Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  Rutinsky looked up with a sudden dazzling smile. ‘I got there because I am clever and intelligent and brave and possess a mercurial temperament. See? I have snapped out of it already. Let me see the bottle.’

  Crompton handed over the bottle, envious of Rutinsky’s mercuriality. He promised himself that someday, after Reintegration, he too would perform outlandish non sequiturs.

  Swiftly, deftly, Rutinsky took a miniature olfactotalizer out of his pocket and clamped it to the bottle. First he took a qualitative reading to ensure that this was indeed lurhistia. Then, satisfied, he took a reading on quantity as measured by intensity, to make sure that Crompton hadn’t added a gill or so of water.

  The pointer on the olfactotalizer dial swung around and bent itself in half around the limit pin!

  ‘Yep, it’s the real thing,’ Rutinsky said reverently. He turned to Crompton and his eyes were moist. ‘My friend, I wonder if you realize how much you have done. With the contents of this one slender bottle, I can release Freesmellers from their corporate embarrassment. In the name of Edwin Pudger, saintly white-haired head of our organization, I thank you for this favor, Mr. Crompton.’

  ‘It’s not a favor, it’s a criminal business transaction. I mean, pay me.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rutinsky. He took a bulging wallet from his pocket and began counting out notes. ‘Let’s see; our agreed-upon price was 800,000 SVUs, to be paid in equal parts of Aaian and Yggan currency. At today’s rate of exchange that comes to 18,276 Aaian pronics and 420,087 Yggan drun-mushies. Here, I think you will find the count correct.’

  Alistair stuffed the currency into a pocket. Then he stiffened; he had just heard a high-pitched whistling sound coming from the vicinity of Rutinsky’s abdomen.

  ‘What is it?’ Crompton demanded.

  ‘Transmission signal,’ Rutinsky said, taking from his waistcoat a subminiature radio the size and shape of a Dodecanese snuffbox. ‘It’s the CEWS special broadcast. One can’t afford to be without it.’

  ‘What in God’s name is the CEWS?’ Crompton demanded.

  ‘Criminal Early Warning System,’ Rutinsky said. ‘Didn’t you know about it? Let’s listen to what they have to say.’

  ‘Good afternoon, fellow criminals,’ a cheerful voice declared over the subminiature quadrophonic speaker. ‘This is your old friend and d.j. Jack the Ripper broadcasting to you on various clandestine frequencies from our secret mobile unit somewhere deep in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of romantic New Mexico. Got a good show for you felons out there; latest bank robbery scores on the hour, and, of course, our Opportunity Line which presents daily a list of Golden Sucker Cities where law enforcement has gone lax, or venial, or just plain non-existing! Tonight’s show is brought to you by Footpad Tailors, inventors of the Overcoat with a Thousand Pockets; and by Martin and Mishkin tempered steel burglar tools, and Old Heidelberg cyanide tablets for the job that goes sour. We’ll be hearing more about these and other fine products later in the show. But right now I’ve got a hot flash: An impeccable source from within the organization tells us that Pyschosmell, Inc., the monopolistic octopus of the fragrance world, has been knocked over to the tune of fifty-nine grams of lurhistia, most precious substance weight for weight in the galaxy! The name of the suspect has already been announced, so we break no confidences when we say: Alistair Crompton! If you can hear this, you haven’t gotten far enough away! Good luck, Alistair, you’re going to need it! And now a selection of tunes from The Beggar’s Opera. …’

  Rutinsky turned off the radio. He said to Crompton, ‘Bit of sloppy planning, eh?’

  ‘It’s impossible!’ Crompton said. ‘The business was to shut down for two weeks! Nobody ever checks up on me! I don’t understand –’

  ‘Understanding is a luxury you can’t afford right now,’ Rutinsky said. ‘Good-bye, Crompton. If you’re caught, tell them that Rutinsky sneers at them.’

  So saying, the Chief Agent drew a zero-null hyper-energizing quickcloak out of his pocket. Quickly he shook out the folds of the stolen garment (for it could be carried legally only by FBI men of Ultradon category) and arranged it around his shoulders. Instantly he vanished. Only his red fox porkpie hat was left on the bar. The Mark of Rutinsky!

