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_.

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 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 for 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, politics