Crompton Divided (10 page)

‘Only long enough to Reintegrate you,’ Crompton said.

‘Then it’s going to be a long stay,’ Loomis said. ‘Because I’m staying just the way I am.’

He turned back to the Self-Expression Machine and played a cheerful little piece compounded of the sounds, smells, and images of lust, greed, and intoxication. Crompton left before the reprise.

13

He wandered aimlessly through the streets, uncertain of his next move. His glittering premise had broken apart. Somehow it had never occurred to him that Loomis, a mere segment of himself, and not too bright a segment at that, might prefer to go it through life alone.

He pulled himself together sufficiently to hail a taxi. It was a six-legged semiliving Ford Vivacoupe – the XFK model with the 240-cubic-inch stomach and the hemispheric kidneys. He fitted his feet into the stirrups, gave the address of his hotel to the built-in driver surrogate, and lolled disconsolately against the well-worn pommel. By divergent paths the bitter insight came to him: better love’s disreputable counterfeit than the eternal highwire act on the slippery catenaries of your own nerves. He was very close to tears at that moment.

The taxi clattered down the incident-strewn streets of Cetesphe. Crompton, preoccupied with his misery, did not even notice the Testercian funeral procession that passed, led by the corpse itself, gaily decked in harlequin colors, his flippers animated by minute electrical impulses directed by the priest-technicians nearby.

The Hotel Granspruinge came into sight, but Crompton indicated to the taxi that it should drive on. A certain unstable dynamism – the product, perhaps, of helplessness times in-security – had invaded his being. Though normally a well-controlled man, even by his own stringent standards, he had decided that this was the time for the occasional crazy plunge he did allow himself.

‘Do you happen to know,’ he asked the taxi, ‘where I could find a Moodalizer Den?’

The taxi, though only half alive, and not gifted with intelligence in the usual sense of that word, was nevertheless able to make an immediate U-turn and proceed down a narrow alley until it came to a store which bore a flashing neon sign reading:

joe’s moodalizer.

Crompton got out of the taxi and paid. He entered the Moodalizer, trembling slightly from anticipation. What he was doing wasn’t really
wrong
, he had to remind himself.

The proprietor, a bald sweating fat man in an undershirt, looked up from his comic book long enough to indicate an empty cubicle to Crompton. Crompton went in and quickly stripped down to his underwear. His breath came more heavily as he fitted the electrodes into place on his forehead, arms, legs, and chest.

‘All right,’ he called out, ‘I’m ready to order.’

‘Okay,’ the fat man said. ‘You know the rules. You get one from Column A and one from Column B. Our selections for the day are printed on the menu on the wall.’

Alistair scanned the selections. ‘Under Column A – State of Mind – I think I’d like number five, Courageous Equanimity. Unless you’d recommend sixteen, Daring Insouciance?’

It’s running a little thin tonight,’ the fat man said. ‘If I were you I’d stick with five. Or try seventeen, Satanic Cunning, very piquant tonight with especially selected Oriental emotional ingredients. I can also recommend twenty-three, All-wise Compassion.’

‘I’ll stick with five,’ Crompton said. ‘Now for Column B, Contents of Mind. I think I’d like a nice number twelve, Tight-packed Logical Thought Forms Garnished with Mystic Insights and Sprinkled with a Seasoning of Understanding and Humor.’

‘That’s always a good one,’ the fat man said. ‘But let me suggest our special tonight, number one thirty-one, Inspirational Associations under Pale Rose Jelly Visions, and Garnished with Humor and Pathos. And we are famous for our number seventy-eight, Whole Sensuality Thoughts Served on a Bed of Butterfly Random Insights with a Topping of Humor and Gravity.’

‘Could you possibly let me have two from Column B? I’d make it worth your while.’

‘Can’t do it, buddy,’ the fat man said. ‘Too great a risk for you. It could send you into terminal oscillation, and lose me my license.’