  Crompton paid for the drinks and flung himself out into a hostile and unpromising world.

  5

  ‘Alone with you at last, my curvaceous darling – and now, the foam!’

  Would you mind turning off the radio?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘Not a chance, buddy,’ the sweating pedicab driver snarled. ‘I always listen to the “House of Chagrin,” my favorite show.’

  ‘Let me show you how they do it in Djibouti,’ the radio warbled, ‘with butterflies!’

  Crompton leaned back, trying to keep his composure. What had happened? How had they gotten on to him? Did he have a chance now? His destination was the New York Spaceport situated in what had been Brooklyn before the interdiction. Already he had gotten as far as Stone Street and Avenue J, with no pursuit in sight. Only a little farther now. …

  ‘Ditmas, for the love of litmus paper, get your hands off my giggie!’

  Now the taxi was rounding the William Bendix Memorial. The doubleshotted circumvex towers of the Spaceport were just ahead! But now traffic was clogging the road – bicycles, pedicabs, tricycles, men on roller skates, women on pogo sticks, persons jogging – all of the variegated transportational forms that made New York famous as ‘The City of the Sweaty Thighs.’ And now, just ahead, the main gate!

  ‘Rutabaga? Surely there is some simpler explanation.’

  ‘Driver, let me out here,’ Crompton said.

  ‘That’ll be five and six.’

  ‘Graustark? I should think not!’

  ‘Haven’t you got anything smaller?’

  ‘Keep the change!’

  ‘Denigration is for beginners, my poor Sylvie; the experienced man likes his mot just so.’

  Leaping from the pedicab, and narrowly escaping being run over by a walrus-bearded man driving an oxcart, Crompton rushed through the main gate, trying to look like a man who was about to miss his spaceship, which, indeed, was his situation. He rushed past the Disneystand and the hard-apple salesman, swept by the Punishment Boutique, and came huffing up to the Trans Pan Interstellar Spaceways System (TPISS) desk with its proud slogan, Non est ad astra mollis a terria via.

  He presented his deckle-edged reservation voucher to the android made up to look like Albert Dekker. ‘Ah, so, velly good,’ the android with the mismatched voxtape said. ‘But you gotta pay, Jack! No payee, no tickee, and no tickee, no splacefright.’

  ‘Of course I’m going to pay,’ Crompton said. ‘Would you like it in Aaian pronics or Yggan drunmushies?’

  ‘We only able to glet Getelguesan fioavics. Uranian contemptuous, or American Express traveler’s checks. You no glot? Blank change you money, okay, Joe?’

  Crompton rushed to the bank, where a nubile exchanger from Drumghera IV deftly made change with her opposed and replicating lips. He sped back to the TPISS desk and presented his money to the android.

  ‘Very good, sir,’ the android said. ‘Sorry about that pseudo-Chinese voice earlier. My consistency-autochecking circuits have been malfiring recently and I just haven’t gotten around to seeing the electronician. Those fellows cost a fortune and always send you on to a specialist anyhow. So I put up with it, what else can I do on my salary? And usually it’s okay, but today as my lousy luck would have it the sunspot cycle coincided with an old Fu Manchu movie in the upper lounge, and photosynthetic diffraction did the rest, and so I came on like an absolute fool –’

  ‘My tickeee!’ Crompton gasped.

  ‘Here it is, sir,’ the android said. ‘First stop is Aaia. You’ve got ten-year stopover privileges. The standard lunches are served and you may purchase psychedelics when the craft is in space. Did you ever see any of Albert Dekker’s movies? There is an Albert Dekker festival playing now in the south lounge which you are cordially invi
ted to attend –’

  But the android moonlighter (he had rented his features to the entrepreneur of the Albert Dekker festival – a move that could have cost him his job if the ‘own-face’ rule had been strictly enforced) no longer had anyone before him, for Crompton had rushed off.

  ‘Crompton, Crompton,’ the android said, and a faint moue of concentration creased his brow. ‘Ah, yes! Rhymes with Pompton!’ And he turned away, satisfied. Androids are never unhappy for long.

