Ross said, “But——”
Helena, hanging from the acceleration loops, smiled 106maternally. “Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “Ross don’t you think we’re far enough away yet?”
Ross said hopelessly, “All right,” and cut the drive. The starship hung in space in the limbo between stars. Azor, “Minerva,” and the rest were light-years behind, far out of range of challenge.
Helena wriggled free from the loops and rubbed her arms where the retaining straps had gripped them. “After all,” she said demurely, “you told me how to run the ship, and really, Ross, I’m not quite stupid.”
Ross said, “But——”
“But what, Ross? It isn’t as if I were some sort of brainless little thing that had never run a machine in her life. My goodness, Ross——” She wrinkled her nose. “You should remember. All those days in the dye vats? Don’t you think I had to learn a little something about machines there?”
Ross swore incredulously. To compare those clumsy constructs of wheels and rollers with the subtle subelectronic flows of the Wesley force—and to make it work! He said, unbelievingly, “And the ‘Minerva’ helped you vector in? They gave you the co-ordinates and radared your course?”
“Certainly.” Helena turned to Bernie, who was staring dazedly around him. “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.
Ross turned his back on them and faced the Wesley Christmas tree of controls. Don’t question it, he told himself; take a miracle for what it is. God wanted you out of “Minerva”—and God moves in most mysterious ways His wonders to perform.
Anyway, they had to get going. When the court had exiled Helena in the starship they had gone through the customary rituals; not only was everything that looked like a weapon gone, along with all but a teacup of fuel for the auxiliary jets, but the food locker was stripped entirely. He put everything else out of his mind and began to calculate a setting.
Bernie said over his shoulder, “Home, huh? That place you call Halsey’s Planet?”
Ross shook his head. “Not this time. I got this far and 107I’m still alive; maybe I can finish the job. Anyway, I’ll try. The first solid suggestion I’ve had ever since I took off was what that half-witted old moron——” He ignored a little gasp from Helena. “——said back on ‘Minerva.’ If Flarney had lived, he would have gone there; we’ll go there now.” He finished manipulating the calculator and began to set it up on the board. He said, “The name of the place is—Earth.”
..... 10
IT took Ross a while to learn a lesson, but when he learned it, it stuck. This time, he promised himself, no spaceport.
They sneaked into the solar system that held fabulous old Earth from far outside the ecliptic, where the chance of radar detection was least; they came to a relative dead halt millions of miles from the planet and cautiously scanned the surrounding volume of space with their own radar.
No ships seemed to be in space. Earth’s solar system turned out to be a trivial affair, only five planets, scarcely a half-dozen moons among them. None of the planets except Earth itself was anything like inhabitable.
“Hold tight,” said Ross grimly, “I’m not so good at this fine navigation.” He cautiously applied power along a single vector; the starship leaped and bucked. He corrected with another; and the distant sun swelled in their view plates with frightening rapidity. The alarm beeps bleated furiously, and the automatic cutoff restored all controls to neutral.
Ross, sweating, picked himself up from the floor and staggered back to the panel. Helena said carefully, “You’re doing fine, Ross, but if you’d like me to take over for a minute——”
109Ross swallowed his pride and stood back. After one wide-eyed stare of shock—she wasn’t even calculating!—he gripped the loops and closed his eyes and waited for death.
There was a punishing bump and his eyes flew open. Helena was looking at him apologetically. “You would have done it better,” she lied, “but anyway we’re down.”
Ross lied, “Of course, but I’m glad you had the practice. Where—uh, where are we?”
Helena silently showed him the radar plot. Earth, it seemed, had a confusing multiplicity of continents; they were on one in the northern hemisphere, a large one as Earth’s continents went, and smack in the middle of it. It was night on their side of Earth just then; and, by the plot, a largish city was only a dozen or so miles away.
“Okay,” said Ross wearily, “landing party away. Helena, you stay here while Bernie and I——”
Helena said simply, “No.”
Ross stared at her a minute, then shrugged. “All right. Then Bernie will stay while——”
“I will not!” said Bernie.
Clearly it was time for a showdown. Ross roared: “Who’s the captain here, anyway?”
“You are,” Helena said promptly. “As long as I don’t have to stay here alone.”
“Yeah,” said Bernie.
Ross said, “Oh.” He thought for a while and then said, “Well, let’s all go.” They thought it was a wonderful idea.
Earth wasn’t a very unusual planet—lots of green sand and purple vegetation. Either the master star chart was wrong or the gravity meter was off; the former, strangely enough, gave Earth’s gravity as 1.000000 and the latter as 0.8952, a whopping ten per cent discrepancy. Further, the principal inert gas in Earth’s atmosphere was, according to the master chart’s planetary supplement, nitrogen; and according to the ship’s instruments was indubitably neon. A terrific aurora polaris display constantly flickering in the northern sky bore that out.
But the gap between the chart and the facts didn’t particularly worry Ross as they swung along overland. So the 110chart was off, or perhaps things had changed. This was—according to Flarney via Whitker—the place where people knew about the formula, where his questions would be answered. After this, he thought happily, it’s off to Halsey’s Planet and an unspecified glorious future, revered as the savior of humanity instead of a lousy Yards clerk pushing invoices around. And Helena, he thought sentimentally....
He turned to smile at her and found she and Bernie were giggling.
