Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  Alistair Crompton, the dominant personality in the original body, recovered from the operation; but a vital two-thirds of him was missing, gone with the schizoid personalities. Certain human attributes, emotions, capabilities, had been torn from him, never to be replaced or substituted. Crompton grew up an unprepossessing youth of meager height, painfully thin, sharp-nosed and tight-lipped. His hairline was receding, his eyes were glassy, and his face remained sparse of stubble.

  His high intelligence and talented olfactory sense brought him a good job and rapid promotion with Psychosmell, Inc., and he had risen quickly to the position of Chief Tester, the top of his profession, a job that brought him respect and a very adequate income. But Crompton was not satisfied.

  On all sides of him, the envious Crompton saw people with all their marvelous complexities and contradictions, constantly bursting out of the stereotypes that society tried to force on them. He observed prostitutes who were not good-hearted, army sergeants who detested brutality, wealthy men who never gave a cent to charity, Irishmen who hated talking, Italians who could not carry a tune, Frenchmen with no sense of logic. Most of the human race seemed to live lives of a wonderful and unpredictable richness, erupting into sudden passions and strange, calms, saying one thing and doing another, repudiating their backgrounds, overcoming their limitations, confounding psychologists and driving psychoanalysts to drink.

  But this splendor was impossible for Crompton, whom the doctors had stripped of complexity for sanity’s sake.

  Crompton with a robot’s damnable regularity, arrived at Psychosmell promptly at 8:52 every morning of his life. At five o’clock he put away his oils and essences and returned to his furnished room. There he ate a frugal meal of unappetizing health food, played three games of solitaire, filled in one crossword puzzle, and retired to his narrow and lonely bed. Each Saturday night Crompton saw a movie, jostled by merry and unpredictable teen-agers. Sundays and holidays were devoted to the study of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for Crompton believed in self-improvement. And, once a month, Crompton would slink to a newsstand and purchase a magazine of salacious content. In the privacy of his room he would devour its contents; and then, in an ecstasy of self-loathing, rip the detestable thing to shreds.

  Crompton was aware, of course, that he had been turned into a stereotype for his own good. He tried to adjust to the situation. For a while he cultivated the company of other slab-sided centimeter-thin personalities. But the others he met were complacent, self-sufficient, and smug in their rigidity. They had been that way since birth. They experienced no lack. They had no dreams of fulfillment, no wish for self-transcendence. Crompton soon found that those who were like him were insufferable; and he was insufferable to anyone else.

  He tried hard to break through the stifling limitations of his personality. He attended self-help lectures and read inspirational books. He applied to the New York Greater Romance Service, and they arranged a date for him. Crompton went to meet his sweet unknown in front of Loew’s Jupiter Theater, with a white carnation reeking in his lapel. But within a block of the theater he was seized by a trembling fit and forced to retreat to his room.

  Crompton had only his basic individual characteristics: intelligence, tenacity, stubbornness, and will. The inevitable exaggeration of these qualities had turned him into a stereotype of an extreme cerebrotonic, a driven monolithic personality aware of its own lacks and passionately desiring fulfillment and fusion. But try as he would, Crompton could not help but act within the narrow confines of his character. His rage at himself and at the well-meaning doctors grew, and his need for self-trancendence increased accordingly.

  There was only one way for him to acquire the amazing variety of possibilities, the contradictions, the passions, the humanness, of other people. And that was through Reintegration. Accordingly, when he reached the legal Reintegration age of thirty, Crompton went to see Dr. Vlacjeck, the neurohypnotic surgeon who had performed the original operation. Crompton was excited, eager to get the names and addresses of his missing personality components, eager to Reintegrate, passionately desirous of becoming a whole human being.

  Dr. Vlacjeck reviewed his case, checked him out with his cognoscope, fed the resulting values into his computer terminal, and shook his head sadly over the result.

  ‘Alistair,’ he said, ‘it is my unhappy duty to advise you to waive Reintegration and try to accept your life as it is.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Crompton demanded.

  ‘According to the computer readout you simply don’t have the stability or strength to hold those detached personalities in balance, to fuse them into yourself.’

