Crompton Divided Read Free Page A

human race seemed to live lives of a wonderful and unpredictable richness, erupting into sudden passions and strange, calms, saying one thing and doing another, repudiating their backgrounds, overcoming their limitations, confounding psychologists and driving psychoanalysts to drink.
    But this splendor was impossible for Crompton, whom the doctors had stripped of complexity for sanity’s sake.
    Crompton with a robot’s damnable regularity, arrived at Psychosmell promptly at 8:52 every morning of his life. At five o’clock he put away his oils and essences and returned to his furnished room. There he ate a frugal meal of unappetizing health food, played three games of solitaire, filled in one crossword puzzle, and retired to his narrow and lonely bed. Each Saturday night Crompton saw a movie, jostled by merry and unpredictable teen-agers. Sundays and holidays were devoted to the study of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , for Crompton believed in self-improvement. And, once a month, Crompton would slink to a newsstand and purchase a magazine of salacious content. In the privacy of his room he would devour its contents; and then, in an ecstasy of self-loathing, rip the detestable thing to shreds.
    Crompton was aware, of course, that he had been turned into a stereotype for his own good. He tried to adjust to the situation. For a while he cultivated the company of other slab-sided centimeter-thin personalities. But the others he met were complacent, self-sufficient, and smug in their rigidity. They had been that way since birth. They experienced no lack. They had no dreams of fulfillment, no wish for self-transcendence. Crompton soon found that those who were like him were insufferable; and he was insufferable to anyone else.
    He tried hard to break through the stifling limitations of his personality. He attended self-help lectures and read inspirational books. He applied to the New York Greater Romance Service, and they arranged a date for him. Crompton went to meet his sweet unknown in front of Loew’s Jupiter Theater, with a white carnation reeking in his lapel. But within a block of the theater he was seized by a trembling fit and forced to retreat to his room.
    Crompton had only his basic individual characteristics: intelligence, tenacity, stubbornness, and will. The inevitable exaggeration of these qualities had turned him into a stereotype of an extreme cerebrotonic, a driven monolithic personality aware of its own lacks and passionately desiring fulfillment and fusion. But try as he would, Crompton could not help but act within the narrow confines of his character. His rage at himself and at the well-meaning doctors grew, and his need for self-trancendence increased accordingly.
    There was only one way for him to acquire the amazing variety of possibilities, the contradictions, the passions, the humanness , of other people. And that was through Reintegration. Accordingly, when he reached the legal Reintegration age of thirty, Crompton went to see Dr. Vlacjeck, the neurohypnotic surgeon who had performed the original operation. Crompton was excited, eager to get the names and addresses of his missing personality components, eager to Reintegrate, passionately desirous of becoming a whole human being.
    Dr. Vlacjeck reviewed his case, checked him out with his cognoscope, fed the resulting values into his computer terminal, and shook his head sadly over the result.
    ‘Alistair,’ he said, ‘it is my unhappy duty to advise you to waive Reintegration and try to accept your life as it is.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ Crompton demanded.
    ‘According to the computer readout you simply don’t have the stability or strength to hold those detached personalities in balance, to fuse them into yourself.’
    ‘Other Cleavees have succeeded,’ Crompton said. ‘Why not me?’
    ‘Because the original operation came too late. Your personality segments had already hardened.’
    ‘I’ll have to take my chances,’