"Take the paper with you and read it on the bus," she said. I
picked it up rather than risk an argument. "And be sure and see the
radio-therapist," she added as a parting shot when I reached the hall
door.
In the hall, with the door safely closed, I started to take out the
wallet. I hesitated. She was the type of woman who might come to the
door with more instructions. So I went down the stairs to the ground
floor, and out to the sidewalk.
I had never seen this neighborhood before. I walked along the sidewalk
and casually took out my wallet. Unfolding it, I saw an identification
card. It was a familiar one. It was the one for Rexlo Research
Corporation. It classified me as a scientist.
My name was David Thordsen!
* * * * *
It made sense. I wasn't going to bother about what kind of sense yet.
But I felt a great weight lift. For one thing, I didn't have to wonder
about where I was going to go for the day. For another, I was suddenly
and irrationally sure that I wasn't insane.
Why?
Probably it was more like having a box of pieces from what seems to be
a jigsaw puzzle. None of the pieces fit together. You begin to wonder
if it is a puzzle, or just nonsense pieces. Then you find two that fit
together. The edge of one fits into the edge of the other.
I was Fred Martin. That certainty persisted. Right now it was my only
certainty. But I had been Orville Snyder who worked in the lab at Rexlo
Research, although I had never heard of him before. That was one of the
pieces. It fitted, somehow, against the obvious fact that I was now
David Thordsen who worked there.
And yet I wasn't David Thordsen. The woman who must be his wife was a
stranger to me, just as the woman who must be Orville Snyder's wife was
a stranger.
There was one additional thing. When I had seemed to be Orville, I
had looked in the mirror, and my features had been my own. As David
Thordsen I had looked in the mirror, and my features were my own.
Still the same face, the same eyes looking at me.
While I had been mulling these things over in my thoughts I had been
riding on the bus. The Rexlo buildings were in the next block. I rose
and went to the doors, eager to get to the lab. A thousand things could
be checked and cross-checked there. The things on Orville's bench,
Orville himself when and if he showed up.
"Hello, Thordsen!" I looked at the man who greeted me so cheerfully,
and nodded. But I had never seen him before. "Nice mornin'," he said,
falling into step beside me as we entered the main building.
The elevator was running now. We stepped in. The elevator operator
smiled and said. "Good morning, Dr. Thordsen, Dr. Mintner."
Mintner! This stranger beside me was Mintner. I had worked with Mintner
for a long time--and yet I had never seen him before. This man was a
stranger.
We stepped out of the elevator together. We went down the hall to the
lab door. It was open. I went in first.
My gaze went to my bench--or Orville's bench, rather. A man was there,
his back to me, his shoulders and elbows moving in the process of
fitting parts together.
"Morning, Orville," Mintner said behind me.
The man at the bench turned his head. He smiled and said, "Hi, Hank.
Hi, Dave."
I stared at his face. I tried to find something familiar in it. There
was nothing. I had never seen him before. I was positive of that.
And it was a strange feeling. I went across the lab and glanced over
his bench. The tube bank was there, the condensors and resistors,
almost in the same positions I had left them last night.
"Uh, Dave," Orville Snyder said.
"Yes?" I said, still looking at the things on the bench.
"Uh, I'm a little short again. Could you spare another twenty?"
* * * * *
I looked at him, startled. The woman who was his wife--she had
drunk up the grocery money. My eyes flicked down toward his hip
pocket. I was certain that in his wallet was a slip of paper with
my--Thordsen's--name on it, and a figure after it. Fifty dollars, to be
exact.
I took out my wallet and looked in it. I had two twenties and three
fives and some ones. I extracted a twenty.
"Thanks, Dave," he said gratefully. He took out his wallet and put the
twenty in it. I caught a glimpse of two of the identification cards.
They were the ones I had examined so carefully last night.
"Aren't you going to mark it down?" I asked, smiling.
He looked at me queerly. "Mark it down?" he echoed. "I can remember.
This makes seventy."
"Okay," I said. I went over to my desk. A few minutes later I watched
from the corner of my eye as he extracted the folded slip and jotted
swift marks on it. A notation of the new amount he owed me. And I
wasn't the only one he owed money to--because of his wife.
Henry Mintner came back into the lab. I hadn't seen him leave, nor
missed him. He was carrying several small cartons of electronic parts.
Orville Snyder was back at work again.
Did I have some work--as Dave Thordsen--that I was supposed to get busy
at? If so, I didn't know what it was. Anyway, I had more engrossing
things to occupy me. My thoughts.
It was now obvious to me that Hank and Orville did work here. So did I,
or rather, Dave Thordsen. There were just the three of us. No one else
worked in the lab.
Yet I was first, last and always Fred Martin, who lived in a bachelor
apartment. And I had been working in this lab for three years. The
bench Orville was working at was my bench. The work he was doing was my
work.
"Dave!" I snapped out of my thoughts at the sound of Mintner's voice.
