Part 2

The elevator was running now. We stepped in. The elevator operator smiled and said. "Good morning, Dr. Thordsen, Dr. Mintner."

Mintner! This stranger beside me was Mintner. I had worked with Mintner for a long time--and yet I had never seen him before. This man was a stranger.

We stepped out of the elevator together. We went down the hall to the lab door. It was open. I went in first.

My gaze went to my bench--or Orville's bench, rather. A man was there, his back to me, his shoulders and elbows moving in the process of fitting parts together.

"Morning, Orville," Mintner said behind me.

The man at the bench turned his head. He smiled and said, "Hi, Hank. Hi, Dave."

I stared at his face. I tried to find something familiar in it. There was nothing. I had never seen him before. I was positive of that.

And it was a strange feeling. I went across the lab and glanced over his bench. The tube bank was there, the condensors and resistors, almost in the same positions I had left them last night.

"Uh, Dave," Orville Snyder said.

"Yes?" I said, still looking at the things on the bench.

"Uh, I'm a little short again. Could you spare another twenty?"

* * * * *

I looked at him, startled. The woman who was his wife--she had drunk up the grocery money. My eyes flicked down toward his hip pocket. I was certain that in his wallet was a slip of paper with my--Thordsen's--name on it, and a figure after it. Fifty dollars, to be exact.

I took out my wallet and looked in it. I had two twenties and three fives and some ones. I extracted a twenty.

"Thanks, Dave," he said gratefully. He took out his wallet and put the twenty in it. I caught a glimpse of two of the identification cards. They were the ones I had examined so carefully last night.

"Aren't you going to mark it down?" I asked, smiling.

He looked at me queerly. "Mark it down?" he echoed. "I can remember. This makes seventy."

"Okay," I said. I went over to my desk. A few minutes later I watched from the corner of my eye as he extracted the folded slip and jotted swift marks on it. A notation of the new amount he owed me. And I wasn't the only one he owed money to--because of his wife.

Henry Mintner came back into the lab. I hadn't seen him leave, nor missed him. He was carrying several small cartons of electronic parts. Orville Snyder was back at work again.

Did I have some work--as Dave Thordsen--that I was supposed to get busy at? If so, I didn't know what it was. Anyway, I had more engrossing things to occupy me. My thoughts.

It was now obvious to me that Hank and Orville did work here. So did I, or rather, Dave Thordsen. There were just the three of us. No one else worked in the lab.

Yet I was first, last and always Fred Martin, who lived in a bachelor apartment. And I had been working in this lab for three years. The bench Orville was working at was my bench. The work he was doing was my work.

"Dave!" I snapped out of my thoughts at the sound of Mintner's voice. "This stuff's no good," he called to me. "It's as bad as the other dialectric we used. It holds the proper saturation charge without breakdown, but on discharge it holds too high a residual charge." He came over to my desk and sat down on one corner of it. "Damn it," he said. "It seems there's no in-between. We either get a dialectric that discharges instead of holding, or we get one that holds and never lets go completely. We get a computer that doesn't work, or one that jams with random stuff after it's been in use."

"Keep trying," I said vaguely.

"I will," he said. He grinned. "That's what I get paid for."

I looked up at him speculatively. I had the impulse to try something. I snapped my fingers suddenly and sat up, as though just remembering something. "Fred Martin!" I said.

"Who's he?" Mintner asked, and I could tell he had never heard the name before.

"Skip it," I said. "I was just thinking of something I had forgotten."

"Oh," he said, turning away and going back to his work.

My right shoulder was aching again. It reminded me I was supposed to call a radio-therapist. I took the classified directory out from under a pile of papers and started to thumb through it. It gave me an idea. I took the other directory and looked for the name of Fred Martin. I found it, and jotted down the address and phone number.

Leaving the lab, I took the elevator down and went out to the sidewalk. A taxi was there. I gave the driver the address and settled back. Ten minutes later he pulled to the curb in front of the apartment house. I recognized it. I recognized the driveway at the side that led back to my garage stall where I parked my car.

