Doppelgangers (9 page)

And, evidently pleased with his own address, the chef actually chuckled.

The incident was so small that he would have forgotten it, no doubt, but that a few days later he found on returning to his room a notice from the post office that a package was waiting him. He went down there before work. Naturally, it would be his teeth. His disappointment was keen when he saw that the package handed him was far too small. He opened it as he went along to work, and his annoyance was shot with surprise when out of it he took an Alpha badge pin. Of course no one had to wear these badges. The administration often said they wanted people to be happy and they believed that happiness was the cement of agreement. They didn't want people to be loyal but to be satisfied, and they didn't believe that loyalty or manufactured satisfaction was durable. Still, most people at the big festival of freedom did wear some such badge and nearly everyone who was in one of the public services wore them rather more often. Well, if that was his instruction, he had better live up to it—it didn't seem a very subtle piece of window dressing for the Mole to think up after a number of days—but the obvious can, with the very subtle, have an edge which is concealed by apparent bluntness.

As he was approaching the place where he worked he put the badge in the breast of his tunic. It was a small rod with an Alpha on the top like the Constantine Labarum. He was fitting it into his buttonhole when the top twisted loose. Poorly made, he thought, as he drew out the top and left the stem in the buttonhole. But as he tried to fit it together again he saw that the joint which had come loose, just under the capital A, had, depending from it, a dowel that pegged into the stem-hollow. And it was a very long dowel, almost the length of the stem. He had now arrived at the side street in which his work-place was. He examined the object which he was holding by its capital letter head, which made a fine grip, and saw that he had hold of a very fine and sharp skewer about two inches long, double-bladed. He tried it on the hair of the back of his hand. It was as sharp as a razor. Of course the two incidents could be coincidence. But were they? And if not, to what did they point? He put the badge together, put it right in his buttonhole, and went in.

One evening, though, his mind tired of this solitaire. Why try to solve problems of other people's behavior when that of your own and your own position is completely enigmatic to yourself? He must have company. But who'd want an object like him to spend an evening with? Suddenly, with the conviction that need will give, he thought of Alie—Alie would understand. She'd said she liked him because he was different, that she was tired of handsome health. Well, women were sometimes like that; they had pity—“And pity from thee more dear than that from another.” The line running into his mind set it. He got up from his meal and went down to that park. A show was on—nothing might have happened since then. He walked about. No one noticed him. He went to the place where they had sat. Broad bands of flush lighting were flooding the lawns and concentrating on the outdoor stage. But just where they had sat there had been a heliotrope shadow made by the light being broken by a screen of bushes. He came into that mauve dusk. Sure enough, that must be she, and she was alone. This must be meant; luck like that could only mean that she did come here—waiting. He came up from behind and sat down in one of the rows of seats immediately behind hers. He could see her profile when he bent forward. She did look grave, sad even. He rested his hand softly on the back of her chair. He could control his voice now, if he spoke softly so that it could sound as it had formerly sounded.

“Alie”—she did not start, but he was a good enough observer to see the neck muscles tauten—“Alie, I had to be away—away on a hard bit of work.” She didn't turn. But he thought he saw her head almost involuntarily bow. “Alie, at that, that work, I've been—well a bit knocked about—I'm injured?” There was a question in his voice. No, she wasn't going to cut him short either by going away or turning around. “Alie, you said you might like me, if only for a little, just because I was different. Might we, please just try an evening together?”

His voice was pleading. He did not know till he let it find words how deep and cruel his need was. Certainly his tone told. She was silent. But suddenly he saw that without turning round she had put her hand backward. She touched his knee.

“Thank you,” he said. “I don't know how to thank you.”

The fingers gave a small pat, as a person pats a strange dog they are sorry for but are not sure about. He put his fingers gently on hers. She did not draw hers away. They sat like that a little, and he thought he had never rested before in his life.

Then she said, “Yes, I couldn't get you out of my mind; and, do you know, I was full of some kind of fear. I thought something must have happened to you. I somehow knew you'd have come otherwise.”

There was again a silence. The play had stopped and the crowd had thinned. They were alone in that series of seats. He waited a few moments. Then, taking her hand, he got up gently and moved to the seat beside her. Suddenly her hand was snatched away. She had risen.

“That's a common trick and a mean one!” Her voice was shrill. “You've simply got my name and description from, I suppose, the man who gave it you when he was drunk—so that you'd get off with me in the dusk!”

“But I'm that boy himself. Please, please believe me. I told you I'd been injured, facially injured.”

“Dirty liar, and dirty-minded old lecher! You, injured—you, a fresh young kid only a few weeks ago! Why, you've not been thirty for a dozen years! No, my old scrounger, you didn't get a face like that and a skin like that in any accident. You're just an old piece of debauched skin. Get out!”

He turned round and was back in his room in twenty minutes. Yes, they had seen to it that he was shut out from life. He had a couple of bad days as the shock of hope died down and he settled again to his sunken living.

It was, then, with no relief that a couple of days later he found another notice from the post office waiting for him on his return from work. He had to be early at the kitchen the next morning, and it took twenty minutes to get to that post office. He arrived to find a queue at that window. When he at last received the small package it was nearly time for him to be on duty. He had no time to go back to his room to open it. He guessed what it was—his teeth. He went down into a public lavatory and, locking himself in, tore the package open. He pulled the wadding away and smiled unpleasantly as he saw grinning up at him, like the remains of a skeleton, the artificial pieces of tooth-shaped enamel with the hard sham gums in which they were rooted. Well, there was no time for Hamletesque soliloquies. There was no mirror to watch for effects, and why should he? Wasn't that, at least, dead in him? He slipped them in and was pleased to find what a good fit they were. Those surgeons had understood their horrible art. He felt the firm grip again and could set his jaw once more; it was curiously reassuring and he felt the powerful mounts push out and stretch and hold his lapsed cheeks and chin. He ran his hand over his face. It was firm and taut; the very feel of it was encouraging. He felt his jaw thrust out by the new support. “I suppose,” he amused himself by thinking, “it's the feeling a poor ruptured body has when they build up its abdominal wall for it again.” But there was no time; he ran out and up the stairs, and as a taxi passed he sprang into it, calling out the address. He leaped out as it drew up, threw the fare to the man, and ran in, just on time.

