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 victors 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=L0e-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 one 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 up 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=L0e-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 Lx means the number of genes after the lapse of T years, L0 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 many 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, w
as 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 ordered. “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!
Ben Jones roared, “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing, Doc?”
The doctor pushed Ross through the doorway and turned to face the other Jones. He asked mildly, “What?”
“You heard me!” Ben Jones blustered. “I let you out with this one, and maybe I made a mistake at that. But I by-Jones don’t intend to let you get out of here with all three of them. What are you trying to get away with anyhow?”
The doctor didn’t change his mild expression. He took a short, unhurried step forward. Smack.
Ben Jones reeled back from the slap, his mouth open, hand to his face. “Hey!” he squawked.
The doctor said levelly, “I’m telling you this just one time, Ben. Don’t cross me. You’ve got the guns, but I’ve got these.” He held up his spread hands. “You can shoot me, I won’t deny that. But you can’t make me do your dirty work for you. From now on things go my way—with these three people, with my own life, with the bootleg plastic surgery we do to keep you in armored cars. Or else there won’t be any plastic surgery.”
Ben Jones swallowed, and Ross could see the man fighting himself. He said after a moment, “No reason to act sore, Doc. Haven’t we always got along? The only thing is, maybe you don’t realize how dangerous these three—”
“Shut up,” said the doctor. “Right, boys?”
The other two Joneses in the room shuffled and looked uncomfortable. One of them said, “Don’t get mad, Ben, but it kind of looks as if he’s right. We and the doc had a little talk before you got here. It figures, you have to admit it. He does the work; we ought to let him have something to say about it.” The look that Ben Jones gave him was pure poison, but the man stood up to it, and in a minute Ben Jones looked away. “Sure,” he said distantly. “You go right ahead, Doc. We’ll talk this over again later on, when we’ve all had a chance to cool off.”
The doctor nodded coldly and followed Ross out. Helena and Bernie, suitably Jonesified for the occasion, were already in the car; Ross and the doctor jumped in with them, and they drove away. Now that the strain was relaxed a bit the doctor was panting, but there was a grin on his lips. “Son-of-a-Jones,” he said happily, “I’ve been waiting five years for this day!”
Ross asked, “Is it all right? They won’t chase after us?”
“No, not Ben Jones. He has his own way of handling things. Now if we were stupid enough to go back there, after he had a chance to talk to the others without me around, that would be something different. But we aren’t going back.”
Ross’s eyes widened. “Not even you, Doc?”
“Especially not me.” The doctor concentrated on his driving. Presently: “If I take you to the rendezvous, can you find your ship from there?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Ross confidently. “And Doc—welcome to our party.”
Space had never looked better.
They hung half a million miles off Jones, and Ross fumbled irritatedly with the Wesley panel while the other three stood around and made helpful suggestions. He set up the integrals for Earth just as he had set them up once before; the plot came out the same. He transferred the computations to the controls and checked it against the record in the log. The same. The ship should have gone straight as a five-dimensional geodesic arrow to the planet Earth.
Instead, he found by cross-checking the star atlas, it had gone in almost the other direction entirely, to the planet of Jones.
He threw his pencil across the room and swore. “I don’t get it,” he complained.
“It’s probably broken, Ross,” Helena told him seriously. “You know how machines are. They’re always doing something funny just when you least expect it.”
Ross bit down hard on his answer to that. Bernie contributed his morsel, and even Dr. Sam Jones, whose race had lost even the memory of spaceflight, had a suggestion. Ross swore at them all, then took time to swear at the board, at the starship, at Haarland, at Wesley, and most of all at himself.
Helena turned her back pointedly. She said to Bernie, “The way Ross acts sometimes you’d honestly think he was the only one who’d ever run this thing. Why, my goodness, I know you can’t rely on that silly board! Didn’t I have just exactly the same experience with it myself?”
Ross gritted his teeth and doggedly started all over again with the computations for Earth. Then he did a slow doubletake.
“Helena,” he whispered. “What experience did you have?”
“Why, just the same as now! Don’t you remember, Ross? When you and Bernie were in jail and I had to come rescue you?”
“What happened?” Ross shouted.
“My goodness, Ross don’t yell at me! There was that silly light flashing all the time. It was driving me out of my mind. Well, I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t going to get anywhere if it was going to act like that, so I just—”
Ross, eyes glazed, robotlike, lifted the cover off the main Wesley unit. Down at the socket of the alarm signal, shorting out two delicately machined helices that were a basic part of the Wesley Drive, wedged between an eccentric vernier screw and a curious crystalline lattice, was—the hairpin.
He picked it out and stared at it unbelievingly. He marveled, “It says in the manual, “On no account should any alterations be made in any part of the Wesley driving assembly by any technician under a C-Twelve rating.” She didn’t like the alarm going off. So she fixed it. With a hairpin.”
Helena giggled and appealed to Bernie. “Doesn’t he kill you?” she asked.
Ross’s eyes were glazed and his hands worked convulsively. “Kill,” he muttered, advancing on Helena. “Kill, kill, kill—”
“Help!” she screamed.
The two men managed to subdue Ross with the aid of a needle from Dr. Jones’s kit-pocket.
Helena was in tears and tried to explain to the others: “Just for no reason at all—”
She got only icy stares. After a while she sulkily began setting up the Wesley board for the Earth jump.
• • • • Twelve
Ross awoke, clearheaded and alert. Helena and Bernie were looking at him apprehensively.
He understood and said grudgingly, “Sorry I flipped. I didn’t mean to scare you. Everything seemed to go black—”
They smothered him with relieved protestations that they understood perfectly and Helena wouldn’t stick hairpins into the Wesley Drive ever again. Even if the ship hadn’t blown up. Even if she had rescued the men from ‘Minerva’.
“Anyway,” she said happily, “we’re off Earth. At least, it’s supposed to be Earth, according to the charts.”
He unkinked himself and studied the planet through a vision screen at its highest magnification. The apparent distance was one mile; nothing was hidden from him.
“Golly,” he said, impressed. “Science! Makes you realize what backward gropers we were.”
Obviously they had it, down there on the pleasant, cloud-flecked, green and blue planet. Science! White, towering cities whose spires were laced by flying bridges—and inexplicably decorated with something that looked like cooling fins. Huge superstreamlined vehicles lazily coursing the road and skies. Long, linked-pontoon cities slowly heaving on the breasts of the oceans. Science!
Ross said reverently, “We’re here. Flarney was right. Helena, Bernie, Doc—maybe this is the parent planet of us all and maybe it isn’t. But the people who built those cities must know all the answers. Helena, will you please land us?”
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