Illustrated by Kelly Freas
The ship, Triple G, flashed silently out of the nothingness of hyperspace and into the all-ness of space-time. It emerged into the glitter of the great star-cluster of Hercules.
It poised gingerly in space, surrounded by suns and suns and suns, each centering a gravitational field that wrenched at the little bubble of metal. But the ship’s computers had done well and it had pin-pricked squarely into position. It was within a day’s journey—ordinary space-drive journey—of the Lagrange System.
This fact had varying significance to the different men aboard ship. To the crew it was another day’s work and another day’s flight pay and then shore rest. The planet for which they were aiming was uninhabited but shore rest could be a pleasant interlude even on an asteroid. They did not trouble themselves concerning a possible difference of opinion among the passengers.
The crew, in fact, were rather contemptuous of the passengers, and avoided them.
Eggheads!
And so they were, every one of them but one. Scientists, in politer terms—and a heterogeneous lot. Their nearest approach to a common emotion at that moment was a final anxiety for their instruments, a vague desire for a last check.
And perhaps just a small increase of tension and anxiety. It was an uninhabited planet. Each had expressed himself as firmly of that belief a number of times. Still, each man’s thoughts are his own.
As for the one unusual man on board ship—not a crewman and not really a scientist—his strongest feeling was one of bone-weariness. He stirred to his feet weakly and fought off the last dregs of spacesickness. He was Mark Annuncio, and he had been in bed now for four days, feeding on almost nothing, while the ship wove in and out of the Universe, jumping its light-years of space.
But now he felt less certain of imminent death and he had to answer the summons of the captain. In his inarticulate way, Mark resented that summons. He was used to having his own way, seeing what he felt like seeing. Who was the captain to—
The impulse kept returning to tell Dr. Sheffield about this and let it rest there.
But Mark was curious, so he knew he would have to go.
It was his one great vice. Curiosity!
It also happened to be his profession, and his mission in life.
Captain Follenbee of the Triple G was a hard-headed man. It was how he habitually thought of himself. He had made government-sponsored runs before. For one thing, they were profitable. The Confederacy didn’t haggle. It meant a complete overhaul of his ship each time, replacement of defective parts, liberal terms for the crew. It was good business. Damned good business.
This run, of course, was a little different.
It wasn’t so much the particular gang of passengers he had taken aboard. (He had expected temperament, tantrums and unbearable foolishness but it turned out that eggheads were much like normal people.) It wasn’t that half his ship had been torn down and rebuilt into what the contract called a “universal central-access laboratory.”
Actually, and he hated the thought, it was “Junior”—the planet that lay ahead of them.
The crew didn’t know, of course, but he, himself, hard-head and all, was beginning to find the matter unpleasant.
But only beginning—
At the moment, he told himself, it was this Mark Annuncio, if that was the name, who was annoying him. He slapped the back of one hand against the palm of the other and thought angrily about it. His large, round face was ruddy with annoyance.
Insolence!
A boy of not more than twenty, with no position that he knew of among the passengers, to make a request like that.
What was behind it? That at least ought to be straightened out.
In his present mood, he would like to straighten it out by means of a jacket collar twisted in a fist and a rattle of teeth, but better not—
After all, this was a curious kind of light for the Confederacy of Worlds to sponsor, and a twenty-year-old, over-curious rubberneck might be an integral part of the strangeness. What was he on board for? There was this Dr. Sheffield, for instance, who seemed to have no job but to play nursemaid for the boy. Now why was that? Who was this Annuncio?
He had been spacesick for the entire trick, or was that just a device to keep to his cabin—
There was a light burning as the door-signal sounded.
It would be the boy.
Easy now, thought the captain. Easy now.
Mark Annuncio entered the captain’s cabin and licked his lips in a futile attempt to get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth. He felt lightheaded and heavy-hearted.
At the moment he would have given up his Service status to be back on Earth.
He thought wishfully of his own familiar quarters; small but private; alone with his own kind. It was just a bed, desk, chair, and closet, but he had all of Central Library on free call. Here there was nothing. He had thought there would be a lot to learn on board ship. He had never been on board ship before. But he hadn’t expected days and days of spacesickness.
He was so homesick he could cry, and he hated himself because he knew that his eyes were red and moist and that the captain would see it. He hated himself because he wasn’t large and wide; because he looked like a mouse.
In a word, that was it. He had mouse-brown hair with nothing but silken straightness to it; a narrow, receding chin, a small mouth and a pointed nose. All he needed were five or six delicate vibrissae on each side of the nose to make the illusion complete. And he was below average in height.
And then he saw the star-field in the captain’s observation port and the breath went out of him.
Stars!
Stars as he had never seen them.
Mark had never left the planet Earth before. (Dr. Sheffield told him that was why he was spacesick. Mark didn’t believe him. He had read in fifty different books that spacesickness was psychogenic. Even Dr. Sheffield tried to fool him sometimes.)
He had never left Earth before, and he was used to Earth’s sky. He was accustomed to viewing two thousand stars spread over half a celestial sphere with only ten of the first magnitude.
But here they crowded madly. There were ten times the number in Earth’s sky in that small square alone. And bright!
He fixed the star-pattern greedily in his mind. It overwhelmed him. He knew the figures on the Hercules cluster, of course. It contained between one million and ten million stars—no exact census had been taken as yet—but figures are one thing and stars are another.
He wanted to count them. It was a sudden overwhelming desire. He was curious about the number. He wondered if they all had names; if there were astronomic data on all of them. Let’s see—
He counted them in groups of hundreds. Two—three—He might have used the mental pattern alone, but he liked to watch the actual physical objects when they were so startlingly beautiful. Six—seven—
The captain’s hearty voice splattered over him and brought him back to ship’s interior.
“Mr. Annuncio. Glad to meet you.”
Mark looked up, startled, resentful. Why was his count being interrupted.
He said, irritably, “The stars!” and pointed.
The captain turned to stare. “What about them? What’s wrong?”
