Chapter 13

He was walking again.

He didn’t quite remember how he had left the automat, and he really didn’t even try to remember.

He was trying to remember other things--further back--before he had...

Before he had what?

Before the Institute. Before the beginning of the operations.

The memories were there, all right. He could sense them, floating in some sort of mental limbo, just beyond the grasp of his conscious mind, like the memories of a dream after one has awakened. Each time he would try to reach into the darkness to grasp one of the pieces, it would shatter into smaller bits. The big patterns were too fragile to withstand the direct probing of his conscious mind, and even the resulting fragments did not want to hold still long enough to be analyzed.

And, while a part of his mind probed frantically after the elusive particles of memory, another part of it watched the process with semi-detached amusement.

He had always known there were holes in his memory (Always? Don’t kid yourself, pal!), but it was disconcerting to find an area that was as full of holes as a used machine-gun target. The whole fabric had been punched to bits.

No man’s memory is completely available at any given time. Whatever the recording process is, however completely every bit of data may be recorded during a lifetime, much of it is unavailable. It may be incompletely cross-indexed, or, in some instances, labeled DO NOT SCAN. Or, metaphorically, the file drawer may be locked. It may be that, in many cases, if a given bit of data remains unscanned for a long enough period, it fades into illegibility, never reinforced by the scanning process. Sensory data, coming in from the outside world as it does, is probably permanent. But the thought patterns originating within the mind itself, the processes that correlate and cross-index and speculate on and hypothesize about the sensory data, these are much more fragile. A man might glance once through a Latin primer and have each and every page imprinted indelibly on his recording mechanism and still be unable to make sense out of Nauta in cubitu cum puella est.

Sometimes a man is aware of the holes in his memory. (“What was the name of that fellow I met at Eddie’s party? Can’t remember it for the life of me.”) At other times, a memory may lay dormant and completely unremembered, leaving no apparent gap, until a tag of some kind brings it up. (“That girl with the long hair reminds me of Suzie Blugerhugle. My gosh! I haven’t thought of her in years!”) Both factors seemed to be operating in Bart Stanton’s mind at this time.

Incredibly, he had never, in the past year at least, had occasion to try to remember much about his past life. He had known who he was without thinking about it particularly, and the rest of his knowledge--language, history, social behavior, politics, geography, and so on--had been readily available for the most part. Ask an educated man to give the product of the primes 2, 13, and 41, or ask him to give the date of the Norman Conquest, and he can give you the answers very quickly. He may have to calculate the first, which will make him pause for a second before answering, but the second will come straight out of his memory records. In neither case does he have to think of where he learned the process or the fact, or who taught it to him, or when he got the information.

But now the picture and the name in the paper had brought forth a reaction in Stanton’s mind, and he was trying desperately to bring the information out of oblivion.

Did he have a mother? Surely. But could he remember her? Yes! Certainly. A pretty, gentle, rather sad woman. He could remember when she died, although he couldn’t remember ever having actually attended the funeral.

What about his father?

Try as he might, he could find no memory whatever of his father, and, at first, that bothered him. He could remember his mother--could almost see her moving around in the apartment where they had lived in ... in ... in Denver! Sure! And he could remember the big building itself, and the block, and even Mrs. Frobisher, who lived upstairs! And the school! And the play area! A great many memories came crowding back, but there was no trace of his father.

And yet...

Oh, of course! That was it! His father had been killed in an accident when Martinbart were very young.

Martinbart!

The name flitted through his mind like a scrap of paper in a high wind, but mentally he reached out and grasped it.

Martinbart. Martin-Bart. Mart ‘n’ Bart. Mart and Bart.

The Stanton Twins.

It was very curious, he thought, that he should have forgotten his brother. And even more curious that the name in the paper had not brought him instantly to mind.

Martin, the cripple. Martin, the boy with the poor, weak, radiation-shattered nervous system. The boy who had had to stay in a therapeutic chair all his life because his efferent nerves could not control his body. The boy who couldn’t speak. Or, rather, wouldn’t speak because he was ashamed of the gibberish that resulted.

Martin. The nonentity. The nothing. The nobody.

The one who watched and listened and thought, but could do nothing.

Bart Stanton stopped suddenly and unfolded the newspaper again under the glow of the streetlamp. His memories certainly didn’t jibe with this!

His eyes ran down the column of type:

Mr. Martin has, in the years since he has been in the Belt, run up

an enviable record, both as an insurance investigator and as a