Doppelgangers (7 page)

All this was now taught in every high school as the moral and peroration to all lectures on biology and evolution. Life had tried to produce this kind of society, it was pointed out, often before—in all the social animals, supremely in all the social insects. But just as man had done with his first three revolutions—the religious, the political, and the economic—the fault was that the worker type could not see that it was obviously menial, clearly a means to the full, open, wanton life of the non-worker. So the worker bees kill off the drones; and every puritan who—till the last, the fourth, the final and glorious, revolution—had dominated and then exploited the new age, all these hardworking kill-joys had tried to make themselves, who were mere means, the end. Then, of course, they had to have religious wars and political national wars and economic wars, just because, poor one-track creatures, they could not find any interest in the marvelous manifoldness of actual immediate living. They could live only in some conception of service, and that was right enough. But when they had served, then their real pride came out. They were determined that just to have set men free to be happy in the careless way that life has planned happiness actually to be—that was not enough, was wrong, base, ignoble. So they set up the fancy aims of crusades and causes and pointless heroism, until it ended in the insane nonsense of war for war's sake and sacrifice for sacrifice's sake and life for death's sake.

Of course, when the psychological revolution—the final revolution—broke out, men saw through all this nonsensical pseudo-rationalizing, saw it for what it was. And so the great Alpha had said the first word of the really new age. He frequently remarked laughingly—through those fifty million television sets, his great, wide, generous mouth bellowing out the humor the crowd loved—that he was simply a dolt, but that he had tried to be sensible and really enjoy fun for fun's sake. Finally he decided that Life meant him to take it at second hand, to get his fun out of seeing other people happy. Well, it was probably a pretty poor and faint thing. But then he didn't ask anyone to share it with him. All he asked for was tolerance. For though he was sure that the ordinary man was right and was the real aim and crown of life, and from him would come the really creative ideas, the real progress that can spring only from real freedom to do as you liked and do nothing if that pleased you better—yet there were odd people like himself that kept on turning up. And he asked for a place for himself and his kind. He was ready, too, to show that he and his sort could in their humble way have their uses. They could keep the tracks clear. They could guard the rich liberty of those who wanted to enjoy and create rather than have to watch and prevent the fine free impulses from being thwarted.

“We,” he used to say, referring to as much of the Party as the people were let see, “we are in our way quite a natural growth, though, I grant you, hardly ornamental, and well kept out of the way. We are the roots to you, the flowers. We serve a purpose and get our satisfaction out of working. Life will produce muscles, and they are necessary for holding out the five senses to the sun. And if you produce muscles you have to give them exercise—that is their low form of enjoyment; they get their fun just out of work!”

And the people cheered to the echo his cheery compliments of their gay sloth, the people who had been told this in every key through every stage of their schoolwork, till it was commonsense, obvious fact, till it was the conclusion of every history lesson and why the old nations had made anarchy, why the old religions had made hell and persecution, why the old economics had made dearth and destruction, till it was the conclusion of every lesson on sociology, biology, physiology, till all science was shown to have pointed to this conclusion and all art to spring from it.

So Alpha recruited those who wanted to rule and who were ready to prove the purity of their passion for power by preparing to forswear all the alloys which till then had been mixed with and had weakened power: the wish for display, for pomp, for wealth and any indulgence. If you were of what he called the service type, a few good-natured jokes were made about you, and you became a worker; you were gradually initiated into and inured to the machine. There, too, he and his advisers had shown their psychological skill and they could indeed claim that theirs was the capping revolution, the only one that had understood man in his variety. And therefore this was the final one, the lasting change. As for you, you the private person, Life's picked pet, you could go just as far as you liked.

