Store of Infinity

by Robert Sheckley

There was a silence. Mike Terry wiped his forehead and smiled.

  “It’s the strain, folks, the terrible strain. The doctor tells me…Well, folks, Jim Raeder is temporarily not himself. But it’s only temporary!

  JBC is hiring the best psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in the country. We’re going to do everything humanly possible for this gallant boy. And entirely at our own expense.”

  Mike Terry glanced at the studio clock. “Well, it’s about time to sign off folks. Watch for the announcement of our next great thrill show. And don’t worry, I’m sure that very soon we ‘11 have Jim Raeder back with us.”

  Mike Terry smiled, and winked at the audience. “He’s bound to get well, friends. After all, we’re all pulling for him!

  THE HUMOURS

  Alistair Crompton was a stereotype, and he deeply resented the fact; but there was nothing he could do about it. Like it or not, his personality was monolithic, his desires predictable, and his fears apparent to anyone. To make matters worse, his somatotype fit his personality with inhuman perfection.

  Crompton was of medium height, painfully thin, sharp-nosed and tight-lipped. His hairline was receding, his glasses were protuberant, his eyes glassy, his face sparse of stubble. He looked like a clerk. He was a clerk.

  Glancing at him, anyone could tell that this man was petty, punctilious, cautious, nervous, puritanical, resentful, driven, circumspect, and repressed. Dickens would have pictured him with an overblown sense of his own importance, perched on a high stool and scratching thinly in the dusty ledgers of some ancient and respectable company. A 13th century physician would have seen him as an embodiment of one of the four essential humours which rule the human temperament, and whose essences are to be found in the fundamental qualities of earth, air, fire and water. In Crompton’s case it was the Melancholic Humour of Water, caused by too much cold, dry black bile, which tended to make him peevish and self-involved.

  Moreover, Crompton was a triumph for Lombrose and Kretschmer, a self-contained cautionary tale, a Roman exaggeration, and a sad farce on humanity.

  To make matters worse, Crompton was aware, fully and completely, of his thin, misshapen, predictable personality; aware of it, enraged by it, and unable to do anything about it except hate the well-meaning doctors who had brought it about.

  On all sides of him, the envious Crompton saw people with all their marvelous complexities and contradictions, constantly bursting out of the stereotypes that society tried to force upon them. He observed prostitutes who were not good-hearted, army sergeants who detested brutality, wealthy men who never gave to charity, Irishmen who hated fighting, Greeks who had never seen a ship, Frenchmen with no sense of logic. Most of the human race seemed to lead lives of a wonderful and unpredictable richness, erupting into sudden passions and strange calms, saying one thing and doing another, repudiating their backgrounds, overcoming their limitations, confounding psychologists and sociologists, and driving psychoanalysts to drink.

  But this splendor was impossible for Crompton, whom the doctors had stripped of complexity for sanity’s sake.

  Crompton, with a robot’s damnable regularity, reached his desk promptly at nine o’clock every working morning of his life. At five he put his ledgers neatly aside and returned to his furnished room. There he ate a frugal meal of unappetizing health foods, played three games of solitaire, filled in one crossword puzzle, and retired to his narrow bed. Each Saturday night of his life Crompton saw a movie, jostled by merry and unpredictable teenagers. Sundays and holidays were devoted to the study of Euclidean geometry, for Crompton believed in self-improvement. And once a month Crompton would sneak to a newsstand and purchase a magazine of salacious content. In the privacy of his room he would devour its contents; then, in an ecstasy of self-loathing, rip the detestable thing to shreds.

  Crompton was aware, of course, that he had been turned into a stereotype for his own good. He tried to adjust to the fact. For a while he cultivated the company of other slab-sided, centimeter-thin personalities. But the others he met were complacent, self-sufficient, and smug in their rigidity. They had been that way since birth; unlike Crompton, whom the doctors had changed at the age of eleven. He soon found that those like him were insufferable; and he was insufferable to anyone else.