“Listen, you two!” Captain Ross roared. “Haven’t you learned anything yet? What’s the good of us exploring if we stroll along with our silly heads in the clouds, not paying attention? Do you realize that this place may be as dangerous as Azor or worse?”
“Ross——” Helena said.
“Don’t interrupt! What this outfit needs is some discipline—tightening up. You two have got to accept your responsibilities. Keep alert! Be on the lookout! Any single thing out of the ordinary may be a deathtrap. Watch for——”
Helena was looking not at Ross but over his shoulder. Bernie was making strangled noises and pointing.
Ross turned. Behind him stood a mechanical monstrosity vaguely recognizable as a heavily-armed truck, its motor faintly humming. A man leaned darkly from the cab and transfixed them to the ground with a powerful spotlight. From the dazzling circle of light his voice came, hasty and furtive. “Thought it was two women and a man, but I guess you’re the ones. Ugh, those faces on you! Yes, you’re the ones. Get in. Fast.”
The light blinked out. When their eyes adjusted to the dimmer illumination of the stars and the aurora display they saw a side door in the body of the truck standing open. Too, one of the long, slim gun barrels with which the truck seemed copiously supplied swiveled to cover them.
Ross stupidly read aloud a sign on the truck: “Jones Floor-Cover Company. Finest Tile on Jones. Wall-to-Wall a Specialty. ‘Rugs Fit For a Jones’.”
“Yeah,” the man said. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t try to buy any. Get in, for Jones’ sake! If I’d of known you were half-wits 111I wouldn’t of taken this job for a million Joneses, cash. Get in!” His voice was hysterical and the gun covering them moved ominously. “If this is a frame——” he began to shrill.
“Get in,” Ross said shakily to the others. They climbed in and the door slammed violently and automatically. Helena began to cry in a preoccupied sort of way and Bernie began a long, mumbling inventory of his own mental weaknesses for ever getting involved in this crackbrained, imbecilic, feeble-minded....
There were windows in the truck body and Ross turned from one to another. He saw the guns on the cab telescope into stubs, the stubs fold into the mounts, the mounts smoothly descend flush with the sheet metal. He saw the cursing driver manipulate a dozen levers as the car began to glide across the green sand, purple-dotted with vegetation. Finally, through the rear window, he saw three figures racing across the sand waving their arms, rapidly being left behind. All he could make out was that they seemed to be two women and a man.
Helena was wailing softly, “——and I am not ugly and just because we’re young and we’re strangers isn’t any reason to go around insulting people——”
From Bernie: “——fatheaded, goggly-eyed, no-browed, slobber-lipped, dim-witted——”
“Shut up,” Ross said softly. “Before I bang both your heads together.”
They stared.
“Thank you. We’ve got to think. What’s this spot we’re in? What can we do about it? I don’t have any F-T-L contact name for Earth and obviously this fellow picked us up by mistake. I saw two women and a man—remember what he said?—just now trying to catch up with us. He seems to be some kind of criminal. Otherwise why a disguised gun-carrier? Why floor coverings ‘but don’t try to buy any’? And Jones seems to be the name of the local political subdivision, the name of the local deity and the currency. That’s important. It points to a rigid one-man dictatorship—Jones, of course, or possibly his dynasty. What 112course of action should we take? Kick it around. Helena, what do you think?”
“He shouldn’t have said we were ugly,” she pouted. “Isn’t that important?”
“Women!” Ross said grimly. “If you’ll kindly forget the trivial affront to your vanity perhaps we can figure something out.”
Helena said stubbornly: “But he shouldn’t. We’re not. What if they just think we are because they all look alike and we don’t look like them?”
Ross collapsed. After a long pause during which he tried and almost failed to control his temper he said slowly: “Thank you, Helena. You’re wrong, of course, but it was a contribution. You see, you can’t build up such a wild, far-fetched theory from the few facts available.” His voice was beginning to choke with anger. “It isn’t reasonable and it isn’t really any help. In fact it’s the God-damndest stupidest imitation of reasoning I have ever——”
“City,” Bernard croaked, pointing. The jolting ride had become smoother, and gliding past the windows were green tiled buildings and street lights.
“Fine,” Ross said bitterly. “We had a few clear minutes to think and now we find they were wasted by the crackpot dissertation of a female and my reasonable attempt to show her the elements of logical thinking.” He put his head in his hands and tried to ignore them, tried to reason it out. But the truck made a couple of sharp turns and jolted to a stop.
The door opened and the voice of their driver said, again from behind a flashlight’s dazzling circle: “Out. Walk ahead of me.”
They did, into a fair-sized, well-lighted room with eight people in it whom they studied in amazement. Every one of the eight was exactly the same height—six feet. Every one had straight red hair of exactly the same shade, sprouting from an identical hairline. Every one had precisely the same build—gangling but broad-shouldered. Their sixteen eyes were the identical blue under sixteen identical eyebrows. Head to toe, they were duplicates. One of them spoke—in exactly the same voice as the truckdriver’s.
113“So you want to be Joneses, do you?” he said.
“Absolutely impossible.”
“But we took their money.”
“Give it back. Reasonable changes, yes, but look at them!”
“We can’t give it back. Look what we spent already. Anyway, Sam,——” It sounded like “Sam” to Ross. “——anyway, Sam, look at some of the work you’ve done already. You can do it. I doubt if anybody else could, but you can.”
