Store of Infinity

by Robert Sheckley

  Armed with a thick volume of crossword puzzles, Crompton went to Idlewild Spaceport at the appointed time, endured the high-gravity climb to Station Three, changed for the Lockheed-Lackawanna shuttle to Exchange Point, caught the Hopover to Mars Station One, went through customs, immigration and health, and shuttled down to Port Newton. There he went through the three day acclimatization period, learned how to use the auxiliary stomach lung, stoically took booster shots, and finally received a travel visa good for all Mars. Armed with this, he caught a rapido to Elderberg, near the Martian South Pole.

  The rapido crawled along the flat, monotonous Martian plains, past low gray shrubs struggling for existence in the cold, thin air, through swampy regions of dull green tundra. Crompton kept occupied with his crosswords. When the conductor announced they were crossing the Grand Canal he looked up in momentary interest. But it was merely a shallowly sloping bed left by a vanished river. The vegetation in its muddy bottom was dark green, almost black, Crompton returned to his puzzle.

  They went through the Orange Desert, and stopped at little stations where bearded, wide-hatted immigrants jeeped in for their vitamin concentrates and microfilm Sunday Times. And finally they reached the outskirts of Elderberg.

  This town was the local focus for all South Polar mining and farming operations. It was also a resort for the rich, who came to wallow in its Longevity Baths, and for the sheer novelty of the trip. The region, warmed to 67 degrees Fahrenheit by volcanic action, was the warmest place on Mars. Inhabitants usually referred to it as the Tropics.

  Crompton checked into a small motel, then joined the crowds of brightly dressed men and women who promenaded on Elderberg’s quaint immovable sidewalks. He peered into the gambling palaces, gawked at the shops selling Genuine Artifacts of the Missing Martian Race, peered into the novelty cocktail lounges and the glittering restaurants. He jumped with alarm when accosted by a painted young woman who invited him to Mama Teele’s House, where low gravity made everything that was good better. He brushed off her and a dozen like her, and sat down in a little park to collect his thoughts.

  Elderberg lay around him, replete in its pleasures, gaudy in its vices, a painted Jezebel whom Crompton rejected with a curl of his thin lips. And yet, behind his curled lips, averted eyes and nostrils indrawn in revulsion, a part of him longed for the humanity of vice as an alternative to his present bleak and sterile existence.

  But sadly, Elderberg could corrupt him no better than New York. Perhaps Edgar Loomis would supply the missing ingredient.

  Crompton began his search in the hotels, taking them in alphabetic order. Clerks at the first three said they had no idea where Loomis was; and if he should be found, there was a little matter of unpaid bills. The fourth thought that Loomis might have joined the big prospecting rush at Saddle Mountain. The fifth hotel, a recent establishment, had never heard of Loomis. At the sixth, a brightly overdressed young woman laughed with a slight hysteric edge when she heard Loomis’ name; but she refused to give any information.

  At the seventh hotel, the clerk told him that Edgar Loomis occupied Suite 314. He was not in at present, but could probably be found in the Red Planet Saloon.

  Crompton asked directions. Then, his heart beating rapidly, he made his way into the older section of Elderberg.

  Here the hotels were stained and weathered, the paints worn, the plastics pitted by the seasonal dust storms. Here the gambling halls were crowded close together, and the dance halls blared their mirth at midday and midnight. Here the budget tourists clustered with their cameras and recorders, in search of local color, hoping to encounter at a safe yet photographable distance the wicked glamour that led zealous promoters to call Elderberg the Nineveh of Three Planets. And here were the safari shops, outfitting parties for the famed descent into Xanadu Caverns or the long sandcar drive to Devil’s Twist. Here also was the infamous Dream Shop, selling every narcotic known to man, still in business despite legislative efforts to shut it down. And here the sidewalk hawkers sold bits of alleged Martian drystone carving, or anything else you might desire.

  Crompton found the Red Planet Saloon, entered, and waited until he could see through the dense clouds of tobacco and kif. He looked at the tourists in their gaily colored shirts standing at the long bar, stared at the quick-talking guides and the dour rock miners. He looked at the gambling tables with their chattering women, and their men with the prized faint orange Martian tan that takes, it is said, a month to acquire.