Mark looked at the captain’s wide back and his overdeveloped posterior. He looked at the gray stubble that covered the captain’s head, at the two large hands with thick fingers that clasped one another in the small of the captain’s back and flapped rhythmically against the shiny plastex of his jacket.
Mark thought: What does he care about the stars? Does he care about their size and brightness and spectral classes?
His lower lip trembled. The captain was just one of the noncompos. Everyone on ship was a noncompos. That’s what they called them back in the Service. Noncompos. All of them. Couldn’t cube fifteen without a computer.
Mark felt very lonely.
He let it go—no use trying to explain—and said, “The stars get so thick here. Like pea soup.”
“All appearance, Mr. Annuncio.” (The captain pronounced the “c” in Mark’s name like an “s” rather than a “is” and the sound grated on Mark’s ear.) “Average distance between stars in the thickest cluster is over a light-year. Plenty of room, eh? Looks thick, though. Grant you that. If the lights were out, they’d shine like a trillion Chisholm points in an oscillating force-field.”
But he didn’t offer to put the lights out and Mark wasn’t going to ask him to.
The captain said, “Sit down, Mr. Annuncio. No use standing, eh? You smoke? Mind if I do? Sorry you couldn’t be here this mornins. Had an excellent view of Lagrange I and II at six space-hours. Red and green. Like traffic lights, eh? Missed you all trip. Space-legs need strengthening, eh?”
He barked out his “eh’s” in a high-pitched voice that Mark found devilishly irritating.
Mark said in a low voice, “I’m all right now.”
The captain seemed to find that unsatisfactory. He puffed at his cigar and stared down at Mark with eyebrows hunched down over his eyes. He said, slowly, “Glad to see you now, anyway. Get acquainted a little. Shake hands. The Triple G ’s been on a good many government-chartered cruises. No trouble. Never had trouble. Wouldn’t want trouble. You understand.”
Mark didn’t. He was tired of trying to. His eyes drifted back hungrily to the stars. The pattern had changed a little.
The captain caught his eyes for a moment. He was frowning and his shoulders seemed to tremble at the edge of a shrug. He walked to the control panel, and like a gigantic eyelid, metal slithered across the studded observation port.
Mark jumped up in a fury, shrieking, “What’s the idea? I’m counting them, you fool.”
“Counting —” The captain flushed, but maintained a quality of politeness in his voice. He said, “Sorry! Little matter of business we must discuss.”
He stressed the word “business” lightly.
Mark knew what he meant. “There’s nothing to discuss. I want to see the ship’s log. I called you hours ago to tell you mat. You’re delaying me.”
The captain said, “Suppose you tell me why you want to see it, eh? Never been asked before. Where’s your authority?”
Mark felt astonished. “I can look at anything I want to. I’m in Mnemonic Service.”
The captain puffed strongly at his cigar. (It was a special grade manufactured for use in space and on enclosed space-objects. It had an oxidant included so that atmospheric oxygen was not consumed.)
He said, cautiously, “That so? Never heard of it. What is it?”
Mark said indignantly, “It’s the Mnemonic Service, that’s all. It’s my job to look at anything I want to and to ask anything I want to. And I’ve got the right to do it.”
“Can’t look at the log if I don’t want you to.”
“You’ve got no say in it, you… you noncompos.”
The captain’s coolness evaporated. He threw his cigar down violently and stamped at it, then picked it up and poked it carefully into the ash vent.
“What the Galactic Drift is this?” he demanded. “Who are you, anyway? Security agent? What’s up? Let’s have it straight. Right now.”
“I’ve told you all I have to.”
“Nothing to hide,” said the captain, “but I’ve got rights.”
“Nothing to hide?” squeaked Mark. “Then why is this ship called the Triple G?”
“That’s its name.”
“Go on. No such ship with an Earth registry. I knew that before I got on. I’ve been waiting to ask you.”
The captain blinked. He said, “Official name is George G. Grundy. Triple G is what everyone calls it.”
Mark laughed. “All right, then. And after I see the log book, I want to talk to the crew. I have the right. You ask Dr. Sheffield.”
“The crew too, eh?” the captain seethed. “Let’s talk to Dr. Sheffield, and then let’s keep you in quarters till we land. Sprout!”
He snatched at the intercom box.
The scientific complement of the Triple G were few in number for the job they had to do, and, as individuals, young. Not as young as Mark Annuncio, perhaps, who was in a class by himself, but even the oldest of them, Emmanuel George Cimon—astrophysicist—was not quite thirty-nine. And with his dark, unthinned hair and large, brilliant eyes, he looked still younger. To be sure, the optic brilliance was partly due to the wearing of contact lenses.
Cimon, who was perhaps overconscious of his relative age, and of the fact that he was the titular head of the expedition—a fact most of the others were inclined to ignore—usually affected an undramatic view of the mission. He ran the dotted tape through his fingers, then let it snake silently back into its spool.
“Run of the mill,” he sighed, seating himself in the softest chair in the small passenger’s lounge. “Nothing.”
He looked at the latest color photographs of the Lagrange binary and was impervious to their beauty. Lagrange I, smaller and hotter than Earth’s own sun, was a brilliant green-blue, with a pearly green-yellow corona surrounding it like the gold setting of an emerald. It appeared to be the size of a lentil or of a ball bearing out of a Lenser-ratchet. A short distance away—as distances go on a photograph—was Lagrange II. It appeared twice the size of Lagrange I, due to its position in space. (Actually, it was only four-fifths the diameter of Lagrange I, half its volume and two-thirds its mass.) Its orange-red, toward which the film was less sensitive, comparatively, than was the human retina, seemed dimmer than ever against the glory of its sister sun.
Surrounding both, undrowned by the near-by suns, as the result of the differentially-polarized lens specifically used for the purpose, was the unbelievable brilliance of the Hercules cluster. It was diamond dust, scattered thickly, yellow, white, blue, and red.
“Nothing,” said Cimon.
“Looks good to me,” said the other man in the lounge. He was Groot Knoevenaagle—physician—short, plump, and known to man by no name other than Novee.
