Doppelgangers (5 page)

Then one day one of them spoke. “I'd like to show you how to do something of this for yourself. Especially round the head and neck you should keep this up. It will keep you free of tensions and set the circulation flowing well through all this new skin.”

He was willing to learn. He was shown how to soothe a nerve with a few fingerings of its power-line.

“The back of the neck, though, is the central switchboard for all the head,” was the next instruction.

After he had been trying with his teacher's help to get himself by the scruff of the neck, he was told to work first with his hands in front of him: “Get the movement there and then translate it back.” But he still didn't, evidently, do it right.

To his surprise, and somehow quite considerable pleasure, the masseur—there was only one now—suddenly turned his back to the bed, knelt down, and said, “Look here, put your hands on my neck and that will show you. I'll be able to tell you how to do it; best that way.”

They had several lessons in that method and he learned to feel his way along the nerves and muscles and see where the tensions lay and smooth them out. Then he could put his own hands and fingers on his own neck almost as aptly. The work interested him, too, quite apart from the relief. He had been so long without anything to do that his hands, just as had his flesh, seemed to be craving to get to work, to live again in action. But as soon as he had learned that, he saw his friend—as already he had begun to think of this strange, masked masseur—no more. The life kept on its nightmare quality of irrelevance. For, a day after the massage lessons stopped, he was told by the invisible voice to come along. He was sitting on the edge of his bed after putting on the two-piece suit in which he spent his time when not in bed. He rose uncertainly, and as he did so a small section in the wall, just enough to let a man through, opened. He stepped out into a passage faintly lit through its plastic wall. It went straight for perhaps a hundred yards, then turned right and seemed to end after hardly more than fifty feet. But when he was within arm's length of the terminating wall, it slid aside. He stepped through and he could just hear the panel slip back into place behind him.

He was in a bare room, but it had one reassuring feature—an ordinary, obvious door was at one side of it and, even more reassuring, the door was ajar, while from the other side of it a loud, unguarded voice, full of careless inflection, called out, “Come in, come along.” He stepped across and looked in. That room was larger and full of reassuring things—it was a big kitchen and at the farther end its cooking ranges glowed cheerfully. The man who had called to him again shouted, “Come in” over the noise of an egg beater which he was using.

He was told he could help. He found this, his second teacher, gay, amusing; and learning with him became interesting. He was taught all sorts of cookery by one who was evidently an enthusiast. The hours were not long and the drudgery was off their hands: for all the soiled things simply were put into a transit-duct and the clean utensils were returned by another. In between as they ate their meals—or rested (they seemed to be cooking for not more than half a dozen persons or a few more, beside themselves)—the cheery chef would talk vivaciously and amusingly. But all his life and anecdotes circled round his profession; where he had led it and why he had come here, there was never a hint of such things.

Wearily the captive reflected, this is probably one of the top men, who just chooses to act the part of a chef the better to observe me when relaxed. He himself was too old a hand at secret-service work not to know that vivacious type which is bubbling over with a talk which, like a thick foam, hides the deep, watching mind far better than any smooth stillness. But all that he learned was cookery, and that he learned thoroughly. If this, his new jailer, was an actor, he was the most thorough he had ever met in a profession which puts the highest premium on three-dimensional, all-the-time acting.

After what he was pretty sure was six weeks or two months—for he was told he was an apt pupil—he was told he knew enough, unless he wanted to become a chef, and no doubt, said the chef with a laugh, he only wanted to be an amateur.

“Besides, if I told you any more, I should have to initiate you into the real culinary mysteries and then we should be confreres, and that wouldn't do, would it?”

For a moment in that rhetorical question he thought he caught the far-down echo of a real one. Anyhow, that was the last time he saw the chef, and indeed the last time that he saw anything of that sunken life into which he had gone a young man of promise and full of his own sense of who he was and who he might become—and from which he would emerge, what? For the next day he found an ordinary suit lying on a chair by his bed.

