Doppelgangers (20 page)

The sun was now far in the west. Once more the people were ranged, and once more he spoke to them. The words were of the most obvious but evidently they had been chosen for their psychological, subconscious effect. Given at that pace, with that rhythm, and, at the end, as a kind of recitative with the organ coming in, in chords, between, and giving a background of profound sound all the while, it was clear that the audience was in a hypnotic condition of attention and unification. He could see that their attention was focused on the bright spot the nucleus of which was himself, or rather, his shining garments and his synthetic voice. The whole of the landscape was a white stipple of dots, and each dot was a human face set on this vast epitome, and generalization, of itself.

The final scene of the day-long ritual-act was come—the final words were to be said. Following his conductor, he began to chant and, antiphonally, the audience in the gathering dusk, while his figure burned ever brighter as a beacon of their concentration, sang back. Finally the chorus swelled to a climax and as suddenly the whole volume of sound rose to the sky and was lost. Obeying his conductor, he had raised his arms. He was blessing the millions and dismissing them. He knew that they had fallen on their knees and he, bewildered, raised his eyes to the first star that was appearing in the blue.

Another star appeared and another. They grew rapidly brighter and larger. He saw that the sky was being filled with artificial stars, giant planets. It was a vast fleet of helicopters gently descending, the whisper of their vanes giving a soothing overtone to the silence in which the crowd was bent. As they came closer, ten thousand searchlights of every hue shot up to meet them and bathe these shining hulls in light while they shot down answering beams. Finally the quiet water of the estuary gleaming under this Danae downpour suddenly became fecund and broke. Fountains began to swell and rise, until domes of flashing water fifty and sixty feet high, lit by submarine lighting, and all the water itself made of various phosphorescent incandescences, that shone ever more brightly the more they were agitated, foamed like a long lake of light and lambency. The giant canal was become a great band of burnished gold in which flashed those bosses of living opal. The sea seemed alive, and the long alabastrine rows of the gigantic stadium also glowed with a mild fluorescent flush of inner light.

As he gazed he saw that this steady downflood of light and uprush of illumination had, like waterspout and cloudburst, blended. The lines of illumination subtended: those ascending with those descending forming a vast triangle whose apex was against the stars. The hovering planes had taken up position so that there was first this immense straight-sided arch spanning the giant stadium. Then, from halfway down each of the in-leaning shafts of light, drove out a line of glowing squadrons, met and took up their stations. A luminous “A” that linked earth and heaven had been made. This fabulous symbol of light was reared so that, as he looked down, the stadium had become the floor, and there, reared in flame, was a cathedral under whose vault were the representative millions of all mankind. This sheer peak of light, a hollow mountain whose sides were smooth, precipitous slopes of illumination, must have had its apex ten thousand feet above the earth.

He gazed spellbound. How dark had been their mole-like ways that they had not been told of such a prodigious invention! How could the masses hold up against such a battery barrage of suggestion, every sense bombarded and overwhelmed?

He was still gazing, lightstruck, when his eye was deflected by a green flash in the small porthole at his feet through which he had been able to view the conductor. Yes, he was being summoned. The conductor was looking up at him and had taken his long baton in hand. The man below did not beat time with it. He simply spread wide his feet and then, letting his arms follow the line of his legs and putting his hands out so that they pointed down and out in the same line, he held his long baton so between his open hands, held in position parallel with the ground simply by his thumbs. The remodeled man saw that he was meant to take up this posture. Taking his wand between his thumbs and palms, he stood in this position of an offering celebrant, offering his rod of power and himself in the service of mankind—that must be the meaning of the symbol.

