(Sheffield couldn’t forebear holding his breath. Mark could give the details on all of them. All the details. It was as easy for him to quote all 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-jab, 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 seven hundred eighty-nine men, two hundred seven women and fifteen children under the age of thirteen. In the course of the next year, three hundred fifteen 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. Belter 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.
The men at the controls were the lucky ones. They and, of course, Cimon who, as astrophysicist and director of the expedition, joined them by special dispensation. The others of the crew had their separate duties, while the remaining scientific personnel preferred the relative comfort of their hydraulic seats during the spiral around and down to Junior.
It was while Junior was still far enough away to be seen as a whole that the scene was at its grandest.
North and south, a third of the way to the equator, lay the ice caps, still at the start of their millennial retreat. Since the Triple G was spiraling on a north-south great circle—deliberately chosen for the sake of viewing the polar regions, as Cimon, at the cost of less than maximum safety, insisted—each cap in turn was laid out below them.
Each burnt equally with sunlight, the consequence of Junior’s un tilted axis. And each cap was in sectors, cut like a pie with a rainbowed knife.
The sunward third of each was illuminated by both suns simultaneously into a brilliant white that slowly yellowed westward, and as slowly greened eastward. To the east of the white sector lay another, half as wide, which was reached by the light of Lagrange I only, and the snow there blazed a response of sapphire beauty. To the west, another half-sector, exposed to Lagrange II alone, shone in the warm orange-red of an Earthly sunset. The three colors graded into one another band-wise, and the similarity to a rainbow was increased thereby.
The final third was dark in contrast, but if one looked carefully enough, it, too, was in parts—unequal parts. The smaller portion was black indeed, but the larger portion had a faint milkiness about it.
Cimon muttered to himself, “Moonlight. Of course.” Then looked about hastily to see if he were overheard. He did not like people to observe the actual process by which conclusions were brought to fruition in his mind. Rather they were to be presented to his students and listeners, to all about him in short, in a polished perfection that showed neither birth nor growth.
But there were only spacemen about and they did not hear him. Despite all their space-hardening, they were fixing whatever concentration they could spare from their duties and instruments upon the wonder before them.
The spiral curved, veered way from north-south to northeast-southwest, finally to the east-west in which a safe landing was most feasible. The dull thunder of atmosphere carried into the pilot room, thin and shrill at first, but gathering body and volume as the minutes passed.
Until now, in the interests of scientific observation—and to the considerable uneasiness of the captain—the spiral had been tight, deceleration slight, and the planetary circumnavigations numerous. As they bit into Junior’s air-covering, however, deceleration pitched high and the surface rose to meet them.
The ice caps vanished on either side and there began an equal alternation of land and water. A continent, mountainous on either seacoast and flat in between, like a soup plate with two ice-topped rims, flashed below at lengthening intervals. It spread halfway around Junior and the rest was water.
Most of the ocean at the moment was in the dark sector, and what was not lay in the red-orange light of Lagrange II. In the light of that sun, the waters were a dusky purple with a sprinkling of ruddy specks that thickened north and south. Icebergs!
The land was distributed at the moment between the red-orange half-sector and the full white light. Only the eastern seacoast was in the blue-green. The eastern mountain range was a startling sight, with its western slopes red and its eastern slopes green.
The ship was slowing rapidly now; the final trip over ocean was done.
Next—landing!
The first steps were cautious enough. Slow enough, too. Cimon inspected his photochromes of Junior as taken from space with minute care. Under protest, he passed them among the others of the expedition and more than a few groaned inwardly at the thought of having placed comfort before a chance to see the original of that.
Boris Vernadsky bent over his gas-analyzer interminably, a symphony in loud clothes and soft grunts.
“We’re about at sea level, I should judge,” he said, “going by the value of g.”
Then, because he was explaining himself to the rest of the group, he added negligently, “The gravitational constant, that is,” which didn’t help most of them.
He said, “The atmospheric pressure is just about eight hundred millimeters of mercury which is about five per cent higher than on Earth. And two hundred forty millimeters of that is oxygen as compared to only one hundred fifty on Earth. Not bad.”
He seemed to be waiting for approval, but scientists found it best to comment, as little as possible on data in another man’s specialty.