Store of Infinity

by Robert Sheckley

  The door bulged under repeated blows, and the lock began to give. Crompton turned to his personality component, grateful that Loomis’ essential inadequacy had shown up in time.

  “Come,” Crompton said, “let’s Reintegrate.”

  The two men stared hard into each other’s eyes, parts calling for the whole, potential increasing to bridge the gap. Then Loomis gasped and his Durier body collapsed, folding in on itself like a rag doll. At the same moment, Crompton’s knees buckled as though a weight had landed on his shoulders.

  The lock gave way and the door slammed open. A short, red-eyed, thickly constructed, black-haired man came into the room.

  “Where is he?” the man shouted.

  Crompton pointed to Loomis’ body stretched on the floor. “Heart attack,” he said.

  “Oh,” said the black-haired man, caught between rage and shock. “Oh. Well…Oh.”

  “I’m quite sure he deserved it,” Crompton said coldly, picked up his suitcase and marched out to catch the evening rapido.

  The long ride across the Martian plains came as a much needed breathing spell. It gave Crompton and Loomis a chance to make a true acquaintance, and to settle certain basic problems which two minds in one body are bound to encounter.

  There was no question of ascendency. Crompton was the basic personality, and for thirty-five years had been resident in the Crompton mind-body. Under normal circumstances Loomis could not take over, and had no desire to do so. Loomis accepted his passive role gracefully, and resigned himself, with typical good will, to the status of commentator, advisor, and general well-wisher.

  But there was no Reintegration. Crompton and Loomis existed in the one mind like planet and moon, independent but closely related entities, cautiously testing each other out, unwilling and unable to relinquish personal autonomy. A certain amount of seepage was taking place, of course; but the fusion of a single stable personality out of its discreet elements could not take place until Dan Stack, the third component, had entered.

  And even then, Crompton reminded the optimistic Loomis, Reintegration might not follow. Assuming for a moment that Stack was willing to enter (which he might not be), the three schizoid parts might resist fusion or find it impossible to achieve; in which case their conflicts within one body would rapidly bring on a state of insanity.

  “Why worry about it, old man?” Loomis asked.

  “Because it’s something that must be worried about,” Crompton said. “Even if the three of us achieve Reintegration, the resulting mind might not be stable. Psychotic elements might predominate, and then—”

  “We’ll simply have to take it as it comes,” Loomis said. “Day by day, bit by bit.”

  Crompton agreed. Loomis, the good-natured, easygoing sybaritic side of his personality, was already having an effect upon him. With an effort he forced himself to stop worrying. Soon he was able to do a crossword puzzle, while Loomis toyed with the opening lines of a villanelle.

  The rapido reached Port Newton, and Crompton shuttled to Mars Station 1. He went through customs, emigration and health, and caught the Hopover to Exchange Point. There he had to wait fifteen days for a Venus-bound ship. The brisk young ticket clerk spoke about the problems of “opposition” and “economical orbits”, but neither Crompton nor Loomis understood what he was talking about.

  The delay proved valuable. Loomis was able to provide an acceptable signature to a note requesting a friend in Elderberg to convert his properties into cash, pay his bills, take a healthy broker’s fee, and send his heir, Crompton, the remainder. The transactions were completed on the eleventh day, and provided Crompton with nearly three thousand badly needed dollars.

  At last the Venus ship lifted. Crompton set to work learning Basic Yggdra, root language of the Venusian aboriginals. Loomis, for the first time in his life, tried to work too, putting aside his villanelle and tackling the complexities of Yggdra. He quickly became bored with its elaborate conjugations and declensions, but persisted to the best of his ability, and marveled at the studious, hard-working Crompton.

  In return, Crompton made a few tentative advances into the appreciation of beauty. Aided and instructed by Loomis he attended the ship’s concerts, looked at the paintings in the Main Salon, and stared long and earnestly at the brilliant glowing stars from the ship’s observation port. It all seemed a considerable waste of time, but he persevered.