They had, of course, taken over Sheldon's classification, and that at once gave them a realistic power no dictatorship had ever had before. They had at last something approaching a real map of humanity, instead of those queer selective shadows and profiles of themselves which till then reformers had often honestly taken to be the picture and likeness of mankind. So the good easygoing type—the viscerotonic—were claimed to be life's end: and they had least to do with power, for power (that was one of their camouflage slogans) was just a menial thing like drainage and, like drainage, best kept out of sight. Half of mankind were in that first type. Then there were the somatotonics, the athletic type. It got tired of sitting about in the sun, but that did not mean that it was fit for real power, psychological power. It was simply its muscular tension that made it want to act. You gave it games and competitions and explorations, and got rid of quite a lot by shooting them off the earth on planetary flights from which they never came back—expensive, but really quite cheap considering the riddance—and you put up small monuments to them in the quieter corners of the great public parks—or you kept on sending them down in bathyspheres to be crushed in trying to touch bottom of the ocean abyss. Those who survived that kind of testing were then given the high-power planes of the mental hygiene inspection corps and dashed round and round the world. You could generally wear them out in ten or twenty years of use and never give them a moment to make trouble. Indeed, naturally they gave no more than the pleasure seekers as long as you kept them on the run. Pen them up and they
were
troublesome. But the cure was simple—just simple, straightaway speed. The ones who were a little more than that and who had fairly mixed in them the cerebrotonic element, well, they were quite useful in their limited way. One needs strength in asylum attendants, and quite large numbers were required to staff the arrest squads who were always ready for preventive work and for the actual dealing with those picked up and needing treatment.

As the remodeled man looked around him he could pick out these, the top layer of the machine. There was no attempt to disguise them. Indeed, they were quite noticeable. For while the crowd of Lifers—that was the popular name for those who could loaf for life—was dressed in all ranges of color and hardly a single person wore less than several tints, these public servants wore, though in bright color, suits which were of only one tone. You could see here a couple in plain yellow and there another in Lincoln green. He had been out of the world so long that he had forgotten what the various tints meant, what service corps you belonged to, and, besides, Alpha was always thinking up some new stunt. The attitude of the people, though, had obviously not changed toward these their servant-masters. They regarded them as though they were a mixture of a mailman and a garbage collector—necessary, no doubt, and worth a bonus, of course, but still always rather a mystery as to why a man who could really enjoy himself should care to go on working just for work's sake. Of course, the psychological textbooks at school had explained it all rationally. But still, emotionally, how could careless, carefree men understand such cranks? Thank heaven, though, there
was
someone who liked hard dull work, considering how hateful it is to all well-constituted bodies.

Yes, that was the formula that had won, and—by the deepest of all undergrounds!—it was more true anthropologically than any of the old formulae in the name of which—“The right of private religious judgment! Man is born free and equal!! All profit belongs to labor!!!”—the other revolutions had been made, formulae that always narrowed down man: down from one obsessed by religion, to the lesser man of politics and to the final
reductio ad absurdum
to economic man, interested only in money! No doubt it wasn't right; it was too simple, this shot at the psychological-anthropological solution. That was shown by the things that Alpha the Bull had to do in his underground.

The remodeled man had joined the Mole against the Bull because of what he knew about the Bull's subterfuges. He asked himself now, would he have left the surface for the underground had the Bull been really able to make his case, had he had the whole secret and his explanation needed no helping out from underground violence? Now that he knew the Mole's way, too, how closely the two underground burrows ran, how parallel. Was the Mole anything else but the Bull in opposition? Wasn't he simply the Omega of Alpha?

His mind grew weary trying to find the fine straight edge of right, that once had seemed so clear and strong and noble, amid all the twists and bends that actual practise seemed to force on it, and the strange lights that actual living threw on it. He looked at the crowds flowing past him—weren't they real enough, so strong in their rooted carelessness that you might as well think of turning them from their set gay thoughtlessness as a tumbling, sunlit torrent from its course? He was the shadow, they the thing of abiding strength. Yes, so far the Bull had been right, they were life.