His long experience of complete loneliness had now driven him into a level of interior feeling. He felt as though he were always fingering his way about like a blind man in a complicated prison. He paid much more attention, therefore, to such explorations of his own states of mind than to the impression he might be making on those around him. He was slow, then, to notice that in the kitchen his appearance had begun to awaken interest that in the freshness of his first arrival had not been stirred. And he was even slower to think out why he should now be given some attention. It was, too, the kind of attention of which formerly he would have been most aware. When he turned suddenly he could not, after some time, fail to notice that one or the other of the rest of the crew, sometimes the chef himself, sometimes a couple of them, had actually been looking at him while his back was turned and made the usual clumsy attempt to pretend that they had not been doing so.

Finally the half-dead interest in himself stirred sufficiently under those small prods to make him wonder vaguely about the change. Of course it must be the teeth, but then, surely they had got used to his appearance, and if they had asked the chef he could have told them that as soon as he could get his pay he would have his new set. In this world where personal, physical happiness had been deliberately made the goal of every sane person, people would often have their teeth-profile, as it was called, changed because their beautician had convinced them that the type of beauty he was building up for them would be given more point if their smile were re-accented. It was natural, then, that a person should be changing his teeth; and, as it was expensive, it was just as natural that he might have to work in a quiet place for a few days till his new set could be given him.

Yet all the day that furtive interest seemed to simmer round him. That evening, too, the couple of yellow liveries came to fetch a dinner: There was the same little fuss, the same obvious nervousness in the chef and, to a certain amount, in the other assistants. But with it, he could not help noticing that there was something else, an overtone, and in that he was somehow involved. Usually the two yellow figures stood, one leaning against the stove, the other gazing blankly at the big serving table. But today he twice found that, though they were in their usual positions, their eyes had turned to him.

It was a long day, though, and by the time that he was let go, toward midnight, he was too tired to wish to work his mind on any little problems. He changed out of his white overalls to his street clothes, went out through the kitchen, through the little office, and into the short passage that led to the main door of that entrance of the building; it was on the side into a small street that was not a thoroughfare. The chef had told him to turn out the lights as he left and had gone five minutes ahead. The others had all gone earlier, the chef holding him on with rather annoying insistence about some utensils being put away in better order.

When he had put out the light in the small outer office and let the door lock itself behind him, he noticed that the light in the passage must have burnt itself out. But he could see well enough in a dusk which was lit by reflections of the street lighting coming through a small fanlight over the street door. He walked toward that and had his hand on the inside doorknob when he felt himself held. Again his old knowledge told him that this was no common holdup, just trying to get a payroll of a late worker. That hold was seldom known save to men long trained at picking up wanted people so that the pickup could sometimes be made in broad daylight in the crowded street and the man be held so securely and with such a grip that he would go quietly, for at the slightest struggle he could be dropped dead on the sidewalk while the men who had killed him could quietly call the attention of the police to a case of sudden heart failure.

He therefore stood still. The door opened ahead, he was pushed through and into a car that was waiting at the curb. The door shut behind him and his two companions; the engine started up. My second abduction, he thought. I suppose the Mole must somehow be displeased with my conduct. Perhaps the dismal park incident, or perhaps the attention I awoke today? I wonder which of those, my late colleagues, is really my underground colleague? What a world of shadow and shade. Or has the Mole got planted in that kitchen one of his small recording tubes and can I have said anything within its range that might seem to him to need a personal checkup? Or should I have done more, have I forgotten, was I meant to report regularly and have I failed? The questions ran through his mind; but though, out of habit, he used the old phrase of reference “I,” it had little color with which to hold his attention.

The drive was much the same as the one before, in the way he was treated: silence and darkness. But it didn't last so long, and as far as he could tell they never left the city. True, the traffic did become a little less as they came toward the end of the journey. So he judged they must be in some quiet part of the town when the car stopped. But as the door opened he could see nothing. It was night, and he was pushed rapidly across a piece of empty paving into a tall house that spread above them. They seemed to be in some kind of large porte-cochere. But inside it was even darker. He could just tell that they were in a passage, stone-flagged, he thought, and then they entered a room which was completely black. There he felt himself put into a chair and handcuffed onto it. The chair was fastened to the floor, he soon could judge. He waited for, he thought, about five minutes and felt pretty certain that the two who had brought him in had gone.

Then a voice—not one, he was sure, of those he had got to know in his last ordeal: “You have been condemned to: death.”

Well, that was a fairly straightforward opening, he felt with a certain relief.

“Whether by absurd vanity or for some other reason”—then they didn't know his background?—“you have done something which even if it isn't your fault—as may be—makes no difference. The safety of the state makes your removal imperative.”

Again he felt the relief, and with a certain humor reflected that many Asiatics would rather die than “lose face,” and as he certainly had lost his, why shouldn't he also die?

“Your life, then, is over. About that have no doubt. But there is one way that you can escape physical death. You can cease to be, completely, as a person. Alive in that sense, your absurd escapade or your ill luck—it makes no difference—can serve our purposes.”