  Their cooperation was threatened on the tenth day out, by the wife of a second-generation Venusian planter whom Crompton met in the observation port. She had been on Mars for a tuberculosis cure, and now was going home.

  She was small, bright-eyed and vivacious, with a slender figure and glistening black hair. She was bored by the long passage through space.

  They went to the ship’s lounge. After four martinis, Crompton was able to relax and let Loomis come to the fore; which he did with a will. Loomis danced with her to the ship’s phonograph; then generously receded, leaving Crompton in command, nervous, flushed, tanglefooted and enormously pleased. 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 Loomis looked on.

  At nearly two a.m., ship’s time, the girl left, after pointedly mentioning her room number. Crompton reeled deliriously back to his own room on B deck, and collapsed happily on the bed.

  “Well?” Loomis asked.

  “Well what’”

  “Let’s go. The invitation was clear enough.”

  “There was no invitation,” Crompton said, puzzled.

  “She mentioned her room number,” Loomis pointed out. “That, together with the other events of the evening, constitutes an unmistakable invitation—almost a command.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Crompton said.

  “Take my word,” Loomis told him. “I have some slight experience in these matters. The invitation is clear, the course is open. Onward!”

  “No, no,” Crompton said. “I wouldn’t—I mean I don’t I couldn’t—”

  “Lack of experience is no excuse,” Loomis said firmly. “Nature is exceedingly generous in helping one to discover her ways. Consider also the fact that beavers, raccoons, wolves, tigers, mice, and other creatures without a hundredth of your intelligence manage to perform in exemplary fashion what you find so baffling. Surely you won’t let a mouse outdo you!”

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

  “Absolutely not,” he said firmly.

  “But why?”

  “It would be unethical. The young lady is married.”

  “Marriage,” Loomis said patiently, “is a manmade institution. But before marriage there were men and women, and certain modes between them. Natural laws always take precedence over human legislation.”

  “It’s immoral,” Crompton said, without much vigor.

  “Not at all,” Loomis assured him. “You are unmarried, so no possible blame can attach to you for your actions. The young lady is married. That’s her responsibility. But remember, she is a human being capable of making her own decisions, not some mere chattel of her husband. Her decision has been made, and we must respect her integrity in the matter; to do otherwise would be insulting. 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 his wife, in recompense, will be unusually pleasant to him. He will assume that this is because of his forceful personality, and his ego will be bolstered thereby. So you see, Crompton, everyone will gain, and no one will lose.”

  “Sheer sophistry,” Crompton said, standing up again and moving toward the door.

  “Atta boy,” Loomis said.

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

  “Absolutely not,” Crompton said.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “The
reasons you gave me,” Crompton said, “may or may not be sound. I don’t have enough experience in the world to know. But one thing I do know. I will not engage in anything of this sort while you ‘re watching!”

  “But—damn it, I’m you! You’re me! We’re two parts of one personality!”

  “Not yet we aren’t,” Crompton said. “We exist now as schizoid parts, two people in one body. Later, after Reintegration has taken place…But under the present circumstances, my sense of decency forbids me from doing what you suggest. It’s unthinkable! I don’t wish to discuss the matter any further.”

  At that, Loomis lost his temper. Thwarted from the fundamental expression of his own personality, he raved and shouted and called Crompton many hard names, the least of which was “yellow-livered little coward.” His anger set up reverberations in Crompton’s mind, and echoed throughout their entire shared organism. The schism lines between the two personalities deepened; new fissures appeared, and the break threatened to isolate the two minds in true Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion.

  Crompton’s dominate personality carried him past that. But, in a furious rage at Loomis, his mind began to produce antidols. Those still not fully understood little entities, like leuocytes in the bloodstream, had the task of expunging pain and walling off the sore spot in the mind.

  Loomis shied back in fright as the antidols began building their cordon sanitaire around him, crowding him, folding him back on himself, walling him off.

  “Crompton! Please!”

