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“What we need, what all mankind needs, is a computer that is nonmechanical; 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 of it’s 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 A
“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 someday. 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 unco
The Captain raised his broad hand. He looked troubled. He said, “Wait a minute. A
“Probably,” said Sheffield. “He may have read through the Merchant-Ship Register. If he did, he knows all the names, to
“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 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 assumed 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 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.
Six
Mark A
He had then gone into the ship’s library and worked his way through three dozen books as quickly as he could work the sca
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 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 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.”