The voice that he had become so used to, that came from nowhere, said, “Straight down the passage and then straight on.”

He went down, carrying the suit over his arm. At the right-angle turn the wall opened in front of him and he was in a fine bathroom. A masked attendant, after massaging him, shaved him. With a motiveless detachment he thought to himself, how well they must have done their work to leave quite a steady flow of stubble to be reaped. Well, they had left him a man, if he had lost the particular manhood, the male personality, he had had.

“I'm shaving you,” said the voice above him, “because you'll need for a little to learn to handle this skin of yours.”

The shrouded barber took up a big fold of the skin with his fingers. The man being shaved remembered that he used to enjoy that—coming up from some particularly deep and dirty underground dive all soiled and prickly and under that stimulating rasp becoming smooth again and svelte. It was contrast that counted, really. There had been for a short time a short-wave invention that did away with the need to shave. Three radiation treatments left you with a waxlike face-complexion that lasted three months and more. But after a little it was thought a bit effeminate. Men preferred to go back to the stronger complexion texture given by the latent beard.

Looking up, he found there was a large polished-metal boss that held the diffusion glass under-shade of the light hung above the barber's chair. In this he could just see a miniature of his head, and, as the barber's hands flicked to and fro, he could catch glimpses with each razor-sweep-off of the foam, of a face emerging. It was hard to be quite sure because the flesh seemed so loose. And as the barber took it up in his thumb and finger there seemed so much cheek and chin that any clear outline never seemed to be detectable.

He felt however, increasingly sure of two impressions: the upper part of his face, grown on him closer than glue, was someone else's. Whose you couldn't tell, for as far as he could glance there didn't seem enough of it. For the lower part of it, the greater part of it, was no one's. From the cheekbones almost to the Adam's apple it seemed there must be hanging a series of doublings and folds which, if they had had in them any thrust, might have been called chins. The whole mask, that he felt was so lax that, from drooping eyes downward, the miniature creature up at whom he glanced (and through whom he presumably was looking) appeared a cartoon for a deflated, dismal debauchee. No, it was worse than that, it looked like one of those rubber toys, just a crumpled swath of folds that may, when you inflate them, turn into a pig or a bathing belle.

As a fresh coat of lather was slapped on over this clever wrecking he sighed. Perhaps it would come straight when he could get upright. But did it matter into what shape they had cut and stitched him? The former man seemed already to have been stripped away with the face they had skinned and scalped from him. When he had been put through that last drill, to see that he could move all this curtainage and shrouding, he hadn't, while he pulled it to and fro at command and, as they said, “assembled it,” he hadn't realized what it was, how far it fell short of being a face, when it really fell into repose. But even now he wasn't sure. All he could actually see was a manikin emerging out of foam, and he noticed that the barber's hands, which were shapely enough, looked in their reflection up on the polished boss quite a bit distorted. He thought grimly but with little grit of resentment, They might have turned me into anything, into an ephebe, a hermaphrodite, a monkey-man, a seal creature, or some sort of grotesque modernization of a centaur—one must be thankful for being let remain one of the featherless bipeds. After he was left he showered himself and once or twice caught his reflection in the small puddles of water. What was the use? And muttering with some bitterness, “Narcissus,” he put on the clothes.

II

THE MISSION

The voice directed him back to his room where his breakfast was ready. His gums were now quite hard but still they gave him pap and no teeth to bite anything else. He took it down: his stomach caring little for his appearance, or that of the food, as long as it got its mushy pabulum. What a surface creature this I is, he thought, and before he had turned his mind from this useless and inevitable reflection the voice said, “You will find the office to your left, down the passage.” Again, when he reached the end of the first straight, the wall opened, but this time on the right, and he was in a small but quite normal room in which there was sunlight falling, books, and flowers.

