Authors: Robert Sheckley
The first name on it was Edgar Loomis, living on the planet Aaia. The other was Dan Stack, resident of Ygga.
What were these embodied portions of his personality like? What humors, what stereotyped shapes had these truncated segments of himself taken?
The paper didn’t say. He laid out a hand of solitaire and considered the risks. His early, unintegrated schizoid mind had shown a definite tendency toward homicidal mania. Would that tendency be obliterated in fusion, assuming that the fusion was possible? Or might he be loosing a potential killer upon the world? And aside from that, was he wise in taking a step that carried a powerful threat of insanity and death to himself?
His chance of successful Reintegration was small, according to the doctor; but he was determined to attempt it. Even death or insanity could not be worse, or much different, from the way he lived now.
His mind was made up. But there was a practical difficulty. To Reintegrate, he would have to travel to Aaia, and then to Ygga. Interstellar travel was expensive; and Aaia and Ygga were situated half a galaxy apart.
There was simply no way he could get together the considerable fortune he would need for his fares to these distant worlds and his expenses once he reached them.
No
legal
way existed, to be precise about it.
Crompton was an honest and punctilious man. But this was a matter of life and death. In his circumstance, to abstain from grand larceny was to invite psychic suicide.
Crompton was not suicidal. Coldly he came to his decision, assessed the possibilities, and made his plans.
3
With silent tread, Alistair Crompton proceeded down Primrose Path, as the violet-tinted corridor to Executive Country was called. The rose quartz chalice was gripped firmly in his white hands, and his face was unreadable.
At the end of the corridor was a great oaken door upon which was carved a unicorn sniffing a bouquet of spring wild-flowers held out by a simpering damsel in a dirndl. This was the coat of arms of Psychosmell, Inc. Beneath it was the proud company motto, adapted from Martial with a trifling change of one word:
Bene olet, qui bene semper olet.
Soundlessly the great doors swung open as Crompton approached. Crompton entered the room. In front of him, arranged in a semicircle, were six armchairs in which were seated the six members of the Board. In the center of the semicircle, in an armchair one-third bigger than the others, and raised upon a dais, was the legendary John Blount. Founder of the Firm and Chairman of the Board of Directors.
‘It’s Crompton is it?’ Blount said in his cracked and quavering voice. ‘Come forward, Crompton, let’s take a look at you.’
John Blount was old, considering him as a single personality. But from the viewpoint of the average age of his various parts, Blount was not even middle-aged. Over the years, most of Blount’s vital organs had been repaired or replaced. Even his skin (shining with obscene pinkness) was no more than ten years old. His brain was original issue, however, as were his ancient and unfathomable eyes that gleamed incongruously in his firm-fleshed young man’s face like the eyes of a gila monster poking through a vat of orange jello.
‘Well, Crompton, and how have you been?’ Blount said, the old man’s quavering voice issuing strangely from the strong young body. (Blount refused to have his voice changed; his hands, too, were original issue. Blount perversely maintained that he enjoyed being old and had no desire to achieve a spurious youthfulness. He wanted to be old, but alive, and did what was necessary to maintain that state.)
‘I’ve been fine, sir,’ Crompton said.
‘Glad to hear it, Crompton, glad to hear it. I have followed your career with interest. You have done fine work for this company, my boy, hee hee hee! And now you have favored me with another sample of your talents?’
‘I hope it will please you, sir,’ Crompton said, resisting the sudden irrational urge to throw himself at Blount’s feet and grovel abjectly; for this was how the man’s presence affected everyone, including Blount’s wife, who had calluses half an inch thick on her knees from following her impulses.
‘Well, then, let’s get on with it, hee, hee, hee,’ Blount said, and extended a hand as dry and hard-fleshed as the talons of a Nigerian vulture.
Crompton put the quartz bottle in Blount’s hands and stepped back.
The Founder unstoppered it and delicately sniffed (with his original-issue nose – for it was a matter of pride and discretion with him not to tamper with the organ that had made him rich beyond the dreams of avarice).
