"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 4 - The Martians" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

dark-complexioned. He keeps a low profile. He is quite friendly, but it
doesn't seem to one that it is real friendliness. A political animal, like
Phyllis; only they don't like each other. It's Maya he likes. And Maya makes
sure he feels part of her world. But what he really wants is not clear.
There's a person in there one does not know at all.

More formally, he administered the Revised Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, giving the questionnaires in groups of ten. Hundreds of
questions, calibrated to give statistically significant personality profiles.
Only one of several different tests he was giving over the winter; testing was
one of the main ways they passed the time.
 They were taking this test in the Bright Room, which was lit by


scores of high-wattage bulbs, until everything in it seemed incandescent,
especially people's faces. Looking at them as they worked, Michel suddenly
felt how absurd it was to be schoolmaster to this brilliant crowd. And he saw
very clearly in their glowing faces that they were not answering the questions
to tell him what they were like, but rather to say what they thought they
should in order to get to go to Mars. Of course reading the answers with that
in mind would reveal almost as much as if they were being sincere. Still it
was a shock to see it so clearly right there on their faces.
He shouldn't have been surprised. Faces revealed mood and much else with
extreme precision, in most people anyway. Perhaps all people; a poker face
reveals someone who is feeling guarded. No, he thought while watching them, a
whole language might be developed from this, if one paid proper attention.
Blind people hear actors' voices as completely artificial and false, and in
this world they were all blind to faces, but if he looked at them more
closely, it might yield a kind of phrenology of sight. He might become the
one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
So he watched their faces, fascinated. The Bright Room was very bright
indeed; time spent in such spaces had been shown to ward off the worst of
seasonal affective disorder. In this luminous glare each translucent face
seemed not just to be speaking to him, but also to be a complete rebus of that
person's character: variously strong, intelligent, humorous, guarded,
whatever, but in any case the entire personality, all right there on the
surface. There was Ursula, faintly amused, thinking this was just one of the
many silly things psychologists did; she as a medical person recognized that
it was both ludicrous and necessary, she knew all the medical sciences were as
much art as science. Sax, on the other hand, was taking it all very seriously,
as he seemed to take everything: this was a scientific experiment to him, and
he trusted that scientists in other disciplines were honestly dealing with the
methodological difficulties of that discipline. All right there on his face.
They were all experts. Michel had studied NDM, or Naturalistic Decision
Making; he was an expert on the subject; and he knew that experts took the
limited data available to them in any situation and compared it to their vast
fund of experiences, and then made quick decisions based on analogies to past
experience. Thus now, in this