Doppelgangers (21 page)

After a moment Alpha spoke: “You see,” he said, “something of the pressure. I never suspected it when I made this generator, any more than primitive man suspected that the upper air had in it killing heat or the lower ocean had obliterating pressure, or those poor fools who broke into the other pole of force—the nucleus of the atom of energy—as we have broken into the nucleus of the atom of consciousness—knew the deadly, life-killing powers they released, power which killed all of them by its unsuspected radiation and so withdrew itself again from their meddling hands. Perhaps that, too, is the penalty for us at this other pole.

“I don't know, but I do know you know, and I say it to you, for you alone have been at the center of that tempest of spaceless energy, that we cannot go back. We have gone into the current of that energy hoping to make it turn our little turbines and spin our little craft and we have been caught in that smooth, remorseless flow. We are at the brink. It may be we shall touch some happy isle of stability and plenty right on the rushing verge, as such islets can crest the roaring edge of giant falls; it may be that the deep will wash us down.” He paused.

“But we are together in an absolute pinnacle of loneliness, for better or for worse. About that you can now have no more doubt than I. In all the confusion, the practical personal matter stands out for us at the nucleus. We are bonded together by the very pressure of these unsuspected forces which have been released and have, as it were, crushed in on us, and we are tied like the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, the primal and most strongly knit of all the elements.”

He paused, and the remodeled man turned round in bed to regard this, his captor, who was now clearly offering him partnership. He remembered that, when he was taking the history of sociology and the professor was pointing to what was then called the goal of organic democracy, they were reading an old author called, as far as he remembered, Herbert Spencer, and how this writer had said that a captor is really as much enchained to his captive as the captive to him. Well, it was true here.

“I thought,” Alpha continued, “when you first turned up in my path that you were a masterly convenience. I told you that I was certain this was the kind of thing that befell me—that my ideas fulfilled themselves and my demands were met as soon as I defined them.”

He stopped, and his understudy added, “And you went on to say that you discovered there was always far more in the idea that came to you than you had suspected at the beginning or planned that there should be.”

“True enough,” Alpha owned, “and I ought to have told you further that as time went on I had noticed that each discovery or invention always led to results increasingly surprising and with unforeseen possibilities. It was when I began to recognize that, that I began to wonder whether I might not be in the hands of some power which made me, for its own purposes, believe, as a post-hypnotically controlled patient believes, that I was acting on my own volition, but I was really behaving under the dictates of this invisible hypnotist.

“I knew that I must find an understudy, to take off from me the stunning pressure of these monster congealments and contractions of loyalty, after every one of which I felt more deformed, more typified, and with all my originality, initiative, and enterprise pressed out of me. Weeks would go by, and always a longer interval after each of these monster rites, before my mind could recover from its daze and begin again to think. You see the experience is so dangerous not because it makes its subject insanely puffed up and vain but because it somehow depersonalizes him, smooths out the actual convolutions of his character and thought-pattern, and leaves him only a vast passive mask or mirror, as smooth and featureless as a dark still lake on which a million stars reflect themselves because it itself is utterly motionless, utterly without light.

“Once on my travels I was in Libya in North Africa and in a small shack of a museum built near the excavations I came across a colossal piece of sculpture that had been excavated from the sands near by. It was a face some twelve feet high and had been pieced together from the shattered fragments. I was told it was so interesting because the archeologists had become convinced that this was an accurate copy of what the ancient world tells us was considered the greatest work of sculpture the Greeks had ever produced on the highest theme they knew. It was a measured reproduction of that vanished masterpiece of Pheidieas—the Olympian Zeus. But the thing that struck me as I stood alone in that little, baking shed, alone with this vast face that glimmered through the shattered stone, was that, though of course anatomically perfect in its scale and proportions and majestic in a way, it was quite appallingly empty, vacant, void.

“The archeologist came in and asked me what I thought of it. I said I had never seen a piece of perfectly competent face-carving that gave one such an impression of nothing, of utter vacancy. It might be technically great, but as something to render expression it was nothing. He turned on me and said, ‘Don't you see, you have seen Pheidieas' secret? Only a consummate genius who was also profoundly religious could have done that!'

“Once, we are told, a great sculptor, but not of the highest range, made a Zeus for a Greek city. But when he showed it to the city fathers they were unhappy. They praised its strength and power and emphatic sense of presence—and then paused, till the youngest who was given the task of passing sentence, said ‘But it will not do, for that is not Zeus.'

“The sculptor was in despair. But they were firm. He maintained that it had power and majesty.

“‘Look,' he said, ‘at the lines of authority, just enough to show the strength latent and ready to break.'

“‘That is just it,' they replied; ‘those lines between the great all-seeing eyes, they hint at some partiality, some reaction, some contraction of the wide vision which sees all things with an equal regard and is both kin and alien to the just and the unjust and the evil and the good.'

“The sculptor bowed before their judgment, but they feared he would break under it, for this was as high as he could go. Let this rendering of the divine be refused by his city and what was there left for him to do? It was his authentic vision, true at its level, though inadequate, indeed only inadequate because the theme set him had been so high.

“So the eldest of the judges spoke; ‘This is true,' he said, pointing to the great statue; ‘it is not Zeus but it is godlike in a lesser, darker way. But it may be a way to Zeus, and men must know the gods of judgment and of doom before they can contemplate and rise to the Father of gods and men who is beyond favor and disfavor, beyond our earth's justice and our human mercy. We will gladly receive your work and give it a place of honor among our speaking symbols whereby the people are taught more deeply and surely than by words. We will set it up, and its name shall be the lord and judge of the underworld. This, in its majestic lack of resentment but still its sad realization of judgment, cannot yet be Zeus. But it can be, because of these very features, it can be and is Pluto, the great god not of Light and Life but of Death and Doom.'

