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For about an hour, he poked around the newly assembled apparatus, checking the wiring, and peering into it. When he returned to the temporary office, the oral testing was still going on; Koffler was still on duty as watcher for the union, but the sport had evidently palled on him, for he was now studying a comic book. Melroy left the reactor area and returned to the office in the converted area.
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.
"That's been voided, by Crandall's own act, in interfering with the execution of our contract with the Atomic Power Authority. You know what I think? I think the I.F.A.W. front office is going to have to disavow this. It'll hurt them to do it, but they'll have to. Crandall's put them in the middle on this." "How about security clearance for our own men?" "Nothing to that," Melroy said.
He turned on his heel in an automatically correct about-face and strode out of the office. Melroy straightened out the papers and put them away, then sat down at his desk, filling and lighting his pipe. He was still working at 1215 when Ben Puryear called him. "They walked out on us," he reported.
"Most of my work, for the past few years, has been for public-welfare organizations, with subnormal persons. I told him that, and he said that was why he selected me. He said one other thing. He said, 'I used to think Melroy had an obsession about fools; well, after stopping this load of shot, I'm beginning to think it's a good subject to be obsessed about." Melroy nodded.
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.
"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.
Then you understand my position in the matter." "Certainly, Mr. Melroy. I was talking to Colonel Bradshaw, the security officer, last evening. He agrees that a stupid or careless workman is, under some circumstances, a more serious threat to security than any saboteur.
Crandall says I'm to stay here an' watch what you do to these guys." "This man working for us?" Melroy asked Puryear. "Yes. Koffler, Julius. Electrical fitter; Joe Ricci's gang." "All right. See to it that he gets placed in the first relay for the written test, and gets first turn for the orals.
"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?"
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