Doppelgangers (22 page)

To be called a warm swab is not flattering, his listener thought, and reflected, That means he really is, as far as he can, trusting, and trusting because he must!

VI

THE ROLE EXCHANGE

The diagnosis proved itself correct in the following weeks. True, Alpha kept his interest in his work of interviewing for fresh ideas, and continually worked at new social devices, but his mind, though as clear as ever, seemed to have less control over his emotions. Another insight into his actual state came to the prisoner-companion not when he was with his owner but when the owner was out.

Alpha was to be late that night: he was presiding at a monster banquet of officials—a task not too exhausting; for these meetings, though they had in them an element of adulation, always were occasions on which a good deal of technical discussion was carried on. The remodeled man sat in the study after his dinner had been served him by the trusty on duty. As the man went out of the room after having arranged the fire, the remodeled man looked after him. Would he, too, sink into being such a creature—the highest kind of trusty, but nevertheless a trusty, chief eunuch but still having ceased to be a man? His eye, as he turned round, slowly rested on the desk. Alpha had certainly been mysteriously explicit about it—a kind of tree of knowledge in this little Garden of Eden, he had made it seem. Well, his requested orders should be kept; but obviously it was, as collectors say, an interesting piece and must be more interesting than it actually looked. The remodeled man had been trained in observation. He was also top of his class as a trainee when they did the room-recollection test and he could put things back in the order they had been; that was the second test and a very useful skill when you had done a kidnaping or a theft. He could do that better than anyone in his class.

Suddenly he remembered a useful thing. He went over to a small cabinet by the firplace and took from it a pair of binoculars. They were the latest triumph in lens-making and not available for the public. The police used them for keeping people under observation and Alpha used this super-pair when watching crowds and their behavior from the palace roof. He took them out. Their focus was so good and their use of light so economical that though this room was only brightly lit by artificial light he could, when he put them to his eyes, see every detail of the desk as though he had broken the rule and mounted the dais so as to bend over that innermost sacred altar.

There was a memo with heads of points for his secretary to expand with him. There, in another division, were inquiries and orders for Algol. Here in a third wedge of the semicircular surface were questions to be put to new experts to be seen in the next couple of days. And, in the next division to that, the answers and comments from the last couple of interviews; and, camped outside that, the curve of microphones that linked this desk to the high offices and so made it the focus of world power. Yes, it was interesting but obvious, and there seemed no ground for secrecy there. He knew that few power types are secretive unless it is necessary; a certain surface openness is not only a commonplace but quite an effective disguise. It is also a relaxation to the man who has to keep certain secrets, to speak openly about what doesn't matter if it is repeated.

He put the glasses down on the seat in which he had been sitting. He walked across the room and stood so that he could be as near as possible, though still clear of the dais, which stood out from the back of the desk making a small platform about six inches in height and in breadth about three feet. He was now looking across the desk at the chair, a fine piece of carving or molding, for it was of a purple translucent plastic. The back rose like a miter and on it in cloth of gold was embroidered the large Alpha. The arms came out with a fine sweep terminating in two bulls' heads bent down so that the horns were bowed as though the beasts were charging. He remembered that at the beginning the leader had often been called the Bull, but that name had gradually, as the party became the empire, been let lapse into the more universal title of Alpha. The bulls' heads were deeply and realistically carved, the horns in the decorative design becoming the volutes of the head bosses on which the hand of the seated man would naturally rest. He scanned the whole thing carefully. Yes, it was a fine piece of carving but so far from being imaginative that it was difficult to go on scanning it for clues. He ran over each detail to memorize it—studied the bulls' heads with care, the back of the seat and then, feeling just a little baffled, sat down—surely that was permissible provided he did not touch the desk or throne—on the very edge of the dais. The high back of the desk rose behind him still more than a couple of feet away. He looked across the room and felt that if he had been on report duty he would have earned a bad mark in not being able to bring back something of value. He ran over, from long practice, all the points that he had noted, and meanwhile his fingers tapped out the points on the carpet which was thick enough to make a comfortable seat.

