It thrilled him just to think of the amorphous mountain of data waiting for him. He thought of his mind as a tremendous filing system with index, cross-index, cross-cross-index. He thought of it as stretching indefinitely in all directions. Neat. Smooth. Well oiled. Perfect precision.
He thought of the dusty attic that the noncompos called minds and almost laughed. He could see it even talking to Dr. Sheffield, who was a nice fellow for a noncompos. He tried hard and sometimes he almost understood. The others, the men on board ship- their minds were lumberyards. Dusty lumberyards with splintery slats of wood tumbled every which way; and only whatever happened to be on top could be reached.
The poor fools! He could be sorry for them, if they weren’t so sloppy-nasty. If only they knew what they were like. If only they realized.
Whenever he could, Mark haunted the observation posts and watched the new worlds come closer.
They passed quite close to the satellite, “Ilium.” (Cimon, the astrophysicist, was very meticulous about calling their planetary destination “Troas” and the satellite “Ilium,” but everyone else aboard ship called them “Junior” and “Sister,” respectively.) On the other side of the two suns, in the opposite Trojan position, were a group of asteroids. Cimon called them “Lagrange Epsilon” but everyone else called them “The Puppies.”
Mark thought of all this with vague simultaneity at the moment the thought “Ilium” occurred to him. He was scarcely conscious of it, and let it pass as material of no immediate interest. Still more vague, and still further below his skin of mental consciousness were the dim stirrings of five hundred such homely misnomers of astronomical dignities of nomenclature. He had read about some, picked up others on subetheric programs, heard about still others in ordinary conversation, come across a few in news reports. The material might have been told him directly, or it might have been a carelessly overheard word. Even the substitution of Triple G for George G. Grundy had its place in the shadowy file.
Sheffield had often questioned him about what went on in his mind—very gently, very cautiously.
“We want many more like you, Mark, for the Mnemonic Service. We need millions. Billions, eventually, if the race fills up the entire galaxy, as it will some day. But where do we get them. Relying on inborn talent won’t do. We all have that more or less. It’s the training that counts and unless we find out a little about what goes on, we won’t know how to train.”
And urged by Sheffield, Mark had watched himself, listened to himself, turned his eyes inward and tried to become aware. He learned of the filing cases in his head. He watched them marshal past. He observed individual items pop up on call, always tremblingly ready. It was hard to explain, but he did his best.
His own confidence grew with it. The anxieties of his childhood, those first years in Service, grew less. He stopped waking in the middle of the night, perspiration dripping, screaming with fear that he would forget. And his headaches stopped.