Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  ‘You are a mere parasite of the wealthy,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Now that’s really unfair,’ Loomis said. ‘Don’t the rich have their necessities, too? Maybe they don’t need the same things as the poor, but they do have needs. The government provides food, shelter, and medical attention for the poor. But what do they do for the rich?’

  Crompton laughed. A short, unpleasant sound. ‘If anyone finds it a hardship to be rich, he is free to give up the burden.’

  ‘But nobody can do that! The poor are stuck with their poverty, and the rich are saddled with their wealth. That’s life, it simply can’t be helped. The rich need sympathy; and I am very sympathetic to their problems. They need people around them who can enjoy and appreciate luxuries, and teach them how to enjoy them as well. I perform that function, making it more possible for them to enjoy their lot in life. And rich women, Alistair! They have their needs, too. They are nervous, highly bred, suspicious, these women, and highly suggestible. They need nuance and subtlety. They need the attentions of a man of soaring imagination, yet possessed of an exquisite sensibility. Such men are all too rare in this humdrum world. Fortunately enough, my own talents lie in that direction.’

  Crompton stared at Loomis with a certain horror. He found it difficult to believe that this corrupt, self-satisfied seducer was a part of him, a potentiality of his own psyche. He would have been glad to turn away from Loomis and avoid the whole distasteful business of sex. But it could not be: an inscrutable destiny had proclaimed that even the most lucid and clearest-thinking men must still live with that debased aspect of themselves, must come to terms (by sublimation, if possible!) with the shameful male instinct to fuck a lot of women and have a lot of laughs and get paid a lot of money for doing nothing.

  It was regrettable, but he had to have Loomis. And perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. Crompton had no doubt of his ability to keep an impulsive, changeable, impulse-ruled creature like that in line, maybe even help him to transform his useless rutting instinct into a passion for architecture or a love of gardening, or something like that.

  ‘All of that is really of no concern to me,’ Crompton said. ‘As you know, I am the basic Crompton personality in the original Crompton body. I have come here to Aaia to effect Reintegration with you. I suppose you’ll want some time in which to put your affairs in order?’

  ‘My affairs are always in order,’ Loomis said. ‘I just take up with whoever wants to get it on with me.’

  ‘I meant business matters, such as outstanding debts you might wish to liquidate, settlement of property, and so on.’

  ‘I usually don’t concern myself too much about that sort of thing,’ Loomis said. ‘I figure that taking care of the mess I leave behind after I’m gone is someone else’s business, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘As you wish. Shall we get on with it?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘With the fusion!’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Loomis said. ‘That’s the part I’m kinda doubtful about.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, Al, and the fact is I really don’t want to integrate with you. Nothing personal, but that’s the way I feel.’

  ‘You refuse to fuse with me?’ Crompton asked, incredulous.

  ‘That’s it,’ Loomis said. ‘I’m really sorry, I know you’ve come a long way for nothing; though you might have written first and asked me, you know? Anyhow, my apologies, but that’s how it is.’

  ‘Are you unaware,’ Crompton said, ‘that you are incomplete, unfinished, a caricature of a man rather than a complete portrait? Don’t you know that your only possibility of dragging yourself out of the gutter of your life into the clear, godlike atmosphere of self-transcendence is through fusion with me?’

  ‘I know,’ Loomis said with a sigh. ‘And sometimes I do have the desire to find something pure, sacred, serene, and untouched by the hands of men.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘But frankly, I don’t think about that sort of thing too much. I can get by without it, you know? Especially now that Gilliam has split and I can start getting around a little more. I’m just having too much fun to give it all up in order to take up residence in your head, Al, no insult intended.’

  ‘Your present state of happiness is only temporary, as you must be aware. It will soon pass, like all of the other ephemeral things in your life, and you will return to the misery that has haunted most of your existence.’

  ‘Actually, it hasn’t been so bad,’ Loomis said. ‘I really don’t mind going right on with it just the way it’s been.’

  ‘Then consider this,’ Crompton said. ‘Your personality resides in a Durier body, which has an estimated competence of forty-five years. You are thirty-five now. You have no more than ten more years to go.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Loomis said.

