Doppelgangers (34 page)

Certainly he would in any other situation have been most noticeable, indeed dominating. For the head was immense—a great bubble of a cranium, so that it looked as though the brain had blown out gadroons and apses to give it larger working quarters. The eyes, naturally, under such top hamper, were built over by the overhanging bulge of the forehead. And the nose, and the lateral lines that shaped the mouth running down to the chin, and the chin itself, were merely delicately drawn supports to the hypertrophied brain case. They ran up and out like lean, fluted, shafted buttresses to support that dome.

But the oddest thing in this odd image was not in itself. That lay in the contrast and complement. There could be no doubt about it: the saffron, hawklike figure that bent over the desk and the dark form that was drawn back, though the one was a marvelous balance of extremes and the other as definitely overbalanced, an obvious hypertrophy, yet, in some odd emphatic way, they were complement and supplement—balanced doubles.

The only other thing that appeared of the man were the hands on the desk. They had come forward, evidently to give him some grasp under severe shock, and they were utterly different from the fawn hands lightly poised, like an alighting bird's, just short of them. They were, instead of being clean-sinewed, crabbed. They were very strong and knotted and the fingers were long. But nevertheless they were coarse, twisted, with blunt, powerful nails and like a hogged main there ran down each finger a crest of black hairs that finally met in a small mat of such bristlings that covered the hands' backs. Everything was still, save these hands. Nor did they move much. Rather, under their white coarse skin you saw an inner wrestling going on. The mount of bristles was rising and falling as the sinew tensions flickered underneath.

Suddenly the play was switched to action. The right hand slid with the speed with which a spider, till then brooding, will suddenly move. It darted so quickly that it was already into a shallow drawer to its right before it was told to stop.

The saffron man had said, again quietly but if possible with more manifest emphasis, “No, you can't move your hand.”

For a moment the two figures remained. Perhaps three feet divided them, but both the onlookers felt and knew that they were as closely locked as though they had each other gripped into one solid mass of impacted muscle. In the silence it seemed that one must hear the vibration of that immense torsion. But not a sound or movement gave outer evidence of the wrestling match.

At last the two onlookers could see a minute change. The man seated at the desk was managing, it seemed, to exert some freedom from the hold that had him pinned. His head was drawing back and his eyes were being raised. A tremor even went along his outstretched right arm. The eyes' color couldn't be told but it was possible to see the pupils. They had been small when they first became visible. They shrank as though focusing to a still finer point as though, with their concentration, to break through the pressure that was against them. Then in a moment they dilated. The hand made one more scrabble in the drawer and slid out of it, helplessly hanging down by the chair in which the figure now lolled.

The saffron figure raised itself up. “Brother, I am sorry to have had to use such force. It is my fault as much as yours. I had to take the risk of coming here without knowing whether I could succeed, knowing only that the time had come. For one thing I did know, I must remedy our joint mistake. And the world—macrocosm interlocked with microcosm—needs that you should finish with this your aphelion and return to perihelion. The path you have taken, no doubt, you had to take. But now it leads up again; you have touched bottom—come home.”

The man sunken in the chair stirred a little uneasily.

“You are wondering how you failed,” went on his confronter. “You failed, primarily, because you had finished what you were doing and so lacked power to keep on. And that led to your immediate failure; you shifted your forces in the struggle and that lost it to you. Till you put out your hand, I did know that you could not shift me but I did not know I could make you give. Then, when you reached for a gun, then it was clear that your forces were divided. Your faith in the methods we know had flawed. Your doubts reached despair point, paralysis level. Your doubts about the power of mind robbed you of the power to use it even in self-defense.

“I knew that this must sooner or later happen. It had to follow on your general increasing misgiving and the corresponding growth of your black faith that physical violence alone can count. The fencer who takes his eyes from his opponent's eyes, because he wants the better to direct his own sword, is, of course, done. You turned from apt force, pure will against pure will, from the direct action, to the indirect attempt to solve things of the mind and spirit by hitting the body of your opponent. Then, of course, you had to collapse. You became distracted, you turned to physical force, you felt fear. Hence we are now open with each other again.”

He turned to the other two: “Please go out into the passage and wait for me. I will call you when we are ready to go.”

They went out and he shut the door. They sat on the ground in the dark and they could just hear two voices in steady exchange. At last, after what might have been a couple of hours, the door opened. The man in saffron seemed just the same. The other had risen. They were of the same height and build. Both now were wearing dark cloaks. All that the man in saffron said was, “We can leave now.” The man who had been behind the desk led them to the elevator after switching off the light in the room. As it went out, Alpha II, used to noticing if anything had been changed in a room, could only see that on the desk, which before had been empty, now lay a sealed envelope. As far as he could see, on it was written a code number. The dark-cloaked man pressed the knobs in the elevator and it rushed up like a bubble to the surface of the water from the floor of a pond.

X

THE NEW CIRCUIT

He showed them through the house, let the door latch behind them, and then the three fell in behind the man in saffron who wore his cloak loosely because the night was warm. The streets were full of people not hurrying—for hustle had been discouraged now as poor taste and ill health. The crowds walked about at their ease, and whether they were going to some appointment or simply out for the air they clearly had enough time to enjoy their walk and look at things as they passed. And things were worth looking at. The street had been laid out nobly: houses and groves of flowering trees, avenues and groups of buildings, had been arranged with an eye to design as well as to convenience. Water was used with fine effect in every vista and now that it was night the fountains, falls, and culverts were all lit with fluorescent fluids while the buildings that rose above them were floodlit. There was no attempt to compete with day—but night was given enough illumination so as to be seen in its contrasting beauty.