He went on to ask, “Where’s Junior?” then bent over Cimon’s shoulder, peering out of slightly myopic eyes.
Cimon looked up and shuddered, “It’s name is not Junior. You can’t see the planet, Troas, if that’s what you mean, in this wilderness of stars. This picture is Scientific Earthman material. It isn’t particularly useful.”
“Oh, Space and back!” Novee was disappointed.
“What difference is it to you, anyway?” demanded Cimon. “Suppose I said one of those dots was Troas—any one of them. You wouldn’t know the difference and what good would it do you?”
“Now wait, Cimon. Don’t be so superior. It’s legitimate sentiment. We’ll be living on Junior for a while. For all we know, we’ll be dying on it.”
“There’s no audience, Novee, no orchestra, no mikes, no trumpets, so why be dramatic. We won’t be dying on it. If we do, it’ll be our own fault, and probably as a result of overeating.” He said it with the peculiar emphasis men of small appetite use when speaking to men of hearty appetite, as though a poor digestion was something that came only of rigid virtue and superior intellect.
“A thousand people did die,” said Novee, softly.
“Sure. About a billion men a day die all over the galaxy.”
“Not this way.”
“Not what way?”
With an effort, Novee kept to his usual drawl. “No discussions except at official meetings. That was the decision.”
“I’ll have nothing to discuss,” said Cimon, gloomily. “They’re just two ordinary stars. Damned if I know why I volunteered. I suppose it was just the chance of seeing an abnormally large Trojan system from close up. It was the thought of looking at a habitable planet with a double sun. I don’t know why I should have thought there’d be anything amazing about it.”
“Because you thought of a thousand dead men and women,” said Xovee, then went on hastily. “Listen, tell me something, will you? What’s a Trojan planet, anyway?”
The physician bore the other’s look of contempt for a moment, then said, “All right. All right. So I don’t know. You don’t know everything either. What do you know about ultrasonic incisions?”
Cimon said, “Nothing, and I think I hat’s fine. It’s my opinion that information outside a professional man’s specialty is useless and a waste of psycho-potential. Sheffield’s point of view leaves me cold.”
“I still want to know. That is, if you can explain it.”
“I can explain it. As a matter of fact, it was mentioned in the original briefing, if you were listening. Most multiple stars, and that means one third of all stars, have planets of a sort. The trouble is that the planets are never habitable. If they’re far enough away from the center of gravity of the stellar system to have a fairly circular orbit, they’re cold enough to have helium oceans. If they’re close enough to get heat, their orbit is so erratic that at least once in each revolution, they get close enough to one or another of the stars to melt iron.
“Here in the Lagrange System, however, we have an unusual case. The two stars, Lagrange I and Lagrange II, and the planet, Troas—along with its satellite, Ilium—are at the corners of an imaginary equilateral triangle. Got that? Such an arrangement happens to be a stable one, and for the sake of anything you like, don’t ask me to tell you why. Just take it as my professional opinion.”
Novee muttered under his breath, “I wouldn’t dream of doubting it.”
Cimon looked displeased and continued, “The system revolves as a unit. Troas is always a hundred million miles from each sun, and the suns are always a hundred million miles from one another.”
Novee rubbed his ear and looked dissatisfied. “I know all that. I was listening at the briefing. But why is it a Trojan planet? Why Trojan?”
Cimon’s thin lips compressed for a moment as though holding back a nasty word by force. He said, “We have an arrangement like that in the Solar System. The sun, Jupiter and a group of small asteroids form a stable equilateral triangle. It so happens that the asteroids had been given such names as Hector, Achilles, Ajax and other heroes of the Trojan war, hence—or do I have to finish?”
“Is that all?” said Novee.
“Yes. Are you through bothering me?”
“Oh, boil your head.”
Novee rose to leave the indignant astrophysicist but the door slid open a moment before his hand touched the activator and Boris Vernadsky—geochemist; dark eyebrows, wide mouth, broad face and with an inveterate tendency to polka-dot shirts and magnetic clip-ons in red plastic—stepped in.
He was oblivious to Novee’s flushed face and Cimon’s frozen expression of distaste.
He said, lightly, “Fellow scientists, if you listen very carefully you will probably hear an explosion to beat the Milky Way from up yonder in captain’s quarters.”
“What happened?” asked Novee.
“The captain got hold of Annuncio, Sheffield’s little pet wizard, and Sheffield went charging up-deck, bleeding heavily at each eyeball.”
Cimon, having listened so far, turned away, snorting.
Novee said, “Sheffield! The man can’t get angry. I’ve never even heard him raise his voice.”
“He did this time. When he found out the kid had left his cabin without telling him and that the captain was bully-ragging him—Wow! Did you know he was up and about, Novee?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. Spacesickness is one of those things. When you have it, you think you’re dying. In fact, you can hardly wait. Then, in two minutes it’s gone and you feel all right. Weak, but all right. I told Mark this morning we’d be landing next day and I suppose it pulled him through. The thought of a planetary surface in clear prospect does wonders for spacesickness. We are landing soon, aren’t we, Cimon?”
The astrophysicist made a peculiar sound that could have been interpreted as a grunt of assent. At least, Novee so interpreted it.
“Anyway,” said Novee, “what happened?”
Vernadsky said, “Well, Sheffield’s been bunking with me since the kid twirled on his toes and went over backward with spacesickness and he’s sitting there at the desk with his charts and his fist computer chug-chugging away, when the room-phone signals and its the captain. Well, it turns out he’s got the boy with him and he wants to know what the blankety-blank and assorted dot-and-dash the government means by planting a spy on him. So Sheffield yells back at him that he’ll stab him with a Collamore macro-leveling-tube if he’s been fooling with the kid and off he goes leaving the phone activated and the captain frothing.”
“You’re making this up,” said Novee. “Sheffield wouldn’t say anything like that.”
“Words to that effect.”
Novee turned to Cimon. “You’re heading our group. Why don’t you do something about this?”
