Doppelgangers (25 page)

The covered man had long learned not to move when in such a position. But he parried with a good show of indignation.

“Algol,” he shouted, “wake up! I see what you think. You think that that double you provided has succeeded, and that it's
he
who's talking to you and that that is Alpha dead on the floor.” Then, when that burst of well-simulated indignant humor had been shot off, he went on quietly, “Look at my hand, do you see the ring? You know perfectly well that it's the Leader that's speaking to you. Come along. Let's get that poor lump into the incinerator and disposed of. I haven't suffered a scratch.”

“No, I think you haven't, and I'm glad you haven't. And I'm as sure as you are, that, behind me, on the floor is lying the double and in front of me is the one and only Alpha that has survived—that has survived.” And he began to smile.

The remodeled man was irritated to find his own heart accelerating its beat. He must keep as quiet inside as out, if he were ever to get out of this.

“Algol,” he said in a quietly commanding voice, “don't be a fool.”

“That is precisely what I have been saying to myself for a little while, and now I am going to act on that advice, perhaps the last you'll give me, but better than most you have.” The chief of police drew himself up, weighed the automatic in his hand, and smiled. “I see you don't understand, and I know how unpleasant it is to go away with one's mind all confused. Besides, it will give an extra pleasure to my pretty little piece of work if I share with another and point out in words, actually what has happened, and how I've managed to employ events.

“First, I would say again—
of course
you're Alpha—though now you're Omega, too! For a long while I knew you were in decline. You were fuller and fuller of wild notions of turning the revolution into evolution and all that nonsense. You were becoming no longer the leader of a charge and having the fun and the dash, but a great dummy mouthing out about people having a good time. Oh, it made me sick! But it also taught me sense.

“Well, of course, to cut a long story short, as I'm about to cut another longer-winded storyteller shorter in a minute, I tried to think of some way of bringing back the good old times, and for the people who won to have the prize and to carry on the fine fighting life. We didn't fight and win, to sit about in floodlit nightgowns with crowds debauched with sentiment. But you seemed somehow to have got the great sugary tide, the great oily mass, to suck us away. The police weren't even unpopular; they were treated as increasingly funny, anachronisms! There seemed no way out: but all the while my detestation of you, you old softy, grew. And then your softness made you do the very thing that put everything open.

“I own I never thought that your having a double would serve my purposes so perfectly. But, sooner or later, now I see, it would have happened. You probably don't know that I primed the little piece of carrion on the carpet to make the dash at you by telling the inflated little fellow that he'd knock you out and then he and I would share the prize.”

The realization that Algol was reduced by boasting to such a lie, gave the covered man a new sense of readiness.

“Well,” he remarked, “tell me why the present situation so suits your cards.”

“Gladly, and may I congratulate you on your coolness. I must say, I thought you'd become too soft to hold together right up to the moment that you are blown out. Well, I knew that the one thing that could make all good and plain would be if one or the other of you did the other in. Of course you killed the door dupe. But that's all the same to me. Didn't you see? The one square you should not, must not move on, was, of course, getting rid of your double, at least by killing him. For then, briefly, I kill you because of course you are the double that killed my master and so I revenge my dear lost leader. Macbeth killing Duncan's guards after killing Duncan was pretty crude. But this,” and he smiled with a certain complacency, “is, I think you will allow, pretty neat.” Then, putting his head on one side, he asked lightly, “Have you any more questions?”

The man covered in the chair crouched back. “Algol,” he said, “this is a big mistake, believe me. You are making a colossal mistake, all the way through. Stop this fooling and let me explain. I can—”

“Oh, stop that kind of rhetoric!”

“But,” he broke in again, “give me twenty seconds to tell you one thing. Perhaps in that time—”

“Oh, no, I shan't change my mind! But twenty seconds out of eternity isn't long, and no one is coming to interrupt our interview.” Algol swung his left wrist across his right so that he could see his wrist watch as his right hand trained the automatic on the man in the chair. “Twenty seconds to so impress me that I shall know I quite misunderstood the situation,” he laughed. “Now, go!”

