Crompton Divided by Robert Sheckley Read Free Book Online Page A

here for everyone, and at modest cost. For the adventurous, there are pleasures compounded of the most guilty and deeply hidden desires – to be brought to light and staged for you by a plentiful staff of your own species to ensure the authenticity of all delights – unlike the Gouville FunLand on Drog’hvasta II, where all services, sexual and otherwise, are performed by shape-changing (and sometimes absentminded!) Duverian Hungorfyyords.
    But the description is not the described, as Amirra Tauba remarked as he chewed up the map of the galaxy! Words, in the final analysis, are just about as futile as actions, and much less fun. So welcome to Aaia, where we promise you the time of your incarnation!
     
    Crompton put the brochure in his pocket. He was sitting in the lobby of the Pingala Arms in downtown Cetesphe. His ship had ‘come out of the tube’ (as Captain Remonstrator jocularly expressed it) some twelve hours previously. He was now seated in the lobby of his hotel awaiting the arrival of a man who might be able to help him.
    Edgar Loomis, whom he sought, was the pleasure component of the scattered Crompton personality. He was the fun-seeker, the sensation-lover; without him, there was no party for Crompton, no immediacy, no Now. Loomis was indispensable. But it looked as though there were going to be considerable difficulties in finding him.
    Soon after his arrival, Crompton had gone to the Hall of Records, where information on the whereabouts of all beings on Aaia was scrupulously maintained and updated. He was told that Edgar Loomis was in good health and was currently employed at the Gardens of Rui. But no other information was given to him: by virtue of a very recent law, the addresses of persons and other beings working in the Gardens were no longer to be disclosed. The android clerk, though sympathetic and in agreement that the law made no apparent sense, could do nothing for him except suggest that he conduct a personal search of the Gardens.
    Crompton decided against this. It would be futile, considering their vast extent and the hordes of people employed there, some of them indoors in capacities that would make a chance encounter with a male of their own race unlikely in the extreme.
    He discussed his problem with the desk clerk at the Pingala Arms. The clerk hinted that something might be done, under certain circumstances difficult to define. Crompton, after several agonizing seconds, figured out what the man meant and, crimson with embarrassment, offered him a crumpled handful of Aaian pronics. The clerk accepted them matter-of-factly and made a telegnomic call. He told Crompton to wait in the lobby until someone came for him.
     
    The hotel’s central intake orifice dilated and a small hunchbacked person in a long tattered gray overcoat and cracked brown shoes slid through and said, ‘You Crompton? Follow me.’
    He led Crompton outside, to a waiting limousine. (Crompton learned later that this vehicle ran on the power supplied by a small psychophysical converter that extracted volition from chimpanzees bred especially for this purpose, then converted that energy into torque.) The hunchback seated himself next to Crompton and waited until Crompton paid him six hundred pronics. Then he gave instructions to the driver and the vehicle gibbered away.
    The hunchback said, ‘I’m not guaranteeing anything, but I’m taking you to see the only person who can help you, if he wants to.’
    ‘Who is this person?’ Crompton asked.
    ‘He is the newly elected Council Member for East Cetesphe. He is also the person who sponsored the law that prevents you from learning what you need to know.’
    ‘How can he help me?’
    ‘It is a custom of Aaia that the man responsible for a new law is also granted a legal exception to that law, to use as he pleases, or to bestow on someone else.’
    ‘You’re saying that the man who passes a new law is legally entitled to break it?’
    ‘Precisely.’
    ‘But that’s