Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  Detached, floating free from it all, Crompton watched with muzzy interest as intimacy progressed through winks and nods and gestures and little suggestive comments not always in the best of taste. Soon they were dancing, and then Loomis generously receded, leaving Crompton in command of the body’s volition – nervous, flushed, tangle-footed, and enormously pleased with himself. And it was Crompton who led her back to the table, Crompton who made small talk with her, and Crompton who touched her hand, while the complacent and Machiavellian Loomis looked on.

  At 3:00 A.M., ship’s time, the ship’s bar closed. After a final exchange of pleasantries with Alice-June, Crompton reeled back to his cabin on B deck and collapsed happily on the bed. This evening had been the most fun he had ever had in his whole life. He wanted to lie on the bed now and savor it. But this was not Loomis’s idea at all.

  ‘Well?’ Loomis asked.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Let’s have a quick piss and get going. The invitation was clear enough.’

  ‘I didn’t hear any invitation,’ Crompton said, puzzled.

  ‘She told you her room number rather pointedly,’ Loomis said. ‘That, together with the events of the evening, constitutes more a demand than an invitation.’

  ‘Is that really how this sort of thing works?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘It’s one of the more typical ways.’

  ‘I just can’t believe it!’

  ‘Take my word for it, Alistair, I do have some slight degree of expertise in these matters. Let’s get going.’

  Crompton struggled to his feet, then collapsed across the bed again. ‘No, I wouldn’t … I couldn’t … I mean to say, I haven’t …’

  ‘Lack of experience is no problem whatsoever,’ Loomis said, firmly pulling them to a sitting position. ‘Nature is exceedingly generous in helping one to discover how to do what She considers important for creatures to do together. I will bring to your attention the fact that beavers, racoons, rattlesnakes, scarab beetles, and other creatures without a hundredth of your intelligence manage to perform what you find so baffling. You mustn’t let down the species, Al!’

  Crompton got to his feet, wiped his glowing forehead, and took two tentative steps toward the door. Then he walked back and sat down once again on the bed.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s out of the question,’ he said.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘It would be unethical. The young lady is married.’

  ‘Marriage,’ Loomis said patiently, ‘is a human invention of very recent origin, considering the history of homo sapiens. But before marriage there were men and women, and certain sexual modes between them. Natural law always takes precedence over human legislation.’

  ‘I still think it’s immoral,’ Crompton said, without much vigor.

  ‘But how could you possibly think that?’ Loomis asked, astonished. ‘You are unmarried, so no possible blame can attach to you for your actions.’

  ‘But the young lady is married.’

  ‘Of course she is. That’s her responsibility, not yours. She is first and foremost a human being, not some mere chattel of her husband. She has the God-given right to make her own decisions, and I believe that we must respect that.’

  ‘I never thought of it that way,’ Crompton said.

  ‘So that takes care of her. Finally, there is the husband. He will know nothing of this, and therefore will not be injured by it. In fact, he will gain. For Alice-June, in recompense, will be much nicer to him than she’s been in some time. He will assume that this is because of his forceful personality, and his ego will be beneficially bolstered thereby. So you see, Al, it’s one of those situations that comes along every once in a while in which everyone gains and nobody loses. Isn’t that nice for us?’

  ‘It’s all a lot of sophistry,’ Crompton grumbled, standing up again and walking toward the door.

  ‘Right on, baby,’ said Loomis.

  Crompton grinned idiotically and opened the door. Then a thought struck him with invincible compunction and he slammed the door shut and lay down again on the bed.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ Loomis asked.

  ‘Those reasons you gave me,’ Crompton said, ‘may or may not be sound. I don’t have enough experience of this sort of thing to know. But there is one thing I do know. I will not engage in anything of this sort while you are watching!’

  Loomis was taken aback. ‘But damn it, Al, there is no you or me. I’m you! You’re me! We’re two parts of the same personality!’

