"Yes, sir."
But he couldn't help wondering what it might be that the colonel would consider a little bit odd.
Anthony left the center and walked. He shouldn't have. He knew that they became impatient with him when he wandered off from his work.
"But I have to think. I have all the people in the world in my brain, and still I am not able to think. This power should have come to someone able to take advantage of it."
He went into the Plugged Nickel Bar, but the man on duty knew him for a restricted person from the filter center, and would not serve him.
He wandered disconsolately about the city. "I know the people in Omaha and those in Omsk. What queer names have the towns of the earth! I know everyone in the world, and when anyone is born or dies. And Colonel Cooper did not find it unusual. Yet I am to be on the lookout for things unusual. The question rises, would I know an odd thing if I met it?"
And then it was that something just a little bit unusual did happen, something not quite right. A small thing. But the colonel had told him to report anything about anything, no matter how insignificant, that struck him as a little queer.
It was just that with all the people in his head, and the arrivals and departures, there was a small group that was not of the pattern.
Every minute hundreds left by death and arrived by birth. And now there was a small group, seven persons; they arrived into the world, but they were not born into the world.