"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."
* * * * *
Jaimie made an explosive sound. "But I thought you _must_ have
progressed from empirical methods! I would have said something long ago,
if I hadn't thought you knew what you were doing all the time!" The
historian was on his feet, stalking about the room. "Why didn't you tell
me about this before?"
"Why? What difference would it have made?" Rod frowned, failing to
understand the other's excitement. "Sure, we've progressed from the
older methods, in that we now have pretty complete data for all present
job descriptions. And we can synthesize data for a new job, if it's not
too different. But there isn't any information on the kind of person
needed in a new world. What the devil are you getting so upset about?"
The historian threw himself into a chair and glared at Rod. "If you
couldn't find the kind of people you needed to test, you could have
asked a historian if he knew anything about them!"