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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 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 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 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.
Seven
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 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 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 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 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 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.”