  ‘That means that in ten years, you’ll be dead.’

  ‘I understand what it means,’ Loomis said. Thoughtfully he lighted a handmade cigarette with a red dot near the filter.

  ‘Reintegration won’t be so bad,’ Crompton said, twisting his face into agreeable lines. ‘We’ll all do our best, you and the other fellow we still have to get in touch with. We will settle our differences in a rational, amicable manner and it will all be fine. What do you say?’

  Loomis thought hard, drawing on his cigarette. At last he sighed and said, ‘No.’

  ‘But your very life –’

  ‘I simply can’t get worked up·about that sort of thing,’ Loomis said. ‘It’s enough for me to dig each crazy moment as as it trundles past. Ten years is a long time, something’s bound to turn up.’

  ‘Nothing will turn up,’ Crompton said. ‘In ten years you’ll be dead. Just dead.’

  ‘Well, you can never tell. …’

  ‘Dead!’

  Loomis said, ‘Must you keep on saying that?’

  ‘It’s true. You will be dead!’

  ‘Yeah, it is true,’ Loomis said. He thought and smoked. Then his expression brightened. He said, ‘I guess we’ll just have to do this fusion, then.’

  ‘Now you’re talking!’

  ‘In about nine years.’

  ‘That’s quite impossible,’ Crompton said. ‘Do you think I am simply going to hang around this ridiculous planet for nine years waiting for you to make up your mind?’

  ‘Well – what else can you do?’ Loomis asked reasonably. ‘Come on, old man, let’s not quarrel. I have always found that things have a miraculous way of working themselves out if you simply ignore them and go about your business. Come with me, Alistair. I want to ask your opinion on something.’

  He led Crompton downstairs to a basement workshop. In one corner there was something that looked a little like an electronic organ. It had many switches and buttons and foot pedals, and resembled the cockpit of an anachronistic 747. There was a little footstool in front of it. Loomis sat down and turned on the power.

  ‘This,’ he said to Crompton, ‘is a Wurlitzer-Venco Self-Expression Machine.’

  He flicked switches with both hands. ‘Now I have energized it and set the tone-values. The predominant mood, as you can tell from the clear yellows and oranges projected on the wall in front of you, is one of deep self-pity. This I further embellish through the musical theme which the machine will now produce, and also through the verses which it will write and reproduce in the lower left-hand corner of the big screen to your left. Listen, Alistair.’

  Loomis emoted at the machine, and the machine translated his emotions into colors, forms, rhythms, into chanted verse, into dance forms danced by elegant puppets, into gray ocean and black night, and into bleeding purple-edged sunsets suffused with sunburnt laughter and shaken by tremors of impotent rage. Misty, multicolored scenes came into focus, filled with odd wispy people who enacted dramas of curious import; and in these various representaglia, as they were technically called, one could feel the childhood dreams of the man, his first bewildering sexual cravings, his long and agonized school days, his first
love on his second summer holiday, and much, much more, all flowing to the present, woven and intertwined in all of the art forms available in this series (except for soap-bubble sculpture, a brand-new feature available only with the new Mark V Wurlitzer-Venco) and coming at last to the brilliant and paradoxical coda in which all the various elements were subordinated to their proper place in the ensemble of qualities that made up the projected image of the man, yet each highlighting and evoking the individuality of the others, and thus bringing out – by default, as it were – its own uniqueness. And so it ended and the two men were silent for a time.

  At last Loomis said, ‘What do you think? Be completely frank; politeness is misplaced at a time like this.’

  ‘Well then,’ Crompton said, ‘I must tell you that is exactly what everyone plays on Self-Expression Machines.’

  ‘I see,’ Loomis said frigidly, pinching his nose in a gesture of inner pain.

  He sat for a time, brooding silently. Then presently he cheered up and said, ‘Well, what the hell! It’s only a hobby! I just dabble at it, you know. But I do think I achieved some pretty effects for an amateur, don’t you? Let’s get together for a drink sometime. How long did you say you were staying?’