  ‘Other Cleavees have succeeded,’ Crompton said. ‘Why not me?’

  ‘Because the original operation came too late. Your personality segments had already hardened.’

  ‘I’ll have to take my chances,’ Crompton said. ‘Kindly give me the names and addresses of my Duriers.’

  ‘I beg you to reconsider,’ Vlacjeck said. ‘Any attempt at Reintegration will mean insanity for you, or death.’

  ‘Give me the addresses,’ Crompton demanded coldly. ‘It is my right under the law. I feel that I am capable of holding them in line. When they have become thoroughly subordinated to my will, fusion will follow. Then we will be a single functioning unit, and I will be an entire human being.’

  ‘You don’t know what those other Cromptons are like,’ the doctor said. ‘You consider yourself inadequate? Alistair, you were the pick of the litter!’

  ‘I don’t care what they are like,’ Crompton said. ‘They are a part of me. The names and addresses, please.’

  Shaking his head sadly, the doctor wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to Crompton.

  ‘Alistair, this venture has practically no chance of success. I beg you to consider –’

  ‘Thank you, Dr. Vlacjeck,’ Crompton said, bowed slightly, and left.

  As soon as he was outside the office, Crompton’s self-control began to crumble. He had not dared show Dr. Vlacjeck his uncertainties: the well-meaning old man would surely have talked him out of the attempted Reintegration. But now, with the names in his pocket and the responsibility entirely his own, anxiety swept over him. He was overcome by an intense trembling fit. He managed to control it long enough to take a taxi back to his furnished room, where he could throw himself on the bed.

  He lay for an hour, his body racked by anxiety spasms. Then the fit passed. Soon he was able to control his hands well enough to look at the paper the doctor had given him.

  The first name on it was Edgar Loomis, living on the planet Aaia. The other was Dan Stack, resident of Ygga.

  What were these embodied portions of his personality like? What humors, what stereotyped shapes had these truncated segments of himself taken?

  The paper didn’t say. He laid out a hand of solitaire and considered the risks. His early, unintegrated schizoid mind had shown a definite tendency toward homicidal mania. Would that tendency be obliterated in fusion, assuming that the fusion was possible? Or might he be loosing a potential killer upon the world? And aside from that, was he wise in taking a step that carried a powerful threat of insanity and death to himself?

  His chance of successful Reintegration was small, according to the doctor; but he was determined to attempt it. Even death or insanity could not be worse, or much different, from the way he lived now.

  His mind was made up. But there was a practical difficulty. To Reintegrate, he would have to travel to Aaia, and then to Ygga. Interstellar travel was expensive; and Aaia and Ygga were situated half a galaxy apart.

  There was simply no way he could get together the considerable fortune he would need for his fares to these distant worlds and his expenses once he reached them.

  No legal way existed, to be precise about it.

  Crompton was an honest and punctilious man. But this was a matter of life and death. In his circumstance, to abstain from grand larceny was to invite psychic suicide.

>   Crompton was not suicidal. Coldly he came to his decision, assessed the possibilities, and made his plans.

  3

  With silent tread, Alistair Crompton proceeded down Primrose Path, as the violet-tinted corridor to Executive Country was called. The rose quartz chalice was gripped firmly in his white hands, and his face was unreadable.

  At the end of the corridor was a great oaken door upon which was carved a unicorn sniffing a bouquet of spring wild-flowers held out by a simpering damsel in a dirndl. This was the coat of arms of Psychosmell, Inc. Beneath it was the proud company motto, adapted from Martial with a trifling change of one word: Bene olet, qui bene semper olet.

  Soundlessly the great doors swung open as Crompton approached. Crompton entered the room. In front of him, arranged in a semicircle, were six armchairs in which were seated the six members of the Board. In the center of the semicircle, in an armchair one-third bigger than the others, and raised upon a dais, was the legendary John Blount. Founder of the Firm and Chairman of the Board of Directors.

  ‘It’s Crompton is it?’ Blount said in his cracked and quavering voice. ‘Come forward, Crompton, let’s take a look at you.’

