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 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.
There was only one explanation, Stanton thought. Martin, too, had been treated by the Institute. His memory was still blurry and incomplete, he knew, 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. It looked as though they hadn’t been able to make a superman of Martin, but they had been able to make a normal and extraordinarily capable human being of him, he thought. 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.
FOURTH INTERLUDE
“You understand, Mrs. Stanton,” said the psychiatrist, “that a great part of Martin’s trouble is mental as well as physical. Because of the nature of his ailment, he has withdrawn, pulled himself away from communication with others. If these symptoms had been brought to my attention earlier, the mental disturbance might have been more easily analyzed and treated.”
“I suppose so. I’m sorry, Doctor,” said Mrs. Stanton. Her manner betrayed weariness and pain. “It was so…so difficult. Martin could never talk very well, you know, and he just talked less and less as the years went by. It was so slow and so gradual that I never really noticed it.”
Poor woman, the doctor thought. She’s not well, herself. She should have married again, years ago, rather than force herself to carry the whole burden alone. Her role as a doting mother hasn’t helped either of the boys to overcome the handicaps that were already present.
“I’ve honestly tried to do my very best with Martin,” Mrs. Stanton went on unhappily. “And so has Bart, I know. When they were younger, Bart used to take him out all the time. They went everywhere together. Of course, I don’t expect Bart to do that so much any more. He has his own life to live. He can’t take Martin out on dates or things like that. He has interests outside the home now, like other boys his age. That’s only normal. But when he’s at home, Bart helps me with Martin all the time.”
“I understand,” said the psychiatrist. This is no time to tell her that Bartholomew’s tests indicate that he has subconsciously resented Martin’s presence for a long time, he thought. She has enough to worry about.
“I don’t understand,” said Mrs. Stanton, breaking into sudden tears. “I just don’t understand why Martin should behave this way! Why should he just sit there with his eyes closed and ignore everybody? Why should he ignore his mother and his brother? Why?”
The doctor comforted her in a warmly professional manner, then, as her tears subsided, he said, “We don’t u
nderstand all the factors ourselves, Mrs. Stanton. At first glance, Martin’s reactions appear to be those one would expect of schizophrenic withdrawal. But there are certain aspects of the case that make it unusual. His behavior doesn’t quite follow the pattern we usually expect from such cases as this. His extreme physical disability has drastically modified the course of his mental development, and, at the same time, made it difficult for us to make any analysis of his mental state.” If only, he added to himself, she had followed the advice of her family physician, years ago. If she had only put the boy under the proper care, none of this would have happened.
“Is there anything we can do, Doctor?” she asked.
“We don’t know yet,” he said gently. He considered for a moment, then said: “Mrs. Stanton, I’d like for you to leave both of the boys here for a few days, so that we can perform further tests. That will help us a great deal in evaluating the circumstances, and help us get at the root of Martin’s trouble.”
She looked at him with a little surprise. “Why, yes, of course—if you think it’s necessary. But…why should Bart stay?”
The doctor weighed his words carefully before he spoke.
“Bart will be what we call a ‘control’, Mrs. Stanton. Since the boys are genetically identical, they should have been a great deal alike, in personality as well as in body, if it hadn’t been for Martin’s accident. In other words, our tests of Bart will tell us what Martin should be like. That way, we can tell just how much and in what way Martin deviates from what he should ideally be. Do you understand?”
“Yes. Yes, I see. All right, Doctor—whatever you say.”
After Mrs. Stanton had left, the psychiatrist sat quietly in his chair and stared thoughtfully at his desk top for several minutes. Then, making his decision, he picked up a small book that lay on his desk and looked up a number in Arlington, Virginia. He punched out the number on his phone, and when the face appeared on his screen he said, “Hello, Sidney. Busy right now?”
“Not particularly. Not for a few minutes. What’s up?”
“I have a very interesting case out here that I’d like to talk to you about. Do you happen to have a telepath who’s strong enough to take a meshing with an insane mind? If my suspicions are correct, I will need a man with an absolutely impregnable sense of identity, because he’s going to get into the weirdest situation I’ve ever come across.”
CHAPTER 14
The Nipe squatted, brooding, in his underground nest, waiting for the special crystallization process to take place in the sodium-gold alloy that was forming in the reactor.
How long? he wondered. He was not thinking of the complex crystallization reaction; he knew the timing of that to a fraction of a second. His dark thoughts were, instead, focused inwardly, upon himself.
How long would it be before he would be able to construct the communicator that would span the light-years of intervening distance and put him in touch with his own race again? How long would it be before he could again hold discourse with reasonable beings? How much longer would he have to be stranded on this planet, surrounded by an insane society composed of degraded, insane beings?
The work was going incredibly slowly. He had known at the beginning that his knowledge of the basic arts required to build a communicator was incomplete, but he had not realized just how painfully inadequate it was. Time after time, his instruments had simply refused to function because of some basic flaw in their manufacture—some flaw that an expert in that field could have pointed out at once. Time after time, equipment had had to be rebuilt almost from the beginning. And, time after time, only cut-and-try methods were available for correcting his errors.
Not even his prodigious and accurate memory could hold all the information that was necessary for the work, and there were no reference tapes available, of course. They had all been destroyed when his ship had crashed.
He had long since given up any attempt to understand the functioning of the mad pseudo-civilization that surrounded him. He was quite certain that the beings he had seen could not possibly be the real rulers of this society, but he had no inkling, as yet, as to who the real rulers were.