  Then, unmistakably, he saw Loomis.

  Loomis was at the faro table, in company with a buxom blonde woman who, at a first glance, looked thirty, at a second glance forty, and after a long careful look perhaps forty-five. She was gambling ardently, and Loomis was watching her with an amused smile.

  He was tall and slender. His manner of dress was best expressed by the crossword puzzle word nappy. He had mouse-brown hair sleeked back on a narrow skull. A woman not too choosey might have called him handsome.

  He didn’t resemble Crompton; but there was an affinity, a pull, an instant sense of rapport that all Cleavage members possess. Mind called to mind, the parts calling for the whole, with an almost telepathic intensity. And Loomis, sensing it, raised his head and stared full at Crompton.

  Crompton began walking toward him. Loomis whispered to the blonde, left the faro table and met Crompton in the middle of the floor.

  “Who are you?” Loomis asked.

  “Alistair Crompton. You’re Loomis? I have the original body, and—do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, of course,” Loomis said. “I’d been wondering if you’d show up. Hmm.” He looked Crompton up and down, and didn’t seem too pleased with what he saw.

  “All right,” Loomis said, “we’ll go up to my suite and have a talk. Might as well get that over with now.”

  He looked at Crompton again, with undisguised distaste, and led him out of the saloon.

  Loomis’ suite was a wonder and a revelation. Crompton almost stumbled as his feet sank into the deep-piled oriental rug. The light in the room was dim and golden, and a constant succession of faint and disturbing shadows writhed and twisted across the walls, taking on human shapes, coiling and closing with each other, transmuting into animals and the blotchy forms of children’s nightmares, and disappearing into the mosaic ceiling. Crompton had heard of shadow songs, but had never before witnessed one.

  Loomis said, “It’s playing a rather fragile little piece called ‘Descent to Kartherum.’ How do you like it?”

  “It’s—impressive,” Crompton said. “It must have been terribly expensive.”

  “I daresay,” Loomis said carelessly. “It was a gift. Won’t you sit down?”

  Crompton settled into a deep armchair that conformed to his contours and began, very gently, to massage his back.

  “Something to drink?” Loomis asked.

  Crompton nodded dumbly. Now he noticed the perfumes in the air, a complex and shifting mixture of spice and sweetness, with the barest hint of putrefaction.

  “That smell—”

  “It takes getting used to,” Loomis said. “It’s an olfactory sonata composed as an accompaniment to the shadow song. But I’ll turn it off.”

  He did so, and turned on something else. Crompton heard a melody that seemed to originate in his own head. The tune was slow and sensuous, and unbearably poignant; and it seemed to Crompton that he had heard it somewhere before, in another time and place.

  “It’s called ‘Deja Vu,’” Loomis said. “Direct aural transmission technique. Pleasant little thing, isn’t it?”

  Crompton knew that Loomis was trying to impress him. And he was impressed. As Loomis poured drinks, Crompton looked around the room, at the sculptures, drapes, furniture and gadgets; his clerkly mind made an estimate of cost, added transportation charges and taxes from Terra, and totaled the result.

  With dismay he realized that in this room alone Loomis had goods worth more than Crompton could earn in three and one-quart
er lifetimes of clerking.

  Loomis handed Crompton a glass. “It’s mead,” he said. “Quite the vogue in Elderberg this season. Tell me what you think of it.”

  Crompton sipped the honeyed beverage. “Delicious,” he said. “Costly, I suppose.”

  “Quite. But then, the best is only barely sufficient, don’t you think?”

  Crompton didn’t answer. He stared hard at Loomis, and saw the signs of a decaying Durier body. Carefully he observed the neat, handsome features, the Martian tan, the smooth, mousy brown hair, the careless elegance of the clothes, the faint crows’ feet in the corners of the eyes, the sunken cheeks on which was a trace of cosmetics. He observed Loomis’ habitual self-indulgent smile, the disdainful twist of his lips, the way his nervous fingers stroked a piece of brocade, the complacent slump of his body against the exquisite furniture.

