Graff took a slow sip of vending machine coffee, keyed the next page on the desktop reader. The report writer liked passives: ‘will be effectuated,’ ‘will be seen to have incremented,’ and especially convolutions: ‘may have been cost-effective in the interim while result-negative in the long-range forecast—’Graff keyed the dictionary for ‘forecast.’ It said something about 1) terrestrial weather patterns and, 2) prediction. The latter, he decided, but keyed it up; and found something, as he’d suspected, different than his own definition of ‘prediction.’ These were the people who designed the computers and the software that ran the sims, for God’s sake, and they were giving him messages about Old Earth weather patterns and fortune-telling?He tried to read these reports out of Tanzer’s staff. He felt responsible in the captain’s absence. He worried about missing something. He worried about not understanding Tanzer face to face, and these were the only lessons in blue-sky usage on his regular reading list.‘Effectuated/ he could guess from particles.
