Doppelgangers (17 page)

The listener first smiled to himself. It was clear, all that the queer monster needed was an echo; but as he reflected the humor faded in his mind. There was something coming into the captor's tones that made the captive guest begin to stir uneasily, as when in an easy composition of major chords suddenly is heard a series of minors and even unresolved discords. He had been carried away with the sheer success story, as Alpha had stormed along. The only thing was to keep on the hat of one's common sense in this blustering, boisterous, sunny gale of victory. And then this sudden turning onto the self with even a suspicion of self-pity—the man who seemed up to that moment to be looking on like a Lucretian god who had suddenly awakened to the fact that, “By gum, the little beggars down there are rather fun and one can make them do all sorts of amusing things.” This godlike creature was asking, wasn't he, for sympathy? He remembered a slogan of their old underground training—the man at the top must give but he must never receive, still less ask. But perhaps to that he would be told that it was all pre-psychological, pre-anthropological? But he was puzzled and a little uneasy. In all these days he had now and then felt animal fear and misgiving, but never a hint of the uncanny. Now it stole across to him like an invisible gas through this warm, cheerful room.

He felt he must say something, for the silence seemed to have gone on long and he also had the strange suspicion that Alpha was waiting for him to take up the matter. He tried with a small laugh to make the thing sound light and careless.

“I should have thought,” he said with almost a hint of banter in his voice, “that you would have found the opposite to be the rather heavy truth, that you would have been overwhelmed with adulation. Nothing succeeds like success, and men and women will worship anyone who has succeeded: when, the moment the magic is gone, they will stamp on him or her just because they are sick with themselves for having been taken in by themselves.”

He paused; that would be enough to try out with. He waited.

Alpha seemed to be thinking over what he said, and his reply was in a quiet, questioning tone.

“There's a double problem there, don't you see? I've done all I could—” and his voice got back some of its old tone of assurance—“in the schools to get language properly taught and to get what used to be called semantics, the reaction between things and words, made clear. But it's slow work, and they who started up that hope put more on it than it seems to bear out. But back to our issue. Yes, you can get, I am sure I have got, re-manufactured, that very useful invisible armor, the divinity that hedges a king, and I shall go on, as you'll see, in making that shield more effective. It really would do the world no good at all if I were killed now. Algol—well, of course, would anyone in his senses kill me to make Algol king?” He laughed, a short cough of a laugh. “But one of the underground might succeed in doing the killing and yet assure only such a ridiculous succession. Fancy both of us, the brave little numskull with the quick trigger finger and me the hard-working hub, both being thrown out of the wheel that it might grind along on that police-minded pivot that hasn't a ball bearing or any lubrication in its whole make-up!”

He laughed almost freely for a moment, but then his voice lapsed again: “Yes, I'm getting more sacred at every appearance. I tell you, you'll know, you'll know. It's just like a great white snowball now, growing of itself, every time it turns over on itself. It's all inevitable now—that side of it. I have the graphs of that—the longer even a dictator of the old sort lasted, the safer he was from assassination, provided, of course, that his prestige wasn't punctured; then, as we know, his life wasn't worth a moment's purchase. But the more sacred, the more respected you are, the less you are really appreciated, understood, let be what you are and not lost, like the scrap that the oyster imprisons in the center of its pearl and round which it builds that iridescent tomb.”

That very simile, that had been so often in the guest-prisoner's mind, now coming from his host-captor's mouth, gave another queer sense of uncanny kinship, forced friendship, as though some power beyond them both, close but utterly alien, was determined to fuse these two poor little creatures that so longed to be themselves and yet to have something to be liked for in themselves, into one fused, unreflective lump of satisfied action.

“Yes,” went on his host, “reverence is the loftiest form of dislike. I know it, for I am exposed to it in ever higher voltages. And in that way it's also true that nothing fails like success. I am being mummified in my own fame before I am dead as a living man. At this rate, I soon shall become nothing but a huge ritualized figure, a great symbol of a myth carried about as the people's Luck and Totem, and not another idea will come out of me and not another breeze of enjoyment fan or reach me in my immense sarcophagus—the box that eats the flesh, that's what that stately word means—and I know, as a living corpse being consumed by its stately, fragrant preservatives.

“Oh, yes, I shall be safe from destruction because safe from life. I shall be free to do as I please because I shall be paralyzed by the process and incapable of any thought, any wish to do anything else but to obey the immense momenta I have set in motion—or have I? The same genius that talked about the divinity that hedges kings made his chief character, the prince who was frustrated by seeing too far, go further and speak of that other, darker, vaster divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them as we will. Perhaps we can never get out of the smooth maelstrom of our own success which sucks us down.”

He stopped, his voice having sunk to a monotone. The guest roused himself. Well, anyhow, this was another side, a further aspect. He must at least study it, draw out this strange further extension of this fabulous character.

“But, surely,” he quested, “granted that Algol and the trusties are hardly those one would choose for fireside talking—”

He paused, and his odd double gave him the sentence his own inner censorship was hesitating to pass for publication. “And granted,” said the voice he now used coming out of the original Alpha throat, “granted that I treat you as something less in the picture of actuality than did the Southern women who used to undress before their Negro slaves because they considered them not human, hardly alive, mere parts of the furniture, that you can be my sounding board and amplifier—?”

Yes, it was his thought, and as Alpha One knew it, why should Alpha Two mind saying it?

“Yes,” he said, “I think that is an objective description.” And as the other didn't affirm or deny, he went on, “Surely there must be someone you meet in your life who might be a help and not a rival? Most men have a confidential secretary? Someone who is content to admire, support, and be at hand at off times?”

