Dr. Colles cleared his throat. “Psychology,” he began.
“Good!” said Melchior. “Good. Go ahead—Oh. Here we are. You’ll have to explain this to me when we’re inside, Doctor.”
They went up the steps of what appeared to be a small parochial school, but which was, in fact, a club—and not the sort at which members were fined for not using first names in addressing one another. The guests’ dining room was small and dark. “A brandy to begin with, Doctor?”
“I hold with the ancient grammarian,” Dr. Colles said, suddenly jovial. “It is better to decline six nouns than one drink. Ha Ha!”
Melchior rolled his eyes toward Taylor, who nodded. It was so ordered. “Would you believe it, Doctor,” said Melchior, after the second sip, “I never tasted brandy till I was twenty-five years old? Times change … Ah. Good. Here’s the menu. Anything you especially like.”
The food came. They ate slowly, with grave pleasure appropriate. “Times change,” Melchior repeated, presently. “Take, for example, business: When my business began to get too big for me to handle the paper work myself, I hired my brother-in-law’s cousin to keep the books. But that family-style operation is outmoded. So now I have my personnel manager, Mr. Taylor here, he’s a college man himself, help me select the top men from the accountants’ college for Melchior Enterprises. Taylor knows what the score is.”
Dr. Colles inquired the precise nature of these enterprises. His host said that they included importing, manufacturing and distributing.
“Well, that covers just about the whole range of commerce, doesn’t it? Except for credit.”
“We do that, too.”
Colles chuckled, but seeing his host react with faint surprise, coughed. “Now, about these tests,” he said. And he proceeded to talk about the tests with young Mr. Taylor, while Mr. Melchior listened, nodding. After a while the personnel manager said, “Well, that seems to be all right, then, about the standard tests. Now, Mr. Melchior would like to discuss with you the possibility of setting up another test, one which would have to be personally constructed.”
“Oh?” Dr. Colles raised his eyebrows. “A special test. Well.”
Melchior rubbed his thin lips with his napkin. “We got—” He paused. “We have certain problems concerned with personnel procurement—maybe disprocurement is the right word, huh, Taylor? And we think you might be just the man to deal with them.”
“Well, that’s very flattering. ‘Disprocurement’? Ha ha. And challenging, too. Go on, go on.”
Joe Clock looked up from his lathe. It was that pest, Aberdeen, again. “Whaddaya want, Ab?” he asked. “Come on, come on—”
Ab smiled ingratiatingly. “Whaddaya want, for crysake?” Joe demanded.
The man looked around, nervously. “Uh. Look Joe, when you told me you needed that money couple weeks ago, you said you needed it so bad, I told you that I, uh, I, uh, could let you have it, sure, I mean, glad to help, I, uh—”
“Will ya quit needling me, for crysake? I told ya I’d pay it back.”
Ab smirked, weakly. “Yeah, but, uh, Joe, I told you then it was the, uh, rent money, so I’d, uh, I’d need it back in a week. And that was the truth, I mean … well, Joe, the, uh, the rent, I mean it was due a, a week ago, and I got to have it Joe. So—”
Joe turned back to his lathe. “You’ll get it. Tell ya landlord to keep his pants on, because I don’t have it now. So quit needling me.”
Ab started to protest, explain, plead, but Joe wasn’t paying any attention to him. Finally, with a helpless shrug he moved off, looking back over his shoulder with a puzzled expression, at the oblivious Joe Clock, who—after the other man was well out of sight—took a stroll down to the drinking fountain.
He was greeted there by a man with a wart between his eyes. “You get them new power tools for your cellar yet, that you were talking about?” the man asked.
Joe wiped his dripping mouth. “Yeah. Ordered ‘em two weeks ago and they finally came couple a days ago,” he said. “Beautiful stuff. Come on down and have a look some Sundy.”
The man with the wart between his eyes said, thanks, he might do that. “What was Aberdeen doing over at your machine just now?” he asked. “He look like he was gonna bust out crying.”
Joe frowned. “Who? Oh, Aberdeen. Aah, I dunno what he wanted.” He nodded, moved off. In the corner of his mind was a faint recollection of what Aberdeen wanted, but it was too much trouble to remember. Hell with ‘m.
“Did you read in the papers, last month,” Mr. Melchior asked, over the fresh fruit cup, “about a fellow who worked for Atlantic Coast Canning—”
Dr. Colles said that he believed he did. “Shot the foreman and—”
“Not the foreman, no, but that’s the case. They were both in line to become foreman, but only one could get the job, so this man, Grubacher, he invited Kelly—that was his competitor—to take a ride back from work in his car; then he killed him. Might’ve gotten away with it, too, only they traced the gun.”
Atlantic Coast Canning, it seemed, was an affiliate of Melchior Enterprises, and the incident had disturbed Mr. Melchior a good deal. Dr. Colles was a psychologist; did he understand what would make a man, who had seemed perfectly normal—a good employee—a good husband—do something like that? There had to be something wrong with him, didn’t there? (“Obviously,” said Dr. C.) Well, they didn’t want a repetition of the Grubacher case. They wanted Dr. Colles to help them weed out people like that beforehand.
The psychologist smiled. Society as a whole, and not just Mr. Melchior, he pointed out, would be glad to find a way to do that. But his host waved his hand and shook his head, respectfully impatient.
“No, no, Doctor. Don’t be modest,” he said. “These tests which you and Mr. Taylor are going to set up for our personnel department—you said before that what’s wrong with our society is ‘lack of communication,’ yes? Well, these tests communicate, don’t they? They help weed out all kinds of unfit people, don’t they? But they don’t go far enough! A man who thinks he hears voices and tells people that spies from outer space are after him, well, you can tell right away there’s something wrong with him, and we tell him that we’ll keep his name on file; don’t call us, we’ll call you …”
But Grubacher hadn’t been that type. He didn’t have hallucinations, he didn’t mutter. In no way, either from his work record or his family life or from his friends, could the ordinary lay person have foreseen that he would kill a man in cold blood. When he was caught and his alibi broken down and—confronted with the ballistics test results—he confessed, he was asked (oh, most vain of all questions!) if he wasn’t sorry. Grubacher seemed a little surprised. He was sorry he was caught, sure. But for the act itself? A bit surprised, answering what he obviously considered a foolish question, the killer said, no … what was there to be sorry about? It was the only thing to do: Kelly stood in his way.
Dr. Colles tapped his glasses on the tablecloth. He nodded rapidly. “This fellow would seem to be obviously a psychopath,” he said. “An individual with an underdeveloped superego. They don’t go around muttering or bubbling their lips, they don’t often run amuck; generally speaking, they are calm—cool—and collected. They simply lack what we are accustomed to call conscience. To your man, his fellow-worker wasn’t a being with equal rights, he was simply an obstacle. The sensible thing was to remove him.”