So it was his finger tip and not his eye which first noticed. Indeed it had already twice made its sounding before his mind turned from its catalog of past data to the present. Then he looked down. The light was quite good there, from the central chandeliers and the wall lights. Alpha did not like dusk effects. He was now upon his knees on the floor level, first examining the place where he had sat and then rapidly transferring his inspection to where his feet had been resting. He did this twice and then sat still for some time—this time on the main floor. Then he jumped up quickly and, taking the glasses from the fireside chair where he had dropped them, began with a renewed eagerness of interest, indeed with greater interest than he had showed at the first inspections, to run over every part of the throne chair.

Finally a smile began to spread over his face. Then he sighed and remarked in a whisper to himself, “How hard it dies. Once taught to hunt, a dog can't help chasing even a chicken. But it's so long since one did a bit of riddle reading that to have one and to solve it—still gives a kind of lift.” Then, in a slower tone, “Either it is a hang-over from the earlier regime or perhaps the new regime hasn't really quite yet arrived? Well, that again permits me to wait. But I'm glad of the knowledge.” He put the glasses back in their place, found the book he had been reading to put himself to sleep of nights—a Jane Austen—and settled himself by the fire.

It was not more than an hour after that Alpha came in, dropped into the other chair and remarked, “I'm glad you're up. I don't know whether I won't have to cut out these big banquets, even. Somehow they are exhausting and any information I get I could get better in desk interviews. I wonder whether I haven't (sometimes I think it must be true) so lowered, eroded, and damaged my psychic insulation by exposing myself to those torrents of focused enthusiasm as now to be tapped by any small concourse. Anyhow, I'm more and more depleted, and the more I become empty the more they seem to suck on my vitality. 'Pon my soul, if I still have one, I'd like, I believe, one frank look of hate or suspicion. But to see those men all waiting on me, not frightened and cowed—oh, no!—but just childishly pleased to bask in the presence of power, and, baby-like, content to identify what they have so largely generated, with me, it is exhausting, for they have psychically the same power that physiologically the suckling has over its nurse, to drain her dry and give nothing save a demand that must be met. There's no going back once you have been the wet nurse of a million milk-addicts. I used to be called the Bull when we were charging our way through the flimsy barriers of that effete thing that called itself communism. By heavens! I've sunk to be the universal cow of mankind!” He laughed, but the laugh trailed off into a sigh.

Then he looked up. “Look here,” he said, “can't you somehow put back this energy into me? Aren't I right?” A kind of questing anxious but hopeful tone came into his voice. “I must be, for I know that feeling; that's the feeling I always have before I hit on something big, something that is coming to me and I have only to see it.…”

What, thought his companion, is his queer psychic mind now going for?

“You and I are one creature, a symbiote, with two bodies; you are the reserve body. Hence you can recharge me. Transfusions have to be from people of the same blood group. We are of the same psychic group—and there are only two of us—but that's enough. I know now that if you can lay your hands on me I could draw energy from you. That's it! Massage me! It will somehow put me back and restore my insulation. I'll have you taught.

“I've studied the work, that work in the electrical field of the body. Indeed, it was in that work we found our final weapon. All the drugs—which I believe the Mole uses, if he exists, or the body that calls itself by that purblind name—the barbiturics, all the truth-drug lot, were well enough, but the nucleus of the self was largely untouched and people relapsed or only became trusties. I've told you, one doesn't want everyone a trusty. The electric-field work did the trick. There, again, I saw the real sense in all that senseless knocking out of their senses, by electric shocking, those wretched melancholics. But once you have electrically diagnosed any man's ‘field' then all you have to do is just reverse a man's field and for a while he's out, and then you set it going at another rhythm and no one can say why he's different but he is. He doesn't forget and be an obvious case of shock and amnesia—oh, no! nothing so vulgarly suspicion-waking as that! He just loses interests in his old interests and grows new, and has admirably sound reasons for doing so.”