  Humans, and especially those whose humanotypes can be subsumed under the aegis Crompton, are frequently unhappy, and frightened as well. Pale, out of breath, his thighs sweating (like all New Yorkers), Crompton rushed to the entrance gate. As he approached it, someone caught his arm in a vicelike grip and pulled him to an abrupt halt. Crompton looked up into the flattish yellow face of an enormous android gotten up to look like a homicidal maniac.

  A thin, shivery voice nearby said, ‘All right, Toto, hold him but do not break him, yet. I want to talk to this fellow, hee hee hee.’

  Crompton’s heart fell into that infinite pit of emptiness that was his stomach. Despairingly he turned and looked into the ancient eyes and at the modern skin of John Blount.

  6

  ‘Well, Alistair, and what do you have to say for yourself?’ Blount asked.

  Crompton shrugged. Not twenty yards away was the entrance to his spaceship, tantalizingly near, impossibly far away.

  ‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘How did you find me?’

  Blount smiled pityingly. ‘Only the top executives of the company know the full extent of our security system, Alistair. Special sensors are located in the vaults to register the quantities of the more precious substances present. The quantitative data is fed to a computer, which compares it with continuously upgraded data giving the proper, or formal quantity that should be present at all times. Discrepancies of more than a gram are flashed immediately to mobile security, and simultaneously to me. When I looked over the situation I saw that you were the only possible culprit, and I decided to handle the situation myself.’

  ‘That’s interesting, I’m sure,’ Crompton said. ‘But what happens now?’

  Old John Blount smiled his ghastly death’s-head grin. ‘Now, Alistair, I think it is time for you to throw yourself upon my mercy.’

  Alistair was beginning to tremble. Then he noticed that he was beginning to tremble. A frown crossed his face, a frown of puzzlement. He was acting afraid of this man who held his life in his hands; but he really didn’t feel afraid of him. For after all, Crompton knew that he had taken his chance as a a man must do. That he had failed made no difference, finally. What mattered was that he had done his best.

  ‘I doubt very much whether you have any mercy,’ he said levelly. ‘So I’m not going to throw myself on that. I think I’ll just tell you to go screw yourself, and leave it at that. Go screw yourself, Mr. Blount.’

  Blount’s face registered psychopathic amazement, idiot incredulity, moronic disbelief. He stretched out one hand blindly toward Crompton. Strangling on sputum and rage, he cried, ‘You – you –’

  ‘Hee hee hee,’ Crompton said scornfully.

  Toto reacted to his master’s distress by swinging up his great fist, preparatory to splattering Crompton all over the wall. Crompton winced, but his eyes did not blink and his mouth did not twitch. Blount called out, ‘No, don’t hurt him!’

  Toto pulled the punch just in time, and suffered a double hernia from the sudden g-strain.

  ‘Crompton,’ the old man said, in a voice as light and faint as corn silk blowing over blue plastic, ‘do you know what the penalty is for your crime?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Ten years in prison.’

  ‘I can do that standing on my head,’ Crompton retorted.

  ‘No doubt you can,’ Blount said. ‘That is why I am not going to have you arrested.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  The old man shook his head and smiled a tricky smile. ‘You are free to go, to the ends of the galaxy if you wish, in search of your missing personality components.’

  ‘So you knew about that!’

  ‘Of course. I make it my business to know about all of the freaks in my organization. I say to you, Go, Crompton, on your forlorn and hopeless quest. Ten years in stir is too good for you, but it is all that a despicably soft and corrupt judiciary will give you for your larceny, treachery, and bad manners. I want more than that! I want to pay you back more personally. So go, beyond the writ of Terran law. I will find you. My arm is long, my agents many, my revenge secure.’

  ‘What are you planning to do to me?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘Ah,’ Blount said, ‘that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Frankly, I’m not quite sure, and I’m in no hurry to make up my mind. There are so many piquant possibilities! I look forward to many pleasant hours of gloating over my plans, anticipating your frenzied and futile struggles, your wretched pleas, and your grasping horrified despair at the end.’

  ‘You’re sick,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Not half as sick as you’re going to be when I get my hands on you again, Crompton. This I promise you.’

  Crompton turned and walked away, numbed by the differential juvenescent’s hideous yet puerile threat. He presented his ticket to the ticket-tacker, and the ticket-tacker tacked a tick in the ticket’s upper right-hand corner and let Crompton pass aboard.

