I read a Ray Bradbury story a long time and I am trying to find it and don't remember the title. The story concerned a group of explorers on another planet. I don't remember the exact conflict, but the problem was that each of the members of the group was a specialist in his or her own field and knew nothing of any other field. A problem arises threatening their mission, and the solution does not fall within any of their specialties. With them is a character whose job is that of a reader. All he has ever done is to read and store information in his brain. He calls up the information that they are missing and saves the day. Does anyone know what story this is?

This reply came from muumi by way of the Abebooks Booksleuth Forum.

I remember the story -- not title and author unfortunately, except that I'm quite sure it was not Ray Bradbury -- tell me if these further details are right.

The "reader" was a teenager, it seems to me he was close to autistic, one of a group of such trained by a doctor (who was also along on the mission).� The boy was not well received by the mission specialists because his training was to gather information which he tended to do by tagging along and questioning them.� Because of their specialist mindset they resented questions by an outsider -- what could he possibly want with their information.� Meanwhile, the boy being a specialist himself, possessing encyclopedic knowledge and a photographic memory, resented the rest of them.� (The group of kids called others "noncompos" as in non compos mentis.)� All this conflict gave the doctor's diplomatic skills a major workout.� The crew was investigating mysterious deaths of a previous expedition.� The boy pulled together information from various fields and identified it as poisoning by a rare trace mineral -- beryllium? -- but his interpersonal skills were so bizarre that he almost ended up in a straitjacket instead of being a hero.

These replies came by way of the newsgroups rec.arts.books.childrens and rec.arts.sf.written.

From: Alexei and Cory Panshin

That sounds like A.E. van Vogt's _Voyage of the Space Beagle_. The various episodes appeared as separate short stories c. 1939, but when van
Vogt put them out in book form in the late 40's, he added a new central character, a "nexialist," whose job was to find the common patterns that
the specialists all missed.

Cory Panshin

From: Richard Horton

I'm pretty sure this is "Sucker Bait", by Isaac Asimov. Serialized in Astounding in 1954 (it's a longish novella), collected in _The Martian
Way and Other Stories_.

From: Anthony Frost

Not Bradbury. Try A E Van Vogt though. A little voice is saying "Voyage of the Space Beagle" but I after a quick flick through I can't find it in there. He did like his generalists though and used similar characters in several stories...

Anthony

"Weather prediction will never be accurate until we kill all the butterflies."

From: Mike Schilling

"Sucker Bait" by Asimov. Found in _The Martian Way and Other Stories_.

This reply came from muumi by way of the Abebooks Booksleuth Forum.

The story I remembered was indeed "Sucker Bait," but it seems the original inquirer for whom you posted the request will have to investigate vanVogt too.� That's terrific!

This reply came by way of the newsgroups rec.arts.books.childrens and rec.arts.sf.written.

It's worth pointing out that the stories collected in The Voyage of the Space Beagle contain the first occurrences of an incredible number of ideas which also show up in later SF, often without the later authors being aware of where they got the concepts. Van Vogt actually sued the makers of "Alien" for their uncredited use of his idea of a powerful alien being picked up by a human crew, getting loose on their ship, and hijacking crewmen as a repository for its eggs. So if Asimov was using the idea of a generalist in 1954, he no doubt picked it up from van Vogt as well.

Cory Panshin