  He tried hard to break through the stifling limitations of his personality. For a while he considered emigrating to Venus or Mars, but never did anything about it. He applied to the New York Romance Service, and they arranged a date for him. Crompton went to meet his sweet unknown in front of Loew’s Jupiter, with a white carnation pinned in his lapel. But within a block of the theater he was seized by a trembling fit, and forced to retreat to his room. That night he filled six crossword puzzles and played nine games of solitaire to soothe his nerves; but even this change was not lasting.

  Try as he would, Crompton couldn’t help but act within the narrow confines of his character. His rage at himself and at the well-meaning doctors grew, and his need for self-transcendence increased accordingly.

  There was only one way for him to acquire the amazing variety of possibilities, the contradictions, the passions, the humanness which other people had. So Crompton worked and waited, and at last reached the age of thirty-five. This was the minimum age of consent for Personality Reintegration as set by federal law.

  On the day following his thirty-fifth birthday Crompton resigned his job, withdrew his carefully hoarded savings of seventeen years’ work, and went to see his doctor, determined to regain what had been taken from him.

  Old Dr. Berrenger led Crompton into his consultation room, gave him a comfortable chair and said, “Well lad, it’s been a long time. How are you?”

  “Terrible,” said Crompton.

  “What seems to be troubling you?”

  “My personality,” Crompton said.

  “Ah,” said the old doctor, staring keenly at Crompton’s clerkly face. “Feels a bit cramped, eh?”

  “Cramped is hardly the word,” Crompton said primly. “I am a machine, a robot, a nothing—”

  “Come now,” Dr. Berrenger said. “Surely it isn’t as bad as all that. Adjustment takes time—”

  “I’m sick to death of myself,” Crompton stated flatly. “I want to Reintegrate.”

  The doctor looked dubious.

  “And,” Crompton said, “I have passed my thirty-fifth birthday. Under federal law I am legally en tided to Reintegrate.”

  “You are,” Dr. Berrenger said. “But as your friend as well as your doctor, Alistair, I would most strongly advise against it.”

  “Why?”

  The old doctor sighed and made a steeple of his fingers. “It would be dangerous for you. Extremely dangerous. Perhaps fatal.”

  “But I would have a chance, wouldn’t I?”

  “A vanishingly small one.”

  “Then I demand my privilege of Reintegration.”

  The doctor sighed again, went to his file and took out a thick folder. “Well,” he said, “let me review your case.”

  Alistair Crompton, born to Lyle and Beth Crompton of Amundsenville, Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica. The father was a foreman at the Scott Plutonium mines, the mother was a part-time assembler at the little transistor factory. Both parents had a satisfactory record of mental and physical health. The infant Alistair showed every sign of an excellent postnatal adjustment.

  During his first nine years, Alistair appeared normal in every respect, except for a certain moodiness; but children often are moody. Aside from that, Alistair was inquisitive, aggressive, affectionate and lighthearted, and well above the average in intelligence. In his tenth year the moodiness showed a marked increase. Some days the child would sit in his chair for hours, staring at nothing. At times he didn’t respond to his own name.

  (These ‘spells’ were not recognized as symptoms. They were passed off as the reveries of an imaginative child, to be outgrown in good time.)

  Alistair’s blank spells increased in number and intensity. He began to have temper ta
ntrums, for which the local doctor prescribed tranquilizers. One day, at the age of ten years, seven months, Alistair struck a little girl for no ascertainable reason. When she cried, he attempted to strangle her. Finding this beyond his strength, he picked up a schoolbook and earnestly tried to smash in her skull. An adult managed to drag the kicking, screaming Alistair away. The girl suffered a brain concussion that hospitalized her for almost a year.

  When questioned, Alistair maintained that he hadn’t done it. Someone else must have done it. He would never hurt anyone, he insisted; and certainly not that little girl, of whom he was very fond. More questioning only succeeded in driving him into a stupor which lasted five days.

  Even now there was time to save Alistair, if anyone had been able to recognize the early symptoms of virus schizophrenia. Even in the very young, this disease responded to prompt treatment.

