Doppelgangers (16 page)

“Well, I don't pretend to understand nature but I do attend to her, so I told them to get along with counterchecking the results on chimps. And, sure enough, there one found that the more psychological the reward for these higher types, the better the results. It was approval they lived and pined for, and would leave food if only to be patted and praised. The suggestive power of fame will make a man continent, sober, poor as a miser! Well, I need not tell you, we have not been disobedient to these indications given us by the Life Force. But I see you have finished your meal. Not another glass of this vintage? Well, anyhow, take it with you into the next room. It will really do you good.”

They strolled in together into the study like old friends and sat down in the same two chairs where they had had their first long fireside chat.

Alpha went on easily, “Last time I didn't explain to you that little gadget of the fire. The play of flames round logs, the gentle fluctuating heat, those small things I had researched into. I was sure these great stuffy clokes of heat were a mistake. I'd known about how in the hospitals for crippled children they got such wonderful results by exposing the surgical tuberculosis cases to sunlight in moving air—Rollier a century ago in Switzerland coined the phrase,
Le corset musculaire
—the muscles are gently massaged and the circulation kept going by the rise and fall of the stimuli. I saw at once that man's taste for an open fire must be right—his tastes always are unless you start arguing him out of them—for, of course, he can never tell you why; that's for you, the clever questioner, to find out. I found out.

“People rest best with the merry play of flames to watch. Gas fires made discontent; radiators, revolution! But I've no doubt they did balk something ancient in people. The hearth is the most ancient spot for relaxed contemplation and the hearth must have a fire. But we have reversed the motto and then disproved it. All fire but no smoke. This fuel was an accidental discovery from one of our huge retorts in which we were learning how, out of sewage, to recover the essential elements—such as organic phosphorus—which till then men either destroyed or threw into water and made a poisonous swamp. You know we deal with all garbage now in the electric furnaces every house has fitted, but the more valuable sewages we still extract in our central retort houses. I noticed that at a certain heat there were built up these crystalline forms which are very frondlike, just as corals grow in the sea, but this, of course, is pure chemical action, a very rich crystal form. We discovered that when the heat was raised, then these forms combusted, very cleanly. We next treated them with other salts and we had this fuel. Of great warmth, radiance—see how beautiful those peach-colored flames and those peacock-colored sparks are—and giving off no smoke, and you see that when at last it burns out there is left only that light-blue ash.”

They sat looking at the fluttering glow with that ancient pleasure in the bright hearth. True, as the fuel burned it gave off no smoke and the ash formed as a pale-blue, feathery down.

“It makes a good top dressing for plants too. We still have to grow a great deal of food, but it's getting more and more efficient. One day we'll get synthetic food, I guess. But I'm in no hurry—not that the chemical problem seems far away from solving, now that we have synthesized chlorophyll, but because of the psychological problem. A large part of the people aren't ready yet to do without growing things. It keeps their tempo right. Of course, all the other revolutions lost their balance by thinking of the clever towns and not of the massive lands, of the critical types instead of the integral masses; those are the human chlorophyll. They do the great integration while the rest just break down and up, into pretty but transitory forms, the raw material. Now that we are relieved of that false fever, the belief in progress, in there being a wonderful day in the future for which the present is to live in perpetual discomfort, strain, anxiety, and violence, we can see things in balance.”

The guest swallowed this fresh shock to his faith. He must listen. His mind must not close down or he would act wrongly when the time for acting came.

They were silent for a moment or two, and then Alpha went on, “As you won't need being told, I'm increasingly interested in the psychological side of everything and I refuse to move, even when results are quite laboratorily clear, till I've checked up and found what the psychological consequences will be, what will be the reaction of
homo sapiens
—yes, I see you are surprised that I use that old funny term—but, seriously, I am beginning to see he is far wiser than we thought or than he knew. Of course, I started out on this, knowing that it was the psychological revolution that would demode all the other three, the religious, the political, the economic. They are all pre-anthropological—they just didn't know the nature of the creature they were going to shape for its own happiness. Now one can laugh their pretentious ignorance out of court.”

He chuckled, and his guest stifled a small sigh and that ended in a smile.

“We should never have won unless we were on Life's side. Man had used up all his credit with Nature, and she was saying in tremendous tones, with the blast of the atom, ‘Understand yourself or go! I don't ask you to understand the universe; I do demand you look at yourself and cease talking pretentious, murderous nonsense.'

“Well, I attended, that's all, and that's all that's been needed to give mankind another lease on life. What lies ahead I can't see. I don't pretend to be a prophet. I do claim that I have been contemporary and all the others have been living fossils. I do claim that I have had respect for life, have known I was up against immense mystery, have tried not to dictate to Nature and to control her only in order the better to obey her.

“Indeed, it was that old-fashioned fuss over the first squirt of atomic energy which really began the complete discrediting of the old politicos—that, in fact, was its chief significance in the end. What a gain it was to get rid of that type of caucus man who, since the beginning of city government, was up to his little, smart games of rigging committees and gerrymandering majorities—a fool, incapable of understanding even his own experts, and whose one gift that gave him power with the gullible was his clever, cunning talk. You probably never heard about that part of mankind's protest which I used. It's very stale history now and of interest only to the very few who, like myself, have to know about the roots of what's now flowering.

“History used to interest quite a lot of people. Of course, it doesn't now. It was fairly popular as long as the present was nothing like good enough in itself. Then it was natural to take an interest in the past, because it looked either more romantic or better run than the present, prettier or more profitable. But if the present is really pleasant to look at and to taste, who is going to be as foolish as Aesop's dog and drop what's in one's mouth for a fading reflection?

