The Martian Way and other Stories Part 17

"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 them, 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. Annuncio 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 crews, and anything else the register would contain."

"And he was counting stars."

"Why not? It's a datum."

"I'm d.a.m.ned."

"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 of 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 a.s.sumed an air of wounded dignity. "All right, then. Logbook. 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 cla.s.sification 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

SIX.

Mark Annuncio went through 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 him.

He hated 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 subst.i.tution 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 someday. 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 albedos 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 sails as 78.6 per cent sodium chloride, 19.2 per cent magnesium carbonate, 1.4 per cent pota.s.sium 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 icecaps north and south. (Textbooks of Earth's paleo-climatology drifted past and Mark made no move to stop them.) The icecaps were retreating. In a million years, Junior would have Earth's present climate. It was just about Earth's size and ma.s.s 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.

SEVEN.

Sheffield entered Mark's cabin and joined the boy two hours before landing. He and Mark had originally been a.s.signed 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 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 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 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 doc.u.mentary 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 stopped, flushed slightly, and said, "I mean supposing we get back, I intend to get as many books and films as I can on folkways. I've hardly read anything on that subject. I was down in the ship's library and they had 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 s.p.a.cemen 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 Confederation. 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's 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 folkways that these superst.i.tions are not necessarily based on logical a.n.a.lysis. 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 s...o...b..a.l.l.s."

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 other 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 forbear holding his breath. Mark could give the details on all of them. All the details. It was as easy for him to quote al 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 jag, sighed softly.) "-but what's the use," Mark continued, and Sheffield felt rescued from a horror. "They're just not in the same cla.s.s with the Junior expedition. That consisted of an actual settlement of 789 men, 207 women, and fifteen children under the age of thirteen. In the course of the next year, 315 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? Better 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 const.i.tuted 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.

EIGHT.

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 icecaps, 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 burned equally with sunlight, the consequence of Junior's untilted axis. And each cap was in sectors, cut like a pie with a rainbowed knife.