Doppelgangers (31 page)

“You know that in all the metropoli of the traffic epoch, when the surface population-pressure rose above a certain density per square mile, there were three traffic reactions. First, there were subways, trenches which carried the fastest traffic in trains just under the streets; that was the first underground. Next, when the ground permitted it, there had to be a still lower and freer run-level found by driving tubes totally below the earth, quite unlit by any daylight and fed by special fans for their air. And, as we know, as the density still mounted, there had to be added an elevated system, first in old New York, then abandoned but finally resumed—until you started redistribution—at the high zoning level of the standard skyscraper—the 700-foot elevation, so that the cable ways guided the air gondola-trains above the city in the highest speed-circuits. Well, this pattern of population circulation, this necessary three-layer traffic to keep the masses from congealing and seizing in a super-jam, was also followed by the necessary flow of the forces of movement, of government, of opposition, and of overseership, as they worked upon the otherwise steady stagnation and breakdown of the forces of blind increase. The task was to find for an increasing population, increasingly supplied with economic necessities, those psychological stimuli which would prevent them from degenerating.”

“What do you mean by classing the opposition with the Government!”

“I am speaking as an observer. No government till now, not yours even till today, has, as a matter of fact, been able to command the active loyalty of mankind unless there was a threat and enemy against which to marshal the forces which otherwise corrode of themselves the whole structure. And as there are no longer those physiologically and economically ruinous, but psychologically stimulating, tension-balances produced by the odd structure of nationalism, the stimuli now have to be generated by the struggle of the state's subway forces with the opposition forces driven into what we may call the tube system, the catacombs of ultimate resistance, where men, who have sacrificed themselves to become moles, try to countermine and sub-sap those somatotonic types which you draft off, with their otherwise dangerous energies, to man the trenches of the subway system.”

“But what's all this got to do with Elevators?” he spoke almost irritably. Only the queer force of the man himself had kept him listening to such queer illustrative byplay.

“The Elevated is the third level, the level of overseership and as needed as the others.”

“That's modest of you! Why don't you claim that your little bunch, whoever they are, could govern with their left hand, while, of course, being too good to let their either hand know what the other's doing, keep going with their right the necessary stimuli of the treason which you are pleased to call opposition?”

The man questioned smiled, “I think I can answer to your satisfaction and without delaying you longer. You have reached the point when those who do survey, but do not intrude, or indeed intervene, save to put information at your disposal, feel that the tube system of the Mole has served its purpose. Henceforward the real balance might be an open, and not a blind polar, relationship between those who are purely interested in understanding and movement and those, the government, yourself, who must be chiefly interested in application, correlation, and maintenance. And so, as I have said, I will conclude. I will and can.

“You are the key figure: And it matters as little to me who you may be as a physiological figure, as it really matters to you who, in that respect, I am. We both belong to various blood groups, no doubt, but that does not affect the meeting and blending of our minds. You need me, and, because I exist for the purpose of giving that kind of help, I need you just as much. You see, there is a world picture, a picture in which I have shown your position in general and your particular next step. And as you in particular have to take that step, you are the foot, the upraised foot of mankind, I have to help that foot to be balanced and strong that it may land firmly. The step is right, the ground is ready. The foot remains for us to view. You know,” he suddenly became emphatic, “you
know
that you cannot safely any longer expose yourself to the psychological pressures which have already been generated round the focus, which you have become. And yet we know your intention—inevitable, essential—is that these pressures shall now henceforward, and with a sudden critical step-up of pressure, be immensely increased. They must be. I have, then, two services to do you. The first, we will take when I have received your consent to the second. I can, with the first, relieve you of a pressure which now has served its purpose. But the second, of that, with my help, you must relieve yourself. You see, you must break?”

The part which the man in the chair had been playing, almost under the pressure of his position and because that position seemed to impose a false sense of initiative on him, suddenly seemed to shrivel away. Where was he going? Was he really simply going to slip into the pit, the huge crater left by the burning out of Alpha I, and so lie there embedded and finally fossilized, part of an ever more slowly turning tide of settling mud of custom, settling into a crust of custom, or being broken by some unsuspected revival of success from the deeper level of what his visitor called the mole-tube opposition?

Could he go back to the Mole? No. Before this call he knew that was over—those tubes went just as much in a circle as the subways that ran above them, and shot down into them, shot down into them fresh energy just to go on revolting, revolving, revoluting. And if the Mole came to the top, what would he, of Life's necessity, become? Simply a rather more lively, rather less vigorous, rather more widely seeing rat? The sewers or the ultimate sinks, the street culverts or the final cloacas—those were the choices. Unless there was, as this man (who ought to be mad but for his skilled mass of technical knowledge) suggested, a third process of overseership, the Elevated? Besides, wasn't it true that Alpha I, who certainly was not less tough than he, had broken under that pressure of popular famation which was psychic deformation, and he himself, even at the lower pressures, which now he was going to step up, had felt himself utterly enervated?
Of course,
it was out of the question to go on. He was simply blinding himself in order not to think and to go on to the brink because there seemed no place to stop. Now, however? He must gain time. He must keep this man and somehow test him. He might be a raft or only a bundle of waterlogged straw. An idea flashed in his mind: he could keep him longer and test him without his knowing he was being tested.

“We can consider that all a little later,” he said, stroking the lines on his face. “There is, as it happens, a small problem which is at this moment affecting office efficiency and, if you are the expert you would say, you could help in it.”