  ‘Not yet we aren’t,’ Crompton said. ‘At present we exist as separate schizoid parts, two different people in a single body. Later, after we’ve taken in Dan Stack and the three of us go into true Reintegration … Well, it will be different then. But under the present circumstances, my sense of decency forbids me from doing what you suggest. It is simply unthinkable and I do not wish to discuss it any further.’

  Loomis lapsed into furious silence. Crompton undressed, put on his pajamas, and went to bed.

  22

  ‘It seems to me,’ Crompton said the following morning over coffee, ‘that you and I must have a serious discussion.’

  ‘What’s on your mind, buddy?’ Loomis asked with offensive cheerfulness.

  ‘I wish to remind you that we are engaged in an important and dangerous enterprise. We must find and incorporate Dan Stack, and do it quickly, for our own situation is delicate and precarious in the extreme. We have no time for drunkenness and fun; all that will be possible in due time. But for now there is work to be done. There must be no repetition of last night. Do I make myself clear?’

  Loomis’s thoughtform expressed a civilized and rueful weariness. ‘Alistair, you really are difficult to get along with. I know it’s all terribly serious, but right now we’re sitting in a spaceship without anything to do.’

  ‘I have thought about that,’ Crompton said. ‘We can employ our time most usefully at present by learning haut-Yggal, the main language of the planet we are going to.’

  ‘Learn a language, just like that? I have no aptitude for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Then you can watch quietly while I learn.’

  In the ship’s library, Crompton found a copy of Bender’s Dialectical Variations of Various Common Expressions in Haut-Yggal. He began to study. Loomis amused himself by rerunning his memories of the previous night until Crompton asked him him to desist, as it interfered with his concentration.

  After lunch, Crompton took a nap, then exercised for an hour, then worked on a crossword puzzle. Loomis made no objections. But in the early evening he did request a glass of beer. Crompton was glad to comply with this request. He was not entirely prudish.

  The beer tasted just a little strange. Crompton commented on this to Loomis. Loomis said something, but Crompton lost the words in the vast and shuddering emptiness that had just opened around him. Tables, chairs, dust motes, and bright yellow napkins had begun a stately procession around him as he passed out.

  The next thing Crompton knew it was morning. Puffy-eyed, flatulent, and with an unbelievable headache, he dragged himself out of bed. His cabin looked as if Tamerlane and a regiment of the Golden Horde had held a victory celebration there last night. The floor was littered with bottles, and the ashtrays were filled with skinny little butts. Various garments were still strewn around, and some of them were unmistakably feminine. Cheap perfume filled his nostrils, and it was mingled with the acrid chemical odor of illegal stupefacients.

  Crompton tottered to his feet. He felt pain in his left thigh. Looking down, he saw tooth-marks. He also noticed a smear of feminine cosmetics on his chest.

  There were other signata of sexual incontinence too embarrassing for Crompton even to acknowledge.

  ‘Loomis,’ he said, ‘you drugged me and perpetrated a nauseating debauch using my body last night. What do you have to say for yourself?’

  ‘Only that I am through taking orders from you,’ Loomis declared spunkily. ‘What gives you the right to tell me
what to do or not do? I’m not your slave! I am legally your equal! Hereafter, you may run the body by day and study whatever you please; but I shall have it to myself in the nights!’

  Crompton forced himself to remain calm. ‘You will have control of this body only when and for how long I allow you.’

  ‘But that’s not fair!’

  ‘I would be glad to give you an equal share in operating the body if you were willing to shoulder even a minimal share of the responsibility. But since you do not care for useful behavior, I must act in terms of the better interests of both of us.’

  ‘What makes you the big judge of useful behavior? It’s typical fascist-pig thinking.’

  ‘Watch your mouth,’ Crompton warned.

  ‘Fuck you, fascist pig!’

  At that, Crompton’s thin edge of control crumpled. Red rage consumed him, and he was swept by the imperious desire to destroy his detestable alter ego. Caught off guard by this flood of destructive emotion, Loomis tried to rally, to fight back, to maintain his psychic equilibrium.

