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 Institute; 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 analyzed.
And, while 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 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 cum puella est.