The lighting, of course, was so good that everyone could recognize one another as well as by day. This suddenly awoke alarm in the boy's mind as he came with his companions into the more crowded boulevards. He turned to the form of Alpha who was walking a pace or two ahead of him. Catching him up, he glanced across at the face better known than any one's in the whole world. It had gone. The figure that walked now beside him was quite unrecognizable. He saw a man whose worn face hung in folds and puckers; the whole lapsed mask hung from a disproportionated pendant nose and was caught in at a shrunken chin. Of course: with a quick sleight of hand, a pass or two, as deft and curious as a conjuror's, he could make his appearance vanish—he could disassemble, or should one say dissemble, his personality. He was, when assembled, mankind's figurehead. Take that mask to pieces and what was left? Disassemble an engine, where is the engine? Yes, he was safe. The few ill-looking people that were about were always treated with a courteous lack of attention. It was taken for granted that they were undergoing facial treatment for some accident or disease or that they were gallant incurables. The crowds eddied by with gentle disregard of the queer little group. “If they really knew who we four actually are,” the boy couldn't help feeling, “even their long training in good manners would break down!”

When the four reached the place where the great palace boulevard met them, the saffron man, who had been walking a little ahead with his new companion, waited for them to come up.

“I am to suggest that you two go back to your headquarters. I and my friend here will be crossing the street now.”

Then, speaking to Alpha II, “With your leave, I will call on you once more—tomorrow afternoon if it suits you.”

Alpha II said nothing, but bowed, and the saffron man and his companion were gone.

“We'd better enter by the secretary's entrance, don't you think?” the boy suggested when in silence they had almost reached the palace. “I'm known at that door and I can now send in a call that I and a companion be let through.”

He took one of the small pocket telephone sets out of his tunic, fitted it to his head, tuned it, and in a few seconds was talking. On and off in the street—as smokers pause to light a pipe or cigar—you saw someone pause and go through this same procedure of making a small-beam radio call. The boy put the set again in his pocket and nodded that it was all clear.

They went on together, passed into the small entrance, and gained the private elevator. The boy got out at the secretary's floor. Alpha II went on. In a few seconds he was back in what already seemed his room. He went to his bathroom and, turning to the wall, moved his loaded hands about his mouth and face. Then he turned to the mirror.

It was true, as the likeness that had been built up on him and for him, was remounted, he felt the strange subtle change from doubt to assurance, from bewilderment to inevitability, the ability of inevitability. He went to his bedroom, undressed, and lay down. He noticed with a certain grimly intimate amusement that he now preferred to sleep as he was remodeled and not lapse back even when alone into shapelessness, even in slumber. It was something deeper than appearance. It was a matter of fundamental feeling, kinesthetic sense of being actually in gear, in mesh and physically integrated. He felt the need for the tonic comfort of these inner supports on the great nerve trunks of the face and neck, as the foot feels the need for a firm and level stance. He needed the support of this armature even when relaxed, perhaps even more so, as a dozing body needs the embracing support of an easy chair.

He slept well. Waking, he shaved, dressed, put on the ring, looked at the self that faced him in the pier glass, considerately. Yes, he was once more the part and no one else was it and now no one, even in the lowest depths, was left to challenge it. He was once more the part and for good, and the part was he; he had no part in life but that part, it made him a whole. Besides, where else would he go? Who was he? Who remained? He had been a spearhead of an upthrust of final revolt, which spearhead, in order to pierce the defenses of oppression, had to be key-shaped. And now, broken off in the lock, he had become part of the lock while losing touch with the haft that had driven him. This was the path of non-returning. But whither did it lead?

To shake off that question he went to his desk. Again he noticed that subtle but compelling force of place, point of view, perspective. He remembered that when they were being trained in psychophysical controls and inhibitions and were being taught some hatha-yoga techniques, he had read in one of the original texts that the actual spot where a man day by day sat to realize what he really was, and what he intended to become manifestly, his asana, his seat, became so charged that anyone taking that place must either be hurled from it, or, being able to sustain its transforming power, must become like the master whose throne he was fit to succeed to. Well, hadn't that happened to him? Could he doubt it?

His eye lit on the memoranda for actions that had been fed through the various ducts onto the desk divisions which dealt with them. He ran his eye as along a review of the convergent reins of power. In every case he saw with a certain sense of unhurried interest the answer that should be given, that anyone in his central coign could and must give—and yet without that correlative position might be at a loss to provide. He began making these answers. He told his new General of the Guides, in passing, about the boy's promotion, as along the small television line he and this new acquaintance—who thought he was his old chief—discussed commanding personnel for the new cadres.

So the morning went. After his lunch he rested, but with real ease and hardly dozed, so that he was ready when by his bedside flashed the extension from his desk telling that the man of the inventor class had called for his authorized extension of interview. Alpha II had just settled himself back at his desk when the saffron figure came through the door and stood in front of him. But said nothing. Nor did Alpha. They stood looking at each other and there was a sense of completion in the confrontation. They looked at each other as sculpture reflects sculptor and sculptor regards sculpture.

At last the man on the throne remarked to the man who stood waiting before him, “And now …?”

“Surely you understand?”

“I do, when I'm working, when I'm seated here, but directly I get up and try to understand, as a private person, try to think actually where am I, then I don't.”

“Why try?”

“Can I go on without knowing more than that?”

There was a pause: “Well, if you know more, then you must know considerably more.”

“Explain.”

“Well, you yourself, you know now, though you may be fighting it, that you are not a person; you are now, you have been turned into—as in the old true tales of magic—into something which is both you, in a way, and not you.”

“Yes, I have faced up to the fact that there is no going back.”