  His struggle was to no avail. Crompton’s rage produced a sudden massive flood of antidols – units of psychic energy whose function is to expunge pain. Loomis fought back furiously: he knew that if the antidol process went to completion, he could be lost forever, walled off, encysted in a forgotten cul-de-sac in Crompton’s mind.

  ‘Alistair!’ he screamed. ‘Don’t do it! You need me to Reintegrate with!’

  Crompton heard him and knew what he said was true. He fought down the unexpected blood-lust still singing in his veins and grasped at his remaining modicum of sanity. With a main heave he imposed control over his raging emotions.

  The antidol cordon swiftly collapsed, leaving Loomis shaken but unhurt.

  For a while they weren’t on speaking terms. Loomis sulked and brooded for an entire day and swore that he would never forgive Crompton’s brutality. But he had no talent for hating. Above all he was a sensualist, living the moment, forgetful of the past, incapable of worry about the future. His resentments soon passed, leaving him with his normal sunny disposition.

  Crompton recognized his responsibilities as the dominant part of the personality. Regretting his murderous outburst he worked hard at making himself agreeable. For the rest of the flight they maintained a good, though careful, relationship.

  At last they reached Ygga. They were sent down to the Inducation Satellite, where they passed through customs and immigration. They received injections to prevent Creeping Fever, Green River Plague, Elbow Rot, Knight’s Disease, Chorpster’s Syndrome, and Halloran’s Itch. They were then permitted to take the shuttle down to Yggaville.

  23

  Ygga was the sole planet of the gray dwarf star Ioannis (BGT 344590). A pear-shaped world with an oscillation moment of seven degrees seven minutes at apehelion, Ygga had a terranormic rating of 65892, and a typical Class C spread of minerals except for the sole and unaccountable absence of molybdenum.

  The planet had four continents, three of which were buried under lava and were accordingly uninhabited except by microscopic lava-eaters and their parasites. The fourth continent, Clorapsemia, had a landmass roughly equivalent to Asia and Africa combined. Meandering in an undulent and deckle-edged ribbon along Ygga’s equator, this continent recapitulated a climate and flora and fauna roughly equivalent to some of the better years of Earth’s Carboniferous Age.

  The autochthonous, indigenous, and eponymous race of Ygga, the Yggans, were of remote reptilian ancestry. Standing about eight feet tall, extremely strong and agile, bloodthirsty and of a crude sense of humor, the Yggans were a menace to the Terran minority that controlled their planet. An undeclared war smoldered between the two races, complicated by the fact that the Yggans could not be legally killed, being protected by interstellar protocols. Terrans were not protected from the Yggans by a similar law, however, since the Yggans did not recognize any law except their own, which no one else recognized. Their unruly ways were condoned only because it was usually just worthless, jobless Terrans who got killed, whereas otherwise they would be eligible for social benefits. In addition, this arrangement tended to obscure the knowledge that the Yggans were a dying race whose birthrate had fallen to zero ever since the Terrans had sprayed their planet with Supercyclone B, a gas that induces sterility in reptiles and in certain rare types of moths.

  Yggaville, the chief city of northwest Clorapsemia continent, was a tropical sort of place with broad dusty boulevards decked out in open-air stalls where grinning natives sold hand-chewn tata-bark refulgences for the flourishing art deco market on nearby Nesbitt IV.

  At City Hall, Crompton subverted a stubborn clerk into releasing Dan Stack’s last known address. This was in the city of Inyoyo, a musk-pearl collection point on the left bank of the Greenish River. To reach this place was no easy task, however, for Inyoyo lay behind the Great Swamp of Kilbi, which covered an area equal to all of Western Europe excluding Albania. To cross this one had to join an expedition, and Crompton found one that was departed the following morning.

  After a restless night at the Hotel Ygga, where swarthy plantation owners held noisy reunions with shrill blond harpies until dawn, Crompton went to Collection Street, the starting point for the expedition.

  Trips into the interior were organized with considerable care. The most important feature of every expedition, of course, was its falaya craft. These were boats with hulls made of a local balsa-wood-type plant, ovoid in shape and capable of bearing the weight of a dozen men, or of two ziernies.