"This stuff's no good," he called to me. "It's as bad as the other
dialectric we used. It holds the proper saturation charge without
breakdown, but on discharge it holds too high a residual charge." He
came over to my desk and sat down on one corner of it. "Damn it," he
said. "It seems there's no in-between. We either get a dialectric that
discharges instead of holding, or we get one that holds and never lets
go completely. We get a computer that doesn't work, or one that jams
with random stuff after it's been in use."
"Keep trying," I said vaguely.
"I will," he said. He grinned. "That's what I get paid for."
I looked up at him speculatively. I had the impulse to try something.
I snapped my fingers suddenly and sat up, as though just remembering
something. "Fred Martin!" I said.
"Who's he?" Mintner asked, and I could tell he had never heard the name
before.
"Skip it," I said. "I was just thinking of something I had forgotten."
"Oh," he said, turning away and going back to his work.
My right shoulder was aching again. It reminded me I was supposed to
call a radio-therapist. I took the classified directory out from under
a pile of papers and started to thumb through it. It gave me an idea.
I took the other directory and looked for the name of Fred Martin. I
found it, and jotted down the address and phone number.
Leaving the lab, I took the elevator down and went out to the sidewalk.
A taxi was there. I gave the driver the address and settled back. Ten
minutes later he pulled to the curb in front of the apartment house. I
recognized it. I recognized the driveway at the side that led back to
my garage stall where I parked my car.
"Wait here," I said.
I went up the familiar stairs and stopped in front of the familiar
door. I fumbled in my pockets, but I didn't have any keys. I stood
there for a moment, considering plans of action.
* * * * *
Finally I went back to the taxi and back to the lab. There I hunted
up a radio-therapist and made an appointment for one o'clock. At
four-thirty I was back in the lab again, my shoulder feeling warm and
comfortable. At five, Orville and Hank left.
I looked up Dave Thordsen's number and dialed it. I recognized the
voice of the woman who answered. "Dave," I growled. "I'll be late.
Something that has to be done."
"Did you go to the radio-therapist?" she asked.
"Yes," I grunted. "I'll be home maybe nine. Not later than ten."
I had a hasty dinner at the cafe across the street, then caught another
taxi to my apartment house.
Dismissing the taxi, I walked down the driveway to the line of garage
stalls. In the back of mine, I knew, was a packing case I could sit in
and wait, and no one could see me.
I was restless and uncomfortable. My shoulder ached a little again. I
finally relaxed, and began to feel drowsy. I fought against sleep. A
car entering the stall would awaken me, but that wasn't what I was
afraid of. I was afraid that if I went to sleep I would awaken as
someone else, somewhere else.
I had about decided to go out front and walk up and down to keep awake,
when I heard a car coming. It turned into my stall. I jerked my head
back and kept out of sight until I heard the car door open and close.
Then I risked a look. A man was locking the car door, and that man was
Orville Snyder. My only surprise was that I wasn't surprised. Some part
of my mind had expected that.
The more I thought of it the more obvious it became. Orville Snyder was
also Fred Martin. He was living a double life!
I watched him leave the garage. Should I follow him to his
apartment--_my_ apartment? Of course, I knew I was going to. I had to.
I gave him five minutes, then followed slowly, until I reached the door
of the apartment and stopped.
I could hear him moving around inside, humming cheerfully. I felt a
regret at having to disturb him in his secret existence, but I had to.
I was Fred Martin. He was Fred Martin. He was also Orville Snyder, and
I wasn't. And right now I was Dave Thordsen, too, and he would know me
as Dave Thordsen.
I lifted my fist, feeling a stab of rheumatism in my shoulder, and
knocked at the door.
There was an instant of silence as he stopped humming. Then there were
footsteps. A lock grated. The doorknob twisted. He opened the door and
looked at me, his eyes going very wide suddenly.
"Dave!" he said.
"Hello, Fred Martin," I said calmly.
He blanched. "Come in," he said hurriedly in a hushed voice.
I entered the familiar living room with its shelves lined with my
books. Then I turned to face the man who was both Fred Martin and
Orville Snyder.
"How did you find out?" he asked, his back against the door.
"Never mind that," I said. "Tell me your story. That's what I want to
hear."
He did. All of it. It was a common enough one. He had been born Fred
Martin. He had gone to college. One of his companions in college had
been Orville Snyder. They had graduated together. Afterwards they
had gone their separate ways, keeping in touch with each other by
correspondence.
Then Orville Snyder had died in an automobile accident. He had no known
relatives, and had made Fred the beneficiary of his life insurance.
That was how Fred had known.
Two years later Fred had taken a risk. He saw a chance to make some
money in a quick stock transaction. He "borrowed" some money from the
company he was with. The transaction proved to be a swindle game worked
on him. He was faced with exposure and jail.
He remembered Orville Snyder. In all probability no one knew he was
dead. Records of that were in closed files in the insurance company, in
the files of an undertaker and the city hall of a far-away city.
He could take Orville's identity and employment record, and continue
his career as a research engineer somewhere else in the country.
He did. He worked several places, finally coming to work for Rexlo
Research. Almost at once he met and fell in love with an attractive
girl. They were quickly married. It was a year before he knew her real
character.