‘Now what have we here?’ he mused aloud, his nostrils flexing strongly to allow the fragrance to distribute itself evenly across his old, leathery, but still sensitive olfactory center.
Blount was silent for a time, head thrown back, nostrils working like tiny twin bellows. Crompton knew that the Founder was analyzing the concoction in terms of its primary olfactory qualities, separating and judging the mixture of flowery, fruity, putrid, spicy, burned and resinous odors. After that, Blount could be counted upon to estimate the intensity of the various components, measuring them in olfacties, the unit of smell-intensity. Only after his analysis was complete would Blount relax and permit himself to experience the effect of the substance.
‘First impressions – seaside at Point Pleasance, a rosewood bower, desert winds, a child’s haunted face, the smell of north wind … Pretty indeed, Crompton! And now the initial rebound effect – intensification – sun on salt water – windrows of kelp – silver cliffs, an iron mountain – and the girl, the girl!’
The Directors stirred uneasily to hear that vibrant cry torn from the throat of the differentially juvenescent Founder. Had Crompton slipped up, perhaps not calculated rotating radical?
‘The girl,’ the Founder cried, ‘the girl in her white lace mantilla! Oh, Nieves, how could I have forgotten you! I see before me now the black waters of Lake Titicaca lapping at the ironwood pilings. That great bird of ill omen, the condor, soars low overhead, and the sun comes but from behind massed clouds of purple and pink. You hold my hand. Nieves, you are laughing, you do not know …’
The Founder fell silent. For an interminable minute he did not speak. Then he lowered his head. He was back in the present. The vision had faded.
‘Crompton,’ he said presently, ‘you have concocted a superb psychic elicitor. I do not know what it will bring to my colleagues. But it has given me a minute of all-too-rare delight. The memory was false, of course; but its very intensity argues that it must have been true for someone, somewhere. Gentlemen, I declare a double bonus! Crompton, I hereby increase your salary, whatever it is, by one-third.’
Crompton thanked him. As the quartz decanter was passed from hand to hand he silently left the room, and the great oak door closed silently behind him.
The news spread like wildfire throughout the offices of Psychosmell. Rejoicing was general. Crompton walked soberly back to his Chief Tester’s Room. He locked the door behind him, and proceeded to straighten up as he did after every working day. Briskly he sealed the precious substances and put them in the chute that carried them to the vacuum vaults where they were automatically returned to their hermetic sanctuary.
There was only one change in his routine. He took the container of purified essence of lurhistia, costliest substance in the galaxy weight for weight. Tight-lipped, unhesitatingly, he transferred its contents to a plain hermetic flask. He slipped this into his pocket. Then he filled the lurhistia container with common oil of ylang-ylang and returned it to the vault.
On his person now were fifty-nine grams of lurhistia – the entire produce of two years painstaking hand-extraction from the scrawny hypervalidation plants on Alphone IV. Crompton had the equivalent of a medium-sized fortune in his jacket pocket. It was enough to pay his fares to Aaia and Ygga.
He had crossed his Rubicon, taken the first and irrevocable step toward Reintegration. He was on his way! If only he could get away with it.
4
‘They don’t know the patterns they’re weaving,’ the drunk in the red porkpie hat remarked to Alistair Crompton.
‘Nor do you,’ Crompton snapped. He was sitting at the serpentine bar of the Damballa Club in disreputable Greenwich Village. The jukebox was playing a golden oldie, ‘Rub It in Your Belly, Baby,’ sung by Ghengis Khan and the Hunnies. Crompton was sipping near-beer and waiting for his contact, Mr. Elihu Rutinsky, Chief Agent for the F(I)G.
‘Of course I don’t know,’ replied the cheerful, flatulent, red-hatted man on the slender obelisk-shaped barstool with the half-empty (or half-filled) glass of Old Pigslopp brand dry-charcolated whiskey clasped in one grimy-nailed paw. ‘But at least I know that I don’t know, which is more than you can say for other people. And even before I knew, I knew that I didn’t know that I didn’t know the patterns I was weaving. Take our situation, for example. You probably think that I am quite incidental, a mere accessory to your action, an inert visual object for you to rest your eyes upon – eh?’
