Doppelgangers (11 page)

“Good morning,” said the remodeled man.

“Ah, what a pleasure to an expert,” was the odd but immediate reply. “That tone, quite wonderful. Not, of course, quite the thing. Privately—though in saying so I am actually speaking against my own science—I can't help feeling that we shall never get quite the unique thing. After all, a scientist need not cease to be an artist. And though—please don't misunderstand me—we shall, of course, get an effect which the ordinary man, which every ordinary man, will mistake for the sublime original, we experts, trained to know the finest qualities and having by nature an artist's ear, we shall know. But,” and his little modulating voice took a brighter, almost vigorous, tone and fluttered up from its sentimental coo, “we shall do what we are told to do, never fear. We shall deliver the goods, we shall achieve a reproduction which will serve; and, after all, if we serve, that is all we wish to do—not for us to create—if we copy so that the casual eye sees all that it is fit to see, and needs to see, then let the exquisite appreciation of an irreplaceable original belong, as a pleasure, as a private and rich reward, for those who can, and have to, see more than even their highest skill and most advanced science can convey.”

The small creature beamed after this little flow of eloquence, which was delivered in a series of varied tones which made it even more odd to hear. What he was driving at became, however, quite clear in his next sentence.

“I was told when I received my instructions that I should find a task which would both delight and tax me. As usual, I have been told the exact truth, though, as usual, in this wonderful age, I still said, like the child I am of an earlier discouragement, ‘Ah,
that
must be too good to be true.' And, as usual in these happy days, it is true. Indeed, he was right!

“Of course, I said to our club, it is just one more proof of what we scientists are only just beginning to learn, in this the final phase of man, that what a really creative mind demands
must
be supplied. It just comes out of the unknown to his call. You have seen him in this room, I know, so I can be frank with you. He is so frank and open. He gave me this assignment himself. He hates any indirectness. As long as he has time he will always get straight into touch with the man—however humble—with whom he wishes to work. He told me the story frankly, so I know all—of how he knew he must have this instrument given him and he only thought about it and willed it to happen and, within the time that it took him to think out all the specifications he should need, what he required had emerged—that, I believe, is the right word—emerged.”

The remodeled man did not feel any call to alter the term chosen by his visitor, who ran on, “And then—it is so like him and his modesty, which is innate—he said to me with a twinkle, ‘But the gifts which are sent us in this way always are left with some little piece of work to be finished by us ourselves, and that is why I have sent for you.' You may be sure I felt my position, linked with him in service, unique service. He told me that all that was needed could be done by me and that I should find the work well within my science. He is always right, and now that I have heard I know.

“‘O Alpha,' I said on leaving him (and I couldn't resist saying under my breath ‘and Omega,' for, of course, he wouldn't let me say it aloud—he's far too modest and, as you know, is always saying he's only the usher of the new age), ‘you really mustn't mind if in one way we, at least some of us, feel that you underrate what you have done for us. You think that the ordinary man is just carelessly grateful for at last being left alone and told that he can enjoy himself, and should not and need not care for things that he really doesn't, and can't, care for, and that all the rest like myself only want a chance to work and serve. But there are some of us in the little clubs, the A.A.A.'s, who feel that the finest thing you've given, of all the benefits now poured out on man, is just the power to admire a perfect achievement. You have given us at last a perfect case for loyalty.' And do you know, he clapped me on the back and told me to run along and keep my metaphysics for those who had the brains for them, for he was just a person who tried to do the next thing that came along a little better than he'd done the last.”

To stem this queer eulogy the remodeled man asked, “What's A.A.A.?”

“It's the name of our club or clubs! It stands for ‘Alpha, Avatar of the Absolute.'”

The creature beamed, evidently in a kind of quiet orgy of worship. The man watching him wondered whether the Mole had been able to rouse as intense a loyalty among men as capable in their jobs as this little fellow probably was in his. Probably the Mole thought that you could do without such gushes to drive your resolution. Perhaps the success of outward achievement always rouses a backing, which, wishing to be on the safe side and ashamed of its cowardice, tries to rationalize its timidity by calling it devotion. Of course this kind of emotional attitude had nothing to do with intelligence. Whether you chose to serve Mole or Bull, Alpha or Omega, didn't depend on your mental skill. There was something involved far deeper than that.