He could divorce her. He put it off. Shortly after that he rented this
apartment under his real name, feeling sure that after five years it
would be safe to do so.
He didn't know what he would do now. He had planned on simply dropping
out of sight in the near future. That's what he said.
But I could see in his eyes that he had another, more sinister
plan. Murder. Only, he had been putting it off as he had always put
everything off.
"What are you going to do?" he asked as I stood up and went to the door.
I looked at him, then around at my apartment, but mine no longer. The
supreme conviction that I was Fred Martin had left me.
"I don't know," I said. "Probably nothing. Come to work tomorrow and
say nothing. If I ever want to talk about it I'll tell you. Until then,
forget that I know."
I opened the door and went out into the hall, and closed it behind me.
I looked at the familiar walls of the hallway, at the somewhat worn
carpeting. And in some intangible way it was no longer familiar.
I was bewildered. I had nothing more to cling to. I was neither Fred
Martin nor Orville Snyder--nor Dave Thordsen. I wasn't anyone, and yet
I had to be someone. It was impossible to _be_, and not be someone!
* * * * *
I made my way down the carpeted stairs to the street, trying to think.
Instead, I felt only despair. I had thought I was Fred Martin. Through
the ears of Dave Thordsen I had listened to Fred Martin, and as I
listened I had realized I couldn't be. Some of his memories were my
memories, but what I possessed was nothing more than fragments. Spotty
fragments.
It was the same with his other identity, Orville Snyder. Spotty
fragments that I clutched and possessed, while all else was strange to
me--even such a thing as the name of his wife, a recognition of her
features.
It was the same now, with Dave Thordsen. His face was _my_ face when I
looked at it in the mirror--just as Fred's face had been mine when I
looked at it with his eyes in the mirror.
A new realization materialized within me as I stood on the sidewalk,
trying to decide which way to go to find a bus line. _I had no single
memory of my own._ Not one.
Every memory I possessed belonged to Dave or Orville, or his other
identity, Fred Martin. And those memories were fragments. Three
incomplete jigsaw puzzles mixed together in a box, and now put together
sufficiently to see that they were incomplete. Sufficiently complete to
see they were not one puzzle.
Yet, in a way, they were. I possessed a continuity of thought beginning
when I was standing in the living room with Orville's wife talking to
me, and continuing right up to now. Except for two large gaps. The
first gap in memory was from the time Orville left his house until he
stood in the lab. The second gap was from the time he tried to read the
paper--or _I_ tried to read the paper, until I woke up three or four
hours later as Dave.
That, then, was my own memory, my remembrance of this continuity of
existence starting the day before. Twenty-four hours. If I defined
memory as existence, then I was twenty-four hours old. But that
was utterly absurd. I could think. I could think for myself. I was
reasoning right now, trying to solve the riddle of my existence, and I
was doing so without Dave Thordsen being aware of it.
That was obvious, once I thought of it. Dave would have recognized his
own wife. So would Orville. If they looked at their wives and couldn't
recall ever seeing them before, they wouldn't have the same reaction I
had had.
I studied that angle. Right now, as I walked slowly along the sidewalk
toward the street where I had seen a bus cross, I was not _all_ of Dave
Thordsen. I was seeing through his eyes, hearing what he was hearing.
But he was also seeing through his eyes and hearing with his ears, and
he was completely unaware of me. More, he was unreachable. What was he
thinking of Fred Martin? I didn't know.
My contact was not with Dave Thordsen, but with his sensory and his
motor centers. It had been the same with Fred Martin, with a filtering
through of some of his memories--probably because of his emotional
disturbances. And in both cases the contact was so smooth and intimate
that instead of feeling separate, I had possessed that contact as my
own.
Now, if I could free myself of it, what would happen? I shied away
from the thoughts as I would shy away from death. I couldn't imagine
anything separate from it.
But what else was there for me? A chameleon-like mental life as a
wandering ego? What would happen if I could sever my contact with
Dave's sensory centers and motor centers? Perhaps then I would become
who I was in reality and end this strange pattern of existence.
Suddenly I knew I must.
All sensation ended abruptly. There was no light, no sound. There was
no thought, except for the awareness of existence, and the sense of
passing time.
Then, like the turning on of a light, I was staring through a
windshield. My hands were gripping a steering wheel. I was in my car.
And I was Fred Martin!
Ahead of me a man was starting to cross the street. I could not see him
clearly. But there was something significant about him--something of
tremendous significance.
My foot was pressed down on the gas. My car was going faster and
faster. My hands turned the steering wheel a trifle, heading the car
toward the man. And then I knew who he was--Dave Thordsen!
* * * * *
My blood was ice in my veins. I saw him half turn and see me. He
started to run. I turned the wheel so he couldn't escape. He looked
over his shoulder at the car, then through the windshield at me, and
he recognized me. I could see it in his expression as the left fender
struck him and tossed his shattered body aside.
At the next corner I turned right. Two blocks later I turned right
again. A third time, and ahead of me in the next block a crowd had
collected around something at the curb. A man's body.