  Loomis was in danger of being completely and irrevocably sealed off, lost forever in a black corner of the Crompton mind. And lost with him would be any chance for Reintegration. But Crompton managed to regain his stability in time. The flow of antidols stopped; the wall dissolved, and Loomis shakily regained his position.

  For a while they weren’t on speaking terms. Loomis sulked and brooded for an entire day, and swore he would never forgive Crompton’s brutality. But above all he was a sensualist, living forever in the moment, forgetful of the past, incapable of worry about the future. His resentments passed quickly, leaving him serene and amused as always.

  Crompton was not so forgetful; but he recognized his responsibilities as the dominant part of the personality. He worked to maintain the cooperation, and the two personalities were soon operating at their fullest potential sympathy.

  By mutual consent they avoided the company of the young lady. The rest of the trip passed quickly, and at last Venus was reached.

  They were set down in Satellite 3, where they passed through customs, immigration and health. They received shots for Creeping Fever, Venus Plague, Knight’s Disease, and Big Itch. They were given powders in case of Swamp Decay, and pills to ward off Bluefoot. Finally they were permitted to take the shuttle down to the mainland embarkation depot of Port New Haarlem.

  This city, on the western shore of the sluggish Inland Zee, was situated in Venus’ temperate zone. Still they were uncomfortably warm after the chill, invigorating climate of Mars. Here they saw their first Venusian aboriginals outside a circus; saw hundreds of them, in fact. The natives averaged five feet in height, and their scaly armored hides showed their remote lizard ancestry. Along the sidewalks they walked erect; but often, to avoid crowds, they moved across the vertical sides of buildings, clinging with the sucker disks on their hands, feet, knees, and forearms.

  Many buildings had barbed wire to protect their windows; for these detribalized natives were reputed to be thieves, and their only sport was assassination.

  Crompton spent a day in the city, then took a helicopter to East Marsh, the last known address of Dan Stack. The ride was a monotonous whirring and flapping through dense cloud banks which blocked all view of the surface. The search-radar pinged sharply, hunting for the shifting inversion zones where the dreaded Venusian tornado, the zicre, sometimes burst into violent life. But the winds were gentle on this trip, and Crompton slept most of the way.

  East Marsh was a busy shipping port on a tributary of the Inland Zee. Here Crompton found Stack’s foster-parents, a couple now in their eighties and showing signs of senility. They told him that Dan was a strapping big boy, a mite hasty sometimes, but always well-meaning. They assured him that the affair of the Morrison girl wasn’t true. Dan must have been falsely accused. Dan would never do such a thing to a poor defenseless girl.

  “Where can I find Dan?” Crompton asked.

  “Ah,” said the old man, blinking his watery eyes, “didn’t you know Dan left here? Ten, maybe fifteen years ago it was.”

  “East Marsh was too dull for him,” the old lady said, with a touch of venom. “So he borrowed our little nest egg and left in the middle of the night, while we were sleeping.”

  “Didn’t want to bother us,” the old man quickly explained. “Wanted to seek his fortune, Dan did. And I wouldn’t be surprised but what he found it. Had the stuff of a real man, Dan had.”

  “Where did he go?” Crompton asked.

  “Couldn’t rightly say,” the old man said. “He never wrote us. Never much of a hand with words, our Dan. But Billy Davis saw him in Ou-Barkar that time he drove his semi there with a load of potatoes.”

  “When was that?”

  “Five, maybe six years ago,” the old lady said. “That’s the last we ever heard of Dan. Venus is a big place, Mister.”

  Crompton thanked the old couple. He tried to locate Billy Davis for further information, but found that he was working as third mate on a pocket freighter. The ship had sailed a month ago, and was making stops at all the sleepy little ports on the Southern Inland Zee.

  “Well,” Crompton said, “there’s only one thing to do. We’ll have to go to Ou-Barkar.”

  “I suppose so,” Loomis said. “But frankly, old man, I’m beginning to wonder about this Stack fellow.”

