Doppelgangers (30 page)

“Yes, I got through and I have done my mission. Had you killed me you wouldn't have killed Alpha, you see. He's gone already. They never told you how they prepared the first double. You think you have taken risks and paid. Look at me. What would you have said if, with your looks, that fate had faced you! And I was better looking than you. I can say it, because that ‘I' was flayed off my bones in the depth of a prison long ago. Yes, I was made into a living clay and not only obliterated, but, out of my flesh, with me still imprisoned in it. I was made into the very image of the man I most detested. Whether I succeeded or failed, I was always to be like what I loathed and, incidentally, as you have proved, always be in danger of being killed by any young spark that thought he was getting rid of the Alpha spirit. Spirits, I now know, are not killed so easily; they simply pass like a flame from the candle from which they have been blown onto another prepared to carry them, and be consumed by them.”

The boy had retreated. He was sitting on the floor, his weapon dropped beside him, looking up at the face that looked across over his head. A very old quotation from the prophetic passage that described forever the type of the supreme suffering servant came into the mind behind that face, “A face more marred than all the sons of men.”

“Haven't I,” he asked, “received the mark of the beast? Isn't this to have the stigmata of damnation etched and spliced and grafted into one's flesh and bone?”

Yes, the younger man had been brought to a standstill. There was a silence while the elder man thought, Haven't we both come to the end? Wouldn't it have been better, after all, not to have won this round, too? And then the sense of destiny took him again. Was it possible that so much had been taken from him that now he couldn't fail, that he had become like a kind of wandering Jew that could always travel and never reach his journey's end, a Tithonus who could age and shrivel but never die? They sat like that for some time.

Then the boy said, “Do you think I might go to her? I think she may be coming to by now, and it would be less of a shock to her; indeed, I might be able to explain it all away if I could be with her when she wakes.”

“Yes, go,” said the elder man. “You will be able, I think, now to put things right with her. Just tell her that the drugging might have been one of the Mole's devices and she received what might have been meant for me. She will be happy, and you and she can enjoy that happiness. You had better stay together till I call for you. It would be safer for her, I think.”

The boy said, “Thank you,” simply, and was gone.

VIII

SKYSCRAPER'S VIEW

Alpha II raised his eyes when the panel had slipped into place and they were caught by a small disk near his desk which began to glow. He remembered, as on it appeared: “Certified interviewee No. 1 for”—and then followed the date and hour, 3:30, 352, 1996. Yes, it was time. He would have to do without his secretary but the process was going on. Time and Tide wait for no man, or no mask. And it was well: The tides can wash away everything in the end, even Lady Macbeth's hand, even a remodeled face. He might, in the end, forget that he was ever a private person, a particular man, and be washed by the flow of process into the vast shape of the mask into which he had been cut and thrust, a great depersonalized object, a smooth-worn hub or pivot of the turbine through which raced the waters of the endless flux that drove mankind. He gained his desk and pressed the switch of assent.

Within two minutes the door on his left opened and his visitor mounted the dais, facing him over the desk. At first sight he seemed the inventor sort that he should be—the cerebrotonic type in almost excess. There was the long, high-arched skull well seen as it rose above the small, flat-pressed ears, for though not bald the scalp was covered only with a fine down, almost like a cap of silk. The forehead was high so that its narrowness was compensated by its upward sweep. The eyes so deep and in such caves that, though there were no brow ridges, yet the upper part of the face gave no doubt as to strength, and, though the whole face was narrow and long, the eyes were set so much on the outer part of the skull that they were wide apart, giving a wide-angled look and nothing narrow or peering in the stare. In their cave of fawn brown they shone like acquamarines, pale blue in a fawn setting. The whole skin was fawn and, though unwrinkled, it gave the sense of considerable though perfectly healthy age. The nose was finely shaped but of that one-size-too-big proportion that marks with distinction but mars for beauty the hyperpituitary type. The mouth was wide but the lips so finely and slightly curved that there was neither looseness nor tightness about them; there was the hint of a smile, a smile of constant interest and understanding. The chin, again, was a trifle too long for the proportions to be beautiful but gave a final accent of focused, intelligent resolution to the whole appearance. It was a face you might pass by, but once you looked, you looked again until you had mastered the whole, for it had much to tell and yet was quite obviously uninterested in impressing or in being in any way emphatic. He was dressed in one of the long mantles worn by the elderly who in this age were not afraid to be known as old. The only slightly unusual thing about it was its color—a fawn ocher, not a common tint in this day of bright tones. But it matched his skin very well.

Alpha II had time to give himself this careful inventory, as his visitor made no haste to break the silence that followed his silent bow. The face was worth perusal and, as one read over its smoothly written record, it was pleasant to contemplate. From it there seemed to come to the onlooker that kind of quiet completed sense of pattern that is given by a well-carved steatite head of a Boddhisattva. There was, of course, a personality made manifest, but a personality that fitted with perfect ease the calm, symmetrical conventions of a hieratic art-form. And the voice, when he spoke, was as much an expression of that pattern as was the face.

“I am glad that you have been able to see me. For the expressive ritual forms of the state now seem to have reached a level when further knowledge of research in psychophysical inter-reactions may help. We also need to know more about quantity-quality correlations in regard to the sociological problem of large-scale education through group movement and affirmational action.”

“What are the facts with which you can provide me?” was met by a series of closely argued propositions, formulae of behavior patterns and tables—all given without a note—of correlations of learning-rates, metabolism quotients, emotional reactions, subconscious resistance rhythms, and assimilation curves. As he listened Alpha II began to reflect how, in spite of success, how hit and miss, how amateurish had been the efforts of the Party, the victorious Psychological Party, in their shepherding of mankind.