  Here, he realized, was the stereotype of the sensualist, the man who lived only for pleasures and slothful ease. Here was an embodiment of the Sanguine Humour of Fire, caused by too much hot blood, tending to make a man unduly mirthful and over-fond of fleshy gratifications. And Loomis, like himself, was a monolithic, centimeter-thin personality, his desires completely predictable, his fears obvious to anyone.

  In Loomis resided all Crompton’s potentialities for pleasure, ripped from him and set up as an entity in itself. Loomis, the pure pleasure principle, vitally necessary to the Crompton mind-body.

  “How do you make a living?” Crompton asked bluntly.

  “Through the performance of services, for which I am paid,” Loomis answered, smiling.

  “To put that in plainer English,” Crompton said, “you are a leech and a parasite. You feast on the idle rich who flock to Elderberg.”

  “You would see it that way of course, my hard-working puritanical brother,” Loomis said, lighting a pale ivory cigarette. “But my own view is somewhat different. Consider. Everything today is biased toward the poor, as though there were some special virtue in improvidence. Yet the rich have their needs and necessities, too! These needs are unlike the needs of the poor, but no less urgent. The poor require food, shelter, medical attention. The governments provide these admirably. But what about the needs of the rich? People laugh at the idea of a rich man having problems; but does mere possession of credit exclude him from having problems? It does not! Quite the contrary, wealth increases need and sharpens necessity, often leaving a rich man in a more truly necessitous condition than his poor brother.”

  “In that case, why doesn’t he give up his wealth?” Crompton asked.

  “Why doesn’t a poor man give up his poverty?” Loomis asked in return. “No, it can’t be done, we must accept the conditions that life has imposed upon us. The burden of the rich is heavy; still, they must bear it, and seek aid where they can.

  “The rich need sympathy; and I am very sympathetic. The rich need people around them who can truly enjoy luxury, and teach them how to enjoy it; and few, I think, enjoy and appreciate the luxuries of the rich as well as I do. And their women, Crompton! They have their needs—urgent, pressing needs, which their husbands frequently cannot fulfill due to the tensions under which they live. These women cannot entrust themselves to any lout from the streets. 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. My talents happen to lie in that particular direction. Therefore I exercise them. And of course I expect recompense just like any working man.”

  Loomis leaned back with a smile. Crompton stared at him with a certain horror. He found it difficult to believe that this corrupt, self-satisfied seducer, this creature with the morals of a mink was part of himself. But he was, and necessary to the fusion.

  “Well,” Crompton said, “your views are your business. I’m the basic Crompton personality in the original Crompton body. I’ve come to Reintegrate you.”

  “Not interested,” Loomis said.

  “You mean that you won’t?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You don’t seem to realize,” Crompton said, “that you are incomplete, unfinished. You must have the same drive toward self-realization that I have. And it’s possible only through Reintegration.”

  “Perfectly true,” Loomis said.

  “Then—”

  “No,” Loomis said. “I have an urge toward self-completion. But I have a much stronger urge to go on living exactly as I am living, in a manner I find eminently satisfactory. Luxury has its compensations, you know.”

  “Perhaps you’ve forgotten,” Crompton said, “that you are living in a Durier body which has an estimated competence of forty years.

  If you don’t Reintegrate, you have a maximum of five more years of life. A maximum, mind you. Durier bodies have broken down in less.”

  “That’s true,” Loomis said, frowning slightly.

  “Reintegration won’t be so bad,” Crompton said, in what he hoped was a winning manner. “Your pleasure impulse won’t be lost. It’ll merely be put into better proportion.”

  Loomis thought hard, drawing on his pale ivory cigarette. Then he looked Crompton full in the face and said, “No.”

  “But your future—”

  “I’m simply not the sort of person who can worry about the future,” Loomis said, with a smug smile. “It’s enough for me simply to live through each day, savoring it to the fullest. Five years from now—why, who knows what will happen five years from now? Five years is an eternity! Something will probably turn up.”

