‘Huh?’ Stack said.
‘To put it even more simply – it projects you into a nescient situation where you can fight out your objectivized dream-wars to the death.’
‘Oh,’ Stack said.
‘It’s equivalent to a classical dueling situation, but in this case, metaphorized weapons-systems are utilized. This allows each of you to fight with the conceptual weapons most appropriate to his skills and strengths. The outcome, I am happy to say, will leave only one of you in sole possession of the Crompton Corpus.’
‘I still do not really understand what we are to do,’ Crompton complained.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have the time to give you an introductory course in simulation theory,’ Secuille said. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up as you go along. What do you say, fellows?’
‘I say let’s do it,’ Stack said.
‘Fine by me,’ Loomis said.
‘All right,’ Crompton said.
Even Finch contributed a nuance of agreement.
‘Then it’s up up and away!’ Secuille said.
Discontinuity set in like bleed-pictures end-projected onto dissolving filmstrips. Crompton wanted to ask a few more questions, but he found himself falling endlessly through a gray featureless void and he knew that the end had begun at last.
48
The word parameters was echoing senselessly in his mind. Crompton looked and saw that he was nowhere. It was a strange and uncanny experience, for in this nowhere there was nothing at all; not even Crompton himself.
The problem of describing ‘nothingness’ has haunted writers for centuries. It was not as though Crompton were merely present without anything around him, like a man falling through space. That would be easy enough to describe. But in this case, not only was there nothing surrounding Crompton, there was also no person there to be surrounded. There was nothing. There was only nothing. And yet, something in this nothing was aware, and this awareness Crompton called ‘I,’ even though it might have been anyone, or even a property of the nothingness itself.
At first it was a good experience: the nonexistence of himself and everything else was fun, like schussing down a million-mile ski run. But presently Crompton grew frightened. Speed kills, doesn’t it? And when you kill nothing, that leaves you with nothing doubled, a truly disastrous position.
Monism was nice, but Crompton saw that he was going to have to get into duality. He experimented cautiously by creating light. That worked out well. Next he needed something to look at, so he simulated the first thing that came to mind – a small teak coffee table. It looked so strange hanging there in nothingness that Crompton quickly simulated a chair, and then he simulated himself and sat down in the chair.
Everything felt more normal once he had a body. But it just wasn’t good enough to be a unique and solitary body sitting at a coffee table in the midst of nowhere. It didn’t really get him anywhere. So he created the Earth as quickly and neatly as possible.
After a short rest he surveyed his handiwork. He saw that he had gotten the North American coastline all bulgy and wrong, and his oak trees resembled dwarf mandarins. There were many other anomalies. It was not a godlike effort, but at least it gave him something to look at.
He was feeling lightheaded and silly now and he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do next. So he created a place where he could get some lunch and await further developments. This place was Maplewood, New Jersey, in the year 1944. It was the only town on the face of the metamorphized Earth at that time, and Crompton brought to it a rule of equanimity and peace that will long be remembered in the illusory annals of the state.
It was a lazy, good-natured time of long golden autumn afternoons, fading to deep twilight, and then proceeding directly to dawn. Crompton hadn’t mastered linear time yet. In Maplewood it was forever October 1, and might have continued forever that way with no complaints from anyone.
But suddenly it all changed. Just before midday on one of those interminable October firsts, Crompton saw a smudge of oily black smoke on the horizon, and heard a rumble of ominous thunder to the west. Coming down from his ranch-style presidential palace to investigate, Crompton saw column after column of panzer tanks moving down South Orange Avenue. Standing in the foremost tank was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Standing beside Rommel and looking very pleased with himself was Daniel Stack.
Then Crompton remembered. This was supposed to be a fight to the death via simulation. While he had been fooling around, Stack had been busy creating Rommel and the Afrika Korps.
It looked as thought this war might be over before it had properly begun.
There was no time to make a plan. Crompton snatched at the first images that came to him, conjuring up a fifty-man Swiss guard armed with pikes, a boatload of Viking berserkers, and a detachment of Hungarian irregular cavalry led by von Suppe. These light forces held the approaches to South Mountains Reservation at the Wyoming Avenue line for twenty minutes, long enough for Crompton to flee to the south.
Stack came thundering after him, his armor cutting through the confused Etruscans, Waziris, Dayaks, Janissaries, and Amboinese that Crompton threw in his path. As he advanced, Stack took control of the metamorphized dream territory of the conflict, changing it into western France and pinning Crompton against the seat at Cherbourg. As Stack reorganized his forces for the killing stroke, Crompton threw all his remaining strength into a last effort.
He managed to wrestle control of the dream territory from Stack, with him on one side of the Guadarrama Mountains and Stack on the other.
Stack was stopped for the moment. Crompton took advantage of the precious respite to simulate fresh troops.