He sat down in a chair looking at these with a relief that was so strong that he felt a surprise at its intensity. He was sufficiently master of himself, however, to realize this was his surface self, that had tried in vain to make his animal self give up the wish to live, now going over to those who had remade him. He had capitulated to the brutal terms of “life at any price” and “only let me live.” He looked out of the window at a small lawn and garden, the close view ending in some graceful trees about a square sheet of water. The view rested him, and he was so determined to take it and disregard all else that he refused to look round when he heard another door open. He would not even turn away from the quiet scene when he heard someone take a chair close to him.

He waited until quite a cheerful voice began, “We don't deal in apologies, you know, but we do allow praise, and we cannot say how highly we think of the organic reaction that has been made to this brilliant and brilliantly successful experiment. We are sure now that all the main difficulties are surmounted. The rest presents no real problem. As in chess, there are some more movements to be made but the checkmate is now the definite six moves away. Only a fool could throw away the game now. Not a master, on the other side, can save the situation.”

He turned round slowly. He did not remember ever seeing the man who was talking to him before. But then, you wouldn't. The face was remarkable for one thing: there was absolutely nothing whereby you might remember it—it had features, of course, but in the memorable sense, it was utterly featureless—smooth, unaccented, like the voice. You could not even tell the age—a male adult, that was all you could say, and no scrutiny would help you to remember more.

“It may interest you to know that you are being spoken to,” went on the voice, “by one of the preliminary trials—a successful one, in its way—of course some, both before and after this particular case, broke down, nervously or just in the way of crude physical healing power. Sometimes the repair power seemed to give out. At others it wasn't possible to get results that wouldn't show—there was distortion, or that slight lack of subcutaneous muscle-tone which makes the face look suspiciously wooden—what you used to see on the old scar-removal surgery cases. But in the case which you are now viewing the aim was simple, just to see, as a trial, not whether something could be built up but whether it was possible to remove all likeness and reduce the face to complete nondescriptivity, nonentity. Well, I am told that the effect is quite successful, and I should like to add I have found that it is not merely physiological.

“I find, myself, that if clothes make the man and the uniform makes us uniform, having one's face made neutral does a great deal to make one's character lose those queer and inconvenient quirks which we are always building up as part of our character-pose. After all, what's personality, when you analyze the word, but a mask, an instrument through which one gives tone and flavor and accent to what is otherwise the common cliché-collection and vocabulary of everyone!”

The speaker paused. He had spoken in his partless part perfectly, without accent or emphasis, as though to himself or to some large unknown audience and as though it were all so obvious as hardly to need the saying.

“You'll be surprised and pleased,” the faintest glow of mild complacency came into the flat tone of the voice, “to notice how much a real change in physiognomy does for the psyche. In some of the earlier cases they did try pretty thorough glandular alterations, hoping then, by thyroidectomy, interstitial graftings, and such neat surgeries so to change the endocrine balance that the basic alteration of physique and appearance desired would come about. But it was more ingenious than successful. Of course, it had to be a hit-or-miss procedure.

“They produced naturally (or should I say unnaturally?) some quite interesting, and indeed unexpected, results. Indeed, very interesting for pure research into the problem, What is personality? But then, of course, as you know as well as I, this laboratory is not for pure research. It's for a very special, very particularly applied, research. In my own case, they were still hoping something might come from glandular surgery combined with radical change in appearance. So I was given a fairly extensive thyroidectomy,” the man touched a fine vertical line by his Adam's apple, “but I don't think it really helped. The utter change in appearance is what counts and really affects and alters character—slower, of course, but in the end much surer—a sort of natural seasoning, maturing, weathering, from the surface in. Put a man into waiter's clothes, keep him in them, never let him be in anything else, and gradually he learns to wait; he becomes a waiter and wants to be. There was a successful actress whose final hit was the playing so well of the part of an ancient arthritic lady that the run ended by bringing her to a standstill. Off the stage she woke up to find she had actually become arthritic!”