Isaac Asimov - Sucker Bait

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.