Doppelgangers (6 page)

He almost smiled. For a moment his listener forgot himself as he tried hard through that waxen mask to tell whether buried under that smooth smudge there might not be the face of a man whom he had once known as a comrade. It was no use. It was certainly lost. And his own attention was switched back to himself by what the creature was now saying:

“Your case, of course, is as much beyond mine as mine was beyond anything they had done till then. I am really only a trial piece, a halfway house, though I can be and am used as a useful kind of super, and no doubt a number of such featureless models will be made, for of course we can serve a number of general purposes. But yours is an attempt at uniqueness while ours is the reverse. We are, if I may so say, that kind of generalized skeleton key with which a number of ordinary locks can be picked. You are a key forged for one master lock.”

“I would like you either to be more explicit, or to stop,” he suddenly found himself saying with an emphasis that made him master of his mumbling mouth and dedental jaws.

“Quite a right remark, and I will,” was followed without a pause by definite instructions.

“Then I go out today?”

“At once.”

“Without teeth?” he gobbled.

“But you know, with all the beauty operations, the gums and jaw must settle.”

He got up. The model rose with him, and they went past the window to the door by which it had entered. His mind switched from self-pity to an outer disgust. He found he could not think of this neat automaton as really a man. As they went past the window the slanting sunlight fell on that face. It was as smooth as a child's. All that long diary which man writes so unconsciously but so minutely all over his face, the caution round the eyes, the anger reactions in the pulls under the lower lids, the scorn stifled by still curling round the nostrils, the humor round the mouth-corners, the pulls of repeated resolution on the chin muscles and tendons, all gone, leaving not a wrack behind. But as he looked again, in that strong crosslight, he could see, as fine as the shadows of a gossamer spider's web, the faintest, neatest lines, crossing and running right across the face's smooth contours and the rise and fall of the main members. They were the only traces of this prodigious surgical battle that, on this field, had succeeded in annihilating a man's written and engraved life.

He was taken to the door by which the model had entered. It opened on a flight of stairs going down. He followed until it was clear that they were in a deep basement, when, passing through another door at the foot of the flight, he found himself on a small platform where, on the other side, a car was drawn up. This must have been the underground terminus at which he had arrived—how long ago and how different a man. And that looked as though it were the vehicle which had delivered him to his ordeal. The model opened the car door. Yes, it must be the same tumbril. It had no windows and was as smooth inside as had been his cell.

The model handed him two envelopes. “This,” he said, “holds sufficient currency notes for your expenses, and this, your instructions.”

The man waved him into the car. He obeyed, and as he sat down the door was closed, the car started. It was completely dark inside. He felt about. The door had no handle. There was nothing to do but to wait and listen. He heard the hollow echo become more open—they must have left the tunnel. Then there were the quick turns and swayings which he remembered he'd diagnosed as the side road. After that came the longer sweeps of the highroad and the ever more frequent rushing sounds of other cars passing, them. Finally the full sounds of city traffic began to rise round them. The story had been rewound. He was back again—but was it he who was back? A dim light came on in the back of the cab. It showed the interior as smooth as his cell.

He counted the currency notes, quite enough to live for a week or more as well as one might wish, longer if one was careful. He then tore open the other envelope. Queer to give instructions—he thought while doing it—and leave no means to destroy them. But when he had read them he smiled with his still stiff and rumpled face. He remembered the old rule: never destroy, but always leave about the apparently obvious. The instruction was a piece of printed pasteboard. It contained only one piece of writing and that was a date and hour. It said that one of the big semi-official employment agencies had an appointment for him at 11:30
A.M
. on a date. Everything in the new state was semi-official: “free enterprise with nothing but general welfare supervision”—that was one of the first successful slogans. He guessed the date given must be the day that he was now living in. That showed that more time had gone in his country visit than he'd thought.

As he was trying to think back he was suddenly physically swung back. The car had stopped. He waited, sitting forward. But nothing happened. Then just as he thought they were about to start again, the door swung open. This time it opened the normal way.