Crompton didn’t reply. He was still gripped in the icy self-control that had carried him from his testing room to the Sills-Maxwell, and so to Manhattan to meet a man who was already ten-minutes late. The bottle of lurhistia burned against his side like a harbinger of decomposed belongings. The jerk in the red porkpie hat leaned close to him, breathing the odor of the curdled kvass into his delicate olfactory passages.
‘
Mi coche no
va
,’ the man said unexpectedly.
It was the secret password, decided upon long ago in the peaceful days when Crompton had concocted this scheme!
‘You are Elihu Rutinsky!’ Crompton said in a half-whisper.
‘None other, and at your service,’ the drunk said, casting aside his hat, stripping off his dexmeer-compound face and his drunkenness, and revealing the silvery mane framing the long, mournful face of the elusive and hypercautious Rutinsky.
‘One must make sure,’ Rutinsky said, with a bleak smile. As Chief Agent for Freesmellers (Illegal) Guild, or F(I)G, this man was responsible for the democratizing and deinstitutionalizing of psychosmelling in Albania, Lithuania, and Transylvania. His Guild, though illegal in the United States, was duly registered and paid taxes, as was required of all illegal organizations.
‘Quick, man, there’s no time to lose!’ Rutinsky snapped.
‘Well,
I
wasn’t wasting any time,’ Crompton said. ‘I was here on time. It was you who insisted upon turning a straight-forward criminal business deal into a cloak and dagger operation’
‘So I’ve got a flair for the dramatic,’ Rutinsky said. ‘Is that a crime? It just happens that I’m also cautious. Would you condemn a man for that?’
‘I’m not condemning you for anything,’ Crompton said. ‘I am merely pointing out that you needn’t tell
me
to hurry since
I
am not wasting any time. Shall we get down to business?’
‘No.’ Rutinsky said. ‘You have hurt my feelings, impugned my honor, and cast an aspersion on my courage. I think I shall have another drink.’
‘All right,’ Crompton said, ‘I’m sorry if what I said upset you. Can we get down to business now?’
‘No, I don’t think you’re being sincere,’ Rutinsky said sulkily, biting at the ends of his fingernails and snuffling.
‘How in God’s name did
you
ever get to be Chief Agent for Freesmellers?’ Crompton asked.
Rutinsky looked up with a sudden dazzling smile. ‘I got there because I am clever and intelligent and brave and possess a mercurial temperament. See? I have snapped out of it already. Let me see the bottle.’
Crompton handed over the bottle, envious of Rutinsky’s mercuriality. He promised himself that someday, after Reintegration, he too would perform outlandish non sequiturs.
Swiftly, deftly, Rutinsky took a miniature olfactotalizer out of his pocket and clamped it to the bottle. First he took a qualitative reading to ensure that this was indeed lurhistia. Then, satisfied, he took a reading on quantity as measured by intensity, to make sure that Crompton hadn’t added a gill or so of water.
The pointer on the olfactotalizer dial swung around and bent itself in half around the limit pin!
‘Yep, it’s the real thing,’ Rutinsky said reverently. He turned to Crompton and his eyes were moist. ‘My friend, I wonder if you realize how much you have done. With the contents of this one slender bottle, I can release Freesmellers from their corporate embarrassment. In the name of Edwin Pudger, saintly white-haired head of our organization, I thank you for this favor, Mr. Crompton.’
‘It’s not a favor, it’s a criminal business transaction. I mean, pay me.’
‘Of course,’ said Rutinsky. He took a bulging wallet from his pocket and began counting out notes. ‘Let’s see; our agreed-upon price was 800,000 SVUs, to be paid in equal parts of Aaian and Yggan currency. At today’s rate of exchange that comes to 18,276 Aaian pronics and 420,087 Yggan drun-mushies. Here, I think you will find the count correct.’
Alistair stuffed the currency into a pocket. Then he stiffened; he had just heard a high-pitched whistling sound coming from the vicinity of Rutinsky’s abdomen.