He watched Ilium as it appeared in the viewport at closest approach. It was brighter than he could imagine a moon to be. (Figures for albedoes of three hundred inhabited planets marched through his mind, neatly arrayed in decreasing order. It scarcely stirred the skin of his mind. He ignored them.)
The brightness he blinked at was concentrated in the vast, irregular patches that Cimon said—he overheard him, in weary response to another’s question—had once been sea bottom. A fact popped into Mark’s mind. The original report of Hidosheki Makoyama had given the composition of those bright salts as 78.6% sodium chloride, 19.2% magnesium carbonate, 1.4% potassium sulf—The thought faded out. It wasn’t necessary.
Ilium had an atmosphere. A total of about 100 mm of mercury—a little over an eighth of Earth’s, ten times Mars, 0.254 that of Coralemon, 0.1376 that of Aurora. Idly he let the decimals grow to more places. It was a form of exercise, but he grew bored. Instant arithmetic was fifth-grade stuff. Actually, he still had trouble with integrals and wondered if that was because he didn’t know what an integral was. A half dozen definitions flashed by, but he had never had enough mathematics to understand the definitions, though he could quote them well enough.
At school, they had always said, “Don’t ever get too interested in any one thing or group of things. As soon as you do that, you begin selecting your facts and you must never do that. Everything, anything is important. As long as you have the facts on file, it doesn’t matter whether you understand them or not.”
But the noncompos didn’t think so. Arrogant minds with holes in them!
They were approaching Junior itself now. It was bright, too, but in a different way. It had ice caps north and south. (Textbooks of Earth’s paleoclimatology drifted past and Mark made no move to stop them.) The ice caps were retreating. In a million years, Junior would have Earth’s present climate. It was just about Earth’s size and mass and it rotated in a period of thirty-six hours.
It might have been Earth’s twin. What differences there were, according to Makoyama’s reports, were to Junior’s advantage. There was nothing on Junior to threaten mankind as far as was known. Nor would anyone imagine there possibly might be were it not for the fact that humanity’s first colony on the planet had been wiped out to the last soul.
What was worse, the destruction had occurred in such a way that a study of all surviving information gave no reasonable clue whatever as to what had happened.
Sheffield entered Mark’s cabin and joined the boy two hours before landing. He and Mark had originally been assigned a room together. That had been an experiment. Mnemonics didn’t like the company of noncompos, even the best of them. In any case, the experiment had failed. Almost immediately after take-off, Mark’s sweating face and pleading eyes made privacy absolutely essential for him.
Sheffield felt responsible. He felt responsible for everything about Mark whether it was actually his fault or not. He and men like himself had taken Mark and children like him and trained them into personal ruin. They had been force-grown. They had been bent and molded. They had been allowed no normal contact with normal children lest they develop normal mental habits. No Mnemonic had contracted a normal marriage, even within the group.