“Please provide me personally with all these tables and graph records,” he said as the exposition came to an end. “I understand that with these you are certain that experimental methods and tests-out would show a very great improvement in solidarity and reduction of the wastage rate that requires will-treatment and mental reduction?”

“Undoubtedly,” the other replied.

Alpha considered his next remark, and then, “I suppose you are aware that the span of your work, its width of correlation, its insight into the whole new problem of government by assent and anthropological comprehension, goes far beyond what is contributed by the usual social inventor or researcher?”

The “Why,
of course
” of his visitor made him react with the same words, “
Why
of course?” with an accent of real question put on them. “Why come to me if you know so much? Did it not occur to you that the head of the state, the chief correlator, might not welcome one who not only could give him information—” he hesitated a moment, and then said, “Alpha must always be open to that—but could see the whole interlocked relationships in a wider angle of vision than the state had yet shown signs of perceiving? Knowing as much as you do, you must have known that about humanity?”

He put his question partly as a challenge to try out the man in front of him and partly from clear curiosity. In those few minutes of demonstration the figure and the mind behind the figure came together in a single focus and he knew he was in the presence of a species of intelligence, or rather of high character, that he had never met before. To ask the man who he was, was a temptation he must resist as long as possible. Meanwhile he must find out indirectly all he could. But his curiosity was the more roused the more he realized that here was a creature who had the power to reveal as much of himself as he chose and who had shown only a small aspect of the type of mind, of which the clearly expressed radical knowledge just given was merely the specimen he at that moment required in order to gain Alpha's attention. His visitor was, it was clear—and one would be all the more at his mercy the less one faced up to the knowledge—one who was not only aware of whom he was talking to, of what would interest and hold at that moment in that place, but also as clearly of what impression he himself was making. Alpha II felt as though he and the fawn being in front of him were two pawns put in confrontation and that an intelligence which radiated from above the fawn figure was directing them both. The initiative lay wholly on that outer side of the desk, because it was the stranger who knew precisely where he was and what could develop, what reactions would be made to each of his measured disclosures of information.

The answer to his challenge did not come at once, and then was indirect.

“Do you think you will be able to use the information that I have been able to put at your disposal?”

Alpha's quiet retort, “Of course,” was to have been followed by a demand to know more of the informer.

But this time he was cut short by, “Then we can get on to matters of more concern. The management of this huge business of mankind incorporated, the company of humanity unlimited, unlimited liability, is, of course, a task which needs endless additions to managerial knowledge. But, once it is running, once it is understood, as it is now understood, as an anthropological problem, the frame of right reference has been discovered. And, though there may be errors in application, there are no longer those cardinal and crass errors of fundamental misapprehension, such as, in the three earlier phases of our epoch, stultified and frustrated the efforts of intelligent and devoted men. As one hundred and fifty years ago in surgery we passed out of the prepasteurian, pre-disinfectant stage and then understood why till then all major operations, in spite of the highest surgical skill, had to fail and fall in sepsis and septicemia—” his listener stroked his face as he listened—“so today we know the place and power of antiseptic force, of non-shock, non-violent manipulation—that handling (for that is all that surgery means) whereby the necessary molding of mankind can be done without heaping up a counterreaction that drags all back into disorder.”

“Then you approve of the Government!”

“I am, sir, making an objective diagnosis. Of human bondage and human liberation, even of human happiness and sorrow, of the choice between the charms of plenty and peril, of ease and excitement, I have not spoken.”

Then Alpha II felt his excitement justify a certain rashness of direct attack: “Who are you?”

But it was met with a return back to himself: “You are aware that the first flashes of your further development in the pattern of mankind have been released and have awakened great pleasure.”

He nodded. He had not seen the actual announcements but he knew, by the timing his secretary had given him, that, though it had seemed a speedy piece of work, the preliminary headline hints would be wide over the world by now. “The controls of mankind were to be increasingly thorough, finding out what people wanted and giving the right to have it.” Yes, that was both true and popular. Well, he must try to find out about his visitor by building him up from piecemeal reactions.

“You approve, then?”

“I am here because—having, I believe, convinced you that what you are about to do is in the line of the inevitable development, of which you are the prow, and can also be implemented most swiftly by the means I have indicated (and what I have given you is merely a specimen)—I believe we can now come to the matter which is increasingly central.”

To his question, the answer was almost curtly, “Yourself.”

Now he would call the man's bluff. “Nothing of me,” he said with a grim smile, “till something of you. Who are you?”

“An elevator man.”

An answer which irritated him to react with, “Joking is a grave matter when on secret matters of state. After all, you need never leave these buildings again, if I choose, and even if I let you go, it can be managed so that when you do, you will have left all that you had and were, in our hands.”

“Boasting is even more serious.” The answer was given with such detachment that it was a diagnosis rather than a retort; and, before he could re-attack, the voice went on, “A description literally true, can, and indeed always does, seem funny to one who has not the general information to see its relevance. I am an elevator man for two reasons. The first explains why I am here: I have been sent down to give you this information which you require—the more important part of which I have yet to impart. The second reason explains whence I have come: I have come from the Elevated, or, if you prefer a title which may seem to you less traffic-worn and high-brow, let's say the Over-Heads. It really doesn't matter. People who have learned the importance of anonymity haven't really any names, only temporary numbers to indicate temporary functions. Labels are libels.”

Alpha II tried to break in on this play of words, but for the first time the other raised his hand; it was a hand quite startlingly long and thin, so that as he raised it, it looked less like a hand than a small-shafted rod, imposing silence.