Crompton Divided

by Robert Sheckley

  Sometimes they would refer to another man they called ‘Finch.’ He evidently was one of them. But he never said a word.

  Hertha decided that she liked all three of them, though in different ways. Crompton was her favorite because he was so pathetic.

  Their argument went on interminably. Toward dawn Hertha grew chilly as the mists crept in from the river. The three voices were still going at it. She tried to get into the conversation, but they ignored her. So, after giving the matter due consideration, she got into bed with them.

  That took their attention off their quarrel and onto her, at last, and most gratifyingly.

  Later, Hertha couldn’t decide whether or not what ensued should technically be called an orgy. Whatever it was, it was very good: all of those men seemed to have been without women for a very long time. They were each different: Stack was masculine and loving, Loomis was skillful and amusing, and Crompton, though reluctant at first, was boyish and inexperienced, and sweet.

  That afternoon Crompton awoke before the others and explained the situation to Hertha. The orange-haired woman listened quietly as he related the events that had brought them to this condition.

  ‘Wow,’ she said at last,’that’s really something. But now that you’re all together in one head, what’s supposed to happen?’

  ‘We’re supposed to Reintegrate,’ Crompton said, speaking softly so as not to awaken the others.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we’re supposed to become a single, whole individual. But it hasn’t happened yet, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything you can do?’

  Crompton shrugged. ‘I’ve tried everything I can think of. My doctor on Earth warned me that there was only a small chance of bringing it off. But I had to try.’

  ‘So what’ll happen now?’

  ‘I’m afraid that I – we – are going crazy. None of us is able to control the others. I’m supposed to be the most stable of the bunch, and I’m just about at the end of my strength.’

  ‘Can’t you boys reach some sort of compromise?’ Hertha asked.

  ‘We’ve tried,’ Crompton told her. ‘But it never lasts. Not even when we take turns using the body. The conflicts between us simply can’t be resolved. Hertha, you have been good to us. Now I want you to leave this room before the others awaken. This time there may be violence.’

  ‘Hey, I got an idea,’ Hertha said. ‘Why don’t you see my psychiatrist. He’s done wonders for me.’

  ‘It would be useless,’ Crompton said. ‘Some of the finest doctors on Earth looked into my case, and they weren’t able to do a thing for me.’

  ‘Try Dr. Bates anyhow!’ Hertha cried. ‘You can never tell, maybe something new has turned up since you left Earth.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ Crompton said. ‘The others will be waking up soon. This time it will be the final showdown. Frankly, I’m glad it’s finally come. I’m just too tired to care anymore.’

  Crompton’s head slumped. His eyes closed and his face grew slack. Then, abruptly, he sat upright. Now his eyes were wide open, unfocused, and his features were set in an expression that Hertha had not seen before.

  ‘Hertha, do not be frightened,’ a voice said from Crompton’s mouth. It was a deep, gentle voice, unlike the others.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Hertha, you have in your possession a drug called Blue Twilight.’

  ‘That’s dangerous stuff. How did you know I’ve got some?’

  ‘Give this body four capsules of it.’

  ‘Like hell! That’s a strong dose!’

  The drug will not hurt them. In their present state, it will have the effect of a strong soporific.’

  ‘It’ll put them to sleep? How will that help?’

  ‘The others will sleep; but Crompton is immune to the psychosterazine family to which Blue Twilight belongs. He will be able to maintain sanity and control of the body for a few days longer.’

  ‘I know who you are!’ Hertha cried. ‘You’re Finch!’

  ‘Give them the drug,’ the deep solemn voice said. ‘Tell Crompton I advise him visiting your doctor at once, and taking his advice.’

  Hertha got the capsules and stuffed four of them into Crompton’s mouth. Finch’s wide and expressionless eyes did not watch her.

  ‘Why didn’t you help them before?’ Hertha asked. ‘Isn’t there anything else you can do for them? What sort of person are you, anyhow?’