He began then to think whether the crowd noticed this ghost among them. Of course, he was in the kind of clothes they wore and they had left him his good figure, and with the brightness of the costume the looks of facial features counted for far less. He remembered that when he had been reading all about Machiavelli he came across that strange Baldassare Castiglione's
The Courtier
, a book these people ought to republish, for it was the real answer to all that rationalistic, pre-psychological, preanthropological stuff of Machiavelli's
Prince.
The author there had noticed this very point. He remarks that Spaniards, the type of the thrusting, domineering, totalitarian, imperialistic nationalism of that day, had brought in the ostentatious fashion of wearing black, for this drew everyone's attention to one's face, while a young man who was modest should be able to preserve his anonymity by speaking little and wearing rose-colored velvet. Yes, that was right. And it accounted, no doubt, for the fact that in these crowds hardly a person looked more than twice at his face. Surely it must draw attention to him. He turned to one of the large mirrors. For a moment he had difficulty in picking out himself. Then he saw a creature of good form and carriage, but the face, if you once paid attention to it, was unpleasantly arresting. In all these crowds the faces were as generally vaguely uniform as their gay dresses: a certain standard of good looks was everywhere. The free medical services, the psychophysical hygiene looked after that.

The problem of hair had been solved by glandular study endowed by the state. You could have practically any head of hair you chose for a few treatments—injections and diet—and most people chose bronzes and golds. Well, the people who had remodeled him had taken care of that: his hair had been quite good and now it was one of the standard dark tints, somewhat cleared off the temples and a wave which he'd had was taken out.

It was, of course, the main features of the face and especially the mouth that were wrong. There was that top part, far too rugged, too emphatic, in a crowd where all excess was evidently ridiculous, and then there was that treble collapse of chins, like a cascade of half-melted wax, one of those face-modeling accidents that now with the new techniques had become old vaudeville jokes.

He went close up to the huge looking glass. There were plenty of other people frankly admiring themselves; that inhibition had been gotten over. But he still felt shy and made the acted excuse that dust had gotten in one of his eyes. When he was close he scanned in the full daylight and at full length and framed with fellow men, this new mask. So that was what he was to be for the rest of his life. That was absolutely certain. Because flesh at his time of life had its limit of tolerances and would never take such a tormenting again—like the three wishes, if you had used them all up, then you hadn't that last one to get you back safely to where you were before you dared to wish. But in spite of being hideous, it looked natural. It was simply one of those few misbirths with which beautician surgeons didn't like to meddle because you'd have to tease the flesh so much it might refuse to heal and go malignant. So you gave “Suggest We Don't Mind” mental treatment instead and asked people not to stare and they didn't. Yes, he was simply a misshape. To his most careful scrutiny all that was revealed of the strange secret was the fine gossamer straight lines he had noticed in the sunlight on the model's face as he left that hospital, the faint print of metamorphosis. But, now that he could give careful scrutiny to this fused-on mask, he saw how different it was from the mask worn by the model who had given him his last interview as he left the underground hospital. In that creature's face there was nothing left but an anonymous smoothness; he wasn't bad looking or good looking but blanker than a Chinese coolie's face looks to a Westerner.

But this further experiment which was now fixed on him for life—a far more awful confinement than ever the man with the iron mask suffered—he was now able to study in detail. There had been that growing exposure while he watched in the little mirror his face being shaved. He had seen from casual glances in mirrors as he passed its general disproportion but only now did he gauge how slipshod and unfinished it appeared. There were a number of apparently strong lines on the upper part of the face, deep furrows and convergent folds, and then they seemed to peter out and come to nothing. They should have swept down round the cheekbones and the setting of the nose and bound themselves round, finding purchase in a firm, strong chin. But the whole mask just lapsed. There were big puckers round the mouth and lapses on each side of the nose, and the lower part of the cheeks sank and hollowed. He tried to hope that his teeth would somehow remedy the effect and give back a little strength to that large, drooped, suffering mouth.