The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 03

by Anthology

  His legs moved smoothly, surely, and unhurriedly, carrying him aimlessly along the resilient walkway, under the warm glow of the streetlights. The people around him walked as casually and with seemingly as little purpose as he did. There was none of the brisk sense of urgency that he felt inside the walls of the Institute.

  But he knew he could never get away from that sense of urgency completely, even out here. There were times when it seemed that all he had ever done, all his whole life, was to train himself for the one single purpose of besting the Nipe.

  If he wasn't training physically, he was listening to lectures from Dr. George Yoritomo or from Colonel Mannheim. If he wasn't working his muscles, he was laying plans and considering possibilities for the one great goal that seemed to be the focal point of his whole life.

  What would happen if he failed?

  What would happen if he, the great hyped-up superman, found that the Nipe had only been working at half his normal potential? What would happen if that alien horror simply slashed out with one ultrafast hand and showed Colonel Mannheim and all his watching technicians that they had completely underestimated his alien ability?

  What would happen?

  Why, Bart Stanton would die, of course, just as hundreds of other human beings had died in the past ten years. Stanton would become another statistic. And then Mannheim's Plan Beta would go into effect. The Nipe would be killed eventually.

  But what if he, Stanton, won? Then what?

  The people around him were not a part of his world, really. Their thoughts, their motions, their reactions, were slow and clumsy in comparison with his own. Once the Nipe had been conquered, what purpose would there be in the life of Bartholomew Stanton? He was surrounded by people, but he was not one of them. He was immersed in a society that was not his own because it was not, could not be, geared to his abilities and potentials. 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 a man 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 and perhaps unanswerable. In spite of the apparent bleakness of the future, he had no desire to die, and there was, psychologically, the possibility that too much brooding of that kind would evoke a subconscious reaction that could slow him down or cause a wrong decision at a vital moment. A feeling of futility could operate to bring on his death in spite of his conscious determination to win the coming battle with the Nipe.

  The Nipe was his first duty. When that job was finished, he would consider the problem of himself. Just because he could not now see the answer to that problem did not mean that no answer existed.

  He suddenly realized that he was hungry. He had been walking through Memorial Park, past the museum--an old, worn edifice that was still called the Missouri Pacific Building. There was a small restaurant only a block away.

  He reached into his pocket and took out the few coins that were there. Not much, but enough to buy a sandwich and a glass of milk. Because of the trust fund that had been set up when he had started the treatment at the Neurophysical Institute, he was already well off, but he didn't have much cash. What good was cash at the Institute, where everything was provided?

  He stopped at a newsvendor, dropped in a coin, and waited for the reproducing mechanism to turn out a fresh paper. Then he took the folded sheets and went on to the restaurant.

  He rarely read a newssheet. Mostly, his information about the world that existed outside the walls of the Institute came from the televised newscasts. But, occasionally, he liked to read the small, relatively unimportant little stories about people who had done small, relatively unimportant things--stories that didn't appear in the headlines or the newscasts.

  The last important news story that he had heard had come two nights before. The Nipe had robbed an optical products company in Miami. The camera had shown the shop on the screen. Whatever had been used to blow open the vault had been more effective than necessary. It had taken the whole front door of the shop and both windows, too. The bent and twisted paraglass that had lain on the pavement showed how much force had been applied from within.

  And yet, the results had not been those of an explosion. It was more as though some tremendous force had pushed outward from within. It had not been the shattering shock of high explosive, but some great thrust that had unhurriedly, but irresistibly, moved everything out of its way.

  Nothing had been moved very far, as it would have been by a blast. It appeared that everything had simply fallen aside, as though scattered by a giant hand. The main braces of the storefront were still there, bent outward a little, but not broken.

  The vault door had been slammed to the floor of the shop, only a few feet from the front door. The vault itself had been farther back, and the camera had showed it standing wide open, gaping. Inside, there had been pieces of fragile glass standing on the shelves, unmoved, unharmed.

  The force, whatever it had been, had moved in one direction only, from a point within the vault, just a few feet from the door, pushing outward to tear out the heavy door as though it had been made of paraffin or modeling clay.

  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 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 bloody 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 automatic restaurant and walked over to the vending wall. The big dining room was only about three quarters full of people, and 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 KIDNAPPERS NABBED!

  STAN MARTIN DOES IT AGAIN!

  CERES, June 3 (Interplanetary News Service)--The three men and three women who allegedly kidnapped 10-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 weeks on a small planetoid, was reported in 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," Lt. Vale 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 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 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 understand 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?"