"I'm talking about your performance just now. Here comes the whole crew, walking in with their heads hanging to the floor. Every last man was ready to tell you he was quitting—that the problem was insoluble. And before anyone can say a word, you tell them that the whole thing is impossible and imply that you want to quit. Even Biddington fell for it. You can't back out now, Rod, they say. Let's not have defeatist talk out of you, of all people—"
"I did feel that way," Rod said. "I'm just about ready to quit. I think that whatever our mistake has been, we can't do any better than we have. We just don't know enough."
Jaimie wasn't grinning now. "What will happen if you quit?"
"My guess is that Carlson will set up a military outpost there. Make a clearing, build a fort, maybe a town. Then he'll try to get people to come and live in it." Rod sighed. "It won't work. They'll want to know why the planet had to be colonized that way—why wouldn't the first colonists stay?"
"I agree. The military outpost is a fine method for spreading a culture to an existing civilization. Rome did much for Europe that way; the most powerful cities sprang up near the Roman forts and roads. But as a method for inducing the populace to a new place, it doesn't work. A free people will not willingly move into a military township." Jaimie looked sharply at Rod. "So what do you intend to do—run out and turn it all over to Carlson?"
"I don't know, Jaimie. I just don't know. Six years is a long time."
"Damn it, Rod, you had much worse jobs than this one in industry! How did you select a computer man, a communications man, an engineering physicist, out of a group of men with similar backgrounds? It seems to me a harder problem than this."
"We don't really know much, as I said," Rod said. "Ours has often been an imitation science. When we had to select a computer man, we just gave a battery of tests to successful computer men—structural vision, vocabulary, tri-dimensional memory, ink-blots, syllogisms, practically everything. Then we weeded out the tests whose scores appeared to have no statistical relevance. Any future computer man had to duplicate those results, whatever they were. If we had a recently pioneered civilization around, Jaimie, you'd find this whole staff running through it like pollsters before an election."
"What was all this talk about balance, instability, initiative and all the rest?" asked Jamie.
"That's what we do when we don't know, Jaimie. We try to predict what we need; then we try to find ways of finding it in people."