Crompton Divided (2 page)

‘Yes sir!’ Miss Anachos said, and rustled off, bearing with her that common womanly scent more subtle and precious than the rarest of crystalline confections.

Crompton watched her go. No expression crossed his wizened features. He was glad, however, that he had seen and smelled the last of Miss Anachos. Win, lose, or draw, her exudations would never again disturb his equanimity. Yes, he had sniffed the last of all of them! For soon, very soon, the moment would come when he would –

He stopped himself in midthought. Anticipation could be dangerous. He knew what he had to do. It was only necessary for him to do it – cleanly – as a sword cuts flesh.

Holding the precious substance in its refracting quartz container, Crompton left the Chief Tester’s Room and made his way to the Directors’ Suite, where the near legendary John Blount was awaiting him.

2

Thirty-five years previously, a male child had been born to Beth and Lyle Crompton of Amundsenville, Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica. Lyle was a foreman at the Scott Plutonium Mines. Beth was a part-time assembler at the local transistor factory. Both parents had a satisfactory record of mental and physical health. The infant, christened Alistair, showed every sign of excellent postnatal adjustment.

During his first nine years, Alistair appeared normal in every respect, except for a certain moodiness; but children often are moody for no reason at all. Aside from that, Alistair was an inquisitive, aggressive, affectionate, and lighthearted child, and well above the norm in intelligence.

In his tenth year Alistair’s moodiness showed a marked increase. Some days the child would sit alone 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 a high-strung, imaginative child, to be outgrown in due time.

During his eleventh year they increased in number and severity. He became subject to temper tantrums, for which the local doctor prescribed tranquilizers. One day, at the age of eleven years, seven months, Alistair struck a little girl for no discernable reason. When she cried, he attempted to strangle her. Finding this beyond his strength, he picked up a school-book and tried to smash in her skull. An adult managed to drag the kicking, screaming Alistair away. The girl suffered a brain concussion and was hospitalized 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. Beside, he liked that little girl and was going to marry her when they both grew up.

More questioning only succeeded in driving him into a stupor that lasted for five days.

Even then there was time to save Alistair, if anyone had been able to recognize the early symptoms of virus schizophrenia.

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

The Durier bodies were growth-androids with an estimated forty-five-year viability. But federal law allowed personality Reintegration to be attempted at the age of thirty. The personalities developed in the Durier bodies could, at the discretion of the dominant personality in the original corpus, be taken back into the original personality from which they had issued, with an excellent prognosis for successful fusion. But only if the original operation had been performed in time.

The general practitioner in small, isolated Amundsenville was a good man for frostbite, snow blindness, penguin fever, and other antarctical maladies. But he knew nothing about temperate-zone diseases.

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

During the first week he was moody, shy, and ill at ease, with momentary bursts of his former lightheartedness. 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 act like his former self.

Then, without warning, on the evening of 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; they were the worst possible things, under the circumstances.

After two weeks of stupor characterized by the waxy flexibility of catatonia, the disease reached its climax. Alistair’s parents sent the child to the A1 Smith Memorial Clinic in New York. There the case was immediately and accurately diagnosed as virus schizophrenia in a terminal stage.

Alistair, now twelve, had few reality-contacts with the world; not enough to provide a working basis for the specialists. He was in an almost continual state of catatonia, his schizoid personalities irreconcilably hardening, his life continuing in a strange, unreachable twilight, among the nightmares that were his only companions. Massive Cleavage had little chance of success in so advanced a case. But without the operation, Alistair was 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 the lesser evil, and signed the papers allowing the doctors to make a belated and desperate attempt at Cleavage.

Under deep synthohypnosis, three separate personalities were evoked. The doctors talked to them and made their choice. Two personalities were given names and projected into Durier bodies. The third personality – Alistair – was considered the most adequate by a narrow margin, and retained the original corpus. All three personalities survived the trauma, and the operation was judged a limited success.

The neurohypnotic surgeon in charge, Dr. Vlacjeck, noted in his report that the three personalities, all inadequate, could not hope for a successful Reintegration at the legal age of thirty. The operation had come too late, and the personalities had lost their vital intermingling of traits and sympathies, their essential commonality. In his report he urged them to waive Reintegration and live out their lives as well as they could, each within the stifling confines of his own narrow personality.