  ‘I am not a person,’ Finch said. ‘I am not even yet a nobody. I have done nothing, and that’s something. Maybe you have dreamed all this.’

  And then Finch was gone.

  When Crompton woke up, she told him what had happened.

  Crompton shook his head and said, ‘I don’t like it. Finch is there, but he won’t talk to us. I don’t know what he wants.’

  ‘To live, I suppose,’ Hertha said.

  "No, I don’t think Finch cares about that. … But I want to live!’

  Hertha’s doctor agreed to see Crompton at once.

  ‘Four complete personalities in a single body!’ Dr. Bates said, putting away his cognoscope. ‘That is quite rare, you know, but not unprecedented.’

  ‘We can’t seem to integrate,’ Crompton told him. ‘We can’t even cooperate. We’re fighting all the time and we’re just about at the end of the road. Can you help us?’

  ‘I wish I could,’ Bates said. ‘We don’t come by this sort of thing very often out here in Ygga. But to be honest, I do not have the resources and equipment that your case requires.’

  ‘What do you suggest, then? Should we go back to Earth and look for treatment?’

  Bates shook his head slowly. ‘Your case requires the finest and most advanced techniques available. There is only one place for that. It is quite new, and frankly, experimental. Have you ever heard of Aion Project?’

  36

  Getting to Aion proved easier than Crompton had anticipated. He had only to take the shuttle from Brenh’a to Yggaville, and then go to the nearest travel agency to book his passage onward. As luck would have it, there was a spaceship leaving for Tung-Bradar that very afternoon, arriving there in time for Crompton to make the Star Valley Connection to Aion.

  The journey provided a restful interlude. Crompton became friendly with the ship’s drunken Scots android doctor – a fellow crossword fanatic – who provided him with a supply of Blott-44, one of the newer psychosteroids. Through its unique Peripheral Inspread Effect (PIE), Loomis and Stack continued in their deep sleep. Finch showed no response to the drug. But Finch didn’t count except as an ominous presence who communicated only his absence.

  Crompton, for the first time in many weeks, was the sole and undisputed master of his mind/body. He enjoyed this very much despite the inevitable side effects of the drug – rash on the left side of the nose, greenish saliva, and itchy index fingers.

  How blissful, those days in space! Crompton wished he could just go on like this, his own master, all problems suspended indefinitely. But he had been warned: it would only be a matter of days before habituation set in and Loomis and Stack were clamorously with him once more.

  He read with care the brochure for Aion that the travel agency had given him. It was entitled, Provisional Notes Toward a Paper on Certain Aspects of the Aion Project.

  The Aion Project, snuggled beneath its force dome on the otherwise inhospitable planet Demeter V, is comprised of some ten thousand square miles landscaped to look like California. The result is a green and hospitable land with mountains, valleys, plains, tempting beaches, good restaurants, recreation of every sort, and – of course! – therapies of every description.

  All manner of beings come to Aion for assistance, from a bewildering variety of backgrounds and orientations. We try to deal sensitively with all. In our view, all therapies are aspects of a single universal therapy, just as all conscious creatures are aspects of a single Universal Consciousness.

  Wheth
er this is true or not, it is a beautiful conception, well worth thinking about.

  We at Aion are not formalists, nor are we blind worshippers of academic expertise. We write no textbooks, hold no psychological conferences, and try not to overuse the word symbol. We claim no formal knowledge, no special skills, and we utterly repudiate the ‘guru’ role that patients sometimes force on us in their misguided search for an easy path to self-transcendence. In spite of this, perhaps it would not be too paradoxical to state that whatever can be done for you, we can do, and whatever can’t be done for you, we can help you to learn how to do for yourself; and all at competitive rates.

  We hope that this clears up some of the more common misconceptions concerning Aion. Let us conclude by saying, ‘Welcome! You are indeed a lucky sentient creature to have reached so propitious a place as this. Make the best of your opportunity and work diligently to achieve your salvation.’

