Doppelgangers (28 page)

It was, of course, superbly done, with every aid of the modern stage craft. The great circles of lessening light, of rainbow belts of glory, and smoky mists and fumes of miniatory gloom, were shown with perfect representation, and through it could be seen the small sparklike soul traveling its way, dreeing its weird, until the great climax. After the pleading recitative voice of the attendant lama had tried to restrain it, the rising wind of fear-desire, that bore it away from the first lightning burst of the Clear Light of the Void, carries it onto the lee shores of the underworlds, when, last seen through the refraction of these dark belts of murky light, the forms of the peaceful deities rise with ineffective pleadings, the goddesses and gods of compassion, the redeemers and the grace-bearers, their hands held out in last appeal. But the gale rises higher, and down on the gathering blast sweep the awful marshaled bands of the wrathful deities, and the soul before this typhoon can only scud for safety to the close harborage of a womb and one more birth.

The vast mythos was rendered with a volume of rhythmic sound equal to the light-controls, and the modern composers, with their enlarged orchestration, with their new instruments of siren sweep, with notes and super- and subsonics that shook the central nervous system, were able to charge the whole audience with cathartic ecstasy, to which mankind had been alien since the Greek play ceased to be the actual rendering of the deepest needs of humanity.

The choreographers of this day had also now found, in these great transcendental themes, at last a way out of the futilities of the romantic movement and the boy-meets-girl ineffectiveness. Here were designs worthy of their art, and techniques. These designs at last carried on that cosmic interest and concern of mankind which had been stifled since, when the Greek play was silenced, the miracle play of medievalism had tried to substitute, only itself to peter out with Punch and Judy!

Audience and actors, as of old, were one, and in the tremendous choruses, though they were led by the special singers, the whole of those present partook, while, as the great movements took place on the central stage, the attendance was also conducted so that it too moved in sympathic rhythm, though on simpler pattern, with the tragedy that was explicating itself on the vast altar-stage round which they, the attendance, were ranged. As the great process of dramatic ritual closed, with the small central figure falling down in the great cosmic swirl of desire, down, down to where opened to receive it the billowing ocean trough of the Sansara, the heaving, traveling sea-womb of reincarnation and of time, the music swept broadly forward to a climax in which acceptance and agony were in strophe and antistrophe, until the lights sank one by one, the general vision faded, and the vast view of the single cosmic process shrank back into the manifold and the discriminate. The audience found itself once more in the phenomenal world—its revels ended, the vast altar-stage empty and the world once more around them to be lived in what could be remembered of the outline of meaning which had been shown as in a glass, darkly.

As the show closed and his ground-glass screen, through which he had viewed it, clouded to its quiet opaque gray, the new master of the world sat back. Hadn't they climbed somewhere beyond where men had gone before and carried a step further the possibilities of vision and understanding for mankind? It was true the Fourth Revolution had come and had completed the three preliminary efforts. For they, the new masters, had given the answer to the blind demand of the First Revolution, the Religious Revolution, the need for man to have religious freedom—the right to have his views of the beyond, where the state could not get them or go with them, where every man must go alone. Alpha had seen that the people had a right to have their views rendered for them in the most splendid way that modern means could present the archetypal ideas and hopes and intuitions of ultimate justice and mercy. So, too, the demands of the Second Revolution had been met and man had been given all those political freedoms, that right to liberty and order which had been the blind demand of the Political Revolution—which had till now only ended in military dictatorship and giant armies and the revolt of all peoples outside that small district from which, first, had come the idea of liberty and, next, the armed force which exploited that generous hope. And likewise with the Third, the Economic, Revolution, the demand for the right to plenty, to liberty from breaking toil, the right to find that work in which one's inborn creativeness could find its expression and the man be satisfied and his community benefited in constant and generous reciprocation—that, too, had been blindly and ignorantly demanded. And today, at last, that rightful part of the demand had been found solved in the final solution. The chord of the three demands had found its sudden resolution in the final bass note of the fundamental understanding of man, of the psyche, the true center, while all these others were but epicenters, of those great shocks of readjustment which the rapidly condensing psyche had made.