"Wait here," I said.

I went up the familiar stairs and stopped in front of the familiar door. I fumbled in my pockets, but I didn't have any keys. I stood there for a moment, considering plans of action.

* * * * *

Finally I went back to the taxi and back to the lab. There I hunted up a radio-therapist and made an appointment for one o'clock. At four-thirty I was back in the lab again, my shoulder feeling warm and comfortable. At five, Orville and Hank left.

I looked up Dave Thordsen's number and dialed it. I recognized the voice of the woman who answered. "Dave," I growled. "I'll be late. Something that has to be done."

"Did you go to the radio-therapist?" she asked.

"Yes," I grunted. "I'll be home maybe nine. Not later than ten."

I had a hasty dinner at the cafe across the street, then caught another taxi to my apartment house.

Dismissing the taxi, I walked down the driveway to the line of garage stalls. In the back of mine, I knew, was a packing case I could sit in and wait, and no one could see me.

I was restless and uncomfortable. My shoulder ached a little again. I finally relaxed, and began to feel drowsy. I fought against sleep. A car entering the stall would awaken me, but that wasn't what I was afraid of. I was afraid that if I went to sleep I would awaken as someone else, somewhere else.

I had about decided to go out front and walk up and down to keep awake, when I heard a car coming. It turned into my stall. I jerked my head back and kept out of sight until I heard the car door open and close.

Then I risked a look. A man was locking the car door, and that man was Orville Snyder. My only surprise was that I wasn't surprised. Some part of my mind had expected that.

The more I thought of it the more obvious it became. Orville Snyder was also Fred Martin. He was living a double life!

I watched him leave the garage. Should I follow him to his apartment--_my_ apartment? Of course, I knew I was going to. I had to. I gave him five minutes, then followed slowly, until I reached the door of the apartment and stopped.

I could hear him moving around inside, humming cheerfully. I felt a regret at having to disturb him in his secret existence, but I had to. I was Fred Martin. He was Fred Martin. He was also Orville Snyder, and I wasn't. And right now I was Dave Thordsen, too, and he would know me as Dave Thordsen.

I lifted my fist, feeling a stab of rheumatism in my shoulder, and knocked at the door.

There was an instant of silence as he stopped humming. Then there were footsteps. A lock grated. The doorknob twisted. He opened the door and looked at me, his eyes going very wide suddenly.

"Dave!" he said.

"Hello, Fred Martin," I said calmly.

He blanched. "Come in," he said hurriedly in a hushed voice.

I entered the familiar living room with its shelves lined with my books. Then I turned to face the man who was both Fred Martin and Orville Snyder.

"How did you find out?" he asked, his back against the door.

"Never mind that," I said. "Tell me your story. That's what I want to hear."

He did. All of it. It was a common enough one. He had been born Fred Martin. He had gone to college. One of his companions in college had been Orville Snyder. They had graduated together. Afterwards they had gone their separate ways, keeping in touch with each other by correspondence.

Then Orville Snyder had died in an automobile accident. He had no known relatives, and had made Fred the beneficiary of his life insurance. That was how Fred had known.

Two years later Fred had taken a risk. He saw a chance to make some money in a quick stock transaction. He "borrowed" some money from the company he was with. The transaction proved to be a swindle game worked on him. He was faced with exposure and jail.

He remembered Orville Snyder. In all probability no one knew he was dead. Records of that were in closed files in the insurance company, in the files of an undertaker and the city hall of a far-away city.

He could take Orville's identity and employment record, and continue his career as a research engineer somewhere else in the country. He did. He worked several places, finally coming to work for Rexlo Research. Almost at once he met and fell in love with an attractive girl. They were quickly married. It was a year before he knew her real character.

He could divorce her. He put it off. Shortly after that he rented this apartment under his real name, feeling sure that after five years it would be safe to do so.

He didn't know what he would do now. He had planned on simply dropping out of sight in the near future. That's what he said.