  Crompton thought it sounded a little vague, but promising all the same. Anyhow, he was committed. The ship was landing, and Loomis was muttering in his sleep.

  37

  Crompton went through immigration, health, and customs, and was sent to reception. Here a pretty blond girl in tartan tights helped him fill out his paperwork, collected the fee (200,000 SVUs, nonrefundable), assigned him an apartment, and gave him a map which showed the various features on Aion, including restaurants, boutiques, movie theaters, sex shops, and bowling alleys, also the locations of several hundred ongoing therapies of various sorts, any or all of which he was welcome to join.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ she told him, ‘just take, it’s all included in the fee. The Center will contact you as soon as you’re settled in. Good luck.’

  ‘Have you been through the therapy yourself?’ Crompton asked.

  She shook her head. ‘They wouldn’t accept me. Told me to come back when I had some real problems. The bastards! And they talk about compassion! It really bugs me because I know that beneath my apparent placidity and normalcy I am a deeply troubled person. Do you think it shows at all?’

  ‘Not that I can see,’ Crompton said.

  She sighed, ‘Oh well, I suppose you’ve got a lot of sick, huh?’

  ‘Well,’ Crompton said, ‘I am a paranoid schizophrenic with three different personalities to contend with as well as my own. I guess that’s about as sick as they come outside of a funny farm.’

  ‘Three different personalities!’she said, looking at Crompton with sudden interest.

  ‘I must admit,’ Crompton said, ‘that one of them never says a word and is really no problem. But the other two are a handful.’

  The receptionist’s eyes were glowing and her lips were moist as she murmured, ‘You’re really a Heavy Case, aren’t you? I knew it as soon as I saw you. There’s a certain aura that the Heavy ones have … By the way, my name is Sue. What about coming up to my apartment tonight and I’ll cook dinner and we’ll laugh it up and maybe you can give me a few pointers on spotting my disorders. I know that I’m crazy deep down, but I never can get the symptoms straight.’

  Looking at her eager face and parted lips, Crompton realized that even madness has its ranking order, its heroes, and its groupies. Aion was a place where sickness was the sole industry; so it stood to reason that the real lunatics would be the stars of this culture. It was even probable that an ordinary, garden-variety neurotic would feel outclassed here. After all, your midlife-crisis executive or sexually frustrated housewife wasn’t what Aion was all about. No, Aion was for the far-out ones like Crompton with three personalities fighting it out for possession of his body and whatever went with it. That was the action of Aion!

  Crompton’s response was formed by this insight. He said, ‘Thanks, Sue, I’d really love to do that some other time. But now I’ve got to get myself sorted out first.’

  ‘That’s what all the Heavy Cases say,’ Sue said sadly. ‘Oh well. Here comes your Two-Hour Friend.’

  A tall thin black man was approaching. He had a cheerful face and a great head of wiry hair.

  ‘My what?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘It is well known,’ Sue said, ‘that a Friend is just exactly what a person with heavy psychological difficulties arriving all shook up in a strange place most needs.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘So the Aion Foundation provides a Friend for each incoming guest. The job is on a volunteer basis, but only for two hours at a time since being friends with a person you have nothing in common with and care nothing about is difficult and taxing work.’

  ‘Hi,’ the black man said. ‘I’m Kavi, I come from Fiji.’

  ‘I do not need an assigned Friend,’ Crompton said. ‘I really resent –’

  ‘Don’t tell it to me,’ Sue said, ‘tell it to your Friend. That’s what he’s there for.’

  ‘Tell me all about it, baby,’ Kavi said, and Crompton let the Fijian lead him outside to a taxi.

  38

  Kavi helped Crompton settle into a modern one-room apartment on Polyani Boulevard. The place was equipped with an automatic videorecording system that took down every word you uttered and every gesture you made. This was so that patients could monitor their past behavior and thus keep an eye on the progress they were making. Crompton, not untypically, disconnected the apparatus. He wanted to know when the real therapy would begin, and how many hours a day it would require, and what he was supposed to do, and so forth. Kavi told him that there was no fixed procedure.