That this small emotionalist knew his techniques thoroughly, a moment more showed. He cut off abruptly the mood he had been in, picked up a case which was on the floor beside him, and, opening it, showed a voice-recording instrument.

“Now, please,” he said with brisk efficiency, “we will try some tones.”

For the next twenty minutes he kept the remodeled man busy, as, with terminals on his throat, with mouthpiece to his lips, the voice was gauged. He read off the records on dials, checked them, and then went through the whole process again. Finally, with equal briskness, he packed up his instruments, bowed, and said, “Tomorrow we can start our tone-balance lessons. I will work on all my data here and be ready for you then to give you lessons, so—if I may so put it, and I am sure you will agree—what is a voice full of promise may become a marvelous echo of that voice which has called the world out of chaos, to order and happiness.”

With that, the little fellow slipped quietly out of the door to which he had been withdrawing during the speech. The prisoner went to it after the latch had clicked. Yes, it was locked.

Thus began this odd companionship. He was being trained until his voice would take on the exact tones of his captor—a kind of human parrot in its cage. As he was certainly as interested in learning as is a good speaking bird and had a first-rate teacher, he made progress which charmed his trainer. He found his time with the little fellow also instructive in another way. He must try to understand what made the technicians—and this man was certainly a fine one: an inventor and not only an applier—so passionately loyal to the tyranny. There was no doubt that here—in what he still called their emotional immaturity—lay the real massive strength of the dictatorship. After all, under the strongest walls the final foundation is the natural earth. It carries the fortifications above, which otherwise must collapse. It was nonsense to say that the Bull had not behind him the vast majority-assent of all classes—at least so far. Of course, that assent must mainly be passive—even with this emotionalist. Of course, he did not see a real man in his Avatar Alpha; he saw just an opportunity of getting a worship symbol round which his sugary devotion, reaching precipitation, might crystallize. The remodeled man smiled as he recalled being told in a biology lesson—which of course ended with the benefits of living under the sign of Alpha—that the oyster will make a pearl round anything which intrudes on its soft comfort and the favorite nucleus for its shining and persistent devotion is the egg of a tapeworm.

After about six weeks—in which he saw no one else; “The other tones might disturb you,” said the little voice-specialist, who himself now spoke hardly at all after those first gushers—at last he was told, “Now I would give my word for it, no one but myself could tell the difference. Listen.”

A short record of a speech was played twice over. Turning round triumphantly, the little silver-gray figure challenged him, “Tell which was which? Of course
I
know, and of course there is a wonderful quality which we shall never get, but can you tell?”

No, he couldn't.

“My work is, then, done and I am glad to say how co-operative you have been and how I have appreciated this assignment.”

He felt that the little fellow, as he declaimed this, was speaking to others who were not in the room but were listening to all that went on in it. He hardly troubled to say good-by, though he guessed it was the last time he would see his small companion of the last few weeks. There wasn't really a whole man there: just a pair of wonderfully capable hands and ears and the parts of the brain that deal with those organs, and, behind that, just a little fog of emotion that, like a small, drifting, damp, vague cloud, was at present clinging to the side of this vast, for bidding crag that had reared itself over the flat plains of ordinary mankind.

But after his companion had gone he was not left alone; in fact, his life took on a varied tempo. There was now quite a lot of outward drilling and dressing to be done. It was not more than two days after his last lesson in voice-production that he went into his room to find quite a different sort of man waiting for him. He seemed to show by his every gesture that he was the super-valet.

Without introduction he began, “As soon as your breakfast is finished I am to come for you to show you some presentation detail.”

He was turning back from putting his tray in the service hatch when the door opened and he was bowed out, led down a small passage to a door only a dozen strides away and so into a room larger than the one in which he had been confined. The man who had led him went to a wardrobe and drew back the sliding door. Inside were a number of suits, all of identically the same cut.