But I could see in his eyes that he had another, more sinister plan. Murder. Only, he had been putting it off as he had always put everything off.

"What are you going to do?" he asked as I stood up and went to the door.

I looked at him, then around at my apartment, but mine no longer. The supreme conviction that I was Fred Martin had left me.

"I don't know," I said. "Probably nothing. Come to work tomorrow and say nothing. If I ever want to talk about it I'll tell you. Until then, forget that I know."

I opened the door and went out into the hall, and closed it behind me. I looked at the familiar walls of the hallway, at the somewhat worn carpeting. And in some intangible way it was no longer familiar.

I was bewildered. I had nothing more to cling to. I was neither Fred Martin nor Orville Snyder--nor Dave Thordsen. I wasn't anyone, and yet I had to be someone. It was impossible to _be_, and not be someone!

* * * * *

I made my way down the carpeted stairs to the street, trying to think. Instead, I felt only despair. I had thought I was Fred Martin. Through the ears of Dave Thordsen I had listened to Fred Martin, and as I listened I had realized I couldn't be. Some of his memories were my memories, but what I possessed was nothing more than fragments. Spotty fragments.

It was the same with his other identity, Orville Snyder. Spotty fragments that I clutched and possessed, while all else was strange to me--even such a thing as the name of his wife, a recognition of her features.

It was the same now, with Dave Thordsen. His face was _my_ face when I looked at it in the mirror--just as Fred's face had been mine when I looked at it with his eyes in the mirror.

A new realization materialized within me as I stood on the sidewalk, trying to decide which way to go to find a bus line. _I had no single memory of my own._ Not one.

Every memory I possessed belonged to Dave or Orville, or his other identity, Fred Martin. And those memories were fragments. Three incomplete jigsaw puzzles mixed together in a box, and now put together sufficiently to see that they were incomplete. Sufficiently complete to see they were not one puzzle.

Yet, in a way, they were. I possessed a continuity of thought beginning when I was standing in the living room with Orville's wife talking to me, and continuing right up to now. Except for two large gaps. The first gap in memory was from the time Orville left his house until he stood in the lab. The second gap was from the time he tried to read the paper--or _I_ tried to read the paper, until I woke up three or four hours later as Dave.

That, then, was my own memory, my remembrance of this continuity of existence starting the day before. Twenty-four hours. If I defined memory as existence, then I was twenty-four hours old. But that was utterly absurd. I could think. I could think for myself. I was reasoning right now, trying to solve the riddle of my existence, and I was doing so without Dave Thordsen being aware of it.

That was obvious, once I thought of it. Dave would have recognized his own wife. So would Orville. If they looked at their wives and couldn't recall ever seeing them before, they wouldn't have the same reaction I had had.

I studied that angle. Right now, as I walked slowly along the sidewalk toward the street where I had seen a bus cross, I was not _all_ of Dave Thordsen. I was seeing through his eyes, hearing what he was hearing. But he was also seeing through his eyes and hearing with his ears, and he was completely unaware of me. More, he was unreachable. What was he thinking of Fred Martin? I didn't know.

My contact was not with Dave Thordsen, but with his sensory and his motor centers. It had been the same with Fred Martin, with a filtering through of some of his memories--probably because of his emotional disturbances. And in both cases the contact was so smooth and intimate that instead of feeling separate, I had possessed that contact as my own.

Now, if I could free myself of it, what would happen? I shied away from the thoughts as I would shy away from death. I couldn't imagine anything separate from it.

But what else was there for me? A chameleon-like mental life as a wandering ego? What would happen if I could sever my contact with Dave's sensory centers and motor centers? Perhaps then I would become who I was in reality and end this strange pattern of existence.

Suddenly I knew I must.

All sensation ended abruptly. There was no light, no sound. There was no thought, except for the awareness of existence, and the sense of passing time.

Then, like the turning on of a light, I was staring through a windshield. My hands were gripping a steering wheel. I was in my car. And I was Fred Martin!

Ahead of me a man was starting to cross the street. I could not see him clearly. But there was something significant about him--something of tremendous significance.