The covered man repeated, “There's just time. It is a mistake. Put that pistol down.” He spoke the commonplace words with intense earnestness and, as he spoke, shrank back into the chair, his nervous hands twisting about and fingering its arms.

The smile on Algol's face widened as the muscles of his right hand began to contract.

The nervous fingers of the man he had cornered were now feebly playing with the bull's-head terminals of the chair-arms, while he said over again, “Stop, it's not too late.”

“Fifteen,” counted out Algol's voice and, in mounting triumph, “sixteen, seventeen.”

Nothing moved in the man opposite him, save those twisting fingers. Now even the fingers were all but still. Only the thumb of his right hand still feebly played with the short left-hand horn of the right bull's head, pushed at it, till it suddenly bent.

Algol's right hand, at that moment, opened widely, made the kind of gesture that a Bali dancer makes in explicating a movement, a fan gesture with all the fingers splayed; and the automatic—just as a flower that has been played with is, then, tossed to the audience—leaped lightly from the flattened palm, bounced onto the desk, collided with a couple of the microphones on the left, and was still. Algol carried through the movement of his arm. He had risen, evidently, on tiptoe; he twirled round; his neck and head spun in the same ballet gesture, and then, as quickly, swooped down behind the desk.

The man in the chair fiddled with the loose bull's horn again. A slight sound of shifting came from behind the desk out of his sight. He played with the small tusk of sham ivory again, listening. But no sound now came from the desk's other side. He took his thumb off the bull's head, raised his hand and then, rather wearily, his body. He was taken with an immense yawn. He turned to the right, skirted round the big desk, and, when he was on the other side of it, looked down. Algol was lying with his hand still in that rather unsuitable dancer's gesture, but his other arm was under him and his face was on the floor. His observer bent down, waiting for a moment, then ran his hand under the body on its left side, nodded and immediately rose.

He collected the automatics, the one on the right-hand corner of the desk and the one lying among the microphones. The first he placed by the twisted hand that still seemed reaching out for something. The second he took into the bathroom. He emerged wiping the stock with rubbing alcohol while holding the barrel wrapped in toilet tissue. He put it back in the small locker in which Alpha had kept his insignia pistol which now was serving a more practical purpose. Then he returned to the desk, took the microphone three. The contact opened.

“Trusties One and Two,” he directed, “come up with two mail-delivery sacks.”

He heard the contact close and waited, watching the door. It opened and the two familiar house figures entered, each carrying a voluminous textile sack.

“My defender saved my life but lost his,” he remarked, watching their faces. Perhaps a shadow of commiseration or admiration might have passed across their eyes: certainly not of surprise. And now that cleared and they were evidently only waiting for orders.

“Place the bodies one in each sack.” They handled them as though they were clumsy parcels for the post or pillows limply being pushed into their pillowcases. “Now, carry them out with me.” These men were chosen for powerful build, and they swung the sacks on their shoulders with one heave. He opened the, door for them and led the way to the large elevator. They all got in. He slammed the gate and pressed the lowest knob.

“Dispatching outgoing mail,” he found himself repeating in a whisper. “Two loads: one white mail, the other black mail!”

The whirring stopped with a cushioned jerk. He swung back the gate when they had grounded. He knew where they would be. He was down, with his cargoes, at the incinerator level and at this hour they were out of action. He went over to the wall in which, like built-in marble sarcophagi, the electric furnaces of fused quartz gleamed dully in the strip lighting of this vault. He picked the large central one that dealt with hard garbage at high temperature.

“Open that furnace and deposit the sacks in it.” They obeyed adroitly. The pale white cave, like a cool sepulcher, received the two swathed lumps. “Now you can go back to your quarters, and remember to send down the lift to wait for me. Bring me some hot consommé in another half hour.”

