Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “Then how come we’re out of work?” Charlie challenged.

  Crompton resisted the urge to tell them they were obviously unemployable. Instead, he smiled stiffly and said he had come to Mars to reintegrate. That would leave a job open . . .

  But the derelicts didn’t want to hear anything reasgnable. They wanted a fight, and perhaps a murder.

  “Come on,” Charlie said. “Fight me. I’ll even put away the knife. Or fight Ed here.”

  “Yeah,” Ed said, rubbing the tape across his knuckles.

  Five years ago, Crompton would have taken on the men, together or singly, and to hell with the consequences. But that was before he had Split. Now his fear was almost uncontrollable. The leering faces swam in front of him and he could feel his knees trembling.

  “Come on, fight,” Charlie said, hitting him on the shoulder.

  Crompton wanted desperately to strike back, but he couldn’t. The fighting part of himself was gone, Split away, working on Venus.

  “He’s not going to fight,” Charlie said. “Okay, let’s bust up his briefcase.”

  Crompton hugged it to his chest. Without the Projector, he couldn’t reintegrate. And without reintegration, he might as well not have risked leaving Earth.

  “Please,” Crompton said, “I’m willing to pay—”

  Ed pulled back his fist.

  “Officer!” Crompton shouted. “Over here!”

  The vagrants looked around. Crompton shook free and sprinted away. He had used the oldest trick in the books; but perhaps it was new on Mars.

  Safe in a populated section of Port Newton, but trembling with reaction, he boarded the transplanet rapido. It would take him to Elderberg, near the Martian South Pole. At that notorious city, Crompton hoped to find a man named Edgar Loomis.

  He had to find him; Loomis was crucial to him. For Loomis was one of the segments into which Crompton had Split.

  THE Splitting technique had been devised originally to aid in the conquest of Venus. The planet held great riches for an Earth almost depleted of essential metals, fossil fuels and uranium ores. But above all, Venus had room, lots of room for an overcrowded humanity.

  Mars could support only a small population, and the planet-bearing stars were too far away. Venus was the unlimited hope. But before the planet could be utilized, it had to be conquered. And this took men.

  Venus swallowed men and never gave them back. The mortality rate among the first pioneers was close to ninety per cent. When the news got back to Earth, the stream of recruits dried to a trickle.

  But the frontier had to be opened.

  Experiments were made with growth-androids. The most successful of these, the Durier chassis, looked, heard, tasted, smelled and felt like a human. Its sponge-connection brain was more than adequate. It should have worked perfectly. It didn’t.

  The Durier chassis could be programmed like any other machine. But it could not think. It was incapable of foresight, reflection or initiative. It did not possess intelligence. Without these qualities, the Duriers were worthless on Venus.

  They were tried anyhow, and they died in the swamps and jungles. When the thousandth Durier tripped, fell into three inches of mud and was drowned, their inadequacy was accepted.

  Further experiments were run, but there was no way to induce human capabilities in the Duriers. That could only be supplied by humans. The chassis had to be operated by a human mind—or even a portion of a human mind.

  The ancient phenomenon of schizophrenia was re-examined. In the past, all attention had been devoted toward healing splits in a human mind, synthesizing the two or more personalities that sometimes appeared in a single body. Now, experimenting on volunteers, scientists tried to deepen latent splits, harden the schisms, evoke the id, super-ego and libido components of the mind.

  Separation was easier than synthesis. The scientists were able to develop separate personality tendencies in a mind, along the distinct lines of the furious and aggressive id, the conscientious, hard-working super-ego, and the pleasure-seeking libido.

  The groundwork was prepared. There were potential mind-segments to run the Durier chassis, without loss of the original personality. But the development of Venus still had to wait until Andrew Mikkleton developed his projector.

  A MIKKLETON Projector could be attached between Man and Durier chassis, linking the active human brain to the passive sponge-connection receptacle. The Projector imposed its own electrical similarity patterns between brain and brain, allowing them to become a temporary unity. With the Projector, a man could send his id or libido—but not his super-ego—into the Durier chassis.

  When Projector contact was broken, the Durier lived, its brain occupied by a personality separate and different from the original. Out of one man could come three.