Cimon snarled, “In cases like this, I’m heading the group. My responsibilities always come on suddenly. Let them fight it out. Sheffield talks an excellent fight and the captain never takes his hands out of the small of his back. Vernadsky’s jitterbugging description doesn’t mean there’ll be physical violence.”
“All right, but there’s no point in having feuds of any kind in an expedition like ours.”
“You mean our mission!” Vernadsky raised both hands in mock-awe and rolled his eyes upward. “How I dread the time when we must find ourselves among the rags and bones of the first expedition.”
And as though the picture brought to mind by that was not one that bore levity well after all, there was suddenly nothing to say. Even the back of Cimon’s head which was all that showed over the back of the easy-chair seemed a bit the stiffer for the thought.
Oswald Mayer Sheffield—psychologist, thin as a string and as tall as a good length of it, and with a voice that could be used either for singing an operatic selection with surprising virtuosity or for making a point of argument, softly but with stinging accuracy—did not show the anger one would have expected from Vernadsky’s account.
He was even smiling when he entered the captain’s cabin.
The captain broke out mauvely, as soon as he entered. “Look here, Sheffield—”
“One minute, Captain Follenbee,” said Sheffield, “How are you, Mark?”
Mark’s eyes fell and his words were muffled. “All right, Dr. Sheffield.”
“I wasn’t aware you’d gotten out of bed.”
There wasn’t the shade of reproach in his voice, but Mark grew apologetic. “I was feeling better, Dr. Sheffield, and I feel bad about not working. I haven’t done anything in all the time I’ve been on the ship. So I put in a call to the captain to ask to see the log book and he had me come up here.”
“All right. I’m sure he won’t mind if you go back to your room now.”
“Oh, won’t I?” began the captain. Sheffield’s mild eyes rose to meet the captain. “I’m responsible for him, sir.”
And somehow the captain could think of nothing further to say.
Mark turned obediently and Sheffield watched him leave and waited till the door was well-closed behind him.
Then he turned again to the captain. “What’s the bloody idea, captain?”
The captain’s knees bent a little, then straightened and bent again with a sort of threatening rhythm. The invisible slap of his hands, clasped behind his back could be heard distinctly. “That’s my question. I’m captain here, Sheffield.”
“I know that.”
“Know what it means, eh? This ship, in Space, is a legally recognized planet. I’m absolute ruler. In Space, what I say goes. Central Committee of the Confederacy can’t say otherwise. I’ve got to maintain discipline and no spy—”
“All right, and now let me tell you something, captain. You’re charted by the Bureau of Outer Provinces to carry a government-sponsored research expedition to the Lagrange System, to maintain it there as long as research necessity requires and the safety of the crew and vessel permits, and then to bring us home. You’ve signed that contract and you’ve assumed certain obligations, captain or not. For instance, you can’t tamper with our instruments and destroy their research usefulness.”
“Who in Space is doing that?” The captain’s voice was a blast of indignation.
Sheffield replied calmly, “You are. Hands off Mark Annuncio, captain. Just as you’ve got to keep your hands off Cimon’s monochrome and Vailleux’s microptics, you’ve got to keep your hands off my Annuncio. And that means each one of your ten four-striped fingers. Got it?”
The captain’s uniformed chest expanded. “I take no order on board my own ship. Your language is a breach of discipline, Mister Sheffield. Any more like that and it’s cabin arrest—you and your Annuncio. Don’t like it, then speak to Board of Review back on Earth. Till then, it’s tongue behind teeth.”
“Look, captain, let me explain something. Mark is in the -Mnemonic Service—”
“Sure, he said so. Nummonic Service. Nummonic Service. It’s plain secret police as far as I’m concerned. Well, not on board my ship, eh?”
“Mnemonic Service,” said Sheffield, patiently. “Emm-enn-eee-emm-oh-enn-eye-see Service. You don’t pronounce the first emm. It’s from a Greek word meaning memory.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed. “He remembers things?”
“Correct, captain. Look, in a way this is my fault. I should have briefed you on this. I would have, too, if the boy hadn’t gotten so sick right after the take-off. It drove most other matters out of my mind. Besides, it didn’t occur to me that he might be interested in the workings of the ship itself. Space knows why not. He should be interested in everything.”
“He should, eh?” the captain looked at the timepiece on the wall. “Brief me now, eh? But no fancy words. Not many of any other kind, either. Time limited.”
“It won’t take long, I assure you. Now you’re a space-going man, captain. How many inhabited worlds would you say there were in the Confederation?”
“Eighty thousand,” said the captain, promptly.
“Eighty-three thousand two hundred,” said Sheffield. “What do you suppose it takes to run a political organization that size?”
Again the captain did not hesitate. “Computers,” he said.
“All right. There’s Earth, where half the population works for the government and does nothing but compute and there are computing sub-centers on every other world. And even so data gets lost. Every world knows something no other world knows—almost every man. Look at our little group. Vernadsky doesn’t know any biology and I don’t know enough chemistry to stay alive. There’s not one of us can pilot the simplest space-cruiser, except for Fawkes. So we work together, each one supplying the knowledge the others lack.
“Only there’s a catch. Not one of us knows exactly which of our own data is meaningful to the other under a given set of circumstances. We can’t sit and spout everything we know. So we guess, and sometimes we don’t guess right. Two facts, A and B, can go together beautifully sometimes. So Person A, who knows Fact A, says to Person B, who knows Fact B, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this ten years ago?’ and Person B answers, ‘I didn’t think it was important,’ or ‘I thought everyone knew that.’ ”
The captain said, “That’s what computers are for.”
Sheffield said, “Computers are limited, captain. They have to be asked questions. What’s more the questions have to be the kind that can be put into a limited number of symbols. What’s more computers are very literal minded. They answer exactly what you ask and not what you have in mind. Sometimes it never occurs to anyone to ask just the right question or feed the computer just the right symbols, and when that happens the computer doesn’t volunteer information.
“What we need… what all mankind needs… is a computer that is non mechanical; a computer with imagination. There’s one like that, captain.” The psychologist tapped his temple. “In everyone, captain.”