  ‘You must remember,’ the good-natured Fijian said, taking a cigarette, lighter, and ashtray out of his voluminous hair and lighting up, ‘that Aion is the most advanced center for therapeutics that the galaxy has ever known. There is no single therapy or procedure here; instead, a grand eclecticism prevails. In the saying popular here, “It all depends.” ’

  ‘But what does it all depend on?’ Crompton asked.

  ‘They never told me that,’ Kavi admitted.

  ‘What sort of treatment do you get?’

  ‘In my case, a great black raven comes at night and instructs me. Your treatment will probably take some different form, unless you happen to suffer from psychosymbolic ritual pollution, as I do.’

  Crompton shook his head. ‘I’m a paranoid schiz.’

  There’s quite a few of you lads here,’ Kavi told him.

  By then their two-hour friendship was almost up. They promised to telephone each other in a few days, get together for a drink, and see how the other was getting along. But this in itself was a ritual, since Two-Hour Friends rarely bothered to keep up the relationship, which maybe was part of why they were in the Aion Project.

  Crompton spent the rest of the day looking around downtown Aion. He liked the city very much, especially its low pastel buildings set in green parking lots. There were a lot of people around and they all seemed friendly. Most of them were engaged in the group therapy sessions that were continually going on in pizza parlors, movie theaters, hairdressing establishments, and the like. It gave Aion a certain distinctive air, and generated an atmosphere of understanding and compassion that could be felt a hundred miles out in space.

  Aion’s total preoccupation with therapy and honest communication sometimes made for minor difficulties, as, for example, when Crompton went to a drugstore to get some shaving cream and razor blades.

  The clerk, a short bearded man in a check suit, put down his copy of Inslight, the Journal of the Midget Psychologists, and asked, ‘What do you want those things for?’

  ‘To shave with,’ Crompton replied.

  ‘That’s not necessary, you know,’ the clerk said.

  ‘I know,’ Crompton said, ‘but I like to shave.’

  ‘Indeed?’ The clerk smiled knowingly. ‘That is a rationalization so obvious that I won’t even bother calling your attention to it.’

  ‘I don’t know what is the matter with you,’ Crompton said. ‘Are you going to sell me some shaving cream or aren’t you?’

  ‘Don’t get excited,’ the clerk said. ‘I was
merely trying to empathize with your situation via the few clues available to me.’ He laid out an assortment of shaving creams and razors on the counter. ‘Take your pick, and don’t mind me, I’m just a faceless nobody whose sole function in life is to serve you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to insult you,’ Crompton said. ‘I was simply trying to get some shaving cream.’

  ‘It is apparent to me,’ the bearded man said, ‘that you have many important things to do, like shaving your silly face, and that you have no time to spend with a fellow human being who might want to share with you for a fleeting instant the realization that we are something more than our roles, something more than our fleshy envelopes. … That we are in fact awareness itself meeting itself in unusual circumstances.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Crompton replied, and walked out. He could hear applause from the back of the store. It emanated from the bearded man’s psychotherapy group.

  Crompton saw that people in Aion communicated with each other on the slightest provocation, as if they were all a little drunk and beligerent. Later that afternoon, he was able to watch the Aion style in its fullest flower.

  Two cars had had a minor collision at a cross street. The two drivers, obviously unhurt, got out of their cars. Although one was short and stocky and the other lean with a mottled skin, they both resembled account executives in acute midlife crises. They were both smiling.

  The tall man surveyed the damage and, in languid, amused tones, said, The long arm of facticity seems to have brought us to the crunch, so to speak. I wonder if you share with me the perception that you, in the popular expression, jumped the light, and hence were responsible for the ensuing mess. I do not want to make you feel guilty, you understand, I am merely trying to establish the facts in as clear, dispassionate, and objective a manner as possible.’