  The government set up a volunteer program for the extreme-stability types needed for such a Split. The id-personalities—dominant, aggressive types—were badly needed on Venus. Earth, with its overpopulation stresses, wanted to retain the calm, conscientious super-ego types. And sterile Mars, developed by private corporations into a dozen great pleasure resorts, could use the insatiable pleasure-principle? Duriers as escorts always eager for a new sensation.

  Alistair Crompton passed the stability tests. He decided to Split with full knowledge of the consequences. Five-year Splitting contracts sold for good prices. Crompton negotiated his with care, and used the proceeds to buy a plantation in the New York suburb of Antarctica.

  He was set for life. But there were certain dangers.

  His embodied id or libido, now two separate people, might not want to reintegrate with him; and there was no law to make them. One or both might be dead. In either case, Crompton would have to live out his life with a big chunk of his personality missing. And this would be highly unsatisfactory.

  Those were the risks. But the reward was great.

  Before Splitting, Alistair Crompton had been a pleasant, normal man of thirty. After Splitting, with two-thirds of himself missing, with the super-ego rigid within him, he changed. He became petty, punctilious, cautious, nervous, puritanical, resentful, driven, circumspect and repressed.

  Crompton didn’t like the changes in himself. For five years, he lived, made his plans, waited, and wondered what the other portions of himself were like, what they were doing on Mars and Venus.

  Now the contract time was up. Crompton, with his plantation waiting for him, could reintegrate, take back the missing parts of himself through the Mikkleton Projector, return to Earth, live in peace and prosperity . . .

  If he was able.

  A LONG the flat, monotonous Martian plains, the rapido crawled past low gray shrubs struggling for existence in the cold, thin air, through swampy regions of dull green tundra. Crompton kept occupied with a book of crossword puzzles. 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 the microfilm Sunday Times. And finally they reached the outskirts of Elderberg.

  This town was the focus for all South Polar mining and farming operations. But primarily it was 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.

  It was here that Edgar Loomis, Crompton’s pleasure-principle, lived and worked.

  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 was able to recognize the male and female Durier chassis at once. The primary models in both sexes had been designed according to a very thorough survey of tourist preferences
, and so, of course, were even more stereotyped than the tourists themselves.

  Crompton 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 Tele’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 now puritanical lips. And yet, for all his curled lips, averted eyes and nostrils indrawn in revulsion, he longed for the humanity of vice as an alternative to his present bleak and sterile existence.

  But, sadly, Elderberg could not corrupt him. 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 only 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 glamor that led zealous promoters to call Elderberg the Ninevah 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 tourist 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, and elegant with his hairline moustache. 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 choosy might possibly have called him handsome.

  He didn’t resemble Crompton; but there was an affinity, a pull, an instant sense of rapport that all Split 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 looked 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,” said Crompton. “It must be 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. The chair 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—it’s the kind of thing one must become educated to.”

  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; he made an estimate of costs, added transportation charges and taxes from Terra, and totaled the result.

  Loomis had done dismayingly well as a gigilo.

  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 looked hard at Loomis and saw the signs of a decaying Durier chassis. 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 to his lips, the way his nervous fingers stroked a piece of brocade, the complacent slump of his body against the exquisite furniture.

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

  “You’ve done very nicely,” Crompton said. “As I suppose you know, I’ve come to Mars to reintegrate you.”

  “Not interested,” Loomis said. “You mean you won’t?”

  “Exactly,” Loomis said. “You don’t seem to realize that I’m performing an extremely valuable service here. You see, today everything 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 government provides 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 exempt 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.”

  Crompton had to remind himself that this was a pure pleasure-principle speaking. He asked, “In that case, why doesn’t the rich man give up his wealth?”

  “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 off the streets. They are nervous, highly bred, suspicious, these women, and very suggestible. They need nuance and subtlety. They need the attentions of a man of soaring imagination, yet possessed of an exquisite sensibility and an inexhaustible appetite. Such men are all too rare. My talents happen to lie in that particular direction. Therefore, I plan to go on exercising them.”

  LOOMIS leaned back with a smile. Crompton gazed 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.

  “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.”