The visitor seemed quite unsurprised at this procedure and stood quietly while Alpha II switched open the secretarial circuit. There was a small check at the other end and then his secretary's voice, with obvious strain, answered. The voice became even more constricted when it assented to his order, “Come at once and bring with you your visitor.”

She entered and not only was it clear that the effects of the drug that she had been given had not yet wholly cleared but also that the nervous shock she had undergone had reduced her self-control to the thinnest of films. The conflicts going on in her loomed through so that she seemed more to be two persons than one. She stood ever so slightly swaying, between the boy who was just behind her and Alpha. Revulsion and devotion not only were keeping her mind in a crisis of confusion: it was clear that she could not say from which of these two poles she felt these conflicting tides to be arising. Her mind was not merely looking at something about which she could not decide whether to fly or to submit; she had a kind of double vision, for she could not decide where stood the object of her real devotion.

She did not notice the visitor, but he was engaged with her, and before Alpha could enter on an explanation—while he was framing words—the saffron figure said to her, “Come and sit here.” He put her in that chair which had already borne two crises.

To the lad he said, “Sit in this other.” To his clumsy, protesting courtesy, “Where are you going to sit?” he replied, “When operating it is easier to stand.”

Then, turning to Alpha at his desk, “This situation is known to the world, in its outline, and one glance at the third party gives the conclusion. The detail does not matter and might easily confuse the issue in its clarity. I am not concerned about what accident of apparent intrusion brought this physiological counterpart of you here. In the deepest sense it is a convergence—it could not be avoided—and in relation to what I have just said to you it can be used with effect to help liberate you all.”

He paused, looked at the secretary for a moment searchingly, and as he looked she collapsed. The boy made an effort to rise. He was waved back to his seat. The visitor went over to her and put his thin fawn hand on her shoulder.

“I am going to use a very ancient language to you, so old that it is dateless. ‘Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?' You are a woman and you have sought a man on which to rest. And you thought that a superman must be a man of men. You would have the supreme man. No. Woman must not seek to mix a dream, a political dream, with a racial fact. No man who serves mankind can serve a woman. You have loved, in your dangerous wish to have a genie lover, not a man but a huge projected shadow of mankind. The rainbow is real enough provided we never try to touch it. It exists in its great span of beauty because it is always at that distance from us. That which sits at that desk is a simulacrum. Why, you cannot know that is even the same physique which sat there seven days past: the whole of the wave-lengths of energy that make it up
have
passed away, and been replaced by others which have been made to take on the same form. You have already made your choice.” He took her by the hand and placed her on her feet.

“You are simply trying, with a false consistency to your own belief in your dignity, against your deep sane sense of your happiness, to fight your rightful fate.” He took her and turned her to the boy. “Man, here is your woman; woman, here is your man. Go; the way is clean open to you. You were nearly trapped: but now the road is wide open; don't be your own jailer.”

She struggled for a moment. “But will
he
be safe?”

“This is the surest way of making him safe. He has no danger but in your balked husband.”

“But all those awful people of the underground who hate him?”

“That, too, will pass away as quickly as this closer peril will pass. The man who is to be your husband will help us at that last solution.”

At that there was a hesitation, and, wavering, she put out her hand onto the boy's shoulder.

“You're not going to put him in any risk?”

“You see, already he is yours! But he'll remain yours all the more, if you do not with him, what you did with his great shadow over there. You must let him be what he is, that he may be to you what you need. And now I'm going to explain to you quite briefly where you are and who you are, in order that you two may go ahead with that private sane happiness which is your main contribution to the happiness of the whole.

“The reason for my
visit,
” he stressed the word slightly and looked across at Alpha's seat, “is that your society has reached a crisis—not a crisis that leads to a crash but one that might lead to great confusion. You know, you men of action, how easy it is to take action. You must already have suspected how hard it is to stop action, to get back to the freedom of being able to wait and take your time and let things develop. That is the effect of too much violence; it is first intentional and then goes on merely by its own inner momentum. I want to persuade you just to carry on, to let things develop and to cease pushing them to and fro. For I know that if you will do that, then the rest is easy.”

“But you own that it is hard, damned hard?” Alpha II interjected.

“Not too hard if once one sees why it should be done.”

“Can you show us why?”

“Yes, it's inevitable, and if you, if we, don't do it, it will be done with a good deal of trouble, but done it will be.”

“How?”

“Well, it's already practically hatched: all you have to do is not to prevent its coming out.”

“Explain.”

“Surely you see what you have been the tools in shaping? At the beginning of social history there are three great realistic Utopists, Manu, Vyasa, and Valmiki. You might do worse than put up monuments to them and name their feast days as the Founding Fathers of Mankind. For they
were,
though they have had to wait for some time before humanity was prepared to study itself and so understand their insight. They saw that four types of men as a matter of fact are viable, do get born, and insist on living their special kinds of life.

“We have seen violent efforts, revolutionary explosions which tried to make mankind fuse into one level—atomistic democracy; then as violent re-revolutions—called mistakenly reactions—when men tried to correct this false simplification and get on with two: masters and men, officers and privates, labor and management. But this balance was too simple and therefore unstable. The Alpha experiment—” he did not look at the present occupant of the seat—“was important, was inevitable, because it marked the end of the third revolutionary phase, the recognition of three types: The masses left to enjoy themselves, in fecund plenty; the hard-working technicians and officials; and the directive of men of ideas, pure research, theory, and oversight. This is the system which this revolution, the psychological or anthropological revolution, took over from Sheldonism, and that is why the poor old dual system of applied Marxism went down before it, or rather vanished like an outworn idea, as spent as was the idea of the Holy Roman Empire.