Authors: Robert Sheckley
‘Well, of course. But I was doing it all so cleverly that she could never find out a thing. And since she had no real evidence, her jealousy was irrational. All might still have been well if she hadn’t hired that detective. He couldn’t find anything really incriminating, either; but to save his reputation, he framed me. He bribed three models to swear that they had had relationships with me, singly,
ensemble
, and with others. The damnable thing was that it was true, but he hadn’t caught me at it. Still, the technical fact of it having actually happened prevented me from showing Suzy that I had been framed. … It resulted in quite a nasty scene, as you can imagine. I gave her back her ankle bracelet and left her apartment.’
Things were never quite so good for Loomis after the lifeguard job. He did manage to get hired as a substitute bartender at one of the popular nightclubs. It was a good situation: bartenders have first crack at the female customers, also an inside track with the waitresses. He really wanted to hold on to this one. And he did well at it. But –
‘I got fired,’ he admitted candidly. ‘It was because Leela made a scene and the owner decided that I was trouble. I’d been living with Leela for about a month at that time. Leela wasn’t her real name. She’d picked that up from some book. She started these scenes because Myra, whom I had recently met, was always hanging around. As if I could stop her from coming into the bar!’
‘Why was she always hanging around?’
‘Well, she’d become dependent on me. Foolishly enough, I had agreed to help her out. She was learning to be an exotic dancer, and she needed someone with sure hands to hold her while she practiced splits and backbends. Leela put the worst possible interpretation on this, of course.’
‘Did she have cause?’ Crompton asked.
Loomis shook his head impatiently. ‘She never caught me doing anything out of line with Myra. So why should she be so certain? What right did she have to make a big public mess, and to accuse me – with no evidence at all – of sleeping with Myra and Bunny? Any court anywhere in the galaxy would exonerate me –’
‘Wait a minute. Who was Bunny?’
‘Bunny was Myra’s sister. About sixteen, a charming little thing with great blue eyes and a cute, immature little figure.’
‘And what were you doing with her?’
‘Only what I had to do.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You see, they lived together in a one-room efficiency. Bunny began to get ideas. And Myra didn’t care. That Myra!’
‘So Leela made a scene and that was the end of your job?’
‘That’s right. My life became a succession of temporary jobs and temporary women. One of those women was Gilliam. And that brings us up to date.’
‘What made you decide to marry Gilliam?’
‘Well, she insisted. She was the only one who ever really insisted. That’s love, isn’t it? And she was pretty good-looking, and rich. I figured, how far wrong can I go? It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?’
‘Is Gilliam rich? I thought you said she worked as a waitress.’
‘She was just doing it for a goof. For a while I thought we could be happy together – just her and me and her money. But it was not to be. We’ve had our problems.’
‘Other women?’
‘What else? I seem to be cursed with this powerful interest in women.’
‘In their sexuality, you mean,’ Crompton stated.
‘Well, of course. That’s what women want men to be interested in them for, Alistair. Women
are
their sexual natures. Very few men are aware of this.’
‘That surely isn’t true,’ Crompton said. ‘From what I’ve seen, nearly all men are interested in sex.’
‘It’s not the same thing,’ Loomis said. ‘Being interested in sex is simply being interested in one’s own sensations. But few men are interested in women’s sexual nature. It frightens them. You’re a virgin, Al, aren’t you?’
‘We are discussing you, not me. If I understand correctly, you live off the earnings of women.’
‘And we all know what
that
is,’ Loomis said. ‘Don’t be so high and mighty, Alistair! Men and women
do
live off each other – all except the freaks like you.’
‘You are a mere parasite of the wealthy,’ Crompton said.
‘Now that’s really unfair,’ Loomis said. ‘Don’t the rich have their necessities, too? Maybe they don’t need the same things as the poor, but they do have needs. The government provides food, shelter, and medical attention for the poor. But what do they do for the rich?’
Crompton laughed. A short, unpleasant sound. ‘If anyone finds it a hardship to be rich, he is free to give up the burden.’
‘But nobody can do that! The poor are stuck with their poverty, and the rich are saddled with their wealth. That’s life, it simply can’t be helped. The rich need sympathy; and I am very sympathetic to their problems. They need people around them who can enjoy and appreciate luxuries, and teach
them
how to enjoy them as well. I perform that function, making it more possible for them to enjoy their lot in life. And rich women, Alistair! They have their needs, too. They are nervous, highly bred, suspicious, these women, and highly suggestible. They need nuance and subtlety. They need the attentions of a man of soaring imagination, yet possessed of an exquisite sensibility. Such men are all too rare in this humdrum world. Fortunately enough, my own talents lie in that direction.’
Crompton stared at Loomis with a certain horror. He found it difficult to believe that this corrupt, self-satisfied seducer was a part of him, a potentiality of his own psyche. He would have been glad to turn away from Loomis and avoid the whole distasteful business of sex. But it could not be: an inscrutable destiny had proclaimed that even the most lucid and clearest-thinking men must still live with that debased aspect of themselves, must come to terms (by sublimation, if possible!) with the shameful male instinct to fuck a lot of women and have a lot of laughs and get paid a lot of money for doing nothing.
It was regrettable, but he had to have Loomis. And perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. Crompton had no doubt of his ability to keep an impulsive, changeable, impulse-ruled creature like that in line, maybe even help him to transform his useless rutting instinct into a passion for architecture or a love of gardening, or something like that.
‘All of that is really of no concern to me,’ Crompton said. ‘As you know, I am the basic Crompton personality in the original Crompton body. I have come here to Aaia to effect Reintegration with you. I suppose you’ll want some time in which to put your affairs in order?’
‘My affairs are always in order,’ Loomis said. ‘I just take up with whoever wants to get it on with me.’
‘I meant business matters, such as outstanding debts you might wish to liquidate, settlement of property, and so on.’
‘I usually don’t concern myself too much about that sort of thing,’ Loomis said. ‘I figure that taking care of the mess I leave behind after I’m gone is someone else’s business, if you see what I mean.’
‘As you wish. Shall we get on with it?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘With the fusion!’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Loomis said. ‘That’s the part I’m kinda doubtful about.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, Al, and the fact is I really don’t want to integrate with you. Nothing personal, but that’s the way I feel.’
‘You refuse to fuse with me?’ Crompton asked, incredulous.
‘That’s it,’ Loomis said. ‘I’m really sorry, I know you’ve come a long way for nothing; though you might have written first and asked me, you know? Anyhow, my apologies, but that’s how it is.’
‘Are you unaware,’ Crompton said, ‘that you are incomplete, unfinished, a caricature of a man rather than a complete portrait? Don’t you know that your only possibility of dragging yourself out of the gutter of your life into the clear, godlike atmosphere of self-transcendence is through fusion with me?’
‘I know,’ Loomis said with a sigh. ‘And sometimes I do have the desire to find something pure, sacred, serene, and untouched by the hands of men.’
‘Well then?’
‘But frankly, I don’t think about that sort of thing too much. I can get by without it, you know? Especially now that Gilliam has split and I can start getting around a little more. I’m just having too much fun to give it all up in order to take up residence in your head, Al, no insult intended.’
‘Your present state of happiness is only temporary, as you must be aware. It will soon 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 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?’