“Maybe,” grunted the captain, “but I’ll stick to the usual, eh? Kind you punch a button.”
“Are you sure? Machines don’t have hunches. Did you ever have a hunch?”
“Is this on the point?” The captain looked at the timepiece again.
Sheffield said, “Somewhere inside the human brain is a record of every datum that has impinged upon it. Very little of it is consciously remembered, but all it is there, and a small association can bring an individual datum back without a person’s knowing where it comes from. So you get a ‘hunch’ or a ‘feeling.’ Some people are better at it than others. And some can be trained. Some are almost perfect, like Mark Annuncio and a hundred like him. Some day, I hope, there’ll be a billion like him, and we’ll really have a Mnemonic Service.
“All their lives,” Sheffield went on, “they do nothing but read, look, and listen. And train to do that better and more efficiently. It doesn’t matter what data they collect. It doesn’t have to have obvious sense or obvious significance. It doesn’t matter if any man in the Service wants to spend a week going over the records of the space-polo teams of the Canopus Sector for the last century. Any datum may be useful some day. That’s the fundamental axiom.
“Every once in a while, one of the Service may correlate across a gap no machine could possibly manage. The machine would fail because no one machine is likely to possess those two pieces of thoroughly unconnected information; or else, if the machine does have it, no man would be insane enough to ask the right question. One good correlation out of the Service can pay for all the money appropriated for it in ten years or more.”
The captain raised his broad hand. He looked troubled. He said, “Wait a minute. He said no ship named Triple G was under Earth registry. You mean he knows all registered ships by heart?”
“Probably,” said Sheffield. “He may have read through the Merchant-ship Register. If he did, he knows all the names, tonnages, years of construction, ports of call, numbers of crew and anything else the Register would contain.”
“And he was counting stars.”
“Why not? It’s a datum.”
“I’m damned.”
“Perhaps, captain. But the point is that a man like Mark is different from other men. He’s got a queer, distorted upbringing and a queer, distorted view on life. This is the first time he’s been away from, Service grounds, since he entered them at the age of five. He’s easily upset—and he can be ruined. That mustn’t happen, and I’m in charge to see it doesn’t. He’s my instrument; a more valuable instrument than everything else on this entire ship baled into a neat little ball of plutonium wire. There are only a hundred like him in all the Milky Way.”
Captain Follenbee assumed an air of wounded dignity. “All right, then. Log book. Strictly confidential, eh?”
“Strictly. He talks only to me, and I talk to no one unless a correlation has been made.”
The captain did not look as though that fell under his classification of the word, strictly, but he said, “But no crew.” He paused significantly. “You know what I mean.”
Sheffield stepped to the door. “Mark knows about that. The crew won’t hear about it from him, believe me.”
And as he was about to leave, the captain called out, “Sheffield!”
“Yes?”
“What in Space is a ‘noncompos.’ ”
Sheffield suppressed a smile. “Did he call you that?”
“What is it?”
“Just short for non compos mentis. Everyone in the Service uses it for everyone not in the Service. You’re one. I’m one. It’s Latin for ‘not of sound mind.’ And you know, captain—I think they’re quite right.”
He stepped out the door quickly.
Mark Annuncio went through the ship’s log in some fifteen seconds. He found it incomprehensible, but then most of the material he put into his mind was that. That was no trouble. Nor was the fact that it was dull. The disappointment was that it did not satisfy his curiosity, so he left it with a mixture of relief and displeasure.
He had then gone into the ship’s library and worked his way through three dozen books as quickly as he could work the scanner. He had spent three years of his early teens learning how to read by total gestalt and he still recalled proudly that he had set a school record at the final examinations.
Finally, he wandered into the laboratory sections of the ship and watched a bit here and a bit there. He asked no questions and he moved on when any of the men cast more than a casual glance at them.
He haled the insufferable way they looked at him as though he were some sort of queer animal. He hated their air of knowledge, as though there were something of value in spending an entire brain on one tiny subject and remembering only a little of that.
Eventually, of course, he would have to ask them questions. It was his job, and even if it weren’t, curiosity would drive him. He hoped, though, he could hold off till they had made planetary surface.
He found it pleasant that they were inside a stellar system. Soon he would see a new world with new suns—two of them—and a new moon. Four objects with brand-new information in each; immense storehouses of facts to be collected lovingly and sorted out.
It thrilled him just to think of the amorphous mountain of data waiting for him. He thought of his mind as a tremendous filing system with index, cross-index, cross-cross-index. He thought of it as stretching indefinitely in all directions. Neat. Smooth. Well oiled. Perfect precision.
He thought of the dusty attic that the noncompos called minds and almost laughed. He could see it even talking to Dr. Sheffield, who was a nice fellow for a noncompos. He tried hard and sometimes he almost understood. The others, the men on board ship- their minds were lumberyards. Dusty lumberyards with splintery slats of wood tumbled every which way; and only whatever happened to be on top could be reached.
The poor fools! He could be sorry for them, if they weren’t so sloppy-nasty. If only they knew what they were like. If only they realized.
Whenever he could, Mark haunted the observation posts and watched the new worlds come closer.
They passed quite close to the satellite, “Ilium.” (Cimon, the astrophysicist, was very meticulous about calling their planetary destination “Troas” and the satellite “Ilium,” but everyone else aboard ship called them “Junior” and “Sister,” respectively.) On the other side of the two suns, in the opposite Trojan position, were a group of asteroids. Cimon called them “Lagrange Epsilon” but everyone else called them “The Puppies.”
Mark thought of all this with vague simultaneity at the moment the thought “Ilium” occurred to him. He was scarcely conscious of it, and let it pass as material of no immediate interest. Still more vague, and still further below his skin of mental consciousness were the dim stirrings of five hundred such homely misnomers of astronomical dignities of nomenclature. He had read about some, picked up others on subetheric programs, heard about still others in ordinary conversation, come across a few in news reports. The material might have been told him directly, or it might have been a carelessly overheard word. Even the substitution of Triple G for George G. Grundy had its place in the shadowy file.
