Stanton had recognized the vault construction type: the Voisier construction, which, by test, could withstand almost everything known, outside of the actual application of atomic energy itself. In a widely-publicized demonstration several years before, a Voisier vault had been cut open by a team of well-trained, well-equipped technicians. It had taken twenty-one hours for them to breach the wall, and they had no fear of interruption, or of making a noise, or of setting off the intricate alarms that were built into the safe itself. Not even a borazon drill could make much of an impression on a metal which had been formed under millions of atmospheres of pressure.
And yet the Nipe had taken that door out in a second, without much effort at 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 was known to have been. The specter of the Nipe evoked a fear, a primitive fear--fear of the dark and fear of the unknown, combined with the rational fear of a very real, very tangible danger.
And yet, there _had_ been a crowd of onlookers. In spite of their fear, it is hard to keep human beings from being curious. It was known that the Nipe didn"t stay around after he had struck; and, besides, the area was now full of armed men. So the curious came to look and to stare in revulsion at the neat pile of gnawed and b.l.o.o.d.y bones that had been the night watchman, carefully killed and eaten by the Nipe before he had opened the vault.
_Thus curiosity does make fools of us all, and the native hue of caution is crimsoned o"er by the bright red of morbid fascination._
Stanton went through the door of the automat restaurant and walked over to the vending wall. The dining room was only about three-quarters full of people; there were plenty of seats available. He fed coins into the proper slots, took his sandwich and milk over to a seat in one corner and made himself 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 a.s.sault 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 glance through the first part of the article, his eyes returned to the picture alongside the article. The line of print beneath it identified the man in the picture as Stanley Martin.
But a voice in Bart Stanton"s brain said: _Not Stan Martin! The name is Mart Stanton!_
And Bartholomew felt a roar of confusion in his mind, because he didn"t know who Mart Stanton was, and because the face in the picture was his own.
XI
He was walking again.
He didn"t quite remember how he had left the automat, and he didn"t even try to remember.
He was trying to remember other things--farther back--before he had--
Before he had what?
Before the Inst.i.tute; 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 a.n.a.lyzed.
And, while part of his mind probed frantically after the elusive particles of memory, another part of it watched the process with semi-detached amus.e.m.e.nt.
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 c.u.m 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!_
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The name flitted through his mind like a sc.r.a.p 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 nonent.i.ty. The nothing. The n.o.body.
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.