"Tom Purdom - Fossil Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

type and clothing mode that had been fashionable when she had been in her
natural prime.
Morgan had put a wargame template on his information system and had it
explore some of the things Madame Dawne could do. Savela might smile at the
thought that a limited, underdeveloped personality like Madame Dawne might
undertake something dangerous. The wargame program had come up with
seventy-four weapon systems a wealthy individual could develop with the aid of
the information in the databanks. Half the systems were straightforward
modifications of the devices that dug out apartment spaces and extracted
mineral resources from the rocky exterior of the ship. Most of the others
involved an offensive use of the self-eplicating machines that handled most of
the passengersтАЩ daily needs.
Madame Dawne couldn't have designed any of the machines the wargame
program had suggested. She probably didn't even know the ship could place them
at her disposal. Did she realize she could ask a wargame program for advice?
Morgan didn't know.

****

Morgan's political studies had included an exhaustive module in applied
personality profiling. He could recite from memory the numbers that described
the kind of person who could become a successful small-community politician.
He hadn't been surprised when his profiling program had told him he scored
below average on most of the critical personality characteristics. He had made
several attempts to enter the course change controversy and the results would
have evoked I-told-you-so head shakes from the technicians who had developed
the profiling program. The program had been almost cruelly accurate when it
had informed him he had a low tolerance for disagreement. He could have given
it fifty examples of his tendency to become hot tempered and defensive when he
attracted the attention of aggressive debaters. For the last few months, he
had been avoiding the public symposiums and feeding private suggestions to
people who could turn his ideas into effective attempts at persuasion. Now he
fleshed out the profiles he had been storing in his databanks and started
recruiting a six member political team.
Morgan couldn't proselytize prospects and debate verbal brawlers, but he
had discovered he could do something that was just as effective: he could win
the cooperation of the people who could. Some of the people he approached even
enjoyed accosting their fellow citizens and lobbying them on political issues.
They couldn't always follow Morgan's logic but they considered that a minor
problem. They were extroverted, achievement-oriented personalities and Morgan
gave them suggestions that worked. If he told them a visit to X made good
sense at this moment, and a visit to Y would be a waste of time, they
approached both prospects the first couple of times he made a recommendation,
and followed his advice after that.
Most of the political strategies Morgan had studied could be fitted into
three categories: you could be combative and confrontational, you could
market, or you could explore the subtleties of the indirect approach.
Temperamentally, Morgan was a marketer who liked to use the indirect approach.
Once he had his political organization going, he ran another analysis of the
profiles in his databanks and organized a Terraforming Committee. Five