Now, at last, the true center had been found and it was henceforward possible to keep pace, or, rather, to balance up one side of the demands of man for expansion with his equally vital but till then overlooked demands for an equilibrium of corresponding cohesion. If man expanded his physical powers by deliberate invention, so he must, by the same use of deliberate invention, forge a new tensile strength in his consciousness, in his psychic capacity, to hold together and remain integrated. The traditional assumptions, loyalties, rituals, and beliefs—even had they held fast and not dragged their own moorings, fixed as they had become in too small a cosmos-picture—were capable only of balancing a traditional set of crafts and skills and technical “mysteries.” With productive science working at one end, productive science must work at the other. The old-fashioned gun barrel of simple steel could hold safely a charge of black powder. The high explosive needed a new metal in which steel was increasingly reinforced till it became only a partner in a new scientific metal which nature had never forged but man invented.

The more he thought, the more he felt the inevitability of the whole vast process. How could the Mole fight it? Wasn't the Mole perhaps merely that rather futile opposition which only serves to bring out the full inventiveness in the side on which has fallen the decree of success? Wasn't he no more than the recessive characteristic, which is masked by the dominant, so that, perhaps, by that effort of masking—as in a healthy body a toxin produces more antitoxin than the body requires and so the body gains a still higher and more general health—the rightful orthogenetic pattern of living which is dominant may become even more inventive with its victory than he would have been had it won by a walkover? “To him who hath shall be given.” The old gnomic saying capped his thought.

He went to bed with his mind at a new balance, with avenues of fruitful choice opening out before him. One thing he knew: he would not hurry, he must not hurry. He had succeeded to, he was crowning so much of, the imperial efforts of the past that in him, too, the great imperial motto could again flourish, the motto of evolution itself, “
Festina Lente.
”

He got up the next morning noticing that no shock met him, even of surprise to find on returning to consciousness what his position had become. Even that strange remodeled face—that, too, with its extra fifteen years falsely written on it—was not that a gain, also, to look forty-five with all the maturity of success and yet, in point of expectation of staying power, to be thirty—one of those master secrets he could keep as part of his inner regalia?

The morning passed quietly. There were a few documents to be signed, a few orders to be confirmed, the notices of some series of honors to be issued. The various secretaries of these chancelleries called, waited, and humbly and gratefully withdrew, clearly having had a lift just to have been in his presence and received his smile. They would report to their families all the little detail they could gather from the routine interview, and the quietly accumulating pressure of loyalty would grow of itself like the strands of a climbing vine wrapping round in a steadily strengthening coil. He lunched early and then sat reading some interesting reports till he had annotated them to his liking. How well everything was presented so that the actual decision was easy and clear, only requiring a top man of undoubted authority and fair general understanding to make it. Could one doubt! This was effective government.

But after he had digested, a small old-fashioned want made itself felt. He would like to take a long, fine, solitary walk in the country—to swing along and let his mind wander, being led from one vague, pleasant line of feeling more than thought, as his body swung its steady soothing measure. Of course, that was out of the question. The captain must stay on the bridge, and he could get enough outings in the great processions. Still, just to be out, not to have to choose between this cooped privacy or that tremendous pressure of exposure—a vacuum or a super-congestion.… Well, it had to be. But while the thought-feeling swayed him his body rose and be began to pace the room.

He made several turns and then, as he came to the upper end farthest away from the desk, he glanced and saw how neatly the bullet tear had been mended in that chair. He bent over it and then looked behind to the wall and saw that where the bullet had lodged had also been carefully covered over. You could just see where the punch had been made but really only if you knew.