“Get out,” said what must have been the voice of the unseen chauffeur.

He didn't need urging, and there wasn't a moment for delay. He saw they were with a number of other cars drawn up at a traffic signal which at that moment was changing lights. The cars behind were already getting under way, and he was a track away from the curb. He leaped for it and ran, getting to the sidewalk just as the car on the track nearest the sidewalk swished behind him. Turning, he looked at the wave of cars sweeping down the receding boulevard. Of course it was useless in that number of standard hulls to try to pick out the one that might have been his prison ship. As neatly dropped as picked up, he thought. Then he glanced up at one of the big street clocks. It was ten past eleven. He looked at the street name and number. He was not more than ten minutes' walk from the place where he was to go. Good timing, they used to be told, is the essence of planning. Well, the central office evidently lived up to its advice.

He strolled along. It never occurred to him not to go on. The momentum they had given him made going back not only absurdly rash—they could and would kill, he knew, if he went off the tracks again after all the trouble they had taken. The Mole was always said to be able to cut his losses grandly. That was one of his strongest points. He would work and work with a plan and then when it would not fit he seemed to care nothing for the trouble he had taken. He would cut the whole thing out and start on a clean new idea—and with a new instrument. He scrapped his old tools with an utter disregard of any kind of attachment to anything but the end. Yes, that was strength, and it was too strong for any of its agents—especially when it had put its obliterating stamp on one, as it had on him. He wasn't going on, then, simply because he calculated it would shorten his life if he didn't—he was past such an independent calculation of choices and the choosing of a path. There seemed nothing else to do—the whole thing was now increasingly inevitable. He didn't even feel much interest as to what lay ahead. It would just happen and he would act as events dictated. He'd once or twice, when he'd been young and in the game at the start, heard one or two of the novice-instructors saying that was the right state of mind. It had seemed just silly to him. A man who serves a great cause should have fire and dash and a clear sense of what he is doing and of the greatness of his goal. But no, they had been right. This, he now knew, is the climate in which the really definitive and decisive things are done.

He began then to take a casual interest in the crowds. The last time he had seen them he had still been taken up with himself and his prejudices and indeed his personal hopes. Let me see, he thought, and it was evening, too, wasn't it, and I met a girl. Certainly the crowds looked, if anything, gayer today. It was a day of lovely lighting.

Alpha and his crew had always said they believed in making the people happy. They were out to give service, to let the ordinary sane man have a good time and get what he wanted. They'd done with all the nationalistic nonsense—they were just the enemies of all rigid ideologies. They wanted the average man and woman to sit back and have a good time and live to find life worth living and enjoyable. Of course, that meant that someone would have to work for them, to relieve them of the task of just tidying up. Hadn't we given over our children, whom we used to try to teach, to the skilled teacher and the school, from the infant-school crèche right up to the university? Even the “traditional state,” in the last phase of nationalism, had done that—it had unraveled that tangle of the animal and the sentimental called the human family.

The next thing, after the closing up and liquidation of the home, was the closing up and liquidation of the nation. Alpha had claimed that was his generous aim. And in a way he'd done it, and, without a doubt, most of the population were grateful. The great base of the pyramid of life, the ordinary self-centered person, settled back with relief, relief from no longer having to be on your toes reaching for a better life for everyone, or some great silly, out-of-the-range-of-the-senses aim. Only the peaks whined and protested and then went underground. Trying to do what? To overset the pyramid?

The thoughts went through his mind, but not as a personal challenge, as they had that last time he had strolled these streets. He wasn't thinking what he might do about it—that was settled and closed, as closed as the scars on his face, as hidden as that old appearance and character which these skilled cuts had swallowed up forever. Yes, the people were happy, gay, merry, as they had never been before. They wanted to be bright and careless, and Alpha had told them that was their duty and his aim for them.

