Page 39 (1/1)

Mark Annuncio went through ship&039;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 one into the ship&039;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 lance at him

He hated the insufferable way they looked at hih he were soe, as though there were so an entire brain on one tiny subject and re only a little of that

Eventually, of course, he would have to ask them questions It was his job, and even if it weren&039;t, curiosity would drive hih, 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 neorld with new suns-two of them- and a new moon Four objects with brand-new information in each; ily and sorted out

It thrilled hi for hi systeht of it as stretching indefinitely in all directions Neat Sht of the dusty attic that the noncohed He could see it even talking to Dr Sheffield, as 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&039;t so sloppy-nasty If only they knehat they were like If only they realized

Whenever he could, Mark haunted the observation posts and watched the neorlds come closer

They passed quite close to the satellite Ilium (Ci 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 Cie Epsilon" but everyone else called theue siht "Ilium" occurred to him He was scarcely conscious of it, and let it pass as ue, and still further below his skin of s of five hundred such honities of nomenclature He had read about sorams, heard about still others in ordinary conversation, coht have been told hiht 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 hiently, 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 so on inborn talent won&039;t do We all have thatthat counts, and unless we find out a little about what goes on, on&039;t kno to train"

And urged by Sheffield, Mark had watched himself, listened to himself, turned his eyes inward and tried to beco cases in his head He watched them marshal past He observed individual itely ready It was hard to explain, but he did his best

His own confidence greith it The anxieties of his childhood, those first years in Service, grew less He stopped waking in thewith 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 iures for albedos of three hundred inhabited planetsorder It scarcely stirred the skin of his htness he blinked at was concentrated in the vast, irregular patches that Cimon said (he overheard him, in weary response to another&039;s question) had once been sea bottoinal report of Hidosheki Makoyaht sails as 786 per cent sodiunesiuht faded out It wasn&039;t necessary

Ilium had an atmosphere A total of about 100 hth of Earth&039;s, ten times Mars&039;, 0254 that of Coralerow to rew bored Instant arithrade stuff Actually, he still had trouble with integrals and wondered if that was because he didn&039;t knohat an integral was A half dozen definitions flashed by, but he had never had enough h he could quote theh

At school, they had always said, "Don&039;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 youas you have the facts on file, it doesn&039;t matter whether you understand theantJunior itself now It was bright, too, but in a different way It had icecaps north and south (Textbooks of Earth&039;s paleo-cliy drifted past and MarkIn a million years, Junior would have Earth&039;s present climate It was just about Earth&039;s size and ht have been Earth&039;s twin What differences there were, according to Makoyae There was nothing on Junior to threaten ine there possibly ht be were it not for the fact that humanity&039;s first colony on the planet had been wiped out to the last soul

What orse, the destruction had occurred in such a way that a study of all surviving inforave no reasonable clue whatever as to what had happened