  He walked directly into the orange and gray module that ferried passengers to the orbiting spaceship many miles above.

  His numbness fell away as the ship soared high into yellow sunlight. Not even the thought of death can upset a man who is going into space for the first time. The journey into the unknown transcends the framework of anxiety, at least for a while.

  Two

  7

  Aboard the orbiting starship, the passengers fastened their safety belts and sipped from paper cups filled with orange juice. There was an awkward moment when the artificial gravity generator cut out and the hostesses floated into the air, still smiling. But everything was soon under control. Soon the red takeoff light came on.

  ‘This is the voice of your captain, Eddie Remonstrator,’ said a pleasant Midwestern voice over the public address system. ‘We are in takeoff configuration now, ladies and gentlemen, and it may be of interest if I describe the procedure, since that is the trickiest part of the whole trip. Now then: the port and starboard searcher probes are extended on full and going through their ninety-degree cycles. As you probably know from magazine articles, these sensors are searching the fabric of space for what are technically called Foster-Harris discontinuity areas, or FHda’s for short. These FHda’s are like a sort of hole in space, folks, only it might better be compared to a hole through two folds of fabric. You see, space has no substance, but it does have configuration. That was proven by Edkwiser and Braintree back in ’09, and it is what makes rapid interstellar flight possible. You must remember, however, that spatial configuration exists only on a single order of magnitude.

  ‘Now, finding a suitable FHda. … Excuse me a moment, folks. … Okay, I’m back now. Our starboard sensor just came up with a fat one, and I’m just about to ease this little old ship right into the FHda helix – because it isn’t really a hole, folks. It can be best visualized as a hollow tube twisted into a helical shape, and us as going into that tube. Spatial configuration always follows helical routes, except in the vicinity of gray stars. That’s Von Gresham’s Law.

  ‘Okay, we’re approaching it now, folks. Soon our ship will be flowing smoothly along the helical path that in n-dimensional space describes a straight line. We’re approaching. … Ease her to starboard, chief bosun. That’s it, steady as she goes. … Guide by the flare line along the outer orifice. … Just a touch more left rudder. … Now meet her, meet her. … Steer small, damn you! Trim those cephoid flaps back to zero! Reset the tabulating skin surface totalizer to zero zero niner! Retract the sponge antenna! Give me seven degrees on the
bivalvular de-quenching remoulade!’ (Here the captain’s voice became indistinct, and his words blurry and capable of misinterpretation.) ‘Okay, now the drumhead marshtide ripcurrent is closing fast! Give me a tune on the fiddle!’ (That couldn’t be right, Crompton thought: he must have heard wrong.) ‘Now take a turn around the double avunculars and collapse the spread-fragment tourniquet glide-runners! Watch the drag-timer, it’s gaining turbulent-spontaneity! There we go! Now trim ballast and it’s downhill all the way!’

  There was a moment of silence. Then the captain said, ‘Well, folks, there you are, a blow by blow account of how a star ship gets going. We’ll be traveling through the FHda helix for some twenty hours of subjective time, so relax and get comfortable. Our hostesses will now be taking orders for psychedelics for those among you who want to spaceout while going through space. There is a movie in the forward lounge that sounds mighty good, something about Albert Dekker. Enjoy yourself, folks, this is Captain Eddie Remonstrator signing off.’

  Crompton rubbed his nose vigorously and wondered whether he was hearing things or if Captain Remonstrator was conducting himself in an unusual manner. Or a little of both, perhaps. …

  ‘Yes, actually, it is,’ the person in the seat next to Crompton remarked.

  ‘What is?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘A little of both.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘I am referring to your last thought before this conversation began. You were wondering if you were hearing things or if Captain Remonstrator was behaving in an unusual manner. Then you thought perhaps it was a little of both, which is the correct answer, and refers to your instinctive understanding of the degree of variability possible on either side of the observer-observed dichotomy.’

  ‘So you can read my mind,’ Crompton said, and looked at the person with attention. He saw a fresh-faced young man with a crew cut, wearing a gray sweater and brown slacks and white buckskin shoes.