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 Surete test. And this memory test is a honey--'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 case--"

* * * * *

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."

"Look, Sid," Melroy said. "We've been all over that. Once we start work
on the reactors, you and Ned Puryear and Joe Ricci and Steve Chalmers
can't be everywhere at once. A cybernetic system will only do what it's
been assembled to do, and if some quarter-wit assembles one of these
things wrong--" He left the sentence dangling; both men knew what he
meant.

Keating shook his head. "This union's going to bawl like a branded calf
about it," he predicted. "And if any of the dear sirs and brothers get
washed out--" That sentence didn't need to be completed,