“These, as you know,” he remarked, without turning round, “are the official uniform.”

Of course, he knew them all too well by sight: the tunic of silver white, the white cone hat, the boots of soft white plastic that came up to the edge of the tunic just below the knees.

“You will wear these. Put them on now so that I may judge.”

“But if I am the exact double of Alpha, why do you wish me to try on?”

He didn't see why he shouldn't try to draw out this other odd “servant of Alpha and the public.”

“I am an expert in carriage as well as in costume. The psychology of clothes has never been understood till now, and the enormous subconscious part they play in men's lives—all the more when they don't recognize that and think they don't care what they wear. Now, please put on one of these sets.”

When he was uniformed, the other asked him to walk slowly up the room and back again, sit down, stand and raise his arm, make a small speech.

As he finished this drill his instructor remarked, “Any carriage expert in the crowd would guess something was wrong. Of course you will get used to the hang of it and the part, but if you learn wrong, as you will if you go your own way, then we shan't be able to get your acquired reactions out of you. This is the time.”

And certainly they had a time of it. It was far harder work than that with the voice trainer. He was made conscious of every step and movement and every attitude into which the body fell when not moving. As the days went by his admiration grew for the machine which he had so long fought and so little understood. He had seen its underground steel tentacles. He didn't suspect (perhaps no one but the Mole knew—and did he?) the psychological care, study, and research and experiment, that had been put into this new method of holding people, this psychological tackle which was always finding new ways of impressing people's emotions.

The man who trained him was even less communicative than the voice teacher, and he felt it would be useless to ask him for any more information than he would give just to make the remodeled man become a perfect model. At last he, too, evidently thought he had done his job. He made his pupil rehearse in front of mirrors alongside of which were screens on which were thrown life-size cinema shots in full color of Alpha making all his conventional appearances, at fetes and rallies and great services, vast displays and social rituals.

It became a curious interest to the remodeled man to see how far he could go in becoming like his model. First he rationalized it as a necessary part of camouflage, of stalking one's prey, so that the hunter appeared, to the ignorant hunted, as innocent as a tuft of waving grass. Then he found himself thinking of himself as playing a part in theatricals. He had always been fond of them as a boy, and no doubt the melodramatic ideas of adventure with which the stage always has to deal had influenced him in choosing his profession—so disappointingly different when you got inside it from what you felt it must feel when you thought of it from outside! Well, now he could let his bent and gift have its way. At last he could combine the extreme of realism—the skilled assassin within one step of his strike—with the extreme of melodrama—the actor who actually plays a real part right on the stage of life and so that an audience, far vaster than any that any actor had ever played to before or could play, should be carried away with complete conviction of the reality of the performance, again in a way that no audience before had ever been able to be convinced. He realized that he was that type of actor who to do well must sink himself in his part, be his character. And surely once again he was unique in the whole annals of the stage, for no actor before had had so perfect a make-up, such an undetectable living likeness of the part he wished to play.

As he stood in the uniform reciting in the very voice he had for a decade heard giving out these very words; as he saw in the great mirrors the body, inside which he was making every gesture and sound and even detailed facial play which he knew so well as that of the master of the world, he felt a curious vague but convincing sense of identity come over him. There were moments, when he gave with full conviction one of the perorations or stood for a culminating moment with his arms raised to bless the vast crowds, when the tiny dowel of selfhood at the center of this vast column of build-up seemed to shrink—he used the simile again to himself with a wan inner smile—to the position of the tapeworm egg, the egg of the bold parasite that floated secretly into the hold of the oyster, thinking to consume the dull creature, having got past its defenses. But when it was in the life that enveloped it, that life threw round it, veil by veil, the iridescent coats which finally walled it up, making it the inert, imprisoned nucleus and base for a manifestation of its own triumphant power to react, defend itself, and recreate a new pattern of its energy out of what had been meant to be an assault on its life.