The Martian Way and Other Stories

Sucker Bait Chapter 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."
"Uh-huh," said Sheffield..
"And, well-I may have been wrong. In the whole log, the purpose of the expedition was never mentioned. Now that wouldn't be so unless the purpose were secret. It was as if he were even keeping it from the other ship's officers. And the name of the ship is given as the George G. Grundy"
"It would be, of course," said Sheffield. "I don't know. I suspected that business about Triple G.," said Mark darkly.
Sheffield said, "You seem disappointed that the Captain wasn't lying."
"Not disappointed. Relieved, I think. I thought-I thought-" He stopped, and looked acutely embarrassed, but Sheffield made no effort to rescue him. He was forced to continue. "I thought everyone might be lying to me, not just the Captain. Even you might, Dr. Sheffield. I thought you just didn't want me to talk to the crew for some reason."
Sheffield tried to smile and managed to succeed. The occupational disease of the Mnemonic Service was suspicion. They were isolated, these Mnemonics, and they were different. Cause and effect were obvious.
Sheffield said lightly, "I think you'll find in your reading on folkways that these superstitions are not necessarily based on logical analysis. A planet which has become notorious has evil expected of it. The good which happens is disregarded; the bad is cried up, advertised, and exaggerated. The thing snowballs."
He moved away from Mark. He busied himself with an inspection of the hydraulic chairs. They would be landing soon. He felt unnecessarily along the length of the broad webbing of the straps, keeping his back to the youngster. So protected, he said, almost in a whisper, "And, of course, what makes it worse is that Junior is so different."
(Easy now, easy. Don't push. He had tried that trick before this and-)
Mark was saying, "No, it isn't. Not a bit. The other expeditions that failed were different. That's true."
Sheffield kept his back turned. He waited.
Mark said, "The seventeen other expeditions that failed on planets that are now inhabited were all small exploring expeditions. In sixteen of the cases, the cause of death was shipwreck of one sort or another, and in the remaining case, Coma Minor that one was, the failure resulted from a surprise attack by indigenous life forms, not intelligent, of course. I have the details on all of them-"
(Sheffield couldn't forbear holding his breath. Mark could give the details on all of them. All the details. It was as easy for him to quote al the records on each expedition, word for word, as it was to say yes or no. And he might well choose to. A Mnemonic had no selectivity. It was one of the things that made ordinary companionship between Mnemonics and ordinary people impossible. Mnemonics were dreadful bores by the nature of things. Even Sheffield, who was trained and inured to listen to it all, and who had no intention of stopping Mark if he were really off on a talk jag, sighed softly.)
"-but what's the use," Mark continued, and Sheffield felt rescued from a horror. "They're just not in the same class with the Junior expedition. That consisted of an actual settlement of 789 men, 207 women, and fifteen children under the age of thirteen. In the course of the next year, 315 women, nine men, and two children were added by immigration. The settlement survived almost two years and the cause of death isn't known, except that from their report it might be disease.
"Now that part is different. But Junior itself has nothing unusual about it, except-of-course-"
Mark paused as though the information were too unimportant to bother with and Sheffield almost yelled. He forced himself to say calmly, "That difference, of course."
Mark said, "We all know about that. It has two suns and the others only have one."
The psychologist could have cried his disappointment.
Nothing!
But what was the use? Better luck next time. If you don't have patience with a Mnemonic, you might as well not have a Mnemonic.
He sat down in the hydraulic chair and buckled himself in tightly. Mark did likewise. (Sheffield would have liked to help, but that would have been injudicious.) He looked at his watch. They must be spiraling down even now.
Under his disappointment, Sheffield felt a stronger disturbance. Mark Annuncio had acted wrongly in following up his own hunch that the Captain and everybody else had been lying. Mnemonics had a tendency to believe that because their store of facts was great, it was complete. This, obviously, is a prime error. It is therefore necessary, (thus spake Karaganda) for them to present their correlations to properly constituted authority and never to act upon it themselves.
Well, how significant was this error of Mark's? He was the first Mnemonic to be taken away from Service headquarters; the first to be separated from all of his kind; the first to be isolated among noncompos. What did that do to him? What would it continue to do to him? Would it be bad? If so, how to stop it?
To all of which questions, Dr. Oswald Mayer Sheffield knew no answer.