My foot was pressed down on the gas. My car was going faster and faster. My hands turned the steering wheel a trifle, heading the car toward the man. And then I knew who he was--Dave Thordsen!

* * * * *

My blood was ice in my veins. I saw him half turn and see me. He started to run. I turned the wheel so he couldn't escape. He looked over his shoulder at the car, then through the windshield at me, and he recognized me. I could see it in his expression as the left fender struck him and tossed his shattered body aside.

At the next corner I turned right. Two blocks later I turned right again. A third time, and ahead of me in the next block a crowd had collected around something at the curb. A man's body.

I turned into the driveway and slid the car into my garage stall.

The left headlight was broken. I thanked my lucky stars for being the cautious type. I always carried a spare. I got it, and tools, from the trunk of the car. Ten minutes later the job was done.

Now I had one more job to do. I'd put it off long enough. I realized that now. Thordsen's discovery of my secret identity had precipitated things. He was dead now, but while I was in the mood I might as well get it all done.

It was wrong. I knew it was wrong. But I was Fred Martin and it was something to cling to, to hold to forever. It was better to be Fred Martin than to be nothing.

In the glove compartment was a gun, a small size thirty-eight automatic. It belonged to Orville Snyder. I took it out and put it in my pocket. Then I backed my car out of the garage and turned it into the driveway. As I edged across the sidewalk I looked up the street. Police cars were there with their ogling red eyes. And an ambulance. Fear clutched at me. Maybe Thordsen wasn't dead.

I fought down the fear. If Thordsen lived, I was done. That possibility made it all the more imperative that I kill--

I didn't know her name. Even now I couldn't get her name. Some psychological block kept it from me.

I sat back, mentally, and looked at the situation. The realization slowly simmered through that it wasn't _I_ who had killed Thordsen. It wasn't _I_ who was driving so intently, with my fingers gripping the steering wheel so tensely. I had thought so because I seemed to _possess_ thoughts, tie myself to them and believe them mine.

I tried to feel regret for Dave Thordsen. I couldn't, because Fred Martin didn't. I tried to feel horror at what was coming. I couldn't. All I could feel was an overwhelming desire to point the gun at that woman and fire, and see her crumble to the floor.

I didn't recognize the house. I remembered the concrete porch painted with red enamel. I parked the car at the curb and walked to the porch with swift nervous steps. But I was taking care to keep my footsteps silent.

At the front door I took my keys from my pocket and slipped the right one carefully into the lock. With infinite caution I turned it until I heard the ever so faint click of the lock opening. Then I opened the door, inch by inch.

I recognized the living room where my first memory of events had begun. It was deserted. In another part of the house a radio was going, playing soft music. A woman's voice, singing, came to my ears. It wasn't on the radio. It was off key and untrained.

I took out the gun and made sure the safety catch was off. I pulled the loading mechanism back far enough to make sure a bullet was in the chamber. With the gun in my hand, I crossed to a door. I hesitated briefly, then twisted the knob and gave the door a light push that made it swing open wide.

* * * * *

The singing stopped. I saw her across the room, sitting before a large mirror. And she saw me in the mirror. She saw the gun, too.

"No, Orville!" she said. Her hand went up to her mouth, but she didn't turn.

I lifted the gun and aimed carefully. Even as I pulled the trigger I tried desperately not to, and at the same time I sensed that the only reason I could try not to was because a part of Fred Martin was also trying to stop this killing.

I wasn't able to have a thought of my own. I was a chameleon, a freak aggregation of fragmentary thoughts from other people's minds, brought together in a temporal continuity held together by the concept, _I_.

Or was I?

Right now I was in the living room again. I had found pen and paper in a desk, and was writing. What I was writing was a confession for the murder of my wife. I read her name where I had written it. Thelma. It was weird to not have known her name until I read it after writing it.

But what else was this I was writing? I was going to kill myself? But I wasn't. I had built up my other identity too carefully. The note was a cover-up.

