“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 subcenters 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 every thing 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 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 Annuncio and a hundred like him. Someday, I hope, there’ll be a billion like him, and we’l 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 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 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 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 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.