“It’s the captain. Didn’t you say he told you that the crew were not to know we were visiting a world on which the first expedition had died?”
“Yes, of course. Well?”
“Because spacemen consider it bad luck to touch on a world like that, especially one that looks harmless. ‘Sucker bait,’ they call it.”
“That’s right.”
“So the captain says. It’s just that I don’t see how that can be true. I can think of seventeen habitable planets from which the first expeditions never returned and never established residence. And each one was later colonized and now is a member of the Federation. Sarmatia is one of them, and it’s a pretty big world now.”
“There are planets of continuous disaster, too.” Sheffield deliberately put that as a declarative statement.
(Never ask informational questions. That was one of the Rules of Karaganda. Mnemonic correlations weren’t a matter of the conscious intelligence; they weren’t volitional. As soon as a direct question was asked, the resultant correlations were plentiful but only such as any reasonably informed man might make. It was the unconscious mind that bridged the wide, unlikely gaps.)
Mark, as any Mnemonic would, fell into the trap. He said, energetically, “No, I’ve never heard of one. Not where the planet was at all habitable. If the planet is solid ice, or complete desert, that’s different. Junior isn’t like that.”
“No it isn’t,” agreed Sheffield.