Ross felt his eyes crossing, and gave up the effort of trying to tell which Jones was speaking to which. Even the clothing was nearly identical—purple pantaloons, scarlet jacket, black cummerbund sash, black shoes. Then he noticed that Third-from-the-left Jones—the one who seemed to be named Sam—wore a frilly shirt of white under the scarlet jacket. Only a lacy edge showed at the open collar; but where his was white, the others were all muted pastels of pink and green.
Sam said coldly, “I know nobody else can do it. Anybody else! Who else is there?”
A Jones with a frill of chartreuse pursed his lips. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “there’s Northside Tim Jones——”
“Northside Tim Jones,” Sam mimicked. “Eight of his jobs are in the stockade right now! Paraffin, for Jones’s sake—he still uses paraffin to mold a face!”
“I know, Sam, but after all, these people need help. If you won’t do it for them, what’s left?”
Sam shrugged morosely. “Well——” he said. Then he shook his head, sighed, and came forward to look at the three travelers. With an expression of revulsion he said, “Strip.”
Ross hesitated. “Hold it!” he said sharply to Helena, already half out of her coveralls. “Sir, there may have been some mistake. Would you mind explaining just what you propose to do?”
“The usual thing,” Sam said irritably. “Fix your hair, build up your frames, level you off at standard Jones height. The works. Though I must say,” he added bitterly, “I never saw such unpromising specimens in my life. How the Jones 114have you managed to stay out of trouble this long? Whose garrets have you been hiding in?”
Ross licked his lips. “You mean,” he said, “you want to make us look more like you gentlemen, is that it?”
“I want!” Sam repeated in bafflement. Over his shoulder he roared, “Ben, what kind of creeps are you saddling me with?”
Ben, looking worried, said, “Holy Jones, Sam, I don’t get it either. It was a perfectly normal deal. This guy came up to me in Jones’s Joint and made a pitch. He knew the setup all right, and he had the money with him. Six hundred Joneses, cold cash; and it wasn’t funny money, either.” His face clouded. “I did think, though,” he mentioned, “that he said two women and one man. But Paul Jones picked them up right at the rendezvous, so it must’ve been the right ones.”
He glowered suspiciously at Ross and the others. “Come to think of it,” he said, “maybe not. Tell you what, Sam, you just sit tight here for twenty minutes or so.” And he hurried out of the room.
One of the other Joneses said curtly, “Sit down.” Ross, Bernie, and Helena found chairs lined up against a wall; they sat. A different Jones rummaged in a stack of papers on a table; he handed something to each of them. “Relax,” he advised. Obediently the three spacefarers opened the magazines he gave them. When they were settled, most of the Joneses, after a whispered conference, went out. The one that was left said, “No talking. If we made a mistake, we’re sorry. Meanwhile, you do what you’re told.”
Ross found that his magazine was called By Jones; it seemed to be a periodical devoted to entertaining news and gossip of sports, fashion, and culture. He stared at an article headed “Be Glad the People’s Police Are Watching YOU!”, but the words made little sense. He tried to think; but somehow he couldn’t find a point at which to grasp the flickering mass of impressions that were circling through his brain. Nothing seemed to make a great deal of sense any more; and Ross suddenly realized that he was very, very tired.
His mind an utter blank, he sat and waited.
115It was twenty minutes and a bit more. Then the door flew open and half a dozen Joneses burst in. Even at first sight, Ross could tell that three of them were newcomers. For one thing, two were women; and the third, though red-haired, tall and gangling, had a nose a full centimeter shorter than any of the others, and his hair was crisply curled.
“All right, you Peepeece!” snarled the first Jones. “You found what you were looking for—now try to get out!”
Helena did the talking. It wasn’t Ross’s idea, but when her heel crunched down on his instep he was too startled to object, and from then on he didn’t get a chance to get a word in edgewise.
He had to admit that her act was getting across with the audience. Long before she had finished reporting their meeting, their flight to Azor, the escape from “Minerva,” and the flight here, most of the Joneses had put their guns away, and all were showing signs of stupefaction. “——And then,” she finished, “we saw this truck, and that very good-looking man picked us up. And so we’re here on Earth; and, honest to goodness, that’s the exact truth.”
There was silence while the Joneses looked at each other. Then the plastic-surgeon-type Jones, Sam with the white shirt front, stepped forward. “Hold still, my dear,” he ordered. Helena bravely stood rigid while the surgeon raked searchingly through the roots of her hair, peered into her eyes, expertly traced the configuration of her ribs.
He stepped back, shaken. “One thing is for sure,” he told the others, “they’re not Peepeece. Not with those bones. They’d never get in.”
Ben Jones beat his forehead and moaned. “How do I get into these things?” he demanded.
One of the female Joneses said shrilly, “We didn’t expect anything like this. We’re honest Jones-fearing Joneses and——”
“Shut up!” Ben Jones roared. “What about the other two, Sam? They all right too?”
“Oh, for Jones’s sake, Ben,” Sam said disgustedly, “just look at them, will you? Do you think the police would take in a five-inch height deviation like that one——” he pointed 116to Bernie——“or a half-bald scarecrow like that?” Ross, stung, opened his mouth to object; but swiftly closed it again. Nobody was paying much attention to him, anyhow, except as Exhibit A.