But how in that great tent of light that overtowered him would the people be able to see this tiny creature offered up on the high altar of the highest temple ever reared in the whole history of the world? As he gazed up, however, he began to note that the milky, iridescent cone of light in which he saw himself enveloped, and which he had realized projected his image to a vast size, was now growing. Every moment the luminous Brocken figure, of which he was the tiny microscopic heart, the homunculus-nucleus, grew and towered. Finally he saw that it had reached up to the great cross-beam of the Alpha figure made by the planes and their lights. As the light-shadow of his gigantized head touched this ceiling, the spanning rung was withdrawn. His light-magnified figure, he could now see, towered up halfway to that apex which arched so loftily the giant nave made by the stadium. As he stood, with the rod held athwart his body by his down-slanted arms and hands, he saw he was not so much an offering as an intermediary: he had become the giant Alpha itself.

Standing thus, he heard a strange murmur coming up from underneath—a strange sound such as he never before had heard human beings emit. It was certainly not applause—the time was past for the grateful recognition and acknowledgment that the show had been fine, the production superb, the entertainment royal, the day a lovely success and worthy of the approval of a people who had the highest standard of what a show should be. The sound conveyed (from human beings to another human being standing solitary in this heart of light) directly the knowledge that the human spirit had been mastered, overwhelmed, that show and symbol and critical appreciation of detail, acknowledgment of skill and finish and ensemble, had all gone, beaten flat under a tide of impression. The short-circuit had taken place. They were no longer looking, listening, blending impressions, appreciating. They were stunned; and yet in that cry it was not a concussion that those creatures, smitten into one, were feeling. It was, on the contrary, a release. Surely they were stunned out of any defense of understanding, any power of reply. But they were raised, and that cry was one of desire, of yearning for what they could not know.

Here was the true and terrible catharsis which is ecstasy, which, not for thousands of years, had man felt and known, when, meeting in an agonia, a contest of creative, parturitional pain, the deep forces of the earth, of Pan the father of Panic, meet the divine sky forces of a wonder which is unbearable in the promise it offers because it must be beyond fulfillment—so long as the creature clings to its separateness. These masses had been not only fused, they were being raised above themselves, standing high above themselves, and had left their small separate bodies kneeling on the ground. That cry was a vast expiration in which they offered themselves utterly to something beyond any power of theirs to define.

As he looked and listened, caught in the same uprush of the psychic atmosphere, he heard the small prompting voice beginning to recite. And now without any hesitation, still less criticism, but as a hypnotized patient, he cried with the full volume of the Alpha voice, which a hundred thousand amplifications made a veritable voice of thunder that rolled along the vast arch of light and re-echoed off the floor of waters:

“I am Alpha, no person but a principle, the principle of perpetual beginning, the promise of unknown evolution and development. My head and summit is in heaven, my feet, firm-set, wide-spanning, gauge the earth and sea from east to west: from north to south I compass mankind and all its lands, and radiate down overseership and light. I am the initial and eternal Atlas sustaining earth from heaven, yet, as Prometheus Unbound, linking the height with the depth, apex with level. And, in between, I have made a mighty bridge with the rod of my power to carry in ever increasing volume all the lawful traffics of mankind and every joyful excursion of humanity. I am the stairway to the stars and the link of the earth's ends.”

The voice stopped, and he waited, as much a tranced spectator as any one of them. What had spoken through him, what inhuman air had passed by, using him as a small reed in the giant tuba through which it sounded? He felt dazed and waited, hardly caring what came next. But when the voice whispered from below, “Step back one pace,” he obeyed, though it might mean that he was to fall headlong. He felt the ground, on which his backward step had put him, quiver. Then he thought, with something more passive than content, This is the end, the final detachment of the instrument or the reed from the word. But, instead of falling, he was raised. He had been made to step on the prow of a helicopter, which, while the Alpha speech roared from him, like a tide through a turbine, had come up behind the plinth, and, the moment he ceased speaking and his light-projection was shrunken, had come in to take him off.