‘Then I’ll take twelve from Column B, but leave out the humor.’ (These places sprinkled it over everything.)

‘Right,’ the fat man said. He set his instruments. ‘Get ready. Here it comes!’

Crompton felt the familiar sense of wonder and gratitude as the current hit. He was suddenly calm, utterly serene, and filled with a joyous sense of certainty. Energy and stability flooded through him, and with them came insights of great subtlety and depth. Crompton saw the vast and complex cobwebbing that connects all parts of the universe, and he was at the center of it, in his rightful place in the Scheme of Things. Then he understood that not only was he a man, he was also all men, and an axiomatic expression of the commonality of the species. Inviolable joy welled up in him; he possessed the will of Alexander, the wisdom of Socrates, the scope of Aristotle. He knew what things were all about. …

‘Time’s up, buddy,’ the fat man called out as the machinery clicked off.

Crompton tried to hold on to the splendid mood which the Moodalizer had induced, but it slid away from him and he was himself once more, and trapped in the claustrophobic confines of his situation. All he was left with was a fragile and indistinct memory. But that, though intangible, was still something.

He returned to his hotel room feeling marginally better.

Soon he grew despondent again. He lay on his bed and felt sorry for himself. It really was unfair! He had come to Aaia with the perfectly reasonable expectation of finding in Loomis a creature even more miserable than himself, a thin and inadequate personality disgusted with the futile inanities of his existence and eager, no, pathetically grateful for a chance to attain wholeness.

Instead he had found a man well pleased with himself, a man content to continue wallowing in the brutish sensual pleasures that all authorities agree can never bring true happiness.

Loomis did not want him! This inexplicable and astounding fact undermined the very basis of Crompton’s planning and left him without apparent recourse. For you cannot coerce a part of you into joining the rest of you. This is a law of nature as old as exfoliation.

But he had to have Loomis.

He considered his options. He could leave Aaia and go to Ygga, find and incorporate the other aspect of his personality, Dan Stack, then return and try again with Loomis. But the two planets lay half a galaxy apart, the logistics were too tricky and the costs too great, and it was a lousy idea anyhow. Loomis had to be dealt with immediately, not put off until another time.

But perhaps he should give up the whole mad venture. Why not go to some pleasant Earth-type planet, and there make whatever adjustments he could on his own? It wouldn’t be so bad. There was, after all, a certain joy in hard, dedicated work, a sort of pleasure in denying oneself pleasures, and a sour happiness to be found in steadiness, circumspection, dependability. …

To hell with that!

He sat up on the bed, his narrow face set in lines of determination. So Loomis refused to fuse with him? That was what Loomis thought! Little did Loomis know of Crompton’s iron will, his tenacity, his unshakable resolve. Loomis was selfish, stubborn only when the mood was on him, perseverant only when things were going his way. And he was subject to the rapidly changing moods that are the hallmark of the unstable cyclothymic pleasure-seeking personality.

‘Before I’m through with him,’ Crompton said, ‘he’ll come crawling to me on his hands and knees, begging to be taken in.’

It would call for patience; but that was Crompton’s chief asset. Patience, cunning, determination, and a measure of ruthlessness – those were the qualities by which Crompton expected to capture his butterfly-minded component.

Master of himself once again, Crompton mentally reviewed his circumstances. He realized at once that he could not remain in the Hotel Grandspruinge. It was much too expensive. He needed to conserve his money against unknown contingencies.

He packed, settled his bill, and went out and hailed a taxi. ‘I need a cheap room,’ he told the driver. ‘Si hombre, por qué no?’ the driver responded, and proceeded across the Bridge of Sighs that connects luxurious downtown Cetesphe with the slums of East Cetesphe.

14

The taxi took Crompton deep into the notorious Pigfat district of South Cetesphe. Here the streets were narrow and cobblestoned, and ran, or rather, staggered, through numerous compound windings and adventitious turns. A permanent yellowish gray fog lay over the district, and the gutters were uniformly full of slops. Although it had been midday when Crompton left the Grandspruinge, in Pigfat it was always dusk going on night.

