Sheffield suppressed a smile. “Did he call you that?”
“What is it?”
“Just short for non compos mentis. Everyone in the Service uses it for everyone not in the Service. You’re one. I’m one. It’s Latin for ‘not of sound mind.’ And you know, captain—I think they’re quite right.”
He stepped out the door quickly.
Mark Annuncio went through the ship’s log in some fifteen seconds. He found it incomprehensible, but then most of the material he put into his mind was that. That was no trouble. Nor was the fact that it was dull. The disappointment was that it did not satisfy his curiosity, so he left it with a mixture of relief and displeasure.
He had then gone into the ship’s library and worked his way through three dozen books as quickly as he could work the scanner. He had spent three years of his early teens learning how to read by total gestalt and he still recalled proudly that he had set a school record at the final examinations.
Finally, he wandered into the laboratory sections of the ship and watched a bit here and a bit there. He asked no questions and he moved on when any of the men cast more than a casual glance at them.
He haled the insufferable way they looked at him as though he were some sort of queer animal. He hated their air of knowledge, as though there were something of value in spending an entire brain on one tiny subject and remembering only a little of that.
Eventually, of course, he would have to ask them questions. It was his job, and even if it weren’t, curiosity would drive him. He hoped, though, he could hold off till they had made planetary surface.
He found it pleasant that they were inside a stellar system. Soon he would see a new world with new suns—two of them—and a new moon. Four objects with brand-new information in each; immense storehouses of facts to be collected lovingly and sorted out.