 Why does Bertrand Malloy end up with odd officers under his command?
Illustrated by Martinez In his office apartment, on the top floor of the Terran Embassy Building in Occeq City, Bertrand Malloy leafed casually through the dossiers of the four new men who had been assigned to him. Every man in the Diplomatic Corps who developed a twitch or a quirk was shipped to Saarkkad IV to work under Bertrand Malloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador to His Utter Munificence, the Occeq of Saarkkad. He trusted no one, and was perpetually on his guard against imaginary plots and persecutions. Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. And, Malloy knew, his own position was not unimportant in that war. For nine years, Bertrand Malloy had been Ambassador to Saarkkad, and for nine years, no Saarkkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige. The Occeq of Saarkkad himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who, themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkad would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products that the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants and animals—products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and which could be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe. It was Bertrand Malloy's job to keep the production output high and to keep the materiel flowing towards Earth and her allies and outposts. A staff of top-grade men could have handled them without half trying. Not the worst ones, of course; there were places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to the war effort. Malloy knew that, no matter what was wrong with a man, as long as he had the mental ability to dress himself and get himself to work, useful work could be found for him. But Malloy didn't like to stop at merely thwarting mental quirks; he liked to find places where they were useful . It had taken Malloy a long time to get it into Miss Drayson's head that it was perfectly all right—even desirable—for her to keep secrets from everyone except Malloy. She came in through the door, a rather handsome woman in her middle thirties, clutching a sheaf of papers in her right hand as though someone might at any instant snatch it from her before she could turn it over to Malloy.
 Higher quality candidates were sent to higher priority jobs.
 He has a reputation of being able to handle them well.  Higher quality candidates were sent to higher priority jobs.  He requests them specifically.  It is part of his punishment for this low-ranking position.