Doppelgangers (13 page)

The dinner was served. All the hot dishes kept their exact temperature of 120 degrees because they were made of a conductor which drew its heat through the table which was charged.

“A small invention which I had devised was this tableware.” Alpha put his hand under the table, and the dishes which had been a rose pink began to flush a deep red. A moment after and they had faded to a silver white. “No need to taste a thing to see if it is the right heat. That rose-pink tint I find the right heat. You may find it a trifle on the hot side. The resistance switch just under the table at your right hand controls your side of the table and sets your dishes at the glow that you find most palatable.”

Through the meal of four light courses, each of which was exquisite and all blended like four singing parts, Alpha talked lightly, easily, entertainingly, of the gadget side of the new world. According to him, he had set on foot many of the inventions which made the new life so amusingly distracting—the cinema invention whereby the figures no longer appeared on a screen but, owing to electric fields making invisible projection screens, the actors appeared as though they were three-dimensional figures. Alpha didn't refer to the use to which his double knew this had been put, and, no doubt, for which it had been invented. He spoke also of textiles which had been developed together with lamps which sent out an invisible radiation, in which, however, the textiles fluoresced.

“The result,” he remarked, “is remarkable. I have found it of great use. No, there is none of it here. Some small inventions have to be used with economy or their use is spoiled. I am no inventor and so I am not concerned to spill my results and cast pearls before peacocks.

“I want my children to be happy, and the world is my family, and as they are children and want to stay children and are wise in wanting that—that is the whole of my discovery in a nutshell—they don't want to grow up and there is no need that they should. I take care that not only should they not be troubled by questions they can't understand and problems which make them suffer for no purpose, but also that their pleasures should be rationed to them, always enough, always some little treat and change coming to them, but never a surfeit. Like a good father, I get ready a surprise for each birthday and Christmas. And sometimes—as with all good children—some small thing, done with the proper element of surprise, pleases them more than some big, gaudy show or something too clever and ingenious. I'm not here to dictate to the eternal child in man but just to find out what it needs and to see that it gets that. Then it is satisfied.

“I never make or set on foot an invention and let it come on the world directly it is found. Timing is everything. I put them into my reserve account. In the old-fashioned phrase, they are my capital. As long as I have a store of these—and I have a large sum now put by—I need fear no disturbance. A really new gadget has a lasting power of amusement, of distraction, of about six months. Then you must serve another, no sooner and no later—just like a well-served dinner, you must neither rush it nor dawdle.

“I hope you have enjoyed this meal; on the whole, I have learned as much psychophysiology from cookbooks as from any other textbook. Of course, the men who wrote them didn't know that they knew so much about the mind-body, but they were drawing on a huge experimental tradition of ‘taste and see' and ‘mix and try,' and it is fascinating to discover how the main classical sequence of hors d' oeuvre, soup, fish, game, sweet, entree, and dessert, reveals an intuitive knowledge of the whole rhythm of response of the nervous and chemical system of the body. It's that kind of knowledge—not theory, but practice that has worked and expanded step by step and had to prove its pudding by constant eating—that I have found most useful. I was always reading those textbooks of the great traditional arts of living—cooking, tailoring, acting, singing, to see what was latent knowledge in them: to see how it could and must be made explicit, though esoteric, knowledge.

“It had to be done, for the great tradition and intuitive way of life had almost completely given out. And
someone
had to keep people going. He'd have, himself, to do it deliberately and self-consciously in order that they might still carry on doing it unthinkingly and enjoyably, a synthetic extension of tradition, an
ersatz
instinct. Man can't live without a complete social pattern. From eating and sex, to clothes, games, manners, music, metaphysics, religion—it's all style, it's all fashion, and once the ancient regime, the grand manner, is gone, someone has to invent. But I mustn't run on into theory myself.” And he turned his guest's attention to the flowers on the table.