  John Blount was old, considering him as a single personality. But from the viewpoint of the average age of his various parts, Blount was not even middle-aged. Over the years, most of Blount’s vital organs had been repaired or replaced. Even his skin (shining with obscene pinkness) was no more than ten years old. His brain was original issue, however, as were his ancient and unfathomable eyes that gleamed incongruously in his firm-fleshed young man’s face like the eyes of a gila monster poking through a vat of orange jello.

  ‘Well, Crompton, and how have you been?’ Blount said, the old man’s quavering voice issuing strangely from the strong young body. (Blount refused to have his voice changed; his hands, too, were original issue. Blount perversely maintained that he enjoyed being old and had no desire to achieve a spurious youthfulness. He wanted to be old, but alive, and did what was necessary to maintain that state.)

  ‘I’ve been fine, sir,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Glad to hear it, Crompton, glad to hear it. I have followed your career with interest. You have done fine work for this company, my boy, hee hee hee! And now you have favored me with another sample of your talents?’

  ‘I hope it will please you, sir,’ Crompton said, resisting the sudden irrational urge to throw himself at Blount’s feet and grovel abjectly; for this was how the man’s presence affected everyone, including Blount’s wife, who had calluses half an inch thick on her knees from following her impulses.

  ‘Well, then, let’s get on with it, hee, hee, hee,’ Blount said, and extended a hand as dry and hard-fleshed as the talons of a Nigerian vulture.

  Crompton put the quartz bottle in Blount’s hands and stepped back.

  The Founder unstoppered it and delicately sniffed (with his original-issue nose – for it was a matter of pride and discretion with him not to tamper with the organ that had made him rich beyond the dreams of avarice).

  ‘Now what have we here?’ he mused aloud, his nostrils flexing strongly to allow the fragrance to distribute itself evenly across his old, leathery, but still sensitive olfactory center.

  Blount was silent for a time, head thrown back, nostrils working like tiny twin bellows. Crompton knew that the Founder was analyzing the concoction in terms of its primary olfactory qualities, separating and judging the mixture of flowery, fruity, putrid, spicy, burned and resinous odors. After that, Blount could be counted upon to estimate the intensity of the various components, measuring them in olfacties, the unit of smell-intensity. Only after his analysis was complete would Blount relax and permit himself to experience the effect of the substance.

  ‘First impressions – seaside at Point Pleasance, a rosewood bower, desert winds, a child’s haunted face, the smell of north wind … Pretty indeed, Crompton! And now the initial rebound effect – intensification – sun on salt water – windrows of kelp – silver cliffs, an iron mountain – and the girl, the girl!’

  The Directors stirred uneasily to hear that vibrant cry torn from the throat of the differentially juvenescent Founder. Had Crompton slipped up, perhaps not calculated rotating radical?

  ‘The girl,’ the Founder cried, ‘the girl in her white lace mantilla! Oh, Nieves, how could I have forgotten you! I see before me now the black waters of Lake Titicaca lapping at the ironwood pilings. That great bird of ill omen, the condor, soars low overhead, and the sun comes but from behind massed clouds of purple and pink. You hold my hand. Nieves, you are laughing, you do not know …’

  The Founder fell silent. For an interminable minute he did not speak. Then he lowered his head. He was back in the present. The vision had faded.

  ‘Crompton,’ he said presently, ‘you have concocted a superb psychic elicitor. I do not know what it will bring to my colleagues. But it has given me a minute of all-too-rare delight. The memory was false, of course; but its very intensity argues that it must have been true for someone, somewhere. Gentlemen, I declare a double bonus! Crompton, I hereby increase your salary, whatever it is, by one-third.’

  Crompton thanked him. As the quartz decanter was passed from hand to hand he silently left the room, and the great oak door closed silently behind him.

  The news spread like wildfire throughout the offices of Psychosmell. Rejoicing was general. Crompton walked soberly back to his Chief Tester’s Room. He locked the door behind him, and proceeded to straighten up as he did after every working day. Briskly he sealed the precious substances and put them in the chute that carried them to the vacuum vaults where they were automatically returned to their hermetic sanctuary.