Sheffield had often questioned him about what went on in his mind—very gently, very cautiously.
“We want many more like you, Mark, for the Mnemonic Service. We need millions. Billions, eventually, if the race fills up the entire galaxy, as it will some day. But where do we get them. Relying on inborn talent won’t do. We all have that more or less. It’s the training that counts and unless we find out a little about what goes on, we won’t know how to train.”
And urged by Sheffield, Mark had watched himself, listened to himself, turned his eyes inward and tried to become aware. He learned of the filing cases in his head. He watched them marshal past. He observed individual items pop up on call, always tremblingly ready. It was hard to explain, but he did his best.
His own confidence grew with it. The anxieties of his childhood, those first years in Service, grew less. He stopped waking in the middle of the night, perspiration dripping, screaming with fear that he would forget. And his headaches stopped.
He watched Ilium as it appeared in the viewport at closest approach. It was brighter than he could imagine a moon to be. (Figures for albedoes of three hundred inhabited planets marched through his mind, neatly arrayed in decreasing order. It scarcely stirred the skin of his mind. He ignored them.)
The brightness he blinked at was concentrated in the vast, irregular patches that Cimon said—he overheard him, in weary response to another’s question—had once been sea bottom. A fact popped into Mark’s mind. The original report of Hidosheki Makoyama had given the composition of those bright salts as 78.6% sodium chloride, 19.2% magnesium carbonate, 1.4% potassium sulf—The thought faded out. It wasn’t necessary.
Ilium had an atmosphere. A total of about 100 mm of mercury—a little over an eighth of Earth’s, ten times Mars, 0.254 that of Coralemon, 0.1376 that of Aurora. Idly he let the decimals grow to more places. It was a form of exercise, but he grew bored. Instant arithmetic was fifth-grade stuff. Actually, he still had trouble with integrals and wondered if that was because he didn’t know what an integral was. A half dozen definitions flashed by, but he had never had enough mathematics to understand the definitions, though he could quote them well enough.
At school, they had always said, “Don’t ever get too interested in any one thing or group of things. As soon as you do that, you begin selecting your facts and you must never do that. Everything, anything is important. As long as you have the facts on file, it doesn’t matter whether you understand them or not.”
But the noncompos didn’t think so. Arrogant minds with holes in them!
They were approaching Junior itself now. It was bright, too, but in a different way. It had ice caps north and south. (Textbooks of Earth’s paleoclimatology drifted past and Mark made no move to stop them.) The ice caps were retreating. In a million years, Junior would have Earth’s present climate. It was just about Earth’s size and mass and it rotated in a period of thirty-six hours.
It might have been Earth’s twin. What differences there were, according to Makoyama’s reports, were to Junior’s advantage. There was nothing on Junior to threaten mankind as far as was known. Nor would anyone imagine there possibly might be were it not for the fact that humanity’s first colony on the planet had been wiped out to the last soul.
What was worse, the destruction had occurred in such a way that a study of all surviving information gave no reasonable clue whatever as to what had happened.
Sheffield entered Mark’s cabin and joined the boy two hours before landing. He and Mark had originally been assigned a room together. That had been an experiment. Mnemonics didn’t like the company of noncompos, even the best of them. In any case, the experiment had failed. Almost immediately after take-off, Mark’s sweating face and pleading eyes made privacy absolutely essential for him.
Sheffield felt responsible. He felt responsible for everything about Mark whether it was actually his fault or not. He and men like himself had taken Mark and children like him and trained them into personal ruin. They had been force-grown. They had been bent and molded. They had been allowed no normal contact with normal children lest they develop normal mental habits. No Mnemonic had contracted a normal marriage, even within the group.
It made for a terrible guilt-feeling on Sheffield’s part.
Twenty years ago there had been a dozen lads trained at one school under the leadership of U Karaganda, as mad an Asiatic as had ever roused the snickers of a group of interviewing newsmen. Karaganda had committed suicide eventually, under some vague motivation, but other psychologists, Sheffield for one, of greater respectability and undoubtedly of lesser brilliance, had had time to join him and learn of him.
The school continued and others were established. One was even founded on Mars. It had an enrollment of five at the moment. At latest count, there were one hundred and three living graduates with full honors—naturally, only a minority of those enrolled actually absorbed the entire course. Five years ago, the Terrestrial planetary government—not to be confused with the Central Galactic Committee, based on Earth, and ruling the Galactic Confederation—allowed the establishment of the Mnemonic Service as a branch of the Department of the Interior.
It had already paid for itself many times over, but few people knew that. Nor did the Terrestrial government advertise the fact, or any other fact about the Mnemonics. It was a tender subject with them. It was an “experiment.” They feared that failure might be politically expensive. The opposition—with difficulty prevented from making a campaign issue out of it as it was—spoke at the planetary conferences of “crackpotism” and “waste of the taxpayers’ money.” And the latter despite the existence of documentary proof of the precise opposite.
In the machine-centered civilization that filled the galaxy, it was difficult to learn to appreciate the achievements of naked mind without a long apprenticeship.
Sheffield wondered how long.
But there was no use being depressed in Mark’s company. Too much danger of contagion. He said, instead, “You’re looking fine, sport.”
Mark seemed glad to see him. He said, thoughtfully, “When we get back to Earth, Dr. Sheffield—”
He slopped, flushed slightly, and said, “I mean, supposing we get back, I intend to get as many books and films as I can on folk-wavs. I’ve hardly read anything on that subject. I was down in the ship’s library and they had nothing—absolutely nothing.”
“Why the interest?”
“It’s the captain. Didn’t you say he told you that the crew were not to know we were visiting a world on which the first expedition had died?”
“Yes, of course. Well?”
“Because spacemen consider it bad luck to touch on a world like that, especially one that looks harmless. ‘Sucker bait,’ they call it.”
“That’s right.”
