Crompton Divided by Robert Sheckley Page A

pass, like all of the other ephemeral things in your life, and you will return to the misery that has haunted most of your existence.’
    ‘Actually, it hasn’t been so bad,’ Loomis said. ‘I really don’t mind going right on with it just the way it’s been.’
    ‘Then consider this,’ Crompton said. ‘Your personality resides in a Durier body, which has an estimated competence of forty-five years. You are thirty-five now. You have no more than ten more years to go.’
    ‘Hmmm,’ Loomis said.
    ‘That means that in ten years, you’ll be dead.’
    ‘I understand what it means,’ Loomis said. Thoughtfully he lighted a handmade cigarette with a red dot near the filter.
    ‘Reintegration won’t be so bad,’ Crompton said, twisting his face into agreeable lines. ‘We’ll all do our best, you and the other fellow we still have to get in touch with. We will settle our differences in a rational, amicable manner and it will all be fine. What do you say?’
    Loomis thought hard, drawing on his cigarette. At last he sighed and said, ‘No.’
    ‘But your very life –’
    ‘I simply can’t get worked up·about that sort of thing,’ Loomis said. ‘It’s enough for me to dig each crazy moment as as it trundles past. Ten years is a long time, something’s bound to turn up.’
    ‘Nothing will turn up,’ Crompton said. ‘In ten years you’ll be dead. Just dead.’
    ‘Well, you can never tell. …’
    ‘Dead!’
    Loomis said, ‘Must you keep on saying that?’
    ‘It’s true. You will be dead!’
    ‘Yeah, it is true,’ Loomis said. He thought and smoked. Then his expression brightened. He said, ‘I guess we’ll just have to do this fusion, then.’
    ‘Now you’re talking!’
    ‘In about nine years.’
    ‘That’s quite impossible,’ Crompton said. ‘Do you think I am simply going to hang around this ridiculous planet for nine years waiting for you to make up your mind?’
    ‘Well – what else can you do?’ Loomis asked reasonably. ‘Come on, old man, let’s not quarrel. I have always found that things have a miraculous way of working themselves out if you simply ignore them and go about your business. Come with me, Alistair. I want to ask your opinion on something.’
     
    He led Crompton downstairs to a basement workshop. In one corner there was something that looked a little like an electronic organ. It had many switches and buttons and foot pedals, and resembled the cockpit of an anachronistic 747. There was a little footstool in front of it. Loomis sat down and turned on the power.
    ‘This,’ he said to Crompton, ‘is a Wurlitzer-Venco Self-Expression Machine.’
    He flicked switches with both hands. ‘Now I have energized it and set the tone-values. The predominant mood, as you can tell from the clear yellows and oranges projected on the wall in front of you, is one of deep self-pity. This I further embellish through the musical theme which the machine will now produce, and also through the verses which it will write and reproduce in the lower left-hand corner of the big screen to your left. Listen, Alistair.’
    Loomis emoted at the machine, and the machine translated his emotions into colors, forms, rhythms, into chanted verse, into dance forms danced by elegant puppets, into gray ocean and black night, and into bleeding purple-edged sunsets suffused with sunburnt laughter and shaken by tremors of impotent rage. Misty, multicolored scenes came into focus, filled with odd wispy people who enacted dramas of curious import; and in these various representaglia, as they were technically called, one could feel the childhood dreams of the man, his first bewildering sexual cravings, his long and agonized school days, his first love on his second summer holiday, and much, much more, all flowing to the present, woven and intertwined in all of the art forms available in this series (except for soap-bubble sculpture, a brand-new feature available only with the new Mark V Wurlitzer-Venco) and