As he spoke of this final triumph his buoyancy again inflated him; and he went on almost cheerfully:

“Well, I am sure you can do just what I need. Nothing, of course, as extreme as a real treatment—nothing like that at all. Simply massage, just to give me back my self-centering—just to make me cease to be what all this massive suggestion has made me: the natural prey of the mass appetite for adoration which I have awoken. I just can't go on being drained,” and something almost like a whimper came into the hard urgency of the tone.

Well, here was an opening, and, of course, one that had been prepared. Was the Mole as blind as Alpha boasted?

“I've had some little training in massage,” he said. “I was taught it to use on myself after some injuries and then I used it to help others. I think I might be able to give you some relief.”

That last word seemed to erode further Alpha's restraint. “I must have it, I wouldn't allow to myself how far I'm gone. I am keeping myself going just because there is nowhere to fall.”

That night the remodeled man found the second skill which had been given when he changed appearances brought into play. From a light hand with pastry we mount to a light hand with pathological muscles, the phrase ran through his mind. Whether it was the self-suggestive power of Alpha or whether the two
had
become uncannily akin, the massage was an immense success. It became his chief duty and hardly a night went without his being called to give this assistance.

“He says the people are addicts on his voice and face; well, now he is an addict of my hands!”

But, though the rest which Alpha gained from the treatment put him more and more at ease, his emotional tone did not harden. Increasingly every night he would run through further and further sections of his life, and it was increasingly clear that this man, so long walled up, and whose only escape from self was to be exposed to the annihilating stream of public worship, had at last found a rest. Ever more clearly came the cry, the demand for sympathy, for understanding, yes, for companionship.

And increasingly the reiterated refrain became, “Why can't I get out! Haven't I done enough? The Revolution is over; Evolution, the natural process, that hasn't got to be worked, growth, natural growth, can take its place. And Evolution can't, unless we stop this dictating. But how can I get out? I can't get away. I can't escape! I'm walled in! Why, this very body has crystallized into a mummy, a bit of type, a great formalized routine stamping-machine, a huge polished die.”

“Do you know,” he once remarked with a sigh at the end of a series of such self-pitying complaints, “there's a disease that attacks embryos, so that the life-drive goes out of the wretched little foetus. The life which should be central in it, its own life, somehow becomes transferred to its outer flesh. And so the ghastly little man-to-be is degenerated into a great growing mass of pointless tissue. Day by day, as it should be getting on to be born, it is just turning into a rougher, clumsier, blunter, vaguer, more obliterated outline of a living creature. Yes, so terrible is Nature to those that fail to keep free, that in some cases the wretched little mite turns actually in the end into a kind of stone. It isn't even flesh and blood any longer.”

His voice was growing excited: “Do you know what they call that monstrous, misconceived thing which can't even be called a misbirth, which can't even get expelled from the womb, but has to be cut out and thrown away, if the womb that bore it is not to be killed by what it has produced, its own tombstone precipitated within it? They call it,” and his voice squeaked in its panic dismally, “they call it a Mole!”

He was silent a few moments, sunken in a speechless dejection. Then he began again to argue with himself.

“And the Mole,” he muttered, “he or his group are kept alive only by the contrast, by the fact that I am up here, so they have to be down there. Moles are only mice that have gone blind by suppression, or growths that have failed to be carried on by the current of life and so can't get out. If I, as a Bull, hadn't trampled about, they wouldn't have gone underground and tried to tunnel the ground from under my feet. It was all they could do. My success forced them under. But let the surface pressure off and up they will be turned and their destructive digging will be over. They'll live on the surface, again re-get their sight and be able to see ahead. They'll cease to gnaw at the roots of things, and eat, as rats and mice should, the seeds of which there are plenty, and not kill the seed-producing plants. That's the proper balance of life. On the surface their manure pays for their meals. As it is, they are driven down, not only to gnaw at the roots of everything, but to tunnel, ruin the soil and make harvests impossible. The whole earth at last is in danger of being eroded away.”