Yesterday's doors
"Checking on your investment, I see?" I said.

"I've been getting a lot of lowdown on you, Adam," he retorted. "For a man who can't remember yesterday, you've been doing an awful lot of remembering. Also, it appears to be exact and very useful remembering. I wish somebody would explain to me just what it's all about?"

"First," I said, "would you like me at last to clear up the mystery of the murder of Marian Slade by Dean Hale?"

If he hadn't laughed aloud I might have thought I had made a mistake, but men didn't laugh at murder, so I took the plunge.

"Marian Slade, of course, was not murdered. You coppers and dicks were doing your level best to make me remember myself. You took extreme measures. You accused me of being a murderer, which ought to shock any amnesiac out of his amnesia. You gave me a name, Dean Hale. I'll bet your contribution was Marian Slade, by an association of ideas! Somebody had to be murdered, you remembered the Lab and how useful a man who might never remember would be to its mentors—and so, Dean Hale murdered Marian Slade. Am I right?"

"Close enough, Adam," he said, a bit ruefully. "But just between pals, I wish you could remember who you are."

"I appear to be remembering a lot of people I have been," I answered. "That is, if you believe in reincarnation."

"This past lives of individuals stuff is the bunk!" he insisted, while the scientists, who ate with us, smiled patronizingly and shook their heads.

"We'll prove it isn't bunk," said Doctor A. "After all, it's nice, or would be, to know you never really go into the grave, or the sea, or the crematorium, wouldn't it? Only your body does."

I didn't believe him, Jan Rober didn't. I doubted if anybody with a grain of sense would. I didn't know how to explain Father Wulstan, or Anghor, but they'd have to be more reasonable than reincarnation to convince me.

"Just what," I asked, becoming more serious, "have you managed to get out of my experiences, if you must call them that, as Anghor? Before you answer, it strikes me that all Anghor's palaver about the creative power of thought is on a par with what we've seemed to prove about reincarnation, a kind of waking-sleeping nightmare! How could anybody except the gods create by the power of thought?"

"You believe in telepathy?" asked Doctor L.


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