ou all know why we're here. To begin with, I'm not going to accuse
anyone of mistakes. Each of you is the best possible man in the country
for his job. If you weren't, you wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have asked
for you; and General Carlson wouldn't have kept you. So there's nothing
to feel bad about. If you can't do this work, no one can.
Self-recrimination is foolish when you've been put on an impossible
problem. I didn't call you in to bawl you out, but to ask you if we
should continue spending project funds for nothing."

Jaimie raised his eyebrows at this speech, but said nothing.

"What do you mean, impossible problem?" one of the interviewers
objected. "We know what we need--it's just that we're still making some
mistake in selection that we haven't corrected."

"That's right, Rod." Biddington, the project psychologist, took up the
dissension. "We know something is wrong with the selection techniques,
or in the personality patterns we consider necessary. But it's only a
problem of finding out what it is. The problem is by no means
insoluble."

"As long as you're not ready to give us up," another interviewer said,
"we aren't going to quit."

"You can't afford to get defeatist about this, Rod," Biddington went on.
"This project is too important to fail. Whether you like it or not, your
experience is too valuable for you to back out."

Rod grinned and held up his hands. "All right. That's the reaction I
wanted. If you all still think we can get somewhere, we may as well try
to analyze this last group." He sat down at his desk. "I have the files
here, along with the tapes of the interviews. Let's see what difference
we can find between those who hung on this long, and the ones that quit
after the first three months."

* * * * *

The group settled down to trying to differentiate between a man who
couldn't do a job but could try for six months longer than the next.
They took the colonists carefully apart, trait by trait, and put them
all back. They reviewed the colonists' records from birth, and compared
them in endless combinations. Jaimie came into the discussion to show
what the status of the colonies had been at the time each colonist had
resigned: what diseases had been encountered when one man quit; how much
jungle had been cleared before another did.

Files came and went in a continuous flux; coffee and sandwiches came and
grew cold and stale. The air became gray with smo