“Quite a naturally-unnatural extension of horticulture,” he smiled. “I'd noticed that gardening makes men sedate and content, more than anything else. But not only is that difficult unless you live in the country—and many people don't want to do that—but you need a contemplative disposition that can wait for things—and the childlike nature is not patient. You also need, or needed in the old art of gardening, quite a liking for dirt, hard work, and the constant combating of garden pests—and most people hate fighting things. Then one day, when I was thinking about how valuable a strong taste for growing flowers would be in my people—how the contemplative orders, for example, found that gardening was the best corrective of the intense nervous strain their intense methods of concentration set up—I happened to be visiting one of my labs where we were working at one of the barbiturics—one of the sleep-and-disassociation drugs that have proved very useful tools if not overdone. But I, as the high-distance onlooker, saw something the chemists didn't: the chemical forms which were being precipitated were of a peculiarly beautiful and elaborate crystalline pattern.

“I set on foot another line of research at once. And from that simple cross-breeding of two ideas—owing to my imposing one line of thought on another—out of it came our modern floriculture. As you know—these are some of the new patterns—we can make, like a kaleidoscope, flower patterns of any color or salient design. People love making the chemical beds—neat and clean, and, rapidly sprouting out of them, these crystal forms, as beautiful as any flower, of more variety of shapes and tints, of course free from all pests and, as the old hymn used to say, never-fading blooms. Of course, they have to be scented after they are grown, but that is just the little problem which you leave for the people to play with. Never give them a toy which they have to put all together for themselves, but, at the same time, never give them one that is perfectly finished and to which they can add nothing. I think we know our children and have found out the way to keep them perpetually arrested in happiness by sending them round and round the maze of pleasure at such a pace and on such a span that when they arrive back at the same place it seems new—or, you may prefer an eating term, the appetite has recovered. Well, you have finished. Let us go into my study.”

He led the way into another room. It was somewhat larger. At one end was a large curved desk with six microphones set round the left-hand sweep of its curve. There was a door on its left, immediately opposite the door by which they were entering. There were tall windows with blue curtains drawn. The floor was covered with a thick carpet, the pile of which was so thick that all sound of footsteps was completely lost in it. The pattern was a series of checks of amber and silver. There was an open fireplace set in the wall through which the door had just let them, and, in front of the fire, two chairs drawn up. Alpha waved his double to one of these and sat down himself, took a cigarette from the crystal box, but put it back and then handed the box to his guest.

“I think I'll inhale one of the salts instead,” he remarked and took from the small table on which the cigarettes were, a tiny smelling-salts bottle.

“That was another line of research. I thought about priests—again men of great repressions and nervous tension—and their snuff, and how it had gone out. And then about the nineteenth century and that curious period of women having fainting fits and being recovered by sal-volatile. Then, as so often happens with me in my reading, I came across a Frenchman's researches of a century ago on the nerves on the inside upper part of the nose and their effect on the brain.

“After that it was plain sailing. I was bound to run across the other line of convergent research. We were using all we could get from tantra and hatha-yoga to train the men who had to fight the underground fortresses of democratic reaction and the atavisms left over by the spent revolutions. I soon found that the necessary breathing exercises had, naturally, a great deal to do with the lungs, but also quite a lot to do with an air massage of those nerve-ends right up near the brain at the top of the nose. Then, putting two and one together, I had made these different kinds of salts and got a threefold result. Perhaps you don't know that, beside the scents, which I have made into the basis of a supersensual art (so a man who has lost his digestion can still go on relishing all kinds of olfactory pleasures and people become nose epicures and despise as gross gluttons the old-fashioned palate addicts), there are stronger ones that act like a kind of drink.

“Of course, one had light along that path to popular conquest from, first, cocaine, which was generally snuffed and generally ended by decaying the snuffer's nose, and the work in morphia in getting the toxic element out of that drug. We now—as always in our whole campaign—hit at dividing body from mind and keeping the body intact and letting the mind put on its own well-fitting handcuffs or, rather, surgical belts.

