"If rats are experimented on, they will develop cancer."

Morton's Law

April 1, the day of reckoning, literally crashed upon the scene. They were in the sixth day of a four-hour test. Suddenly It occurred with a note of finality that astonished even the most confirmed pessimists, the headquarters independent cost analysts. The event was the dreaded appearance of test results, in this case the worst form of that malaise flight test results. It had been a truly forgettable experience. Thinking back to the time the decision had been made, it had seemed like a profoundly good idea to save schedule time by proceeding with high-rate production and then conducting the flight tests whenever it became convenient. Now, as Daedalus's management surveyed their factory (which was bulging over onto the employees' golf course with unflyable airplanes) that was not so certain. Mother Nature, it seemed, does not respond well to many of the modern management and marketing techniques which had proved so successful back in the proposal-writing days. Even such tried and true methods as declaring the flight which was prematurely terminated by the crash on takeoff as being 80 percent successful (successful checkout, successful start-up, successful taxi, and successful ground run all before the disastrous lift-off phase) no longer seemed to wash. Such events had...