“Why not? It’s a datum.”
“I’m damned.”
“Perhaps, captain. But the point is that a man like Mark is different from other men. He’s got a queer, distorted upbringing and a queer, distorted view on life. This is the first time he’s been away from, Service grounds, since he entered them at the age of five. He’s easily upset—and he can be ruined. That mustn’t happen, and I’m in charge to see it doesn’t. He’s my instrument; a more valuable instrument than everything else on this entire ship baled into a neat little ball of plutonium wire. There are only a hundred like him in all the Milky Way.”
Captain Follenbee assumed an air of wounded dignity. “All right, then. Log book. Strictly confidential, eh?”
“Strictly. He talks only to me, and I talk to no one unless a correlation has been made.”
The captain did not look as though that fell under his classification of the word, strictly, but he said, “But no crew.” He paused significantly. “You know what I mean.”
Sheffield stepped to the door. “Mark knows about that. The crew won’t hear about it from him, believe me.”
And as he was about to leave, the captain called out, “Sheffield!”
“Yes?”
“What in Space is a ‘noncompos.’ ”