But he was not yet to be released from this intolerable pressure of the focus of a million incomprehensible desires. No, the plane rose until his small shining figure was at the very apex of the giant arch of light. Then the whole giant “A” moved out across the plain, and, as it swept slowly away, the supporting aligned batteries of searchlights from the two long ramps of the stadium followed the vast angle and then died like the glow on a mountain from which the last rays of the sun have been withdrawn. Underneath, the crossbar, linking the two slanting columns, had been re-formed by a moving rank of lit helicopters. The “A” that arched the earth moved on to the capital. So it rode, a compass of light, spanning miles of countryside, its moving image visible from scores of miles away. Finally it covered the whole capital in its bestriding, and he, the apex light, was shining right over the palace itself. There the light-symbol stood for a moment hovering, a star radiating down its beams over the place of natality, the spot whence had been projected this final beginning. For a moment he was so raised aloft, like a kind of offering to the stars themselves, and, looking up from the blaze below, he saw their unaffected distances.

He sighed half with relief, half with an anesthetic exhaustion. And as he sighed his station began to sink, the plane was descending with him like a spent ember from a dying bonfire. A glowing spot, he was brought down until the dark flat surface of the palace lay immediately below. His last glance showed that like a setting moon he had drawn back, into the city out of which he had led its tides of population that morning, its hundreds of thousands. He could see its lights flashing from ten thousand relit homes and the sounds rising as men went back to their variety with a new appetite for the manifold after their uplook into the void where all difference ends in the hypnosis of unity.

He hardly felt the plane ground and stood with almost the stiffness of catalepsy until he was helped out. As the engine behind him stopped, the last dike against the flood of exhaustion seemed to be withdrawn. He felt vaguely that he had been psychically magnified, distended beyond all inner power of re-recollection. He had been filled with the focus pressure of loyalty, so that for a whole day he might preside over the monster meeting of mankind. No doubt he had been carefully primed to stand that pressure, but now his system knew that it had used up every scruple of the dosage. As he was helped from the prow-throne, the light of his garments sank. “A ghost,” he muttered to himself, “a ghost when midnight strikes and he must vanish,” and let himself be led down to his apartment. He was aware that they unrobed him—perhaps the trusties; he was too dazed to recognize anyone, he who for hours had been turned into a symbol and had seen mankind fuse back into a single species.

He slept, for he found he was lying in bed when the doctor came in to him. Then for a moment he was nearly stirred from his coma of anonymity. He looked at the man at first unregardingly. Then a faint tremor of question stirred somewhere in him. The man, who was, of course, one of the selfless or callous (put it as you wished) instruments of this machine that had got its head—this man was trembling and his eyes were moist. When he took the remodeled man's arm his hands shook. Finally he went down on one knee. He gave the injection badly, letting the liquid leak from the puncture. The patient turned with an involuntary impatience from the clumsy stab. The doctor succeeded better next time and then, as though the effort were a great one, bent down. Yes, he had placed his forehead on the back of the remodeled man's inert hand. So, he thought faintly, as he sank into complete unconsciousness, no one can stand against this nucleonic energy we have released. Even the doctor, who knows that he prepared the lay figure, is overcome by it and worships the form out of which the power has gone, the glory departed.

He did not know how long he slept. He woke still with that feeling, as though his base had been taken from him and earth no longer could hold firmly his feet. But he was well. Physically his tiredness was gone from him. He woke because he had been disturbed by something. Someone was in the small room, sitting on the chair for which there was just room beside the bed. He could not remember why he felt as though he had no base. But he recognized the little room and he felt he had been through some unprecedented ordeal for which he had had no defense; all the skills of control which he had been taught had somehow been undermined and overwhelmed by some monster attack. He turned his head to see who was sitting beside him. He saw himself and then, as double images seen for a moment are brought into the unity of single focus with a sudden click of the eye, he knew it was Alpha, Alpha the First, who was sitting there, and he was as he was because for some hours he had endured taking, as Alpha the Second, the weight of the full Atlas pressure.

He realized, a moment after, what he had been through and that it was no subjective impression when he saw the difference in Alpha's attitude. He was concerned, solicitous. This was, he felt as his memory came back and completed itself, even more strange and yet inevitable than the doctor's inability to check the reverence-reaction in himself when he gave the injection as he fell to sleep.