“Why, I didn’t even know who either of them were, until yesterday morning.”
“That’s not the way they tell it,” Crandall retorted. “They say you and Keating have been out to get them ever since they were hired. You and your supervisors have been persecuting both of those men systematically. The fact that Burris has had grounds for all these previous complaints proves that.”
“It proves that Burris has a persecution complex, and that Koffler’s credulous enough to believe him,” Melroy replied. “And that tends to confirm the results of the tests they failed to pass.”
“Oh, so that’s the line you’re taking. You persecute a man, and then say he has a persecution complex if he recognizes the fact. Well, you’re not going to get away with it, that’s all I have to say to you.” Crandall flung the test-sheet he had been holding on to the desk. “That stuff’s not worth the paper it’s scribbled on!” 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. “Harry Crandall was out here talking to them, and at noon the whole gang handed in their wrist-Geigers and dosimeters and cleared out their lockers. They say they aren’t coming back till Burris and Koffler come back to work with them.”
“Then they aren’t coming back, period,” Melroy replied. “Crandall was to see me, a couple of hours ago. He tells me that Burris and Koffler told him that we’ve been persecuting Burris; discriminating against him. You know of anything that really happened that might make them think anything like that?”
“No. Burris is always yelling about not getting enough overtime work, but you know how it is: he’s just a roustabout, a common laborer. Any overtime work that has to be done is usually skilled labor on this job. We generally have a few roustabouts to help out, but he’s been allowed to make overtime as much as any of the others.”
“Will the time-records show that?”
“They ought to. I don’t know what he and Koffler told Crandall, but whatever it was, I’ll bet they were lying.”
“That’s all right, then. How’s the reactor, now?”
“Hausinger says the count’s down to safe limits, and the temperature’s down to inactive normal. He and his gang found a big chunk of plutonium, about one-quarter C.M., inside. He got it out.”
“All right. Tell Dr. Rives to gather up all her completed or partially completed test records and come out to the office. You and the others stay on the job; we may have some men for you by this afternoon; tomorrow morning certainly.”
He hung up, then picked up the communicator phone and called his secretary.
“Joan, is Sid Keating out there? Send him in, will you?”
Keating, when he entered, was wearing the lugubriously gratified expression appropriate to the successful prophet of disaster.
“All right, Cassandra,” Melroy greeted him. “I’m not going to say you didn’t warn me. Look. This strike is illegal. It’s a violation of the Federal Labor Act of 1958, being called without due notice of intention, without preliminary negotiation, and without two weeks’ time-allowance.”
“They’re going to claim that it isn’t a strike. They’re going to call it a ‘spontaneous work-stoppage.’ ”
“Aah! I hope I can get Crandall on record to that effect; I’ll fire every one of those men for leaving their work without permission and absence from duty without leave. How many of our own men, from Pittsburgh, do we have working in these machine shops and in the assembly shop here? About sixty?”
“Sixty-three. Why? You’re not going to use them to work on the reactor, are you?”
“I just am. They’re all qualified cybernetics technicians; they can do this work better than this gang we’ve had to hire here. Just to be on the safe side, I’m promoting all of them, as of oh-eight-hundred this morning, to assistant gang-foremen, on salaries. That’ll take them outside union jurisdiction.”
“But how about our contract with the I.F.A.W.?”
“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. “Most of them are security-cleared, already, from the work we did installing that counter-rocket control system on the U.S.S. Alaska, and the work we did on that symbolic-logic computer for the Philadelphia Project. It may take all day to get the red tape unwound, but I think we can be ready to start by oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”
By the time Keating had rounded up all the regular Melroy Engineering Corporation employees and Melroy had talked to Colonel Bradshaw about security-clearance, it was 1430. A little later, he was called on the phone by Leighton, the Atomic Power Authority man.
“Melroy, what are you trying to do?” the Power Authority man demanded. “Get this whole plant struck shut? The I.F.A.W.’s madder than a shot-stung bobcat. They claim you’re going to bring in strikebreakers; they’re talking about picketing the whole reactor area.”
“News gets around fast, here, doesn’t it?” Melroy commented. He told Leighton what he had in mind. The Power Authority man was considerably shaken before he had finished.
“But they’ll call a strike on the whole plant! Have you any idea what that would mean?”
“Certainly I have. They’ll either call it in legal form, in which case the whole thing will go to mediation and get aired, which is what I want, or they’ll pull a Pearl Harbor on you, the way they did on me. And in that case, the President will have to intervene, and they’ll fly in technicians from some of the Armed Forces