  ‘Only long enough to Reintegrate you,’ Crompton said.

  ‘Then it’s going to be a long stay,’ Loomis said. ‘Because I’m staying just the way I am.’

  He turned back to the Self-Expression Machine and played a cheerful little piece compounded of the sounds, smells, and images of lust, greed, and intoxication. Crompton left before the reprise.

  13

  He wandered aimlessly through the streets, uncertain of his next move. His glittering premise had broken apart. Somehow it had never occurred to him that Loomis, a mere segment of himself, and not too bright a segment at that, might prefer to go it through life alone.

  He pulled himself together sufficiently to hail a taxi. It was a six-legged semiliving Ford Vivacoupe – the XFK model with the 240-cubic-inch stomach and the hemispheric kidneys. He fitted his feet into the stirrups, gave the address of his hotel to the built-in driver surrogate, and lolled disconsolately against the well-worn pommel. By divergent paths the bitter insight came to him: better love’s disreputable counterfeit than the eternal highwire act on the slippery catenaries of your own nerves. He was very close to tears at that moment.

  The taxi clattered down the incident-strewn streets of Cetesphe. Crompton, preoccupied with his misery, did not even notice the Testercian funeral procession that passed, led by the corpse itself, gaily decked in harlequin colors, his flippers animated by minute electrical impulses directed by the priest-technicians nearby.

  The Hotel Granspruinge came into sight, but Crompton indicated to the taxi that it should drive on. A certain unstable dynamism – the product, perhaps, of helplessness times in-security – had invaded his being. Though normally a well-controlled man, even by his own stringent standards, he had decided that this was the time for the occasional crazy plunge he did allow himself.

  ‘Do you happen to know,’ he asked the taxi, ‘where I could find a Moodalizer Den?’

  The taxi, though only half alive, and not gifted with intelligence in the usual sense of that word, was nevertheless able to make an immediate U-turn and proceed down a narrow alley until it came to a store which bore a flashing neon sign reading:

  joe’s moodalizer.

  Crompton got out of the taxi and paid. He entered the Moodalizer, trembling slightly from anticipation. What he was doing wasn’t really wrong, he had to remind himself.

  The proprietor, a bald sweating fat man in an undershirt, looked up from his comic book long enough to indicate an empty cubicle to Crompton. Crompton went in and quickly stripped down to his underwear. His breath came more heavily as he fitted the electrodes into place on his forehead, arms, legs, and chest.

  ‘All right,’ he called out, ‘I’m ready to order.’

  ‘Okay,’ the fat man said. ‘You know the rules. You get one from Column A and one from Column B. Our selections for the day are printed on the menu on the wall.’

  Alistair scanned the selections. ‘Under Column A – State of Mind – I think I’d like number five, Courageous Equanimity. Unless you’d recommend sixteen, Daring Insouciance?’

  It’s running a little thin tonight,’ the fat man said. ‘If I were you I’d stick with five. Or try seventeen, Satanic Cunning, very piquant tonight with especially selected Oriental emotional ingredients. I can also recommend twenty-three, All-wise Compassion.’

  ‘I’ll stick with five,’ Crompton said. ‘Now for Column B, Contents of Mind. I think I’d like a nice number twelve, Tight-packed Logical Thought Forms Garnished with Mystic Insights and Sprinkled with a Seasoning of Understanding and Humor.’

  ‘That’s always a good one,’ the fat man said. ‘But let me suggest our special tonight, number one thirty-one, Inspirational Associations under Pale Rose Jelly Visions, and Garnished with Humor and Pathos. And we are famous for our number seventy-eight, Whole Sensuality Thoughts Served on a Bed of Butterfly Random Insights with a Topping of Humor and Gravity.’

  ‘Could you possibly let me have two from Column B? I’d make it worth your while.’

  ‘Can’t do it, buddy,’ the fat man said. ‘Too great a risk for you. It could send you into terminal oscillation, and lose me my license.’

  ‘Then I’ll take twelve from Column B, but leave out the humor.’ (These places sprinkled it over everything.)

