind of a mistake.”
“Too bad about Crandall. He was a good kid, only he didn’t stop to think often enough,” Cronnin said. “Well, I guess the strike’s off, now; that’s one thing.”
“But all those people, out there!” Womanlike, Doris Rives was thinking particularly rather than generally and of humans rather than abstractions. “It must have killed everybody for miles around.”
Sid Keating, Melroy thought. And Joe Ricci, and Ben Puryear, and Steve Chalmers, and all the workmen whom he had brought here from Pittsburgh, to their death. Then he stopped thinking about them. It didn’t do any good to think of men who’d been killed; he’d learned that years ago, as a kid second lieutenant in Korea. The people to think about were the millions in Greater New York, and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, and as far south as Trenton, caught without light in the darkness, without heat in the dead of winter, without power in subways and skyscrapers and on railroads and interurban lines.
He turned to the woman beside him.
“Doris, before you could get your Board of Psychiatry and Neurology diploma, you had to qualify as a regular M.D., didn’t you?” he asked.
“Why, yes—”
“Then you’d better report to the nearest hospital. Any doctor at all is going to be desperately needed, for the next day or so. Me, I still have a reserve major’s commission in the Army Corps of Engineers. They’re probably calling up reserve officers, with any radios that are still working. Until I hear differently, I’m ordering myself on active duty as of now.” He looked around. “Anybody know where the nearest Army headquarters is?”
“There’s a recruiting station down on the thirty-something floor,” Quillen said. “It’s probably closed, now, though.”
“Ground Defense Command; Midtown City,” Leighton said. “They have a medical section of their own; they’ll be glad to get Dr. Rives, too.”
Melroy helped her on with her coat and handed her her handbag, then shrugged into his own overcoat and belted it about him, the weight of the flashlight and the automatic sagging the pockets. He’d need both, the gun as much as the light—New York had more than its share of vicious criminals, to whom this power-failure would be a perfect devilsend. Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together, they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.
ULLER UPRISING (1952) — Part 1
Introduction, by Dr. John D. Clark
THE SILICONE WORLD
1. THE STAR AND ITS MOST IMPORTANT PLANET
The planet is named Uller (it seems that when interstellar travel was developed, the names of Greek Gods had been used up, so those of Norse gods were used). It is the second planet of the star Beta Hydri, right angle 0:23, declension -77:32, G-0 (solar) type star, of approximately the same size as Sol; distance from Earth, 21 light years.
Uller revolves around it in a nearly circular orbit, at a distance of 100,000,000 miles, making it a little colder than Earth. A year is of the approximate length of that on Earth. A day lasts 26 hours.
The axis of Uller is in the same plane as the orbit, so that at a certain time of the year the north pole is pointed directly at the sun, while at the opposite end of the orbit it points directly away. The result is highly exaggerated seasons. At the poles the temperature runs from 120°C to a low of -80°C. At the equator it remains not far from 10°C all year round. Strong winds blow during the summer and winter, from the hot to the cold pole; few winds during the spring and fall. The appearance of the poles varies during the year from baked deserts to glaciers covered with solid CO2. Free water exists in the equatorial regions all year round.
2. SOLAR MOVEMENT AS SEEN FROM ULLER
As seen from the north pole—no sun is visible on Jan. 1. On April 1, it bisects the horizon all day, swinging completely around. April 1 to July 1, it continues swinging around, gradually rising in the sky, the spiral converging to its center at the zenith, which it reaches July 1. From July 1 to October 1 the spiral starts again, spreading out from the center until on October 1 it bisects the horizon again. On October 1 night arrives to stay until April 1.
At the equator, the sun is visible bisecting the southern horizon for all 26 hours of the day on January 1. From January 1 to April 1, the sun starts to dip below the horizon at night, to rise higher above it during the day. During all this time it rises and sets at the same hours, but rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. At noon it is higher each day in the southern sky until April 1, when it rises due east, passes through the zenith and sets due west. From April 1 to July 1, its noon position drops down to the north, until on July 1, it is visible all day, bisected by the northern horizon.
3. CHEMISTRY AND GEOLOGY OF ULLER
Calcium and chlorine are rarer than on earth, sodium is somewhat commoner. As a result of the shortage of calcium there is a higher ration of silicates to carbonates than exists on earth. The water is slightly alkaline and resembles a very dilute solution of sodium silicate (water glass). It would have a pH of 8.5 and tastes slightly soapy. Also, when it dries out it leaves a sticky, and then a glassy, crackly film. Rocks look fairly earthlike, but the absence or scarcity of anything like limestone is noticeable. Practically all the sedimentary rocks are of the sandstone type.
All rivers are seasonal, running from the polar regions to the central seas in the spring only, or until the polar cap is completely dried out.
4. ANIMAL LIFE
As on Earth life arose in the primitive waters and with a carbon base, but because of the abundance of silicone, there was a strong tendency for the microscopic organisms to develop silicate exoskeletons, like diatoms. The present invertebrate animal life of the planet is of this type and is confined to the equatorial seas. They run from amoe
ba-like objects to things like crayfish, with silicate skeletons. Later, some species of them started taking silicone into their soft tissues, and eventually their carbon-chain compounds were converted to silicone type chains, with organic radicals on the side links. These organisms were a transitional type, with silicone tissues and water body fluids, resembling the earthly amphibians, and are now practically extinct. There are a few species, something like segmented worms, still to be seen in the backwaters of the central seas.
A further development occurred when the silicone chain animals began to get short-chain silicones into their circulatory systems, held in solution by OH or NH2 groups on the ends and branches of the chains. The proportion of these compounds gradually increased until the water was a minor and then a missing constituent. The larger mobile species were, then, practically anhydrous. Their blood consists of short-chain silicones, with quartz reinforcing for the soft parts and their armor, teeth, etc., of pure amorphous quartz (opal). Most of these parts are of the milky variety, variously tinted with metallic impurities, as are the varieties of sapphires.
These pure silicone animals, due to their practical indestructibility, annihilated all but the smaller of the carbon animals, and drove the compromise types into odd corners as relics. They developed into a fish-like animal with a very large swim-bladder to compensate for the rather higher density of the silicone tissues, and from these fish the land animals developed. Due to their high density and resulting high weight, they tend to be low on the ground, rather reptilian in look. Three pairs of legs are usual in order to distribute the heavy load. There is no sharp dividing line between the quartz armor and the silicone tissue. One merges into the other.
The dominant pure silicone animals only could become mobile and venture far from the temperate equatorial regions of Uller, since they neither froze nor stiffened with cold, nor became incapacitated by heat. Note that all animal life is cold-blooded, with a negligible difference between body and ambient temperatures. Since the animals are silicones, they don’t get sluggish like cold snakes.
The H. Beam Piper Megapack Page 35
