“Correct, captain. Look, in a way this is my fault. I should have briefed you on this. I would have, too, if the boy hadn’t gotten so sick right after the take-off. It drove most other matters out of my mind. Besides, it didn’t occur to me that he might be interested in the workings of the ship itself. Space knows why not. He should be interested in everything.”
“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 sub-centers 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 everything 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.