Hastily he created Varus’s lost legion led by Gustavus Adolphus, and a double regiment of Assyrian axmen led by Hammurabi. He knew that these forces were hopelessly inadequate – but the swiftness and fury of Stack’s assault left him no time to ponder military metaphors. Under pressure, he had to use whatever frivolous images his crossword-loving mind sent up. It put him at a considerable disadvantage, since Stack’s natural orientation was toward gory visions and bloody spectacles.
But now the situation changes again. Stack solves the territorial problem by converting his panzers into an enormous army of blank-faced Aztecs armed with sound-swords and wivver pistols, and led by Tezcatlipoca. These forces scramble down the steep Guadarrama slopes on knotted vines, screaming bird-call war cries and making hateful faces.
Crompton’s Assyrians take one look and head back to Babylon as fast as their dromedaries can carry them. Varus’s lost legion close shields and hold their ground. Soon they are engulfed in a sea of copper warriors. Desperately Crompton sends in Tom Mix, Billy the Kid, the Magnificent Seven, Joe Louis, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. They are swallowed up piecemeal, and Crompton reels back, exhausted, finished. …
Only to be rescued by the provident arrival of Loomis, who comes charging out of a glade of oak trees with five thousand Kashmiri hashisheens.
Stack contains this thrust by creating and interposing the Membrillo Apaches, with two Zulu impis in support. Loomis is repulsed with heavy losses. But Stack has overreached himself, he falters, his forces waver and slide in and out of focus. Crompton takes over the territoriality motif and creates a wide summer meadow, just the place for the ten squadrons of Cromwell’s Roundheads that he has simulated.
Stack reacts quickly by changing the meadow into a desert and charging in with Genghis Khan and his horde. Crompton mows them down with machine-gun fire from the destroyer he has just produced on the lake he has just created.
Stack simulates Submariner and sinks the cruiser. He decimates Crompton’s forces with hard-bitten Carthaginian cohorts. His troops devastate the countryside. They catch Loomis feasting in the greenwood and seem likely to destroy him. But at the last moment, who should join the fight but Finch, mounted on a white elephant at the right hand of King Asoka, marching with a colorful collection of mantra-singing bodhisattvas, arahants, and praty
ekabuddhas. These forces refuse to kill anyone and confine themselves to scornful glances: they are easily obliterated by Stack’s fuzzy-wuzzies. But their interposition gives Loomis time to change into Owen Glendower and vanish into the mountains of Wales.
In the resulting confusion, Crompton takes charge. He transposes the situation into the American Civil War, producing the lines outside Richmond and splitting himself into Grant and Sherman. Stack’s feeble riposte is to turn into Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé and retreat toward Canada. He makes a stand at Mindanao, which falls, and then at Dien Bien Phu, which also falls.
Pressed to the utmost extremity, Stack is heard to mutter: ‘I’m a Freud that this day that began so Jung is getting Adler and Adler. …’
He goes down at last into a flaming pit of oblivion that Crompton has created for him. His qualities are reduced to notions, his essence is denied.
Loomis is looking for a truce now, his spaniel-brown eyes begging; but Crompton, full of end-state lust, impales him on a crimson derationalizer.
Finch doesn’t even wait to be struck down. To save Crompton from murder, he reverts to nothingness.
They are gone now, all gone. And now it is Crompton alone, thick breath sobbing in his throat, staring at the carnage and watching himself change change change into implacable archetypal killer weeping in his beer and throwing up all over his glen-plaid suit. A definitive Crompton for the ages!
But now, lo, Crompton himself is gone. He is here no longer with his schemes and desires, his hopes and fears, his talented nose and scrawny body.
There is someone else here. It is a new time, and now a new person has been created through the wonder of the alchemical marriage.
The new person opened his eyes and yawned and stretched, enjoying the sensations of light and color. Former possession of Alistair Crompton, tenanted for a while by Edgar Loomis, Dan Stack, and Barton Finch, the new person stood up and considered life and found it good. Integrated at last, like other men, he could not be multifarious, many-motived. At last he could strive for the important things in life – sex, money, love, and God – and still have time left for several hobbies.
What should he strive for first? How about money and God, and let love work itself out? How about going all out for love and money, and letting the God thing sit for a while?
He considered. No solution came to mind. He saw that there were many things to do, and many things to not do, and there were many reasons for doing and not doing each thing, and there was no clear way of knowing what was right and what was not.
The new person considered. A presentiment of disaster came over him. He was still stuck in the human situation! He said, ‘Hey, Alistair, fellows, are you still there? I don’t think this one is going to work either.’
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Previously published as The Alchemical Marriage of Alistair Crompton
Copyright © 1978 by Robert Sheckley
ISBN 978-1-4976-2438-2
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Crompton Divided Page 18