Chapter 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 seemed; they had passed no houses for several miles now. They rounded a rutted turn, and ahead was a sign.

STOP!

RESTRICTED AREA AHEAD

WARNING: THIS ROAD IS MINED

NO TRAFFIC ALLOWED! DETOUR
“Trespassers beyond this point will be shot

without further notice.” Decree #404-5

People’s Commissariat of

Culture and Solidarity.

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?”

“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.

“Workers, Peasants, Joneses all——”

“By these presents know ye——”

“If you don’t stop in spite of all——”

“THIS to hell will blow ye!”

“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 from 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:

“By order of People’s Democratic Council

Of Arts & Sciences, Small Arms Division.”

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:

THAT’S ALL, JONES!

——PEOPLE’S POLICE

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 briefly. “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 through 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 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, L{T}=L{O}e-^{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.