Before he had what?
Before the Institute; before the beginning of the operations.
The memories were there, just beyond the grasp of his conscious mind,
like the memories of a dream after one has awakened. Each time he tried to
reach into the darkness to grasp one of the pieces, it would break up into
smaller bits. The patterns were too fragile to withstand the direct
probing of his conscious mind. Only the resulting fragments held together
long enough to be analyzed.
And, while 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 be
silly, pal!_), but it was disconcerting to find an area that was as
riddled 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. However it is
recorded, however completely every bit of data may be recorded during a
lifetime, much of it is unavailable because it is incompletely
cross-indexed or, in some cases, 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 long enough 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, those are much more fragile. A man might glance once
through a Latin primer and have every page imprinted indelibly on his
recording mechanism and still be unable to make sense of the _Nauta in
cubito 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 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 for 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, politics, geography, and so on--had been readily available for
the most part. Ask any 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 the answer without having to think of where he learned it 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 had died,
although he couldn't remember ever having attended the funeral.
What about his father?
He could find no memory 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 building itself, and the block, and even Mrs.
Frobisher, who lived upstairs! And the school! A great many memories came
crowding back, but there was no trace of his father.
And yet....
Oh, of _course_! His father had been killed in an accident when Martinbart
were very young.
_Martinbart!_
[Illustration]
The name flitted through his mind like a scrap of paper in a high wind,
but he reached out and grasped it.
Martinbart. Martin-Bart. Mart 'n' Bart. Mart _and_ Bart.
The Stanton Twins.
It was 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 radiation-shattered nervous
system. The boy who had had to stay in a therapy 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 street lamp. His memories certainly didn't gibe with _this_!
His eyes ran down the column of type.
"... Mr. Martin has, in the eighteen months since he came to
the Belt, run up an enviable record, both as an insurance
investigator and as a police detective, although his
connection with the Planetoid Police is, necessarily, an
unofficial one. Probably not since Sherlock Holmes has there
been such mutual respect and co-operation between the
official police and a private investigator."
The was only one explanation, Stanton thought. Martin, too, had been
treated by the Institute. His memory was still blurry and incomplete, but
he did suddenly remember that a decision had been made for Martin to take
the treatment.
He chuckled a little at the irony of it. They hadn't been able to make a
superman of Martin, but they _had_ been able to make a normal and
extraordinarily capable man of him. Now it was Bart who was the freak, the
odd one.
_Turn about is fair play,_ he thought. But somehow it didn't seem quite
fair.
He crumpled the newspaper, dropped it into a nearby waste chute, and
walked on through the night toward the Neurophysical Institute.