life of Bartholomew Stanton? He was surrounded bypeople, but he was not one of them. He was immersed in a society that wasnot his own because it was not, could not be, geared to his abilities andpotentials. But there was no other society to turn to, either.
He was not a man "alone, afraid" in a world he had never made; he was aman who had been made for a world, a society, that did not exist.
Women? A wife? A family life?
Where? With whom?
He pushed the thoughts from his mind, the questions, unanswered andperhaps unanswerable. In spite of the apparent bleakness of the future, hehad no desire to die, and there was the possibility that too much broodingof that kind would evoke a subconscious reaction that could slow him downor cause a wrong decision at a vital moment. A feeling of futility couldoperate to bring on his death in spite of his conscious determination towin the coming battle with the Nipe.
The Nipe was his first duty. When that job was finished, he would considerthe problem of himself. Just because he could not now see the answer tothat problem did not mean that no answer existed.
* * * * *
He suddenly realized that he was hungry. He had been walking throughMemorial Park, past the museum, an old, worn edifice that was still calledthe Missouri Pacific Building. There was a small restaurant only a blockaway. He reached into his pocket and took out the few coins that werethere. Not much, but enough to buy a sandwich and a glass of milk. Becauseof the trust fund that had been set up when he had started the treatmentat the Neurophysics Institute, he was already well off, but he didn't havemuch cash. What good was cash in the Institute, where everything wasprovided?
He stopped at a news-vendor, dropped in a coin, and waited for thereproducing mechanism to turn out a fresh paper. Then he took the foldedsheets and went on to the restaurant.
He rarely read a news-sheet. Mostly, his information about the world thatexisted outside the walls of the Institute came from the televisednewscasts. But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relativelyunimportant little stories about people who had done small, relativelyunimportant things--stories that didn't appear in the headlines or on thenewscasts.
The last important news story had come two nights before, when the Nipehad robbed an optical products company in Miami. The camera had shown theshop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blow open the door of thevault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken the whole frontdoor of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twisted paraglassthat had lain on the pavement showed how much force had been applied fromwithin.
And yet, the results were not that of an explosion. It was more as thoughsome tremendous force had _pushed_ outward from within. It had not beenthe shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrust that hadunhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of its way.
Nothing had been moved very far, as it would have been by a blast. Itappeared that everything had simply fallen aside, as though scattered by agiant hand. The main braces of the store front were still there, bentoutward a little, but not broken.
The vault door had lain on the floor of the shop, only a few feet from thefront door. The vault itself had been farther back, and the camera hadshowed it, standing wide open, gaping. Inside, there had been pieces offragile glass standing on the shelves, unmoved, unharmed.
The force, whatever it had been, had moved in one direction only, from apoint within the vault, just a few feet from the door, pushing outward totear out the heavy door as though it had been made of paraffin or modelingclay.
Stanton had recognized the vault construction type: the Voisierconstruction, which, by test, could withstand almost everything known,outside of the actual application of atomic energy itself. In awidely-publicized demonstration several years before, a Voisier vault hadbeen cut open by a team of well-trained, well-equipped technicians. It hadtaken twenty-one hours for them to breach the wall, and they had no fearof interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off the intricatealarms that were built into the safe itself. Not even a borazon drillcould make much of an impression on a metal which had been formed undermillions of atmospheres of pressure.
And yet the Nipe had taken that door out in a second, without much effortat all.
The crowd that had gathered at the scene of the crime had not been large.The very thought of the Nipe kept people away from places where he wasknown to have been. The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, a primitivefear--fear of the dark and fear of the unknown, combined with the rationalfear of a very real, very tangible danger.
And yet, there _had_ been a crowd of onlookers. In spite of their fear, itis hard to keep human beings from being curious. It was known that theNipe didn't stay around after he had struck; and, besides, the area wasnow full of armed men. So the curious came to look and to stare inrevulsion at the neat pile of gnawed and bloody bones that had been thenight watchman, carefully killed and eaten by the Nipe before he hadopened the vault.
_Thus curiosity does make fools of us all, and the native hue of cautionis crimsoned o'er by the bright red of morbid fascination._
* * * * *
Stanton went through the door of the automat restaurant and walked over tothe vending wall. The dining room was only about three-quarters full ofpeople; there were plenty of seats available. He fed coins into the properslots, took his sandwich and milk over to a seat in one corner and madehimself comfortable.
He flipped open the newspaper and looked at the front page.
And, for a moment, his brain seemed to freeze.
The story itself was straightforward enough:
BENCHAIM KIDNAPERS NABBED! STAN MARTIN DOES IT AGAIN!
Ceres, June 3 (Interplanetary News Service)--The three men and three women who allegedly kidnapped ten-year-old Shmuel BenChaim were brought to justice today through the single-handed efforts of Stanley Martin, famed investigator for Lloyd's of London. The boy, held prisoner for more than ten months on a small asteroid, was reported in very good health.
According to Lt. John Vale, of the Planetoid Police, the kidnap gang could not have been taken by direct assault on their hideout because of fear that the boy might be killed. "The operation required a carefully-planned, one-man infiltration of their hideout," he said. "Mr. Martin was the man for the job."
Labeled "the most outrageous kidnapping in history", the affair was conceived as a long-term method of gaining control of Heavy Metals Incorporated, controlled by Moishe BenChaim, the boy's father. The details....
* * * * *
But Bart Stanton wasn't interested in the details. After only a glancethrough the first part of the article, his eyes returned to the picturealongside the article. The line of print beneath it identified the man inthe picture as Stanley Martin.
But a voice in Bart Stanton's brain said: _Not Stan Martin! The name isMart Stanton!_
And Bartholomew felt a roar of confusion in his mind, because he didn'tknow who Mart Stanton was, and because the face in the picture was hisown.
XI
He was walking again.
He didn't quite remember how he had left the automat, and he didn't eventry to remember.
He was trying to remember other things--farther back--before he had--
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 toreach into the darkness to grasp one of the pieces, it would break up intosmaller bits. The patterns were too fragile to withstand the directprobing of his conscious mind. Only the resulting fragments held togetherlong enough to be analyzed.
And, while part of his mind probed frantically after the elusive particlesof memory, another part of it watched the process with semi-detachedamusement.
He had always known there were holes in his memory (_Always? Don't besilly, pal!_), but it was disconcerting to find an area that was asriddled as a used machine-gun target. The whole fabric had been punched tobits.
No man's memory is completely available at any given time. However it isrecorded, however completely every bit of data may be recorded during alifetime, much of it is unavailable because it is incompletelycross-indexed or, in some cases, labeled _Do Not Scan_. Or,metaphorically, the file drawer may be locked. It may be that, in manycases, if a given bit of data remains unscanned long enough it fades intoillegibility, never reinforced by the scanning process. Sensory data,coming in from the outside world as it does, is probably permanent. Butthe thought patterns originating within the mind itself, the processesthat correlate and cross-index and speculate on and hypothesize about thesensory data, those are much more fragile. A man might glance oncethrough a Latin primer and have every page imprinted indelibly on hisrecording mechanism and still be unable to make sense of the _Nauta