“So the captain says. It’s just that I don’t see how that can be true. I can think of seventeen habitable planets from which the first expeditions never returned and never established residence. And each one was later colonized and now is a member of the Federation. Sarmatia is one of them, and it’s a pretty big world now.”
“There are planets of continuous disaster, too.” Sheffield deliberately put that as a declarative statement.
(Never ask informational questions. That was one of the Rules of Karaganda. Mnemonic correlations weren’t a matter of the conscious intelligence; they weren’t volitional. As soon as a direct question was asked, the resultant correlations were plentiful but only such as any reasonably informed man might make. It was the unconscious mind that bridged the wide, unlikely gaps.)
Mark, as any Mnemonic would, fell into the trap. He said, energetically, “No, I’ve never heard of one. Not where the planet was at all habitable. If the planet is solid ice, or complete desert, that’s different. Junior isn’t like that.”
“No it isn’t,” agreed Sheffield.
“Then why should the crew be afraid of it. I kept thinking about that all the time I was in bed. That’s when I thought of looking at the log. I’d never actually seen one, so it would be a valuable thing to do in any case. And certainly, I thought, I would find the truth there.”
“Uh huh,” said Sheffield.
“And, well—I may have been wrong. In the whole log the purpose of the expedition was never mentioned. Now that wouldn’t be so unless the purpose were secret. It was as if he were even keeping it from the other ship officers. And the name of the ship is given as the George G. Grundy.”
“It would be, of course,” said Sheffield.
“I don’t know. I suspected that business about Triple G,” said Mark, darkly.
Sheffield said, “You seem disappointed that the captain wasn’t lying.”
“Not disappointed. Relieved, I think. I thought… I thought—” He stopped and looked acutely embarrassed, but Sheffield made no effort to rescue him. He was forced to continue, “I thought everyone might be lying to me, not just the captain. Even you might, Dr. Sheffield. I thought you just didn’t want me to talk to the crew for some reason.”
Sheffield tried to smile and managed to succeed. The occupational disease of the Mnemonic Service was suspicion. They were isolated, these Mnemonics, and they were different. Cause and effect were obvious.
Sheffield said lightly, “I think you’ll find in your reading on folk-ways that these superstitions are not necessarily based on logical analysis. A planet which has become notorious has evil expected of it. The good which happens is disregarded; the bad is cried-up, advertised, and exaggerated. The thing snowballs.”
He moved away from Mark. He busied himself with an inspection of the hydraulic chairs. They would be landing soon. He felt unnecessarily along the length of the broad webbing of the straps, keeping his back to the youngster. So protected, he said, almost in a whisper, “And, of course, what makes it worse is that Junior is so different.”
(Easy now, easy. Don’t push. He had tried that trick before this and—) Mark was saying, “No, it isn’t. Not a bit. The expeditions that failed were different. That’s true.”
Sheffield kept his back turned. He waited.
Mark said, “The seventeen other expeditions that failed on planets that are now inhabited were all small exploring expeditions. In sixteen of the cases the cause of death was shipwreck of one sort or another and in the remaining case, Coma Minor that one was, the failure resulted from a surprise attack by indigenous life-forms, not intelligent, of course. I have the details on all of them—”
(Sheffield couldn’t forebear holding his breath. Mark could give the details on all of them. All the details. It was as easy for him to quote all the records on each expedition, word for word, as it was to say yes or no. And he might well choose to. A Mnemonic had no selectivity. It was one of the things that made ordinary companionship between Mnemonics and ordinary people impossible. Mnemonics were dreadful bores by the nature of things. Even Sheffield, who was trained and inured to listen to it all, and who had no intention of stopping Mark if he were really off on a talk-jab, sighed softly.)
“But what’s the use,” Mark continued, and Sheffield felt rescued from a horror. “They’re just not in the same class with the Junior expedition. That consisted of an actual settlement of seven hundred eighty-nine men, two hundred seven women and fifteen children under the age of thirteen. In the course of the next year, three hundred fifteen women, nine men and two children were added by immigration. The settlement survived almost two years and the cause of death isn’t known, except that from their report, it might be disease.
“Now that part is different. But Junior itself has nothing unusual about it, except, of course—”
Mark paused as though the information were too unimportant to bother with and Sheffield almost yelled. He forced himself to say calmly, “ That difference. Of course.”
Mark said, “We all know about that. It has two suns and the others only have one.”
The psychologist could have cried his disappointment. Nothing!
But what was the use. Belter luck next time. If you don’t have patience with a Mnemonic, you might as well not have a Mnemonic.
He sat down in the hydraulic chair and buckled himself in tightly. Mark did likewise. (Sheffield would have liked to help, but that would have been injudicious.) He looked at his watch. They must be spiraling down even now.
Under his disappointment, Sheffield felt a stronger disturbance. Mark Annuncio had acted wrongly in following up his own hunch that the captain and everybody else had been lying. Mnemonics had a tendency to believe that because their store of facts was great, it was complete. This, obviously, is a prime error. It is therefore necessary—thus spake Karaganda—for them to present their correlations to properly constituted authority and never to act upon it themselves.
Well, how significant was this error of Mark’s. He was the first Mnemonic to be taken away from Service headquarters; the first to be separated from all of his kind; the first to be isolated among noncompos. What did that do to him? What would it continue to do to him? Would it be bad? If so, how to stop it?
To all of which questions, Dr. Oswald Mayer Sheffield knew no answer.
The men at the controls were the lucky ones. They and, of course, Cimon who, as astrophysicist and director of the expedition, joined them by special dispensation. The others of the crew had their separate duties, while the remaining scientific personnel preferred the relative comfort of their hydraulic seats during the spiral around and down to Junior.
It was while Junior was still far enough away to be seen as a whole that the scene was at its grandest.
North and south, a third of the way to the equator, lay the ice caps, still at the start of their millennial retreat. Since the Triple G was spiraling on a north-south great circle—deliberately chosen for the sake of viewing the polar regions, as Cimon, at the cost of less than maximum safety, insisted—each cap in turn was laid out below them.