  The ziernies were the bell-hoofed hornless oxen of Ygga, the standard transport across the swamplands. The ziernies were physically similar to the East Indian water buffalo, differing mainly in having sphincter muscles around their fore-kneecaps, for a reason no one had ascertained. These great, tireless beasts were capable of plodding rapidly through the soupy mixture of sand, water, clay, malt, and borax crystals that made up the greater part of the swamp. When aroused, the ziernies were capable of attaining speeds of five miles an hour, or better, slapping the water with their bell-shaped feet and creating a partial vacuum through which the falaya craft could easily be towed. The drawback of the ziernie was its tendency to metamorphose unexpectedly into its alternate form, which was long and flat and batlike and of no use to Terrans whatsoever. In this way they differed considerably from their Terran cognates, but were good-tempered and sweet-smelling brutes despite that.

  At considerable expense Crompton rented his own ziernie, driver, and falaya craft. He also had to purchase a knapsack, folding tent, pink plastic washbasin, canteen with orange canvas cover, two compasses, a supply of Compactoplex food pellets, a Swiss Army knife, and a miniature collator with a twelve-month charge.

  At last everything was ready. The wagonmaster gave two warning blasts on the traditional rhinoceros-hide bugle, then one more. The expedition set off, accompanied by the deep-throated singing of the Yggan paddlers. Their chant can be roughly translated as follows:

  By diverse and paradoxical means the spirit of mud

  Consigns grief to the heavens and sharp wings to the face

  That haunts the watery wastes of the dark swamp Mother

  Whose trace is her ritual and whose somber sweet nostrils.

  The exact meaning of this plaintive and evocative text awaits the publication of a definitive book on Yggan psychology. For now, it can only be pointed out that in common with many tribal chants throughout the galaxy, obscurity is made to carry a heavy burden.

  24

  Loomis claimed at first that he wanted to participate in the operation of the body. But this was not exactly true. What Loomis wanted was to be there for the interesting parts. He wanted to taste the varied flavors and textures of food, experience the sensation of thirst-quenching, look at fascinating objects and hear amusing sounds. But he didn’t want to be in conscious control and full sensory contact during the nasty spells.

  The interminable days of traveling through the swamp seemed to be made up mostly of nas
ty spells. ‘Take over,’ Crompton would say, and abruptly Loomis would be tipped out of the dreamy mental domain that he usually inhabited into the seat of consciousness. One moment he would be floating along in a disembodied high, drifting on the waves of images that dimly limned the external world for him, blurrily, as through a translucent screen; the next instant, pow! he’s in the head, looking out of the eyes – those gritty, tired eyes – sick of staring at the monotonous gray-green vegetation or the grimy, insect-bitten backs of the bearers.

  But the visual impact was the least of it. Consider the olfactory situation: plunged from his odorless cocoon into the dusky pungencies of the bearers, the burnt-meat smell of rotting vegetation, the unbearable chlorine-and-violet odor of the ziernie’s stools, all combined with the sharp ammoniac scent of Crompton’s own perspiration.

  How Crompton himself – possessor of one of the human race’s truly discriminating noses – could stand this cacophonous stench, and do so uncomplainingly, was a measure of the hard-driving stoicism of the man. Loomis considered the situation to be frankly unbearable. (The odors of alien places are difficult to describe, but frequently subsume the essence of a place more vividly than the more usual visual description. Who will forget Clarenden’s statement that Alkmene V smells ‘exactly like a bison’s fart delivered through a vat of rancid goat’s cheese’? Or Grignek’s statement about Gnushi II – ‘an aroma rather like the amalgamation of molasses and cold cream in the belly of a putrefying anteater’?)

  But even smell was not the worst of it. What was really intolerable was that Loomis, all sleepy and good-natured and lazy, had to take over and feel the maddening itching of Crompton’s eczema, had to caw angrily through aching throat at the skylarking bearers, had to feel the continual anxiety of waiting for a possible native attack, and worst of all, had to make continuous effort to push the tired body onward, resisting the desire to call a halt, take a break, give up the whole damned thing.