“Did you suppose I hadn't? Certainly I have my confidential private secretary and certainly it seemed that after a number of changes I should be able to pick the person who could play that pretty standard part. And in a way,” he paused, “in a way, as usual, I have succeeded, as I always do, far beyond what could be expected—and, as now seems increasingly probable, it has been the very completeness of the success that has made the situation a failure. A woman must be cast for that part, for only a woman can be as really technically clever and orderly and clear-minded and as intuitive and perfectly supplemental as the part needs; and, though you might, in a certain type of man, get someone who had both those gifts, you could not get the third requirement. That's the power with wholehearted energy to, subordinate the self to the person served. A man who could so subordinate is a fool; a man clever enough for the intellectual strain of the job is ambitious and so disloyal at heart. Well, all that's mere formula—it's the kind of thing you'll find written up in any of the preliminary studies in employment agency work so as to guide tyros in the job of classifying jobs and applicants. And I didn't give enough thought to developing it further.”

He sighed, “Always there are unfinished pieces and fringes in one's circle of thought, and, this being so close to me, as I was long-sighted on vast plans, I neglected. I thought I had the person. Such persons can't be extemporized; you have to find the raw material and then cut it into shape.” He was so engrossed in his own problem that he didn't notice his listener's wince. “It took me years to train the one that finally seemed the best, and all the time we were right in the muddle of getting into the saddle. It had to be a very unforeseen, piecemeal piece of training. But, as far as I could give time to judge, all was going well. She is a wonderful machine. Of course, she's efficient to an amazing degree—has the kind of subconscious that never creates anything and so, as none of its memories are digested or assimilated, they all come out as fresh, hard, clear as they went in; and, as she takes everything from me, naturally her mind is my subsidiary brain, my memory. But she has also the other mediumistic gift or trick. She is amazingly able to complete, and never to distort with a shadow of creativeness or her own originality, what I am going to say or even am going to think. It is never what she thinks, it is simply the thought I have latent, and I have no more to trouble to get it into words. She's thus not merely my memory but in a way my vocabulary and my imagery. And naturally I gave as little attention to her as one gives to one's digestion or lungs when they are working in complete health and with perfect circulation.

“You see, it is symbiosis again, the principle of all higher efficiency; she is merely an essential extension or annex of my brain, to let me get on to more creative work. I can tell her in a couple of sentences what I want for a speech or a memorandum for a line of research to be opened and, when I come back, there is the whole thing with references and developments, but no departures, and not only in perfect order but perfectly elucidated and expanded and made into whatever number of subsections as may be needed for the various ranks of people who must listen to it or apply it. She is my hand and quite a part of my brain and, I thought naturally, that is enough for anyone.” He paused.

“But you see the end of the course. Now she wants to be my heart. I should have known from the studies in animal psychology we have used so much: the apparent lowliness of the one partner at any time of the mating-duel is only strategy; and all the more deliberate if unconscious. She does not know that she wished to dominate, and the poor little scrap of personality, which no doubt is quite happy lost in mine, is quite ignorant of the wile it is performing. But the life in her cannot leave alone its ancient game. I knew
that
when I planned for women to be given even more distraction than men in the new world—children and clothes and shows and lovers: yes, be a great actress and novelist, research a bit, explore, become a saint. It is not that a woman shouldn't be serious. It is that she can never be anything too long. Her current fluctuates even more than man's—as far as either of them are individuals—while her substream and undertow draws steadily, remorselessly, to its distant goal; while, beside that, man is a little ephemera who spins webs that the night will break with the weight of its dew. The mother goddess, Kali, is the destroyer. Durga, her other form, dances on the body of her prostrate mate though he is the terrible Shiva himself.”

He stopped again. His guest was now on edge. Alpha's voice, however, when he went on had become matter-of-fact.

“Of course, that kind of thing was out of the question. Leaving everything else aside, do you suppose that a man who works as I work has any time for dalliance? My rest is just another kind of work. That's nature's way; metabolism actually increases in the body for the first three hours of sleep. Sleep is just an alternative way of acting—the indraw for the output. If you work with the brain constantly it draws on all else. That's why I have ruled that the one safe and right and balanced place for sex is among my routineers—the dear, healthy visceroes—who, as you know, like their lust, but their real delight is not bed but dinner; bed is the rightful overplus from dinner. Hence in them sex does not get out of hand.

“Well, I've told you I hadn't had time to get round to proper investigations into sex, more's the pity. I suppose, like most men who are work-sublimated, I didn't think it mattered quite as much as it does and that the viscero dinner-bed balance would hold the base of society healthy and childbearing while the athletic samurai-somatoes would get their sublimation in the athletic askesis of exercise and physical risk. Certainly men like myself know enough of endocrinology to know the whole of the ductless-gland system is linked up and that if you are a pituitary-thyroid coupling then all the lower coupling, suprarenal-interstitial, must be drawn on and made simply a feeder system for the upper linkage.

“Well, that's an important issue. The world is based on those who have the ‘tamasic' lethargy-lust level just kept roused into cyclic activity by the ‘rajasic' energy-anger drive. This drive comes down from adrenocortin. It pours into the blood-stream and, as it were, seethes and boils with the secretions from the gonads. The world of this simple reacting mass is kept whipped in and moving up by the steady-pressure thyroid with its linked thought-ally, the pituitary hormones, giving point to mere endurance. I wish we'd done more work on that; we must; we must know what the pineal is doing up there. Is it waiting to take over as the pituitary took over? But if that is so, then, as this prophecy of man seems foretold
in petto
(as his past is written in shorthand recapitulation in the foetus growth), then above the type that Sheldon so long ago foresaw and I have fulfilled, there must be still another to come?”

In the interest of his speculation the curious creature had clearly forgotten all his private problem, his mind reaching out to this huge social issue. He recognized it and laughed.