“What we need… what all mankind needs… is a computer that is non mechanical; 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 it is 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. Some day, I hope, there’ll be a billion like him, and we’ll 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 some day. 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 it, 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. He 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 crew and anything else the Register would contain.”
“And he was counting stars.”