It was finished. I left it on the desk and hurried out of the house. The skinny man next door was standing on his lawn looking at the door as I came out.

"What was that in there, Orville?" he asked. "I thought I heard a shot."

"Shot?" I said. "Oh. I remember. Thelma was turning to another station and had the volume too loud."

I went to my car and slipped in behind the wheel. He was still studying the house uneasily. In a few more minutes he would knock to make sure she was all right. Then he would call the police.

But by that time Orville Snyder would be no more.

I knew the plan now. The river had less than fifty miles to go to the ocean. More than one person had committed suicide by leaping from a bridge, without their body ever being found. Once one of the bodies had washed ashore five hundred miles down the coast.

I was going to stop on a bridge and leave my coat, with the gun in it, and with my wallet in it, to serve as proof that I had jumped.

But it wasn't I. It was Fred Martin. I was fighting to destroy the illusion of his surface thoughts being mine, of my being Fred Martin.

It was no use. The most I could accomplish was a conscious realization of the fact.

Abruptly I tried another line. If I couldn't divorce myself from him could I actually control him for a brief moment? I had done so before, when he wasn't under emotional tension.

I looked at the concrete streetlight standards on the curb. I was travelling fast. Forty-five. If I could twist the wheel and crash into a light standard....

I fought for control of my arms. Beads of perspiration formed on my face. I didn't want to kill myself. Why did I think of such an absurd thing?

But it wasn't I who didn't want to kill myself. It was Fred.

With that realization I jerked the steering wheel, feeling myself lurch against the door as the car headed for the curb.

I was two people, and aware of the thoughts of both. I was Fred, and he had done a curious thing in this last second of his life. He had rejected the knowledge of impending death. To him the light standard was Thordsen, and he was once again going to kill him.

And I was myself, aware suddenly that perhaps this was death for me too, for with Fred's death there was nothing to transfer to.

I couldn't face it. I changed my mind and jerked frantically at the wheel to avert the crash. And at the same time I felt myself lifted. I saw the sidewalk and buildings spin. I had time to realize the car had hit the curb and was turning over....

* * * * *

I frowned at the doodles I had drawn on the notepad. One was a triangle. Another was a crude circle, resting on the bottom of the triangle.

"Dr. Mintner," a voice said behind me.

I turned my head, startled. A man I had never seen before was standing there, a plastic lab apron covering his shirt front.

"What is it?" I said.

My thoughts were whirling. I was Mintner. I had always been Mintner.

"I think I know what to do about that problem of the dialectric," he said.

I smiled. The inexperienced fool. I had worked on that problem for two years. It wasn't going to be solved easily. "Yes?" I said.

"I studied it from a different angle than the one you did," he said. "That was what you suggested when I started here two months ago. Try new lines of approach."

"That's right," I said. I smiled encouragingly.

"The dialectric isn't suited for computers," he said. "You tried to find one that was. I tried that too, and covered your ground. Then I asked myself, if it isn't suited to computers, what is it good for? It's no good for computers because it doesn't discharge completely. Or rather, it does and it doesn't. Its structure is altered by the saturation charge and subsequent discharge in the computation processes. But random and not-so-random charges build up again for some reason, and interfere with computations after the machine has been used a few times. I puzzled over this. It was too much like true memory. I think what we have in this computer setup is more like a non-living thinking brain than a simple computer. If we change the bleeder leaks to the control grids--or maybe even cut them out altogether so that the basic charge doesn't dissipate, and feed in something other than figures and equations we can find out. Another thing, we'll have to shield the charge circuits. I've been looking at those completed computers in the back room. The charge circuits have unshielded sections that can act like untuned radar antennae--a little too short in wavelength for radar, but there's all kinds of unknown infra-reds bouncing around."

What he was saying had penetrated with an impact that left me paralyzed and cold. A million things clicked together in one final synthesis of the problem of my identity.

"I think you might have something there," I heard myself say. "Uh, don't touch any of those computers in the storeroom. Try some unused dialectric mix and start from scratch. Get to work on it right away."