“Of course, those first physicists who revolted failed. They tried to begin by taking things into their own hands when they saw that the politicos were too stupid to understand what was being told them. But the physicists themselves were really no better. Why expect it? Pure specialists, they knew even less of human beings and their ways than did the politicos, though they saw much more clearly what had been run into. Why, most of them, though working with pure force, were, would you believe it, still materialists, though their own physicists had shown that matter is only a mental concept that they and their like had thought up. That was stupider than if I should start worshiping myself. Of course they
had
to fail—knowing as little of mankind as of metaphysics; but when they had been batted down and the politicos went on messing and people wouldn't live in the towns, and the bombed places, when you did go back to them, simply gave you cancer or diseases of the central nervous system—well, once I started I didn't have much difficulty in bringing in all the researchers, specialists, technicians, on my side. They couldn't do it themselves, but, with them ready to serve me and seeing that I understood them, well, they went over en masse, and the politicos were left. All I had to do was to wave them out of the way.”

He stopped and hummed to himself, his memories evidently soothing him. Then he went on reflectively, “The underground may be a different proposition. Anyhow, there's the possibility of a real psychological problem lying down there, a residual core of systematic revolt. But,” and he shook off his thought with a guffaw, “those overgrown debating boys with their utter lack of understanding of the present, let alone the future, their complete lack of intelligence, let alone any consistency, let even further alone the slightest suggestion of principle, why, they were simply moss on a diseased tree and as easy to get rid of. No healthy life suffers from parasites.

“Maybe I don't know what Life's for or what it's up to. I've always been called a cynical opportunist. Well, all I've done is to wait, take the step that was offered, and then see what would appear when you were there. There's something moving behind it all, I know, and you must somehow keep pace with it, neither standing still nor going too fast, neither thinking you see the goal nor protesting that you can't see an inch ahead. So I keep all mankind at all levels as my scouts—all out at every range enjoying themselves, doing what their age and temper tell them to do. I let the young have their fun and the old their philosophy, the active their adventures and the speculative their theories, the loose their liberties and the devout their devotions—and I wait.

“I have had to work hard and sometimes hastily to set men free from their self-imposed chains and to fight off those who wanted to rivet fresh ones on them. It's damned difficult to hit hard and yet have no animus. But the result is getting steadily better and we are learning all the while, and less and less force is needed—surely that is a sign of success, of Life backing one.”

He stopped again and gazed at the fire. He was evidently now talking his mind out at the very limits of his speculation.

“The future,” he began again, “the future, what a strange thing—it's there in a way, and in a way we are making it, and in a way it swallows us up in its own unsuspected denouement. What do I foresee? A double answer, I think, like a quadratic equation—and so both may come true. I see a humanity stabilized in a sufficiency of happiness to make a life, that means nothing but that happiness, worth while—and what is that but what used to be called, in the early Sanskrit, ‘To go the way of the Fathers'?

“This is not a blind wheel of suffering to those whom it suits. They plunge into the bath of death after the day of life and come up fresh, ready for another day in the light and in the dust, in the field and the forest. There are species that have managed—all up the huge phylum or tree of life—to make their peace with nature by knowing their place and their pace. They have been on the beat, neither behind nor before, for millions of years; some, like the cockroach, for hundreds of millions.

“Man at last might do that. Or he may finish and go elsewhere—as, again, the Sanskrit says, ‘Go the way of the Gods.' Or he may split, and one great part of the species specialize at last in a form at last perfectly adapted to this world, perfectly skilled to surmount such waves in the environment as changes of climate and yet perfectly content to ride on forever over the broad tide of time. Then there could be another type which would choose to go on, perhaps not
en bloc
but continually effervescing and volatilizing out from the great solid or liquid mass. My geophysicists tell me that the environment, they think, should stay put indefinitely; perhaps, some calculate, it is perfectly balanced on a superthermostatic system and we have only to balance ourselves. Well, I have given happiness to the masses and the opportunity to understand for those who prefer understanding to happiness!”

He stopped, heaved himself up in his chair, half turned, and then chuckled, “My double, how well we have gotten to know each other! You see, we haven't had to get over our differences. Those were smoothed out before we met; and we are also like two identical twins who find themselves washed up on the same lonely island—for we
are
quite alone. I must say. I'm more glad of your company than ever I imagined I would be! For, of course, I'm as alone as any man on an island, more so in some ways. It is not good for man to be alone—an ancient quotation, the sense of which I always understood as far as others are concerned but which now I see I must apply to myself. I must not drift away and get stranded and become too exceptional, a kind of stranded whale in the ocean of understanding. My gift, my power, was always to be able to understand the ordinary ranks of men, not one but the whole three, because I had so much of all three in myself. But you are going to fill not only the physical gap and so give me some time off to myself; you are going, I believe, to fill the psychological hollow and give me the company I needed. Didn't I say I always am let invent far more than I know I am inventing and so always, not kill two birds with one stone but get two birds out of one egg? I see how you stimulate my mind and help it to cross-breed on itself.

“When I was going through Napoleon to discover why the second, the political, revolution failed, I found one of the most interesting responses of that small opportunist mind when put up to a proposition—the ordering of Western man—too big for its little activity-fevered brain. He used every now and then to have fireside talks with a number of his body servants, the people right close to him and too intimately small to be thinking of supplanting him. He called it the times when he would ‘Ossianize'—take on the romantic phase of the starveling Scot, the pseudo-keltic poet-bard who wrote under the name of Ossian. Then he would try to live up to the intellectual possibilities of the huge opportunity that had been dropped into the lap of a Corsican snob. But always, just when he began to see things on some scale, perspective, and focus that might have defined, out of huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, into a real contemporary picture for Western man, the door was knocked on, we are told, and it was either the tailor come to show him new uniforms or the latest chorus girl from the opera sent to amuse the animal that dominated that quite large but localized brain.”