Doppelgangers by H. F. Heard Page A

here’s something that may help your conscience. You might have a job where you’d have to kill your own poultry and other meat. Well, what I’ve shown you will help your fine feelings. All you’ve got to do is to touch the animal on that spot with a very fine sharp skewer and it flops. You can kill a sheep or indeed an ox that way and the flesh is as good as if you’d cut its throat. For I suppose you are merciful and not just a mollycoddle about blood. When it’s dead you open its throat, hang it up, and death has been so quick and central that the blood drains away almost as clean and quickly as though it had died from the cutting of its arteries.
    â€œAll you have to do is to get the animal to lower its head to some fodder if it is a big one, so that it opens the cervical vertebrae, push your skewer between the two top ones, and that drives the point in close to the medulla oblongata and so its breathing stops. Yes, a cook should know the outlines of anatomy. We were taught it at our cuisine school, and quite rightly. That spot saves a lot of trouble. Have been told it would work just as well with a man—all animals have it as their Achilles heel—a bit high up, but as long as one knows what one is looking for the name doesn’t matter, does it?”
    And, evidently pleased with his own address, the chef actually chuckled.
    The incident was so small that he would have forgotten it, no doubt, but that a few days later he found on returning to his room a notice from the post office that a package was waiting him. He went down there before work. Naturally, it would be his teeth. His disappointment was keen when he saw that the package handed him was far too small. He opened it as he went along to work, and his annoyance was shot with surprise when out of it he took an Alpha badge pin. Of course no one had to wear these badges. The administration often said they wanted people to be happy and they believed that happiness was the cement of agreement. They didn’t want people to be loyal but to be satisfied, and they didn’t believe that loyalty or manufactured satisfaction was durable. Still, most people at the big festival of freedom did wear some such badge and nearly everyone who was in one of the public services wore them rather more often. Well, if that was his instruction, he had better live up to it—it didn’t seem a very subtle piece of window dressing for the Mole to think up after a number of days—but the obvious can, with the very subtle, have an edge which is concealed by apparent bluntness.
    As he was approaching the place where he worked he put the badge in the breast of his tunic. It was a small rod with an Alpha on the top like the Constantine Labarum. He was fitting it into his buttonhole when the top twisted loose. Poorly made, he thought, as he drew out the top and left the stem in the buttonhole. But as he tried to fit it together again he saw that the joint which had come loose, just under the capital A, had, depending from it, a dowel that pegged into the stem-hollow. And it was a very long dowel, almost the length of the stem. He had now arrived at the side street in which his work-place was. He examined the object which he was holding by its capital letter head, which made a fine grip, and saw that he had hold of a very fine and sharp skewer about two inches long, double-bladed. He tried it on the hair of the back of his hand. It was as sharp as a razor. Of course the two incidents could be coincidence. But were they? And if not, to what did they point? He put the badge together, put it right in his buttonhole, and went in.
    One evening, though, his mind tired of this solitaire. Why try to solve problems of other people’s behavior when that of your own and your own position is completely enigmatic to yourself? He must have company. But who’d want an object like him to spend an evening with? Suddenly, with the conviction that need will