“So what do we do?” Ben demanded.
Sam shrugged. “The first thing we do,” he said wearily, “is to take care of our, uh, clients here. We get them out of the way, and then we decide what to do next.” He looked around at the other Joneses. “If you three will come this way,” he said, “we’ll finish up your job and get you back home. I needn’t remind you, of course, that if you should happen to mention anything you’ve seen here tonight to the Peepeece it would——” His voice was cut off by the closing door before Ross could catch the nature of the threat.
Ben Jones stayed behind, scowling to himself. “You people got any Joneses?” he demanded abruptly.
“You mean money? Not any at all,” Helena said honestly. Ross could have kicked her.
Ben Jones growled deep in his throat. “Always it happens to me!” he complained. “I suppose we’re going to have to feed you, too.”
“Well,” Helena said diffidently, “we haven’t eaten in a long time——”
Ben Jones swore to his god, whose name was Jones, but he stepped to the door and ordered food. When it came it was surprisingly good; each of the three, with their diverse backgrounds, found it delicious. While they were eating, Ben Jones sat watching them, refreshing himself from time to time with a greenish bubbling liquid out of a jug. He offered some to Ross; who clutched his throat as though he’d swallowed molten steel.
Ben Jones guffawed till his eyes ran. “First taste of Jones’s Juice, hey? Kind of gets right down inside, doesn’t it?” He wiped his eyes, then sobered. “I guess you people are all right,” he admitted. “What I’m going to do with you I don’t know. I can’t take you to Earth, and I can’t keep you here, and I can’t throw you out on the street—the Peepeece would have you in the stockade in ten minutes.”
Ross, startled, said, “Aren’t we on Earth?”
117“Naw,” Ben Jones said disgustedly. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re on Jones, halfway between Jones’s Forks and Jonesgrad. But you came pretty close, at that. Earth’s about fifty miles out the Jones Pike past Jonesgrad, turn right at Jonesboro Minor.”
Ross said bewilderedly, “The planet Earth is fifty miles along the Pike?”
“Not a planet,” Ben Jones said. “It’s an old city, kind of. Nobody lives there any more; the Peepeece don’t permit it. I’ve never been there, but they say it’s kind of, you know, different. Some of the buildings——” he seemed actually to be blushing——“are as much as fifteen, twenty stories high; and the walls aren’t even all green. Excuse me,” he added, looking at Helena.
Sam Jones returned and said to Ben, “It’s all right. All finished. Trivial alterations. Maybe they could have gone along for the rest of their lives on wigs and pads—but we don’t tell them that, do we? And anyway now they won’t worry. Healy Jones, the older man, for instance. Very bright fellow, but it seems he was working as a snathe-handler’s apprentice. Afraid to take the master’s test, afraid to change his line of work—might be noticed and questioned.” He heaved a tremendous sigh and poured himself a tremendous slug of the green fluid. Ben Jones gave Ross a cynical wink and shrug.
“Look at my hand!” the surgeon exploded. It was shaking. He gulped the Jones Juice and poured himself another. “Nothing physical,” he said. “Neurosis. The subconscious coldly counting up my crimes and coldly imposing and executing sentence. I’m a surgeon, so my hand trembles.” He drank. “Jones is not mocked,” he said broodingly. “Jones is not mocked. Think those three are going to be happy? Think they’re going to be folded in Jones’s bosom just because they’re Joneses externally now? No. Watch them five years, ten years. Maybe they’ll sentence themselves to be hateful, vitriol-tempered lice and wonder why nobody loves them. Maybe they’ll sentence themselves to penal servitude and wonder why everybody pushes them around, why they haven’t the guts to hit back—Jones is 118not mocked,” he told the jug of green liquid, ignoring the others, and drank again.
Ben Jones said softly to them, “Come on,” and led them into an adjoining room furnished with sleeping pads. He said apologetically, “The doctor’s nerves are shot tonight. Trouble is, he’s too Jones-fearing. Me, I can take it or leave it alone.” His laugh had a little too much bravado in it. “There’s a little bit of nonJones in the best of us, I always say—but not to the doctor. And not when he’s hitting the Jones juice.” He shrugged cynically and said, “What the hell? L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”
Ross had him by his shirt frill. “Say that again!”
Ben Jones shoved him away. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”
“I’m sorry. Would you please repeat that formula? What you said?” he hastily amended when the word “formula” obviously failed to register.
Ben Jones repeated the formula wonderingly.
“What does it mean?” Ross demanded. “I’ve been chasing the damned thing across the Galaxy.” He hastily filled Ben Jones in on its previous appearances.
“Well,” Ben Jones said, “it means what it says, of course. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He studied their faces and added uncertainly, “Isn’t it?”
“What does it mean to you, Ben?” Ross asked softly.
“Why, what it means to anybody, pal. Right’s right, wrong’s wrong, Jones is in his Heaven, conform or else—it means morality, man. What else could it mean?”