  Crompton resisted a strong desire to throttle some sense into Loomis. Of course the sensualist lived only in the ever-present now, giving no thought to a distant and uncertain future. Five years’ time was unthinkable to the now-centered Loomis. He should have thought of that.

  Keeping his voice calm, Crompton said, “Nothing will turn up. In five years—five short years—you will die.”

  Loomis shrugged. “It’s my policy never to worry past Thursday. Tell you what, old man. I’ll look you up in three or four years and we’ll discuss it then.”

  “It’ll never work,” Crompton told him. “You’ll be on Mars, I’ll be on Earth, and our other component will be on Venus. We’ll never get together in time. Besides, you won’t even remember.”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see,” Loomis said, glancing at his watch. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’m expecting a visitor soon who would doubtless prefer—”

  Crompton arose. “If you change your mind, I’m staying at the Blue Moon Motel. I’ll just be here for another day or two.”

  “Have a pleasant stay,” Loomis said. “Be sure to see the Xanadu Caverns. Fabulous sight!”

  Thoroughly numbed, Crompton left Loomis’ ornate suite and returned to his motel.

  That evening Crompton ate at a snack counter, consuming a Marsburger and a Red Malted. At a newsstand he found a book of acrostics. He returned to his room, filled in three puzzles, and went to sleep.

  The next day he tried to decide what to do. There seemed to be no way of convincing Loomis. Should he go to Venus and find Dan Stack, the other missing portion of his personality? No, that would be worse than useless. Even if Stack were willing to Reintegrate, they would still be missing a vital third of themselves—Loomis, the all-important pleasure principle. Two-thirds would crave completion more passionately than one-third, and be in more desperate straits without it. And Loomis would not be convinced.

  Under the circumstances, his only course was to return to Earth un-Reintegrated, and make whatever adjustments he could. There was, after all, a certain joy in hard, dedicated work, a certain pleasure in steadiness, circumspection, dependability. The frugal virtues were not to be overlooked.

  But he found it difficult to convince himself. And with a heavy heart he telephoned Elderberg Depot and made a reservation on the evening rapido to Port Newton.

  As he was packing, an hour befor
e the rapido left, his door was suddenly flung open. Edgar Loomis stepped in, looked quickly around, shut the door behind him and locked it.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Loomis said. “I’ve decided to Reintegrate.”

  Crompton’s first feeling of joy was stifled in a wave of suspicion.

  “What made you change your mind?” he asked.

  “Does it really matter?” Loomis said. “Can’t we—”

  “I want to know why,” Crompton said.

  “Well it’s a little difficult to explain. You see, I had just—”

  There was a heavy rapping on the door. Loomis turned pale under his orange tan. “Please!” he said.

  “Tell me,” Crompton said implacably.

  Beads of sweat appeared on Loomis’ forehead. “Just one of those things,” he said quickly. “Sometimes husbands don’t appreciate one’s little attentions to their wives. Even the rich can be shockingly bourgeois at times. Husbands are one of the hazards of my trade. So once or twice a year I find it expedient to take a little vacation in a cave I’ve furnished at All Diamond Mountain. It’s really very comfortable, though the food is necessarily plain. In a few weeks the whole thing blows over.”

  The knocking at the door grew louder. A bass voice shouted, “I know you’re in there, Loomis! Come out or I’ll break down this damned door and wrap it around your slimy neck!”

  Loomis’ hands were trembling uncontrollably. “I have a dread of physical violence,” he said. “Couldn’t we simply Reintegrate, then I’ll explain—”

  “I want to know why you didn’t go to your cave this time,” Crompton said.

  They heard the sound of a body slamming heavily against the door. Loomis said shrilly, “It was all your fault, Crompton! Your coming here unsettled me. I lost my fine sense of timing, my sixth sense of danger. Damn it, Crompton, I didn’t get away in time! Me, caught in the act! I barely escaped, with that fantastic muscular neanderthal idiot of a nouveau-riche husband following me around town, searching the saloons and hotels, threatening to break my limbs. I didn’t have enough ready cash to hire a sandcar, and there was no time to pawn my jewelry. And the police just grinned and refused to protect me! Crompton, please!”