Crompton Divided Read Online Free Page A

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