Each burnt equally with sunlight, the consequence of Junior’s un tilted axis. And each cap was in sectors, cut like a pie with a rainbowed knife.
The sunward third of each was illuminated by both suns simultaneously into a brilliant white that slowly yellowed westward, and as slowly greened eastward. To the east of the white sector lay another, half as wide, which was reached by the light of Lagrange I only, and the snow there blazed a response of sapphire beauty. To the west, another half-sector, exposed to Lagrange II alone, shone in the warm orange-red of an Earthly sunset. The three colors graded into one another band-wise, and the similarity to a rainbow was increased thereby.
The final third was dark in contrast, but if one looked carefully enough, it, too, was in parts—unequal parts. The smaller portion was black indeed, but the larger portion had a faint milkiness about it.
Cimon muttered to himself, “Moonlight. Of course.” Then looked about hastily to see if he were overheard. He did not like people to observe the actual process by which conclusions were brought to fruition in his mind. Rather they were to be presented to his students and listeners, to all about him in short, in a polished perfection that showed neither birth nor growth.
But there were only spacemen about and they did not hear him. Despite all their space-hardening, they were fixing whatever concentration they could spare from their duties and instruments upon the wonder before them.
The spiral curved, veered way from north-south to northeast-southwest, finally to the east-west in which a safe landing was most feasible. The dull thunder of atmosphere carried into the pilot room, thin and shrill at first, but gathering body and volume as the minutes passed.
Until now, in the interests of scientific observation—and to the considerable uneasiness of the captain—the spiral had been tight, deceleration slight, and the planetary circumnavigations numerous. As they bit into Junior’s air-covering, however, deceleration pitched high and the surface rose to meet them.
The ice caps vanished on either side and there began an equal alternation of land and water. A continent, mountainous on either seacoast and flat in between, like a soup plate with two ice-topped rims, flashed below at lengthening intervals. It spread halfway around Junior and the rest was water.
Most of the ocean at the moment was in the dark sector, and what was not lay in the red-orange light of Lagrange II. In the light of that sun, the waters were a dusky purple with a sprinkling of ruddy specks that thickened north and south. Icebergs!
The land was distributed at the moment between the red-orange half-sector and the full white light. Only the eastern seacoast was in the blue-green. The eastern mountain range was a startling sight, with its western slopes red and its eastern slopes green.
The ship was slowing rapidly now; the final trip over ocean was done.
Next—landing!
The first steps were cautious enough. Slow enough, too. Cimon inspected his photochromes of Junior as taken from space with minute care. Under protest, he passed them among the others of the expedition and more than a few groaned inwardly at the thought of having placed comfort before a chance to see the original of that.
Boris Vernadsky bent over his gas-analyzer interminably, a symphony in loud clothes and soft grunts.
“We’re about at sea level, I should judge,” he said, “going by the value of g. ”
Then, because he was explaining himself to the rest of the group, he added negligently, “The gravitational constant, that is,” which didn’t help most of them.
He said, “The atmospheric pressure is just about eight hundred millimeters of mercury which is about five per cent higher than on Earth. And two hundred forty millimeters of that is oxygen as compared to only one hundred fifty on Earth. Not bad.”
He seemed to be waiting for approval, but scientists found it best to comment, as little as possible on data in another man’s specialty.
He went on, “Nitrogen, of course. Dull, isn’t it, the way Nature repeats itself like a three-year-old who knows three lessons, period. Takes the fun away when it turns out that a water world always has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Makes the whole thing yawn-worthy.”
“What else in the atmosphere?” asked Cimon, irritably. “So far all we have is oxygen, nitrogen, and homely philosophy from kindly Uncle Boris.”
Vernadsky hooked his arm over his seat and said, amiably enough. “What are you? Director or something?”
Cimon, to whom the directorship meant little more than the annoyance of preparing composite reports for the Bureau flushed and said, grimly, “What else in the atmosphere, Dr. Vernadsky?”
Vernadsky said, without looking at his notes, “Under one per cent and over a hundredth of one per cent: hydrogen, helium, and carbon dioxide in that order. Under a hundredth of one per cent and over a ten thousandt h of one per cent: methane, argon, and neon in that order. Under a ten thousandth of one per cent and over a millionth of a per cent : radon, krypton, and xenon in that order.
“The figures aren’t very informative. About all I can get out of them is that Junior is going to be a happy hunting ground for uranium, that it’s low in potassium and that it’s no wonder it’s such a lovely little double ice cap of a world.”
He did that deliberately, so that someone could ask him how he knew, and someone, with gratifying wonder, inevitably did.
Vernadsky smiled blandly and said: “Atmospheric radon is ten to a hundred times as high here as on Earth. So is helium. Both radon and helium are produced as by-products of the radioactive breakdown of uranium and thorium. Conclusion: Uranium and thorium minerals are ten to a hundred times as copious in junior’s crust as in Earth’s.
“Argon, on the other hand, is over a hundred times as low as on Earth. Chances are Junior has none of the argon it originally started with. A planet of this type has only the argon which forms from the breakdown of K 40, one of the potassium isotopes. Low argon; low potassium. Simple, kids.”
One of the assembled groups asked, “What about the ice caps?”
Cimon, who knew the answer to that, asked, before Vernadsky could answer the other, “What’s the carbon dioxide content exactly?”
“Zero point zero one six emm emm,” said Vernadsky.
Cimon nodded, and vouchsafed nothing more.
“Well?” asked the inquirer impatiently.
“Carbon dioxide is only about half what it is on Earth, and it’s the carbon dioxide that gives the hothouse effect. It lets the short waves of sunlight pass through to the planet’s surface, but doesn’t allow the long waves of planetary heat to radiate off. When carbon dioxide concentration goes up as a result of volcanic action, the planet heats up a bit and you have a carboniferous age with oceans high and land surface at a minimum. When carbon dioxide goes down as a result of the vegetation refusing to lei a good thing alone, fattening up on the good old see-oh-two and losing its head about it, temperature drops, ice forms, a vicious cycle of glaciation starts, and voilà— ”