Ross then proceeded to make an unmannerly nuisance of himself. He grilled their involuntary host mercilessly, shrugging aside all attempted diversions of the talk into what they were going to do with the three visitors. He ignored protestations that Ben was no Jonesologist, Jones knew, and drilled in. By the time Ben Jones exploded, stamped out, and locked them in for the night, he had elicited the following:
Everybody knew the formula; they were taught it at their mother’s knee. It was recited antiphonally before and after Jones Meetings. Ben knew it was right, of course, and some 119day he was going to get right with Jones and live up to it, but not just yet, because if he didn’t make money in the prosthesis racket somebody else would. The formula was everywhere: on the lintels of public buildings, hanging in classrooms, and on the bedroom walls of the most Jones-fearing old ladies where they could see its comforting message last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
From a book? Well yes, he guessed so; sure it was in the Book of Joneses, but who could say whether that was where it started. Most people thought it was just Handed Down. Way back during the war—what war? The War of the Joneses, of course! Anyway, in the war the last of the holdouts against the formula had been destroyed. No, he didn’t know anything about the war. No, not his grandfather’s time or his grandfather’s grandfather’s time. Long ago, that war was. Maybe there were records in the old museum in Earth. The city, of course, not some damn planet he never heard of!
After Ben Jones slammed out and the room darkened Helena and Bernie exchanged comforting words from adjoining sleeping pads, to Ross’s intense displeasure. They fell asleep and at last he fell asleep still churning over the problem.
When he woke he found that evidently the doctor, Sam Jones, had stumbled in during the night and passed out on the pad next to him. The white frill was stiff and green with dried Jones Juice. Helena and Bernie still slept. He tried the door.
It was locked, but there was a tantalizing hum of voices beyond it. He put his ear to the cold steel. The fruits of his eavesdropping were scanty but alarming.
“——cut ’em down mumble found someplace mumble.”
“——mumble never killed yet mumble prosthesis racket.”
“——Jones’s sake, it’s their lives or mumble mumble time to get scared mumble Peepeece are you?”
And then apparently the speakers moved out of range. Ross was cold with sweat, and there was an abnormal hollow in the pit of his stomach that breakfast would never fill.
120He spun around as a Jones voice croaked painfully: “Hear anything good, stranger?”
The surgeon, looking very dilapidated, was sitting up and regarding him through bloodshot eyes. “They’re talking about killing us,” he said shortly.
“They are not really intelligent,” Sam Jones said wearily. “They were just bright enough to entangle me to the point where I had to work for them—and to keep me copiously supplied with that green stuff I haven’t the intelligence to use in moderation.”
Ross said, “How’d you like to break away from this?”
Sam Jones mutely extended his hand. It trembled like a leaf. He said, “For his own inscrutable reason, Jones grants me steadiness of hand during an operation designed to frustrate his grand design. He then overwhelms me with a titanic thirst for oblivion to my shame.”
“There’s no design,” Ross said. “Or if there is, luckily this planet is a trifling part of it. I have never heard of such arrogant pip-squeakery in my life. You flyspecks in your shabby corner of the Galaxy think your own fouled-up mess is the pattern of universal life. You’re wrong! I’ve seen life elsewhere and I know it isn’t.”
The doctor passed his trembling hand over his eyes. “Jones is not mocked,” he croaked. “L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N. You can’t fight that, stranger. You can’t fight that.”
Ross realized he was silently crying behind his covering hand.
He said, much more gently, “It’s nothing you have to fight. It’s something you have to understand.” He told Sam Jones of his two previous encounters with the formula. The doctor looked up, his eyes full of wonder. Ross said, “How would you like to be free, doctor? Free of your shaking hands, free of your guilt, free of these killers? How would you like to know the truth?”
The doctor said faintly, “If I dared——”
Ross pressed, “The museum in Earth city. Get me records, facts, anything about the War of the Joneses. If there’s any meaning to the formula it’ll have to lie in that. It seems there was a battle about its interpretation and we know 121who won. Let’s find out what the other side said. Get me in there.” He was thinking of the disgraceful war of fanaticism that had marred his own planet’s history. The doctor’s weak Jones jaw was firming up, though his eyes were still haunted. “Stall your killer friends, doctor,” Ross urged. “Tell them you can use us for experiments that’ll cut the cost of the operations. That ought to bring them around. And get me the facts!”
“To be free,” the doctor said wistfully. He said after a pause, “I’ll try. But——” And rapped a code series on the steel door.
..... 11
THE doctor said with weak belligerence, “Who do you think I am? Jones? I had to leave your friends behind. I had enough trouble getting those hoods to let me take you along. After all, I’m not a miracle-worker.”
Ross said sullenly, “Okay, okay.” He glowered out of the car window and spat out a tendril of red hair that had come loose from the fringe surrounding his mouth. The trouble with a false beard was that it itched, worse than the real article, worse than any torment Ross had ever known. But at least Ross, externally and at extreme range, was enough of a Jones to pass a casual glance.
And what would Helena and Bernie be thinking now? He hadn’t had a chance to whisper to them; they’d been just waking when the doctor dragged him out. Ross put that problem out of his mind; there were problems enough right on hand.
He cautiously felt his red wig to see if it was on straight. The doctor didn’t seem to look away from his driving, but he said: “Leave it alone. That’s the first thing the Peepeece look for, somebody who obviously isn’t sure if his hair is still on or not. It won’t come off.”
“Umph,” said Ross. The road was getting worse, it 123seemed; they had passed no houses for several miles now. They rounded a rutted turn, and ahead was a sign.
The doctor spat contemptuously out the window and roared past. Ross said, “Hey!”
“Oh, relax,” said the doctor. “That’s just the Cultureniks. Nobody pays any attention to them.”