“But my third discovery was as useful. Besides detensionics and relaxants I found, of course—for discovery, if you have the mind, has about it an element of inevitability—you are in constant touch with your genius and daimon; I know I am, as I've already told you—I found the third use, the discovery of stimulants. I prefer to be like a refined lady of the nineteenth century and sniff my salts when I fear fatigue might bring on the vapors. And I do work hard, you may judge, and sometimes I have lately been near the edge where careful breezes are needed to be gathered to carry me off the rocks.” And he snapped open the little crystal bottle, unloosed its glass stopper, and snuffed a couple of times the savor. Then, shutting it up, he added, “Now we are set: we have the evening before us for work, and our agenda opens, as the old British Parliament used to open, with question time. You ask me any questions you like.”

There was a pause. All through this dinner the remodeled man had been trying to build up out of the mass of detail a clear picture of the creature who was talking to him and who, of course, held him like a tool in his hands. He must keep the old picture—whether it was right or wrong—of the ruthless, cunning tyrant, out of his mind, and use nothing but the copious information and observation that was being given away to him. But still it was too early for that. He must go from step to step and keep the interview going as long as possible. He pulled himself together; yes, that would do as a start:

“My first question is, Why do you let me question you, why should you?”

“That's easily answered—because I know what I don't want. I don't want a ‘trusty.'”

“What's a trusty?”

He knew all too well, but it amused him that Alpha could think he might become a kind of unquestioning, doglike devotee. Alpha put his hand on the arm of his own chair, and the remodeled man thought he was going to rise. But he sat back after the hand movement and a moment later they heard the door away by the big desk open.

Alpha didn't turn round, only remarking, “Demonstration is always quicker than words,” and then still without turning, “Number One, rearrange those flowers in the Kwan Yin pattern. They have lapsed.”

A man came forward and, without saying a word or showing any sign of their presence, set to work to reorder in a variant of Japanese flower decoration the five strange crystalline blooms that rose from a small agate vase.

“Number Two.” Another figure, which looked in carriage and appearance very like the first, now also came onto the hearthrug.

“Under the rug I have let fall my abraxid ring.” Alpha put out his hand to point the spot, and on that hand his signet ring, which all the world knew, was shining. “Get down and find it for me.”

The man looked at his hand to see where it was pointing and then got down on his knees, rolled back the rug, and felt over the surface of the carpet until he had touched every inch. Then he rose and said in a completely even voice, “The ring is not there to my touch nor to my sight.”

“Put the rug back.”

It was put back. The man rose to his knees but did not get on his feet. The two servants paid no attention whatever to each other. The first had finished his flower arrangements and stood aside. They could not be said to be waiting, it was obvious, for waiting means some degree of expectation. They were no more expectant than is a typewriter when not being employed.

Nor, though the guest—as he now felt it stealing over himself to regard himself—tried to detect any reaction, could he catch a trace of it when Alpha went on, “Those two are trusties. We took the word from the kind of convict which imprisonment took years to make—the creature which at last only wished to be left in the familiar safety of the jail and whose one reaction—it could even then be hardly called a wish—was to do as it was told and to obey the orders and carry out authority's wishes.

“Well, we worked up from that unforeseen natural product of unnatural conditions, life's reaction to a living death. We also thought about the whole problem of seasoning—one more example of that putting things together that seem poles apart and getting a new useful blend. It used to take years to season wood and stone and wine. But once we knew exactly in chemical terms what was going on, we could do it in a very low percentage of the natural time. So with making trusties. These men will do anything I tell them, but with no imagination. They are conditioned by the proper barbiturics combined with the right suggestion and periods of initial solitude, so that they, like dogs, respond only to certain stimuli and really listen only to me. And they listen to me only if I speak to them. They are now not listening to me and are unaware of each other. Whatever bizarre thing I set them to do, they will do with great persistence and remarkable skill. But, as I have said, they can never think for themselves.