Crompton Divided by Robert Sheckley Page B

coming at last to the brilliant and paradoxical coda in which all the various elements were subordinated to their proper place in the ensemble of qualities that made up the projected image of the man, yet each highlighting and evoking the individuality of the others, and thus bringing out – by default, as it were – its own uniqueness. And so it ended and the two men were silent for a time.
    At last Loomis said, ‘What do you think? Be completely frank; politeness is misplaced at a time like this.’
    ‘Well then,’ Crompton said, ‘I must tell you that is exactly what everyone plays on Self-Expression Machines.’
    ‘I see,’ Loomis said frigidly, pinching his nose in a gesture of inner pain.
    He sat for a time, brooding silently. Then presently he cheered up and said, ‘Well, what the hell! It’s only a hobby! I just dabble at it, you know. But I do think I achieved some pretty effects for an amateur, don’t you? Let’s get together for a drink sometime. How long did you say you were staying?’
    ‘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