It was early in December that I began to remember things. Dim and formless things at first — sensations that utterly eluded the rigities of words. I tried to express them to de Neant but it was hopeless.

'A circular feeling,' I'd say. 'No — not exactly — a sense of spiral — not that, either. Roundness — I can't recall it now. It slips away.'

He was jubilant. 'It comes!' he whispered, grey beard awaggle and pale eyes glittering. 'You begin to remember!'

'But what good is a memory like that?'

'Wait! It will come clearer. Of course not all your memories will be of the sort we can use. They will be scattered. Through all the multifold eternities of the past-future circle you can't have been always Jack Anders, securities salesman.

'There will be fragmentary memories, recollections of times when your personality was partially existent, when the Laws of Chance had assembled a being who was not quite Jack Anders, in some period of the infinite worlds that must have risen and died in the span of eternities.

'But somewhere, too, the same atoms, the same conditions, must have made you. You're the black grain among the trillions of white grains and, with all eternity to draw in from, you must have been drawn before — many, many times.'

'Do you suppose,' I asked suddenly, 'that anyone exists twice on the same earth? Reincarnation in the sense of the Hindus?'

He laughed scornfully. 'The age of the earth is somewhere between a thousand million and three thousand million years. What proportion of eternity is that?'

'Why — no proportion at all. Zero.'

'Exactly. And zero represents the chance of the same atoms combining to form the same person twice in one cycle of a planet. But I have shown that trillions, or trillions of trillions of years ago, there must have been another earth, another Jack Anders, and' — his voice took on that whining note — 'another crash that ruined Jack Anders and old de Neant. That is the time you must remember out of lethargy.'