  “I am too,” Crompton admitted. “But he’s part of us, and we need him in the Reintegration.”

  “I guess we do,” Loomis said. “Lead on, oh Elder Brother.”

  Crompton led on. He caught a helicopter to Depotsville, and a bus to St. Denis. Here he was able to hitch a ride in a semi bound across the marshes to Ou-Barkar with a load of insecticides. The driver was glad of company across the desolate Wetlands.

  During that fourteen-hour trip Crompton learned much about Venus. The vast, warm, watery world was Earth’s new frontier, the driver told him. Mars was a dead tourist’s curio, but Venus had real possibilities. To Venus came the pioneering types, spiritual and sometimes actual descendants of the American frontiersmen, Boer farmers, Israeli kibbutzniks and Australian ranchers. Stubbornly they fought for a foothold on the fertile steppes, the ore-rich mountains, and by the shores of the warm seas. They fought with the Stone Age aboriginals, the lizard-evolved Ais. Their great victories at Satan’s Pass, Squareface, Albertsville, and Double Tongue, and their defeats at Slow River and Blue Falls were already a part of human history, fit to stand beside Chancellorsville, the Little Big Horn, and Dienbienphu. And the wars were not over yet. On Venus, the driver told them, a world was still to be won.

  Crompton listened, and thought he might like to be a part of all this. Loomis was frankly bored by the whole matter, and disgusted with the rank swamp odors.

  Ou-Barkar was a cluster of plantations deep in the interior of White Cloud Continent. Fifty Terrans supervised the work of two thousand aboriginals, who planted, tended and harvested the li-trees that grew only in that sector. The li fruit, gathered twice a year, was the basis of elispice, a condiment now considered indispensable in Terran cooking.

  Crompton met the foreman, a huge, red-faced man named Haaris, who wore a revolver on his hip and a blacksnake whip coiled neatly around his waist.

  “Dan Stack?” the foreman said. “Sure, Stack worked here nearly a year. Then he left, with a boot in the rear to help him on his way.”

  “Do you mind telling me why?” Crompton asked.

  “Don’t mind at all,” the foreman said. “But let’s do it over a drink.”

  H
e led Crompton to Ou-Barkar’s single saloon. There, over a glass of local corn whiskey, Haaris talked about Dan Stack.

  “He came up here from East Marsh. I believe he’d had some trouble with a girl down there—kicked in her teeth or something. But that’s no concern of mine. Most of us here aren’t exactly gentle types, and I guess the cities are damned well rid of us. I put Stack to work overseeing fifty Ais on a hundred-acre li field. He did damned well at first.”

  The foreman downed his drink. Crompton ordered another and paid for it.

  “I told him,” Haaris said, “that he’d have to drive his boys to get anything out of them. We use mostly Chipetzi tribesmen, and they’re a sullen, treacherous bunch, though husky. Their chief rents us workers on a twenty-year contract, in exchange for guns. Then they try to pick us off with the guns, but that’s another matter. We handle one thing at a time.”

  “A twenty year contract?” Crompton asked. “Then the Ais are practically slave laborers?”

  “Right,” the foreman said decisively. “Some of the owners try to pretty it up, call it temporary indenture or feudal-transition economy. But it’s slavery, and why not call it that’ It’s the only way we’ll ever civilize these people. Stack understood that. Big hefty fellow he was, and handy with a whip. I thought he’d do all right.”

  “And?” Crompton prompted, ordering another drink for the foreman.

  “At first he was fine,” Haaris said. “Laid on with the blacksnake, got out his quota and then some. But he hadn’t any sense of moderation. Started killing his boys with the whip, and replacements cost money. I told him to take it a little easier. He didn’t. One day his Chipetzis ganged up on him and he had to gun down about eight before they backed off. I had a heart-to-heart talk with him. Told him the idea was to get work out, not kill Ais. We expect to lose a certain percentage, of course. But Stack was pushing it too far, and cutting down the profit.”