  In the temperate zones virus schizophrenia had been endemic for centuries, and occasionally broke out into epidemics such as the classic dancing-craze of the Middle Ages. Immunology still had not developed a vaccine to deal with the virus. Standard technique, therefore, called for immediate Massive Cleavage, while the schizoid personalities were still malleable; detection and retention of the dominant personality; and integration of the other personalities through a Mikkleton projector into the passive substance of a Durier body.

  The Durier bodies were growth-androids, with an estimated forty-year adequacy. They were, of course, unviable. But the federal law allowed Personality Reintegration at the age of thirty-five. The personalities developed in the Durier bodies could, at the discretion of the dominant personality, be taken back into the original mind and body, with an excellent prognosis for Reintegration and complete fusion…

  If the cleavage had been performed in time.

  The general practitioner in small, isolated Amundsenville was a good man for frostbite, snow-blindness, cancer, involuntary melancholia, and other simple maladies of the Frozen South. He knew nothing about temperate zone diseases.

  Alistair was put into the town infirmary for two weeks’ observation.

  During the first week he was moody, shy, and ill at ease, with momentary outbursts of his former lightheadedness. In his second week he began to show great affection toward his nurse, who declared he was a perfect darling. Under the influence of her soothing warmth, Alistair began to seem like his former self.

  On his thirteenth day in the infirmary, Alistair slashed the nurse’s face with a broken water tumbler, then made a desperate attempt to cut his own throat. He was hospitalized for his injuries, and sank into a catalepsy which the doctor thought was simple shock. Rest and quiet were prescribed; these were the worst possible things, under the circumstances.

  After two weeks of stupor characterized by the waxy flexibility of catatonia, the disease had reached its height. Alistair’s parents sent the child to the great Rivera Clinic in New York. There the case was immediately and accurately diagnosed as virus schizophrenia in an advanced stage.

  Alistair, now eleven, had few reality-contacts with the world; not enough to provide a working basis for the specialists. He was now in an almost continual state of catatonia, his schizoid personalities irreconcilably hardened, his life lived in his own strange, unreachable twilight, among the nightmares which were his only companions. Massive Cleavage had little chance of success in so advanced a case. But without Cleavage, Alistair would be doomed to spend the rest of his life in an institution, never really conscious, never free from the surrealistic dungeons of his mind.

  His parents chose what seemed the lesser evil, and signed the papers allowing the doctors to make a belated and desperate attempt at Cleavage.

  Alistair received his operation at the age of eleven years, one month. Under deep syntho-hypnosis three separate personalities were evoked in him. The doctors talked to them and made their choice. Two personalities were projected into Durier bodies. The third personality, judged the most adequate of the three, was retained in the original corpus. All three personalities survived the trauma, and the operation was judged a limited success.

  The neuro-hypnotist in charge, Dr. Vlacjeck, noted in his report that the three personalities, all inadequate, could not hope for a subsequent successful Reintegration at the legal age of thirty-five. The operation had come too late, and the personalities had lost their vital intermingling of traits and sympathies, their essential commonality. His report urged them to waive their reintegration rights and live out their lives as best they could, each within his own personality.

  The two Duriers were renamed and sent to foster homes on Mars and Venus. The doctors wished the best for them, but expected very little.

  Alistair Crompton, the dominant personality in the original body, recovered from the operation; but a vital two-thirds of him was missing, gone with the schizoid personalities. Certain human attributes, emotions, capabilities, had been torn from him, never to be replaced or substituted.

  Crompton grew up with only his individual characteristics: a sense of duty, neatness, tenacity, and caution. The inevitable exaggeration of these qualities turned him into a stereotype, a monolithic personality aware of its lacks and passionately desiring fulfillment, fusion, Reintegration…

  “So that’s how it is, Alistair,” Dr. Berrenger said, closing the folder. “Dr. Vlacjeck most strongly advises against Reintegration. I concur, I’m sorry to say.”

  “It’s my only chance,” Crompton said.

