“They could if we wanted to do it.”
“But is it really necessary? I mean, it’s clear we’re already a team of equals.”
“Is it clear?” Arkady said sharply, looking around. “If Frank and Maya tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them? If Houston or Baikonur tell us to do something, are we free to ignore them?”
“I think so,” John replied mildly.
This statement got him a sharp look from Frank. The conversation was breaking up into several arguments, as a lot of people had things to say, but Arkady cut through them all again:
“We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them disastrously. It’s why history is such a bloody mess. Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth’s mistakes just because of conventional thinking. We are the first Martian colonists! We are scientists! It is our job to think things new, to make them new!”
The arguments broke out again, louder than ever. Maya turned away and cursed Arkady under her breath, dismayed at how angry people were getting. She saw that John Boone was grinning. He pushed off the floor toward Arkady, came to a stop by piling into him, and then shook Arkady’s hand, which swung them both around in the air, in an awkward kind of dance. This gesture of support immediately set people to thinking again, Maya could see it on their surprised faces; along with John’s fame he had a reputation for being moderate and low-keyed, and if he approved of Arkady’s ideas, then it was a different matter.
“Goddammit, Ark,” John said. “First those crazy problem runs, and now this— you’re a wild man, you really are! How in the hell did you get them to let you on board this ship, anyway?”
Exactly my question, thought Maya.
“I lied,” Arkady said.
Everyone laughed. Even Frank, looking surprised. “But of course I lied!” Arkady shouted, a big upside-down grin splitting his red beard. “How else could I get here? I want to go to Mars to do what I want, and the selection committee wanted people to go and do what they were told. You know that!” He pointed down at them and shouted, “You all lied, you know you did!”
Frank was laughing harder than ever. Sax wore his usual Buster Keaton, but he raised a finger and said, “The Revised Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” and a great jeer went up from them all. They had all been required to take this exam; it was the world’s most widely used psychological test, and well regarded by experts. Respondents agreed or disagreed to 556 statements, and a profile was formed from the replies; but the judgments concerning what the answers meant were based on the earlier responses of a sample group of 2,600 white, married, middle-class Minnesota farmers of the 1930s. Despite all subsequent revisions, the pervading bias created by the nature of that first test group was still deeply ingrained in the test— or at least some of them thought so. “Minnesota!” Arkady shouted, rolling his eyes. “Farmers! Farmers from Minnesota! I tell you this now, I lied in answer to every single question! I answered exactly opposite to what I really felt, and this is what allowed me to score as normal!”
Wild cheers greeted this announcement. “Hell,” John said, “I’m from Minnesota and I had to lie.”
More cheers. Frank, Maya noted, was crimson with hilarity, incapable of speech, hands clutching his stomach, nodding, giggling, helpless to stop himself. She had never seen him laugh like that.
Sax said, “The test made you lie.”
“What, not you?” Arkady demanded. “Didn’t you lie too?”
“Well, no,” Sax said, blinking as if the concept had never occurred to him before. “I told the truth to every question.”
They laughed harder than ever. Sax looked startled at their response, but that only made him look funnier.
Someone shouted, “What do you say, Michel? How do you account for yourself?”
Michel Duval spread his hands. “You may be underestimating the sophistication of the RMMPI. There are questions which test how honest you are being.”
This statement brought down a rain of questions on his head, a methodological inquisition. What were his controls? How did the testers make their theories falsifiable? How did they repeat them? How did they eliminate alternative explanations of the data? How could they claim to be scientific in any sense of the word whatsoever? Clearly a lot of them considered psychology a pseudoscience, and many had considerable resentment for the hoops they had been forced to jump through to get aboard. The years of competition had taken their toll. And the discovery of this shared feeling sparked a score of voluble conversations. The tension raised by Arkady’s political talk disappeared.