“Well, at every exposure to what is now the wishful-field of mankind, I am smoothed out, and what was once daimonic in me is being so spread and magnified and made sky-embracing that nothing is left but an overarching presence presiding as patiently as the sky itself.”

They were silent till Alpha brought back their talk to their immediate crisis. “You seemed made for the part …”

The remodeled man ran his hand over his face. Could he still feel those fine spiderweb lines, those finely closed crevasses down which his former face had been sunken and sealed?

“And I thought, here, is my very expression, my person that the world wants, redoubled, so that the face of the die can endure the amount of stamping which it must do without losing its edge and character. But that is not to be, I now realize. I know, as a man in the crow's-nest can see, the direction to which the ship of mankind with all its sails set is carrying me—to complete stylization, to a vast concave which will focus their myriad sounds and give back in a single note, without adding a tone of its own, what they would have said.”

He did not wait for his understudy's comments but, as he reached the door, he said, “If you feel not too tired this evening come along to my rooms.”

That invitation marked as much as anything the complete change in their relations. It had suddenly become not one of tentative equality but of an unspokenly recognized interdependent balance: they must go together, each was equally necessary to the other. He used to stroll into the small dining room and, if the door that led to the study was open, go on into that. If it was closed it meant that Alpha was having interviews. It was, he noticed, always left open when Alpha was out. And as the weeks went by and Alpha had only small public appearances to make, which the remodeled man shared about equally with him, as the remodeled man found these only inclined to stun the mind for a day or two, so he noticed Alpha's spirits and interest revived. When they dined together Alpha would tell him of some of these notions and how they were going.

“The one thing,” he said, “I always keep to myself is the growing point of ideas. By that I mean that I am most uneasy when I find my interest in new notions, new contrivances, new social and psychological inventions and insights is at all lessened. The success of the final revolution was, I believe, simply because I was always open to new ideas. My skill was to see that practically any discovery or invention about mankind could be used and how it could be worked in to the general pattern of the remodeled society. So, though I have delegated all other work, this I keep and do myself. Anyone who has an idea, once they have put the outline before one of my outer staff dealing with the subject, has to be passed up to me: first I have a memo, then a thesis, and then the actual interview. Often I see more clearly than the man himself what he has lit on, and, of course, as he is nearly always a specialist, I see the application of it.

“It keeps me busy, and now that my spirit has recovered from the deforming pressure of being the public symbol, I find this is my keenest pleasure. No! The Mole or whoever it is, or any of his bravest pioneers will never get close to me as long as I keep on the move, as long as the way to new invention is through this room. Why, the underground is like a feeble sportsman who can't shoot a flying bird but waits till it settles, then patiently aims his gun, and by the time he has his sights on the game it has flown off to another bush!”

And certainly Alpha worked hard at these interviews and evidently found them fruitful.

For a few months, then, the balance seemed remade on this closer intimacy. The remodeled man found his own mind settling back, and he concluded—wondering faintly was it rationalization—that he, too, whatever in the end he might decide to do, should first regain, as Alpha had regained, it appeared, his full balance, once more contract to his right size of spirit and real personality. And week by week, in spite of small setbacks, caused by the smaller public appearances in which he had to take his equal share, he found he was recovering. There would not be a monster show with the monster psychological pressure till the spring festival, and Alpha had not yet decided which of them should be exposed to that.

“It's not any sentimental consideration for a man about whom I really know nothing,” he remarked when talking it over with what seemed complete detachment. “It is that we are absolutely necessary to each other; we are, in fact, a symbiote. I am the stronger because I have been exposed longer to this thing. Besides, one always has more immunity to something one has self-generated than to a toxin suddenly introduced from another body. I can't afford to waste you if you are to last as long as I, and the last big show made me wonder whether you would endure. It is a very difficult point when you dare no more waste your assistance than you dare waste your own vital resources.”

He stopped and seemed to fall into a kind of depressed reverie. He sighed once or twice, then roused himself, and, seemingly to shake off the mood, began in another tone. “I have made you free of this apartment, so really we are living in a single suite of rooms and I know you come in and out. That's right, but I am glad to notice you have observed one rule …”

How did the man know, his hearer wondered.

“My desk and chair are, you see, raised on a slight dais. I am asking you never to sit there. That part of the room is under observation; a field makes it visible from outside the room. It was an old precaution—I think unnecessary now: but Algol, romantic fellow, attaches importance to it, and you see one has in part to be the mirror of one's followers' wishes. So use the whole of this apartment as you wish but respect that little dais, if you please, and if you're wise.”

Well, it was no use disregarding such warnings when he was already so far out in uncharted waters. He felt pretty sure that he was necessary to Alpha. He felt equally sure that Alpha was still necessary to the revolution that he was steering into evolution. Of Algol he knew nothing and often speculated a good deal. While his mind ran on these vague surface speculations he became aware that Alpha's brighter mood had again become overcast. He heard him sigh again, and again try to rouse himself.

“You have, as I've said, served more purposes than I even hoped, but then that is because I find in me more needs than I suspected. I need companionship. I recover more quickly from mass-exposure when you are about because there is a real person to talk with.”

How real, wondered his listener.

“Perhaps I could take on more public appearances? But at the same time,” the man was speaking evidently to himself, “the more one has someone to talk openly with and in a way to trust, the more one needs, the appetite grows with eating, the blood flows more freely if sponged with a warm swab.”