utrageous 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
that had caught his attention. The line of print beneath it identified
the picture as being that of a man named 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.

_[13]_

He was walking again.

He didn't quite remember how he had left the automat, and he really
didn't even try to remember.

He was trying to remember other things--further back--before he had ...

Before he had _what_?

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
p