As to where they were, that question seemed a little easier to answer. It was highly probable that they were out in space, on the asteroids that his instruments had detected when he was dropping in toward this planet so many years before. He had made an error then in not landing in the Belt, but at no time since had he experienced the emotion of regret or wished he had done differently; both thoughts would have been incomprehensible to the Nipe. He had made an error; the circumstances had been checked and noted; he would not make that error again.
What further action could be taken by a logical mind?
None. The past was immutable and unchangeable. It existed only as a memory in his own mind, and there was no way to change that indelible record, even had the Nipe wished to do so insane a thing.
Surely, he thought, the real rulers must know of his existence. He had tried, by his every action, to show that he was a reasoning, intelligent, and civilized being. Why, then, had they taken no action?
There was, of course, the possibility that the rulers cared very little for their subjects here on Earth, that they ignored what went on most of the time. Still, it would seem that they would recognize the actions of one of their own kind and take steps to investigate.
He was still not absolutely certain about Colonel Walther Mannheim. Was he a Real Person or merely an underling? The information on the man was pitifully small. It would, of course, be possible to wait, to see how Colonel Walther Mannheim behaved if and when he discovered the Nipe’s nest. But if he had not discovered it after all these years—and the information indicated that he had been looking almost since the first—then it was unlikely that he was a Real Person. In which case, it would be dangerous to allow him to find the nest.
No, the best plan of action would be to go to Colonel Walther Mannheim first.
CHAPTER 15
Pok! Pok! Ping!
Pok! Pok! Ping!
Pok! Pok! Ping!
Pok! Pok! Ping!
The action around the handball court was beautiful to watch. The robot mechanism behind Bart Stanton would fire out a ball at random intervals ranging from a tenth to a quarter of a second, bouncing them off the wall in a random pattern. Stanton would retrieve the ball before it hit the ground and bounce it off the wall again to strike the target on the moving robot. Stanton had to work against a machine; no ordinary human being could have given him any competition.
Pok! Pok! Ping!
Pok! Pok! Ping!
Pok! Pok! PLUNK.
“One miss,” Stanton said to himself. But he fielded the next one nicely and slammed it home.
Pok! Pok! Ping!
The physical therapist who was standing to one side, well out of the way of those hard-slammed, fast-moving drives, glanced at his watch. It was almost time.
Pok! Pok! Ping!
The machine, having delivered its last ball, shut itself off with a smug click. Stanton turned away from the handball court and walked toward the physical therapist, who was holding out a robe for him.
“That was good, Bart,” he said. “Real good.”
“One miss,” Stanton said as he shrugged into the robe.
“Yeah. Your timing was off a shade there, I guess. It’s hard for me to tell till I look at the slow-motion photographs. Your arms and hands are just blurs to me when they’re moving that fast. But you managed to chop another ten seconds off your previous record, anyway.”
Stanton looked at him. “You reset the timer again,” he said accusingly. But there was a grin on his face.
The P.T. man grinned back. “Yup. Come on, step into the mummy case.” He waved toward the narrow niche in the wall of the court, a niche just big enough to hold a standing man. Stanton stepped in, and various instrument pickups came out of the walls and touched him at various points on his body. Hidden machines recorded his heartbeat, his blood pre
ssure, his brain activity, his muscular tension, his breathing, and several other factors.
After a minute the P.T. man said, “Okay, Bart, that’s it. Let’s hit the steam box.”
Stanton stepped out of the niche and accompanied the therapist to another room, where he took off the robe again and sat down on the small stool inside an ordinary steam box. The box closed, leaving his head free, and the box began to fill with steam.
“Did I ever tell you just what it is that I don’t like about that machine?” Stanton asked as the therapist draped a heavy towel around his head.
“Nope. Didn’t know you had any gripe. What is it?”
“You can’t gloat after you beat it. You can’t walk over and pat it on the shoulder and say, ‘Well, better luck next time, old man.’ It isn’t a good loser, and it isn’t a bad loser. The damned thing doesn’t even know it lost, and even if it did, it wouldn’t care.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean,” said the P.T. man, chuckling. “You beat the pants off it and what d’you get? Nothing. Not even a case of the sulks out of it.”
“Exactly. And what’s worse, I know perfectly good and well that it’s only half trying. The stupid gadget could beat me easily if you just turned that knob over a little more.”
“Yeah, sure. But you’re not competing against the machine, anyway,” the therapist said. “What you’re doing, you’re competing against yourself, trying to beat your own record.”
“I know. And what happens when I can’t do that any more, either?” Stanton asked. “I can’t just go on getting better and better forever. I’ve got limits, you know.”
“Sure,” said the therapist easily. “So does anybody. So does a golf player, for instance. You take a golf player, he goes out and practices by himself to try to beat his own record.”
“Bunk! Hogwash! The real fun in any game is beating someone else! The big kick in golf is winning over the other guy in a twosome.”
“How about crossword puzzles or solitaire?”
“When you solve a crossword puzzle, you’ve beaten the guy who made up the puzzle. When you play solitaire, you’re playing against the laws of chance, and that can become pretty boring unless there’s money on it. And, in that case, you’re actually trying to beat the guy who’s betting against you. What I’d like to do is get out on the golf course with someone else and do my best and then lose. Honestly.”
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