Ross swallowed and sat as lightly as possible on the green leather cushion of the car. By the time they had gone a quarter of a mile, he began to feel a little reassured that the doctor knew what he was talking about. Then the doctor swerved sharply to miss a rusted hulk and almost skidded off the road. He swore and manhandled the wheel until they were back on the straightaway.
White lipped, Ross asked, “What was that?”
“Car,” grunted the doctor. “Hit a mine. Silly fools!”
Ross squawked, “But you said——”
“Shut up,” the doctor ordered tensely. “That was weeks ago; they haven’t had a chance to lay new mines since then.” Pause. “I hope.”
The car roared on. Ross closed his eyes, limply abandoning himself to what was in store. But if it was bad to see what was going on, the roaring, swerving, jolting race was ten times worse with his eyes closed. He opened them again in time to see another sign flash past, gone before he could read it.
“What was that?” he demanded.
“What’s the difference?” the doctor grunted. “Want to go back?”
“Well, no——” Ross thought for a moment. “Do we have to go this fast, though?”
124“If we want to get there. Crossed a Peepeece radar screen ten miles back; they’ll be chasing us by now.”
“Oh, I see,” Ross said weakly. “Look, Doc, tell me one thing—why do they make this place so hard to get to?”
“Tabu area,” the doctor said shortly. “Not allowed.”
“Why not allowed?”
“Because it’s not allowed. Don’t want people poking through the old records.”
“Why not just put the old records in a safe place—or burn the damn things up?”
“Because they didn’t, that’s why. Shut up! Expect me to tell you why the Peepeece do anything? They don’t know themselves. It isn’t Jonesly to destroy, I guess.”
Ross shut up. He leaned against the window, letting the air rush over his head. They were moving through forest, purplish squatty trees with long, rustling leaves. The sky overhead was crisp and cool looking; it was still early morning. Ross exhaled a long breath. Back on Halsey’s Planet he would be getting up about now, rising out of a soft, warm bed, taking his leisurely time about breakfast, climbing into a comfortable car to make his way to the spaceport where he was safe, respected, and at home.... Damn Haarland!
At least, Ross thought, some sort of a pattern was beginning to shape up. The planets were going out of communication each for its own reason; but wasn’t there a basic reason-for-the-reasons that was the same in each case? Wasn’t there some overall design—some explanation that covered all the facts, pointed to a way out?
He sat up straight as they approached a string of little signs. He scanned them worriedly as they rolled past.
“Duck!” the doctor yelled, crouching down in the seat and guiding the careening car with one hand. Ross, startled, followed his example, but not before he saw that “THIS” was an automatic, radar-actuated rapid-fire gun mounted a few yards past the last sign. There was a stuttering roar 125from the gun and a splatter of metal against the armored sides of the car. The doctor sat up again as soon as the burst had hit; evidently only one was to be feared. “Yah, yah,” he jeered at the absent builders of the gun. “Lousy fifty-millimeters can’t punch their way through a tin can!”
Ross, gasping, got up just in time to see the last sign in the series:
He said wildly, “They can’t even write a poem properly. Did you notice the first and third line rhyme-words?”
Surprisingly, the doctor glanced at him and laughed with a note of respect. He took a hand off the wheel to pat Ross on the shoulder. “You’ll make a Jones yet, my boy,” he promised. “Don’t worry about these things; I told you this place was restricted. This stuff isn’t worth bothering about.”
Ross found that he was able to smile. There was a point, he realized with astonishment, where courage came easily; it was the only thing left. He sat up straighter and breathed the air more deeply. Then it happened.
They rounded another curve; the doctor slammed on the brakes. Suspended overhead across the road was a single big sign:
The car bucked, slewed around, and skidded. The wheels locked, but not in time to keep it from sliding into the pit, road wide and four feet deep, that was dug in front of them.
Ross heard the axles crack and the tires blow; but the springing of the car was equal to the challenge. He was jarred clear in the air and tumbled to the floor in a heap; but no bones were broken.
Painfully he pushed the door open and crawled out. The doctor limped after and the two of them stood on the edge of the pit, looking at the ruin of their car.
“That one,” said the doctor, “was worth bothering about.” He motioned Ross to silence and cocked an ear. Was there a distant roaring sound, like another car following on the road they had traveled? Ross wasn’t sure; but the doctor’s expression convinced him. “Peepeece,” he said 126briefly. “From here on it’s on foot. They won’t follow beyond here; but let’s get out of sight. They’ll by-Jones shoot beyond here if they see us!”
Ross stared unbelievingly. “This is Earth?” he asked.
The doctor fanned himself and blew. “That’s it,” he said, looking around curiously. “Heard a lot about it, but I’ve never been here before,” he explained. “Funny-looking, isn’t it?” He nudged Ross, indicating a shattered concrete structure beside them on the road. “Notice that toll booth?” he whispered slyly. “Eight sides!”
Ross said wearily, “Yes, mighty funny! Look, Doc, why don’t you sort of wander around by yourself for a while? That big thing up ahead is the museum you were talking about, isn’t it?”
The doctor squinted. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his breathing was fast, but he was making an attempt to seem casual in the presence of these manifold obscenities of design. He licked his lips. “Round pillars,” he marveled. “Why, yes, I think that’s the museum. You go on up there, like you say. I’ll, uh, sort of see what there is to see. Jones, yes!” He staggered off, staring from ribald curbing to scatological wall in an orgy of prurience.