  There was only one change in his routine. He took the container of purified essence of lurhistia, costliest substance in the galaxy weight for weight. Tight-lipped, unhesitatingly, he transferred its contents to a plain hermetic flask. He slipped this into his pocket. Then he filled the lurhistia container with common oil of ylang-ylang and returned it to the vault.

  On his person now were fifty-nine grams of lurhistia – the entire produce of two years painstaking hand-extraction from the scrawny hypervalidation plants on Alphone IV. Crompton had the equivalent of a medium-sized fortune in his jacket pocket. It was enough to pay his fares to Aaia and Ygga.

  He had crossed his Rubicon, taken the first and irrevocable step toward Reintegration. He was on his way! If only he could get away with it.

  4

  ‘They don’t know the patterns they’re weaving,’ the drunk in the red porkpie hat remarked to Alistair Crompton.

  ‘Nor do you,’ Crompton snapped. He was sitting at the serpentine bar of the Damballa Club in disreputable Greenwich Village. The jukebox was playing a golden oldie, ‘Rub It in Your Belly, Baby,’ sung by Ghengis Khan and the Hunnies. Crompton was sipping near-beer and waiting for his contact, Mr. Elihu Rutinsky, Chief Agent for the F(I)G.

  ‘Of course I don’t know,’ replied the cheerful, flatulent, red-hatted man on the slender obelisk-shaped barstool with the half-empty (or half-filled) glass of Old Pigslopp brand dry-charcolated whiskey clasped in one grimy-nailed paw. ‘But at least I know that I don’t know, which is more than you can say for other people. And even before I knew, I knew that I didn’t know that I didn’t know the patterns I was weaving. Take our situation, for example. You probably think that I am quite incidental, a mere accessory to your action, an inert visual object for you to rest your eyes upon – eh?’

  Crompton didn’t reply. He was still gripped in the icy self-control that had carried him from his testing room to the Sills-Maxwell, and so to Manhattan to meet a man who was already ten-minutes late. The bottle of lurhistia burned against his side like a harbinger of decomposed belongings. The jerk in the red porkpie hat leaned close to him, breathing the odor of the curdled kvass into his delicate olfactory passages.

  ‘Mi coche no va,’ the man said unexpectedly.

  It was the secret password, decided upon long ag
o in the peaceful days when Crompton had concocted this scheme!

  ‘You are Elihu Rutinsky!’ Crompton said in a half-whisper.

  ‘None other, and at your service,’ the drunk said, casting aside his hat, stripping off his dexmeer-compound face and his drunkenness, and revealing the silvery mane framing the long, mournful face of the elusive and hypercautious Rutinsky.

  ‘One must make sure,’ Rutinsky said, with a bleak smile. As Chief Agent for Freesmellers (Illegal) Guild, or F(I)G, this man was responsible for the democratizing and deinstitutionalizing of psychosmelling in Albania, Lithuania, and Transylvania. His Guild, though illegal in the United States, was duly registered and paid taxes, as was required of all illegal organizations.

  ‘Quick, man, there’s no time to lose!’ Rutinsky snapped.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t wasting any time,’ Crompton said. ‘I was here on time. It was you who insisted upon turning a straight-forward criminal business deal into a cloak and dagger operation’

  ‘So I’ve got a flair for the dramatic,’ Rutinsky said. ‘Is that a crime? It just happens that I’m also cautious. Would you condemn a man for that?’

  ‘I’m not condemning you for anything,’ Crompton said. ‘I am merely pointing out that you needn’t tell me to hurry since I am not wasting any time. Shall we get down to business?’

  ‘No.’ Rutinsky said. ‘You have hurt my feelings, impugned my honor, and cast an aspersion on my courage. I think I shall have another drink.’

  ‘All right,’ Crompton said, ‘I’m sorry if what I said upset you. Can we get down to business now?’

  ‘No, I don’t think you’re being sincere,’ Rutinsky said sulkily, biting at the ends of his fingernails and snuffling.

  ‘How in God’s name did you ever get to be Chief Agent for Freesmellers?’ Crompton asked.