He heard the elevator door clash behind him. Then he spun the resistance knobs at the side of the furnace door and stood, his eyes at the observation slit, where, through translucent deep-tinted quartz, the interior of the furnace could be viewed.

For perhaps two seconds all was black. Then a red sunrise spread over the scene on which he looked, a flat gray landscape from which rose two low ranges of dark mountains. The landscape flushed quickly as though the sun were rising somewhere behind him, flushed and then glowed, glowed and then glared. And the mountain ranges, as though the place had suddenly become volcanic, burst into flame. The flame enveloped them and the landscape became a solid bank of fire enclosing an atmosphere of fire. The mountain range in this climate rapidly began to shrink. The atmosphere which for a few moments was heavy and dim began to clear to a fierce brightness. The two ranges were rapidly shrinking, melting away, or rather withering away. They shrank and twisted as fine paper in an ordinary fire will twist and shrink until it finally contracts and completely vanishes away into gas.

Finally he could tell that anything had been in that consuming mouth only because, on the quivering heat of the floor, the smooth level surface seemed to be slightly raised along two tracks by a low silt of incandescent dust. He had been told that the heat was so intense that it pulverized bone and tooth and that all that was left was a little pure white, very fine calcium dust. It was evidently true. He switched back the dials to “Off” and heard, as he retraced his steps to the elevator, the gentle tick, tick, coming in slower intervals as the furnace made the very slight contraction adjustments that was all the reaction it showed to this tremendous upsurge and downrush of temperature. He got into the elevator.

In the apartment he gave himself a leisurely shower and then, as he heard the trusty come in with the soup, he bathed in a tub of radiated water that stung and needled your muscles till it felt, at least to him, better than any massage. Putting on only a robe, he went in to his late supper just as the trusty who had served it withdrew. He felt hungry, tired, and curiously content. Empty, too—finished, in a way.

His mind did not want to speculate, to think of the future, or to reflect, to live over the past. It stood at a dead center and he was well content to let it do so, while he looked after his body. He knew he had left out nothing and that he had taken all the moves offered him. He felt like a piece on the chessboard that has been played with to considerable effect and now waits until the consequences of what its moves have brought about, develop further.

After drinking the soup he sat smoking while he listened to one of the modern symphonies on his radio and wondered detachedly about music's strange history: how man, the pattern-making animal, had gone on developing this most lovely and deepest of all the abstract patterns—gone on developing it, regardless of the plenty or poverty, the tragedy or happiness of the successive ages. That lovely medieval music rising like still columns of thin blue smoke serenely in the evening sky, out of a landscape black, at ground level, with auto-da-fé fires. Buxtehude and Bach weaving and unwinding that inexhaustible cloth-of-gold, of fuge and concerto, while their Germany was struggling exhausted out of ruin and even the cannibalism of the Thirty Years' War. Yes, even in the spirit of man, even in the spirit of man the technician, was something that went on with its serene evolution and explication, be the earth never so unquiet, and the bodies of men and the passions of those bodies never so cruel or terrified. He turned in to bed with his mind as serene, detached, and vague as a cloud which passes above the sunset and melts in its passage away into the darkening blue.

The next morning he woke fresh, immediately recollecting his position, which, indeed, he had taken care to make clear by moving into the master's bed. And his mind now saw clearly its inevitable next move. As soon as he had dressed and had eaten he went to what already was his desk. Taking microphone one, he gave an instruction and sat back. Within two minutes it was answered, and he was already so sure of himself that in those two minutes the only thought that ran through his mind was a query. He was asking whether his predecessor might not have been actually right in his pet fancy: If you put yourself into the position to have certain progressive, significant ideas they would come to you, hit you. A pole, put high enough on a dark night, will suddenly appear shining white in the high dark, because it is intercepting the beam of a searchlight passing over, but otherwise unseen, in the clear dark air. Certainly he gave not a thought to what he was going to do. It was all obvious, and simply flowed from what had been forced on him.