  ‘Right,’ the fat man said. He set his instruments. ‘Get ready. Here it comes!’

  Crompton felt the familiar sense of wonder and gratitude as the current hit. He was suddenly calm, utterly serene, and filled with a joyous sense of certainty. Energy and stability flooded through him, and with them came insights of great subtlety and depth. Crompton saw the vast and complex cobwebbing that connects all parts of the universe, and he was at the center of it, in his rightful place in the Scheme of Things. Then he understood that not only was he a man, he was also all men, and an axiomatic expression of the commonality of the species. Inviolable joy welled up in him; he possessed the will of Alexander, the wisdom of Socrates, the scope of Aristotle. He knew what things were all about. …

  ‘Time’s up, buddy,’ the fat man called out as the machinery clicked off.

  Crompton tried to hold on to the splendid mood which the Moodalizer had induced, but it slid away from him and he was himself once more, and trapped in the claustrophobic confines of his situation. All he was left with was a fragile and indistinct memory. But that, though intangible, was still something.

  He returned to his hotel room feeling marginally better.

  Soon he grew despondent again. He lay on his bed and felt sorry for himself. It really was unfair! He had come to Aaia with the perfectly reasonable expectation of finding in Loomis a creature even more miserable than himself, a thin and inadequate personality disgusted with the futile inanities of his existence and eager, no, pathetically grateful for a chance to attain wholeness.

  Instead he had found a man well pleased with himself, a man content to continue wallowing in the brutish sensual pleasures that all authorities agree can never bring true happiness.

  Loomis did not want him! This inexplicable and astounding fact undermined the very basis of Crompton’s planning and left him without apparent recourse. For you cannot coerce a part of you into joining the rest of you. This is a law of nature as old as exfoliation.

  But he had to have Loomis.

  He considered his options. He could leave Aaia and go to Ygga, find and incorporate the other aspect of his personality, Dan Stack, then return and try again with Loomis. But the two planets lay half a galaxy apart, the logistics were too tricky and the costs too great, and it was a lousy idea anyhow. Loomis had to be dealt with immediately, not put off until another time.

  But perhaps he should give up the whole mad venture. Why not go to some pleasant Earth-type planet, and there make whatever adjustments he cou
ld on his own? It wouldn’t be so bad. There was, after all, a certain joy in hard, dedicated work, a sort of pleasure in denying oneself pleasures, and a sour happiness to be found in steadiness, circumspection, dependability. …

  To hell with that!

  He sat up on the bed, his narrow face set in lines of determination. So Loomis refused to fuse with him? That was what Loomis thought! Little did Loomis know of Crompton’s iron will, his tenacity, his unshakable resolve. Loomis was selfish, stubborn only when the mood was on him, perseverant only when things were going his way. And he was subject to the rapidly changing moods that are the hallmark of the unstable cyclothymic pleasure-seeking personality.

  ‘Before I’m through with him,’ Crompton said, ‘he’ll come crawling to me on his hands and knees, begging to be taken in.’

  It would call for patience; but that was Crompton’s chief asset. Patience, cunning, determination, and a measure of ruthlessness – those were the qualities by which Crompton expected to capture his butterfly-minded component.

  Master of himself once again, Crompton mentally reviewed his circumstances. He realized at once that he could not remain in the Hotel Grandspruinge. It was much too expensive. He needed to conserve his money against unknown contingencies.

  He packed, settled his bill, and went out and hailed a taxi. ‘I need a cheap room,’ he told the driver. ‘Si hombre, por qué no?’ the driver responded, and proceeded across the Bridge of Sighs that connects luxurious downtown Cetesphe with the slums of East Cetesphe.

  14

  The taxi took Crompton deep into the notorious Pigfat district of South Cetesphe. Here the streets were narrow and cobblestoned, and ran, or rather, staggered, through numerous compound windings and adventitious turns. A permanent yellowish gray fog lay over the district, and the gutters were uniformly full of slops. Although it had been midday when Crompton left the Grandspruinge, in Pigfat it was always dusk going on night.