In an attempt to render any attempt at Reintegration unlikely if not impossible, the two Duriers were sent to foster parents on the planets Aaia and Ygga. 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 an unprepossessing youth of meager height, painfully thin, sharp-nosed and tight-lipped. His hairline was receding, his eyes were glassy, and his face remained sparse of stubble.

His high intelligence and talented olfactory sense brought him a good job and rapid promotion with Psychosmell, Inc., and he had risen quickly to the position of Chief Tester, the top of his profession, a job that brought him respect and a very adequate income. But Crompton was not satisfied.

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 on them. He observed prostitutes who were not good-hearted, army sergeants who detested brutality, wealthy men who never gave a cent to charity, Irishmen who hated talking, Italians who could not carry a tune, Frenchmen with no sense of logic. Most of the human race seemed to live 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 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, arrived at Psychosmell promptly at 8:52 every morning of his life. At five o’clock he put away his oils and essences and returned to his furnished room. There he ate a frugal meal of unappetizing health food, played three games of solitaire, filled in one crossword puzzle, and retired to his narrow and lonely bed. Each Saturday night Crompton saw a movie, jostled by merry and unpredictable teen-agers. Sundays and holidays were devoted to the study of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
, for Crompton believed in self-improvement. And, once a month, Crompton would slink to a newsstand and purchase a magazine of salacious content. In the privacy of his room he would devour its contents; and 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 situation. 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. They experienced no lack. They had no dreams of fulfillment, no wish for self-transcendence. Crompton soon found that those who were like him were insufferable; and he was insufferable to anyone else.

He tried hard to break through the stifling limitations of his personality. He attended self-help lectures and read inspirational books. He applied to the New York Greater Romance Service, and they arranged a date for him. Crompton went to meet his sweet unknown in front of Loew’s Jupiter Theater, with a white carnation reeking in his lapel. But within a block of the theater he was seized by a trembling fit and forced to retreat to his room.

Crompton had only his basic individual characteristics: intelligence, tenacity, stubbornness, and will. The inevitable exaggeration of these qualities had turned him into a stereotype of an extreme cerebrotonic, a driven monolithic personality aware of its own lacks and passionately desiring fulfillment and fusion. But try as he would, Crompton could not 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-trancendence increased accordingly.

There was only one way for him to acquire the amazing variety of possibilities, the contradictions, the passions, the
humanness
, of other people. And that was through Reintegration. Accordingly, when he reached the legal Reintegration age of thirty, Crompton went to see Dr. Vlacjeck, the neurohypnotic surgeon who had performed the original operation. Crompton was excited, eager to get the names and addresses of his missing personality components, eager to Reintegrate, passionately desirous of becoming a whole human being.

Dr. Vlacjeck reviewed his case, checked him out with his cognoscope, fed the resulting values into his computer terminal, and shook his head sadly over the result.

‘Alistair,’ he said, ‘it is my unhappy duty to advise you to waive Reintegration and try to accept your life as it is.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Crompton demanded.

‘According to the computer readout you simply don’t have the stability or strength to hold those detached personalities in balance, to fuse them into yourself.’

‘Other Cleavees have succeeded,’ Crompton said. ‘Why not me?’

‘Because the original operation came too late. Your personality segments had already hardened.’

‘I’ll have to take my chances,’ Crompton said. ‘Kindly give me the names and addresses of my Duriers.’

‘I beg you to reconsider,’ Vlacjeck said. ‘Any attempt at Reintegration will mean insanity for you, or death.’

‘Give me the addresses,’ Crompton demanded coldly. ‘It is my right under the law. I feel that I am capable of holding them in line. When they have become thoroughly subordinated to my will, fusion will follow. Then we will be a single functioning unit, and I will 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 are like,’ Crompton said. ‘They are a part of me. The names and addresses, please.’

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

‘Alistair, this venture has practically no chance of success. I beg you to consider –’

‘Thank you, Dr. Vlacjeck,’ 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. Vlacjeck 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 swept 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. Then the fit passed. Soon he was able to control his hands well enough to look at the paper the doctor had given him.