Doppelgangers (26 page)

The door opened and closed. Waiting for him to speak were the two subordinates of Algol—the two who, those other lives ago, as it happened, were the couple that had picked him up and been the first flight of pouncing falcons which were to carry him up to this present eyrie. Well, certainly, they, no more than he, knew what they had done. He smiled at the thought and they, seeing that the world-master was in good mood, smiled back a little sheepishly and placatorily.

“I wish,” he began, and they were all deferential attention, “to give you instructions which are important and will be for you, I know, profoundly satisfactory.”

He paused and looked again at them. These men, he knew, would commit any act of toughness, if it were their orders; and yet here they were not shamming the part of deferential and even gentle loyalty. As long as he was leader he could draw that side from them—or, for the matter of that, the other—by a single gesture. They were just domesticated wild animals, dogs absolutely faithful to their master and brutes to all else if he set them on the wretched stranger. He remembered how much the old Alpha had learnt and used animal psychology in handling his new giant agglutinations of mankind. How he would point out that his whole success was because he had seen the way between the horns of Hobbes and Machiavelli on the one hand and Rousseau and Owen on the other.

“Man is not a brute,” Alpha used to remark, “in the old romantic sense of that word, but in the new natural-history sense. Nor is he a charming, sane individual making social contracts and contacts and loving to be amiable with all, just because he likes those he knows. Bear cubs love their mother, true enough. But skin her and they will nestle affectionately in her pelt and eat ravenously off her carcass lying beside the pelt. I, without my mask and robe, would naturally be eaten. Someone else who really could wear the giant's robe, would get the worship due from cub to she-bear.”

Well, the poor old fellow had been right. He had prophesied truly. The successor found his mind so clear and detached that he could think these amusing things while giving these cubs their shaping licks and pats. Again he saw that ex-Alpha had been right: a little position might make a man vain, but when your position went beyond rival or equal, then you yourself became self-debunked and quite detached. But could he keep it? Had Alpha, who had gone? Well, he would keep it if he could keep going, and it was clear what he must do and was doing with these tough kids with their child minds. He let the phrases of vague promise run until, as it were, their psychic saliva was flowing. Then he gave them their first lumps of actual food—real news and what it would mean for them.

“I have to tell you that your chief, my faithful servant, has now made an act of incomparable nobility. As you know—and may often have felt with some heaviness—his life had been overclouded in this new dawn, by what he, quite wrongly, but convincedly, believed was a personal blot on his record and scutcheon.

“The revolution had already entered into evolution”—he paused, and they bowed with eager anticipation—“but he felt that he had failed to present me with the thing that was therefore overdue. We have peace and progress. But in his own province those great facts were overcast because he had failed to root out, expose, and bring before me this figure which he calls the Mole. I begged him to leave aside such things, showing him that we had victory, so why trouble about missing some of the steps! But, like all great technicians, his joy was in his work, and he assured me that never could he think that my reign was safe, as long as, however far underground, there lived one who could question it.

“My advice could not avail with him and so finally, with regret, and seeing that without it, he would never have rest, I permitted it; I sent him to what alone could be, to such a man, his rest. He told me that he was sure that, though he valued your services as highly as I do, this work could only be done alone, by one man singlehanded. He must go down alone, for, as he said, and you and I know, the mass attack had failed to penetrate. It had driven back, but only driven deeper the nucleus. To get down to that and behind it, a single probe and lance must serve, alone could serve. And for that supreme task he offered himself and I, for his peace of mind—for of my security in your hands I felt no doubt—I reluctantly permitted. Nor did his sacrifice end there. He would wish that I should make this farewell for him, and I will, with a fitting eulogy. He may be away long, he may be away for good and—here attend to me—when he returns (though that I know would be sufficient for such fidelity) he could only be known to me.”

He saw with pleasure their puzzled but entertained interest.

“Think what this man has done, how completely, in order that he may succeed in his task, he has obliterated himself—for he was always of that nobly extreme type, almost unsuited to survive in a world where the right has the right of way and open passage. He knew that the only way whereby he could hope to penetrate down to the depths he was determined to plumb, would be for him to do nothing less than to disappear, disappear utterly. He must have his outward self completely destroyed and leave no trace of it and go on alone, an obliterated man with nothing again to recognize, to reward, to re-establish, lost in his one consuming purpose.”

They were still at a loss, but their interest certainly not less keyed.

He watched them almost wince as he remarked quietly, “Therefore he has chosen to have his whole body transformed, facial surgery must cut away the face the world knew, and bodily surgery must change that fine body, of which, as a master athlete, he was so proud.” He paused, “He has gone, already he lies somewhere utterly changed, never to be restored, but set on his traceless journey to the unknown. Yes,” he said in deepened tones, “only I, only I can gauge what that sacrifice must mean. But I am glad that you, too, can share my understanding.”

He saw their sentiment, in their moist eyes. swilling over for a moment, their self-interest and excitement—self-interest, that a chief they no doubt liked as little as Algol had liked him, was out of the way, and excitement as to what further rise must be coming to them. He switched over to the proclamation manner.

“I am giving you the first orders for a new advance, soon to rally in a new drive of progress the greater part of mankind. The age of struggle and hidden wrestling closes with this wonderful secret act. Now we all come out openly in spectacular leadership. The age of secrecy closes at this moment. You stand on a new divide, and I name you two as deputy leaders of the two great orders of marshals of humanity.