Ross sighed and walked through the deserted, weed-grown streets to the stone building that bore on its cracked lintel the one surviving word, “Earth.” This was all wrong, he was almost certain; Earth had to be a planet, not a city. But still....
The museum had to have the answers.
On its moldering double doors was a large lead seal. He read: “Surplus Information Repository. Access denied to unauthorized personnel.” But the seal had been forced by somebody; one of the doors swung free, creaking.
Ross invoked the forcer of the door. If he could do it....
He went in and stumbled over a skeleton, presumably that of the last entrant. The skull had been crushed by a falling beam. There was some sort of mechanism involved—a trigger, a spring, a release hook. All had rusted badly, and the spring had lost its tension over the years. A century? Two? Five? Ross prayed that any similar mantraps had likewise rusted solid, and cautiously inched 127through the dismal hall of the place, ready for a backward leap at the first whisper of a concealed mechanism in action.
It was unnecessary. The place was—dead.
Exploring room after room, he realized slowly that he was stripping off history in successive layers. The first had been the booby-trapped road, lackadaisically planned to ensure that mere inquisitiveness would be discouraged. There had been no real denial of access, for there was almost no possibility that anybody would care to visit the place.
Next, the seal and the mantraps. An earlier period. Somebody had once said: “This episode is closed. This history is determined. We have all reached agreement. Only a dangerous or frivolous meddler would seek to rake over these dead ashes.”
And then, prying into the museum, Ross found the era during which agreement had been reached, during which it still was necessary to insist and demonstrate and cajole.
The outer rooms and open shelves were testimonials to Jones. There were books of Jonesology—ingenious, persuasive books divided usually into three sections. Human Jonesology would be a painstaking effort to determine the exact physical and mental tolerances of a Jones. Anatomical atlases minutely gave femur lengths, cranial angles, eye color to an angstrom, hair thickness to a micron. Moral Jonesology treated of the dangers of deviating from these physical and more elastic mental specifications. (Here the formula appeared again, repeatedly invoked but never explained. Already it was a truism.) And Sacred Jonesology was a series of assertions concerning the nature of The Jones in whose image all other Joneses were created.
Subdivisions of the open shelves held works on Geographical Jonesology (the distribution across the planet of Joneses) and similar works.
Ross went looking for a lower layer of history and found it in a bale of crumbling pamphlets. “Comrades, We Must Now Proceed to Consolidate Our Victory”; “Ultra-Jonesism, An Infantile Political Disorder”; “On The Fallacy of ‘Jonesism In One Country’.” These Ross devoured. They added up to the tale of a savage political battle among the 128victors of a greater war. Clemency was advocated and condemned; extermination of the opposition was casually mentioned; the Cultural Faction and the Biological Faction had obviously been long locked in a death struggle. Across the face of each pamphlet stood a similar logotype: the formula. It was enigmatically mentioned in one pamphlet, which almost incomprehensibly advanced the claims of the Biological faction to supremacy among the Joneses United: “Let us never forget, comrades, that the initiation of the great struggle was not caused by our will or by the will of our sincere and valiant opponents, the Culturists. The inexorable law of nature, LT=LOe-T/2N, was the begetter of that holocaust from which our planet has emerged purified——”
Was it now?
The entrance to a musty, airless wing had once been bricked up. The mortar was crumbling and a few bricks had fallen. Above the arched doorway a sign said Military Archives. On the floor was a fallen metal plaque whose inscription said simply Dead Storage. He kicked the loose bricks down and stepped through.
That was it. The place was lightless, except for the daylight filtering through the violated archway. Ross hauled maps and orders and period newspapers and military histories and handbooks into the corridor in armfuls and spread them on the floor. It took only minutes for him to realize that he had his answer. He ran into the street and shouted for the doctor.
Together they pored over the papers, occasionally reading aloud choice bits, wonderingly.
The simplest statement of the problem they found was in the paper-backed “Why We Fight” pamphlet issued for the enlisted men of the Provisional North Continent Government Army.
“What is a Jones?” the pamphlet asked rhetorically. “A Jones is just a human being, the same as you and I. Dismiss rumors that a Jones is supernatural or unkillable with a laugh when you hear them. They arose because of the extraordinary resemblance of one Jones to another. Putting a bullet through one Jones in a skirmish and seeing another 129one rise up and come at you with a bayonet is a chilling experience; in the confusion of battle it may seem that the dead Jones rose and attacked. But this is not the case. Never let the rumor pass unchallenged, and never fail to report habitual rumor-mongers.
“How did the Joneses get that way? Many of you were too young when this long war began to be aware of the facts. Since then, wartime disruption of education and normal communications facilities has left you in the dark. This is the authoritative statement in simple language that explains why we fight.
“This planet was colonized, presumably from the quasi-legendary planet Earth. (The famous Earth Archives Building, incidentally, is supposed to derive its puzzling name from this fact.) It is presumed that the number of colonists was originally small, probably in the hundreds. Though the number of human beings on the planet increased enormously as the generations passed, genetically the population remained small. The same ones (heredity units) were combined and reshuffled in varying combinations, but no new ones were added. Now, it is a law of genetics that in small populations, variations tend to smooth out and every member of the population tends to become like every other member. So-called unfixed genes are lost as the generations pass; the end product of this process would theoretically be a population in which every member had exactly the same genes as every other member. This is a practical impossibility, but the Joneses whom we fight are a tragic demonstration of the fact that the process need not be pushed to its ultimate extreme to dislocate the life of a planet and cause endless misery to its dwellers.