The driver took him to a sagging five-room tenement building. The sign outside of it read: rooms, chambre, zimmer, gwegwelfeisse, ulmuch’thun. It was obviously an interstellar rooming house of the lowest class.

Within, seated at a three-legged cardtable that passed as a reception desk, sat an old, humpbacked crone with a cast in one eye and a raven on her shoulder.

‘A room, is it?’ she asked. ‘Lord, yes, you’re in luck, we just do happen to have a vacancy since they took poor Mr. Crank out of 12-B this morning, or rather shoveled him out, him being in an advanced state of putrescence, poor lamb.’

‘What did he die of?’ Crompton asked.

‘Tertiary envy, that’s what the intern said. Here is your key. Your room is on the top floor underneath the eaves, and you’ve got a nice view of the fishmeal factory.’

Crompton unpacked, then went out for a look at his new district.

Pigfat was certainly a most strange and incongruous sight after the rational wonders of Cetesphe proper. Pigfat was dark, dangerous, dank, and malodorous, and had been carefully planned that way by the Aaians some years ago when they had decided to import slum crime in order to see if there was anything amusing or significant in it. The programmatic origin of the squalor made it no less disgusting in Crompton’s eyes.

He walked down innumberable wretched streets, past overflowing garbage cans and smoldering mattresses. Yellow-eyed cats watched him with an air of savage calculation. A thin sulfurous ground-mist clung to his legs, and a gritty wind tugged at his coattails. From boarded-up tenement windows came the sounds of children crying, couples coupling, dogs howling.

From a nearby saloon he heard coarse shouts of mirth and drunken merriment. Crompton walked quickly past. Suddenly the batwing doors burst open and a man came through and hurried up to Crompton, seizing him familiarly by the arm.

‘Where are you going in such a hurry, Professor?’ the man asked in a friendly voice.

Crompton favored him with a look that could have withered skunk cabbage at ten paces. ‘Sir, I do not believe we are acquainted.’

‘Not acquainted!’ the man said. ‘Mean to say you don’t remember good old Harry Stygmatazian who did a six-month stretch with you at Luna Penitentiary for aggravated bunco?’

Harry Stygmatazian was a small, fat, balding man with wet spaniel eyes and a pug nose.

‘My name is not Professor,’ Crompton told him. ‘I have never been to Luna. And I have never seen you before.

‘That’s beautiful,’ Stygmatazian said, falling into step beside Crompton. ‘You’re such a con artist, Professor, I’d actually think you didn’t know me if I didn’t know better.’

‘I don’t know you!’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll play it your way,’ Stygmatazian said. ‘We’ll pretend we just met.’

Crompton walked, and Stygmatazian hurried along beside him. ‘I guess you just got in, huh, Professor? A lot of the boys are here already. It’s quite an opportunity, isn’t it?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Crompton asked.

‘The Aaian special offer. All next month they are going to let us plunder their homes in the best parts of town, insult their women, beat up tourists, and generally crud the place up, and with no interference from anyone. They say that they want to experience moral outrage. But you know all about this.’

‘The Aaians have actually invited you here to rob them?’ Crompton asked.

‘They’ve even laid on special charter flights for criminals who qualify. You gotta hand it to the Aaians, they really get into the spirit of things.’

‘It is incomprehensible to me,’ Crompton said.

‘But profitable, huh, Professor?’

‘Stop calling me Professor!’

Stygmatazian shook his head admiringly. ‘You’re one in a million, Professor, you never crack. Six months we shared a cell in Luna, and you never once during that time let on that you so much as knew my name. And here you are still keeping it up! That’s what I call control.’

‘Leave me alone!’ Crompton shrieked, and turned back the way he had come. Behind him he could hear Stygmatazian explaining to a disinterested bystander, ‘That’s the Professor. He and I did a stretch together in Luna. You could learn a few things from a man like that.’