He was in that position of inspection when he heard the panel by which his secretary entered slide smoothly and he pulled himself straight, altered the position of the chair as a kind of covering movement—though what could she know about it?—and then turned slowly round. He turned to his left. She would have taken her seat to the right of his desk, so, to avoid passing near her, for he still was not comfortable in the field of her emotional pressure, he would go to his desk by its left side, toward the door that led to the elevator landing. He had taken a couple of steps, then, before he noticed that his way was barred. He looked up and his irritated surprise at the failure of his maneuver went up another gear into a shock, as he saw the figure that stood in his path to the desk was not a woman's at all; a strongly built young man confronted him.

“What are you doing here?” was met with the curt command, “Go back and sit in that chair and perhaps I'll tell you.”

As the command was enforced with the wave of a hand that held an automatic, Alpha II retreated and sat down. Time must be gained, and no doubt this latest piece of madness would explain itself. It looked pretty obvious as to how it was meant to end, but if one could understand how it was brought about that might give one a chance of seeing one's way out.

He began quietly, “Why may I not go to my desk?”

“Because then you'd be armed.”

“But, then, why don't you ask me to put up my hands?”

It was always wisest to keep people who covered you with guns talking as long as you could; that was old underground advice. And the answer, though still more disconcerting, was interesting.

“Because I know about you. You don't carry arms when at home. You depend on another defense—clever enough unless you're caught off your perch.”

The young man backed a little, keeping his victim covered, and then, when he was near the desk, glanced quickly over his shoulder, remarking, “The switch is off,” and with that sat down on the step of the broad dais that ran round the desk.

“Yes, it is a neat little trap, isn't it?” he said, stroking the pile of the carpet with his left hand. “Of course, if the pile just on this dais is a bit stiffer than the silky nylon that makes up the beautiful checked pattern of the rest of the carpet, well, it has to stand more people standing on it, doesn't it? A quite natural precaution in good housekeeping. But, of course,” and he patted the strong nap, “these bristles are pretty stiff, aren't they? Naturally you could have had those silver squares made of a glass fiber as fine and silky as the super-nylon on which you tread, and the gold bronze squares made of a super-conducting copper-aluminum alloy just as floss-soft. But then would either of them have stood without fusing or shorting the quite big currents that you wanted to be able to shoot through them at a moment's notice should your visitor make a sudden suspicious movement?”

Frankness would now serve best, he judged.

“Now, tell me,” he said in a perfectly quiet but interested tone, “how do you know so much about this room and its occupant?”

He looked at the young fellow narrowly. Whom did he remind him of? The face was curiously familiar. Then suddenly he had to smile to himself. How slow he'd been! For, from the first, in spite of the intervention of other interests and questions, he had been puzzled by the look of the lad. Of course he'd seen someone like that before. Never in the flesh, as far as he remembered, but in photos. The fellow was a pretty good rough likeness of what Alpha had been some twenty years ago. The early pictures had not been popular with the later regime but you could yet find them, and naturally the underground had a series.

As the fellow paused, and it was essential for the covered man to keep the conversation going to postpone action when his part was so patently passive, he added, “Of course, I can see part of your passport. It's written on your face.” Then suddenly a great laugh took him as the solution flashed. The laugh evidently shook the lad, who looked positively offended at the levity.

He called out, therefore, through his chuckles, “Sorry, but I was laughing at myself for being so slow. Of course you could only have come through one pass; of course I saw the sign that some traffic might be on that pass, when I viewed that sentry yesterday.”

“What do you mean?” It was the turn of the intruder to be disconcerted.

“You're like what Alpha was when still boyish,” he explained rapidly. “Alpha's secretary naturally adores being near the world's success but would like to possess the idol of the people's heart. All that is no secret. It is merely the inevitable formula. You want to kill Alpha, again a quite common wish among males, as common as the wish among females to marry him. So you get to know Alpha's secretary. You satisfy part of her desire. She has her husband in two pieces, as it were, or served in two courses—but at last the second course decides to swallow the first. Hence, you, somehow, having gained her confidence, put her temporarily out of the way and, having learnt that the old devil is unarmed, again from our Delilah, you pop up and pop him off and no doubt then both of you will, you hope, live happily ever after.”