  “It’s no chance at all,” Dr. Berrenger told him. “You can take the personalities in, but you don’t have the stability to hold them in check, to fuse them. Alistair, we saved you from virus schizophrenia, but the predilection is still there. Try to Reintegrate and you’ll be walking straight into functional schizophrenia, and for good!”

  “Others have succeeded,” Crompton said.

  “Of course. Many others. But invariably they received their operations in time, before the schizoid parts hardened.”

  “I’ll have to take my chances,” Crompton said. “I request the names and addresses of my Duriers.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? Any attempt at Reintegration will mean insanity for you, or worse. As your doctor I cannot—”

  “Give me the addresses,” Crompton demanded coldly. “It is my privilege under the law. I feel that I have enough stability to hold the other personality components in line. When they’ve become thoroughly subordinate, fusion will follow. We’ll be a single functioning unit. And I’ll be an entire human being.”

  “You don’t know what those other Cromptons are like,” the doctor said. “You consider yourself inadequate? Alistair, you were the pick of the litter!”

  “I don’t care what they’re like,” Crompton said. “They’re a part of me. The names and addresses, please.”

  Shaking his head wearily, the doctor wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to Crompton.

  “Alistair, this has practically no chance of success. I beg of you to consider—”

  “Thank you, Dr. Berrenger,” Crompton said, bowed slightly, and left.

  As soon as he was outside the office, Crompton’s self-control began to crumble. He had not dared show Dr. Berrenger his uncertainties; the well-meaning old man would surely have talked him out of the attempted Reintegration. But now, with the names in his pocket and the responsibility entirely his own, anxiety began to sweep over him. He was overcome by an intense trembling fit. He managed to control it long enough to take a taxi back to his furnished room, where he could throw himself on the bed.

  He lay for an hour, his body racked by anxiety spasms, clutching the headboard like a drowning man. Then the fit passed. Soon he was able to control his hands well enough to look at the paper the doctor had given him.

  The first name on it was Edgar Loomis, of Elderberg, Mars. The other was Dan Stack, of East Marsh, Venus. That was all the paper said.

  What were these embodied portions of his personality like? What humours, what stereotyped shapes had these truncated segments
of himself taken?

  The paper didn’t say. He would have to go and find out.

  He laid out a hand of solitaire and considered the risks. His early, unintegrated schizoid mind had shown a definite tendency toward homicidal mania. Would it be any better now in fusion, assuming that fusion was possible? Did he have the right to loose a potential monster upon the world? Was he wise in taking a step that carried the powerful threat of insanity, catatonia, death?

  Crompton thought about it late into the night. At last his native caution won. He folded the paper carefully and put it into a drawer. As much as he desired Reintegration and wholeness, the dangers were simply too great. His present existence seemed preferable to insanity.

  The next day he went out and found a job clerking for an ancient and respectable firm.

  Immediately his habits locked him in. Once again, with a robot’s undeviating sureness, he reached his desk promptly at nine o’clock every morning, left at five and returned to his furnished room and his unappetizing health foods, played three games of solitaire, filled in a crossword puzzle and retired to his narrow bed. Again he saw a movie on Saturday nights, studied geometry on Sundays, and once a month bought, read and destroyed a magazine of salacious content.

  His self-loathing increased. He started a stamp collection, discarded it, joined the All-Boroughs Happiness Club, walked out during its first stiff and embarrassed dance, tried to learn chess, gave it up. His limitations were not to be transcended in this fashion.

  On all sides of him were the contradictions of humanity in their unending richness and variety. Spread before him was the feast of life, which he could not taste. A vision haunted him, of himself spending another twenty years in monotonous, unrelieved clerking;

  thirty years, forty years, without relief, without hope, transcended only by death.

  Crompton spent six months thinking about this in his methodical fashion. Finally he decided that insanity was preferable to his present existence.

  Therefore he resigned his job and once again withdrew his carefully hoarded savings. This time he bought a second-class ticket to Mars, to seek out Edgar Loomis of Elderberg.