“We must wait on life,” was one of his easy perorations. “We don't know what it wants, but the old liberals were right: we must have freedom so as to be able to wait and let it develop as it will. We will tolerate everything save intolerance. That is where the New Liberalism has learned the lesson taught by the failure of the old. We have no quarrel with anyone save those who want to dragoon the people into causes and sacrifices which the people don't want and life doesn't want them to want.

“But we know that the people, because they are kindly and simple and ought to be off guard if they are to be easy and carelessly creative, can be exploited and seized upon. Their liberty is our concern, and we will watch that they may daydream if they wish. Theirs is the creative role. We are merely their trustees and guardians. We have no quarrel save with those puritans and self-appointed fanatics who want the people to sacrifice themselves for any aim save clear, immediate happiness. The common man doesn't need to be told what that is. He knows, as a child knows what food will agree with it, till its taste is spoiled. We intend to give back to all of you your inspired and natural skill in knowing by your taste what agrees with you and what life wants of you.”

Yes, it was simple, so simple and so successful that you couldn't think why someone who wanted power hadn't thought of it before! Of course, he beat all the grim puritans, the old nationalists, the old ideologists, the hard fanatics, the men who thought the masses wanted to be drilled, when all they wanted was the fun of going about in some uniform and some kind of performance a little less dreary than the utilitarianism mixed with the inhibitions of the gentleman, which had been the only alternative formula of the old liberalism.

Here was the proof. The crowd was as bright as a May day festival, a pageant. The last vestiges of that hangover of nineteenth-century good taste that had lasted right on to the final failure of the economic revolutionary phase, the hideous male semi-uniform, as dreary as the worst uniform, the so-called lounge suit, then named the store suit, had gone forever. Men wore what they liked, but most were in that athletic kit which the thirteenth century had stylized—the jersey or belted tunic reaching to the mid-thigh, the long hose, and the boots of the soft plastic that had taken the place of leather. The textiles were of hues which made silk look dingy. And these iridescent crowds were made kaleidoscopic by their reflections in endless mirrors. All blank spaces were large looking glasses.

“If people look at themselves—and it is that they'd rather look at than anything else—they'll never trouble to look further.” He remembered that when he was a young fellow and he was talking to his professor in political science, the man had said that to him. He now suspected that then they were feeling out, making a first test of him, as if he might be one of those few young on whom the bait of pleasure and ease wouldn't take. If so, he would have to be taken into the machine, go under the smooth surface with its finely painted decorations, and see the actual structure underneath that supported all this and the engines that ran it.

Instead, he had been caught by a fellow scholar who had made a contact with the unofficial underground, and for Bull they had exchanged Mole. Well, it was done and irrevocable. Between him and this gay crowd there was a gap as wide and unbridgeable as between the living and the dead. It was too wide for blame or praise to come into the question. For that would mean that choice could be made. No comparison was possible. The living don't blame the dead for having gone. It just can't be helped and had best not be thought about.

Of course, there were officials about in this irresponsible crowd. It didn't take his trained eye to pick them out, either. Alpha was not such an old stick-in-the-mud as to try to hide everything. The actual machine was hidden well underground, but there had to be contact points, holds, and controls which emerged onto the surface. Such things didn't disturb the masses. On the contrary, it gave them a sense of security. They were told half of the truth quite frankly, so frankly that, as they wished to believe it was the whole, they never inquired further. The world, it was said in all lessons on sociology, was divided into two classes as a genetic fact. There were people who could be content to take their pleasure and their ease, those who had by nature, in their blood, the art of living. That was the great mass of people, and no doubt they were the aim of life. And to keep the world fit for such sane people to live in, for men and women who were so natural and healthy that they didn't need any other reason for living than the physical fun that healthy living gave them, nature had provided another type, of too high nervous tension ever to be able to relax, a type which needs to live for something else and never could live just for the life's sake in them, just for friendly fun, who had the itch to work in their blood. It was clear that this was life's aim.