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 wo