“You,” he said, turning to the one who looked least muscular and most spectacular, the dramatic type rather than the man of action, “you will be Grand Master of that division into which I am going to divide all the police, and your division will be called the Guides. It is for you to give mankind the lead and the initiative in every manner of communal invention and advance, in all the ritual of their living, in the full and manifest pattern of social being which must be continually enlarged and enriched. It is for you to see that in your deployment, the forces of humanity shall not develop energy without an adequate expression-pattern. It is not for us to repress but to expand, to find expression for all the yearnings, aspirations, and inspirations of mankind. Repressed, they become revolts and conspiracies. Let have their outlet in the chosen and designed and changing patterns of living and they become a power of cohesion binding man ever more strongly as he grows in magnitude.”

He turned to the other—a tough, if ever there was one, and as simple and action-hungry, as risk-requiring, as a boy of twelve.

“You,” he said, “will head the other order. While this, your companion, your fellow consul, will take out and expand the uniformed police into new advisers, friends, and inspirers of the common man, your task is to take out and explicate the destiny of the secret police, the plain-clothes men. I name you, therefore, the head of the order of Oblates. You have had to live too long as delates—men who had to live on the informer, on delation. That day closes this moment. The red dawn may end in a clear sunrise. It is for you to use the readiness, the power of taking risk, the carelessness of reward, the power to dare and to hold on in secrecy, for a new high. You will use your honored forces—you will set the pattern for them—in a life of continual frontier expansion. At every limit-line of mankind, there you will be marshaled to lead mankind on, to lead it out into new territories. Wherever there is the risk of radical exploration, of the breakthrough into an unknown world, with unknown prizes and unknown dangers, there you must and will be the pioneers.”

He paused, and he saw in the eyes of both of them that simple swimming glance. Yes, they were impressed. The language was commonplace, the tasks obvious, and yet, somehow, said by him and with the trappings and initiative it would give each of these psychological adolescents, the whole thing became a vision all the more powerful and compelling because so vague. He faced them with an intense stare and saw their eyes, which had been fixed on him, waver and sink. He rose.

“I hereby,” he said, “appoint you to these offices and, incidentally, each of you will carry the rank and the salary of our late vanished friend.”

They smiled up at him, as he stood on the ramp which was higher on his side than on theirs, like boys receiving their first prize. He raised his hands and, as though he had ordered it, they sank on their knees. Their heads were bent, bowed over the edge of the desk, as over an altar rail bend neophytes about to receive a sacrament. He put out his hands and laid them on these bowed scalps. He felt the skin move—and remembered the queer old word Horripilation—that gooseflesh-raising of the hair as the nervous system feels the oncoming and presence of a power which frightens and yet excites. So, the ancients said, so is found the man who in the sacred grove or in the inner holy of holies has suddenly been found by the god, looked on, and left happily dead. The heads trembled for a moment under his fingers.

Then he withdrew his hands and said curtly, “Go; the patents of your rank will be prepared immediately. Be prepared to undertake your offices, division of the force, et cetera, at once. Announce that Algol has gone on a mission of the utmost and highest importance and is therefore seconded on an indefinite leave.”

He turned back to his seat and as he sat down he saw the two, become curiously boylike now in his eyes, back out, bowing, through the door.

VII

ROMANTIC REACTION

He sat still for some time after they were gone. Like a refrain through his mind ran the phrase, “It's as easy as that, as that. You just go ahead and say what should be done and it's done.” He knew, without a tremor of doubt, that the orders he'd given, would, though so simple, break out like seed in the long downward slope of subordinates. All he had to do at the high and steep elevation at which he had been dumped, was to set a small trickle going in the direction he intended, and then, inevitably, he could foretell that in a few weeks there would be a great rushing torrent of purposes and skills, orders and arrangements pouring down and out onto the plains of what the world called action and actuality. And in a few months there would be cut out a great bed, and what had been a torrent, strong enough to carve its way with some noise and thrust and some resistance overcome, would have become a great calm river, “with pomp of waters unwithstood,” that flowed on so resistlessly that people took it as being part of the very order of nature.

As he thought, he twisted something on his finger and looking down he saw that it was his central insignia, the signet ring—what old Alpha had called, with his curious gift for using old terms and making them slightly different so as to serve new evolved purposes, the Future-Man's Ring. He had never been able to look closely at it before, for although when he was sent out deputizing he had to wear a reproduction, he had noticed that Alpha there had shown one of his curious reticences—perhaps when he had talked of the inevitability of his inspirations he had really meant just this—a superstitious sense of his own luck and that, like most men
au fond
superstitious, he had identified his luck with this object.

The reproduction he had worn had had the bezel uncarved. This was elaborately carved. It was a large luminous stone of a crystal of electrum tint, and the whole table of the stone—quite an inch in length and perhaps three-quarters in breadth—was taken up with a full and deeply carved design. It was evidently one of those abraxid rings of Gnostic influence. He took a magnifying glass from a drawer in the desk and examined it. It was certainly a striking and suggestive design, and maybe this was the source from which Alpha had gotten his basic idea so that he felt his luck was somehow held in it. It showed, from top to bottom, a giant figure of a man in the stance of the Rhodian colossus, uniting the lands of east and west with his huge straddled stride: he was also clearly an Atlas, for his head was bent forward a little so that he not only regarded the whole earth stretched out before him but held the full clouded heavens on his bent nape, both a diadem and a burden from which he saved the earth. His arms ran down each side of his body and were open outward in an attitude of achievement and bestowal.

Yes, it was clear from where old Alpha had taken that ritual act with which the vast symbolic service and ritual of mankind culminated. From the loins of this superman—this Adam-Kadmon, archetypal hominid—there swooped down an eagle, on the landscape between his feet ramped a winged bull, while, flying out from the inner facet of each kneecap the winged man and the winged lion seraphs met, making the crossbar of the giant “A.” Yes, certainly something in the creative paraconscious of that curious medium-creator that had called itself Alpha, had seen in these ancient Minoan symbols something archetypal and still been able once more to find a contemporary expression and give the stamp of their mold to one more of the social-heredity patterns of mankind.