“From our very earliest records there have been Joneses. It is theorized that this gangling redheaded type was well represented aboard the original colonizing ship, but some experts believe one Jones type and the workings of chance would be sufficient to produce the unhappy situation of type-dominance.
“Some twenty-five years ago Joneses were everywhere among us and not, as now, withdrawn to South Continent and organized into a ruthless aggressor nation. They made 130up about thirty per cent of the population and had become a closely knit organization devoted to mutual help. They held the balance of political power in every election from the municipal to the planetary level and virtually monopolized production and finance. There were fanatics and rabble-rousers among them who readily exploited a rising tide of discontent over a series of curbing laws, finally pushed through by a planetary majority, united at last in self-defense against the rapacity and ruthless self-interest of the Joneses.
“The Joneses withdrew en masse to South Continent. Some sincerely wished them well; others scoffed at the secession as a sulky and childish gesture. Only a handful of citizens guessed the terrible truth, and were laughed at for their pains. Five years after their withdrawal the Joneses returned across the Vandemeer Peninsula and the war had begun.
“A final word. There has been much loose talk among the troops about the slogan of the Joneses, which goes LT=LOe-T/2N. Some uninformed people actually believe it is an invocation which gives the Joneses supernatural power and invulnerability. It is not. It is merely an ancient and well-known formula in genetics which quantitatively describes the loss of unfixed genes from a population. By mouthing this formula, the Joneses are simply expressing in a compact way their ruthless determination that all genes except theirs shall disappear from the planet and the Joneses alone survive. In the formula LT means the number of genes after the lapse of T years, LO means the original number of genes, e means the base of the natural system of logarithms and N means number of generations.”
The surgeon said slowly and with wonder: “So that was my God!” He stretched out his hands before him. The fingers were rock-steady.
Ross left him and paced the corridor uneasily. Fine. Now he knew. Lost genes in genetically small populations. On Halsey’s Planet, some fertility gene, no doubt. On Azor, a male-sex-linked gene that provides men with the backbone required to come out ahead in the incessant war of the genders? Bernie was a gutless character. Here, all too 131many genes determining somatotype. On the planets that had dropped out of communication, who knew? Scientific-thought genes? Sex-drive-determining genes?
One thing was clear: any gene-loss was bad for the survival of a planetary colony. Evolution had——on Earth——worked out in a billion trial-and-error years a working mechanism, man. Man exhibited a vast range of variation, which was why he survived almost any conceivable catastrophe.
Reduce man to a single type and he is certain to succumb, sooner or later, to the inevitable disaster that his one type cannot cope with.
The problem, now stated clearly, was bigger than he had dreamed. And now he knew only the problem—not the solution.
Go to Earth.
Well, he had tried. There had been no flaw in his calculations, no failure in setting up the Wesley panel. Yet—this was Jones, not Earth; the city was only a city, not the planet that the star charts logged. And the planet, beyond all other considerations, was less like Earth than any conceivable chart error could account for. Gravitation, wrong; atmosphere, wrong; flora and fauna, wrong.
So. Eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however unlikely, is true. So there had been a flaw in his calculations. And the way to check that, once and for all, was to get back to the starship.
Ross wheeled and went back into the book room. “Doc,” he called, “how do we get out of here?”
The answer was: on their bellies. They trudged through the forest for hours, skirting the road, hiding whenever a suspicious noise gave warning that someone might be in the vicinity. The Peepeece knew they were in the woods; there was no doubt of that. And as soon as they got past the tabu area, they had to crawl.
It was well past dark before Ross and the doctor, scratched and aching, got to the tiny hamlet of Jonesie-on-the-Pike. By the light from the one window in the village that gave any signs of life, the doctor took a single horrified look at Ross and shuddered. “You wait here,” he 132ordered. “Hide under a bush or something—your beard rubbed off.”
Ross watched the doctor rap on the door and be admitted. He couldn’t hear the conversation that followed, but he saw the doctor’s hand go to his pocket, then clasp the hand of the figure in the doorway. That was the language all the galaxy understood, Ross realized; he only hoped that the householder was an honest man—i. e., one who would stay bribed, instead of informing the Peepeece on them. It was beyond doubt that their descriptions had long since been broadcast; the road must have been lined with TV scanners on the way in.
The door opened again, and the doctor walked briskly out. He strode out into the street, walked half a dozen paces down the road, and waited for Ross to catch up with him. “Okay,” the doctor whispered. “They’ll pick us up in half an hour, down the road about a quarter of a mile. Let’s go.”
“What about the man you were talking to?” Ross asked. “Won’t he turn us in?”
The doctor chuckled. “I gave him a drink of Jones’s Juice out of my private stock,” he said. “No, he won’t turn anybody in, at least not until he wakes up.”
Ross nodded invisibly in the dark. He had a thought, and suppressed it. But it wouldn’t stay down. Cautiously he let it seep through his subconscious again, and looked it over from every angle.
No, there wasn’t any doubt of it. Things were definitely looking up!
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