# Mr. Melroy — Short Fiction character guide

> Mr. Melroy in Short Fiction by H. Beam Piper.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Melroy

**First appearance:** 0014-day-of-the-moron

## Snapshot

An engineer with a jackknife and a shabby leather jacket who lies awake cataloguing the eight ways a breeder reactor can go critical—and fears a ninth.

## Who they are

Mr. Melroy runs the Melroy Engineering Corporation, hired to install a cybernetic control system at a nuclear plant after a series of hushed near-catastrophes. He is tall, spare, and weary, a man who sharpens pencils while reviewing symbolic logic and privately dismisses bureaucratic delays as 'bureau bunk.' His obsessive vigilance—and his nightmares about an unsuspected ninth failure mode—make him the one person in the facility who understands how close the whole enterprise sits to disaster.

## Links

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