Search the Sky

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——"

Ross 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 O.8952, a whopping ten per cent discrepancy. Further, the principal inert gas hi 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 hi 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 chart 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 I 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 course 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.

"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 coujd, 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 Tun 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 have 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.

It was twenty minutes and a bit more. Then the door flew open and half a dozen Joneses burst hi.

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 Jonesfearing 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 to 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 hi the stockade hi ten minutes."

Ross, startled, said, "Aren't we on Earth?"

"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 bit back—

Jones is not 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 Jonesfearing. 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 rilled 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 day 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 Jonesfearing 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 hi 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 hi 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 hi 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 hi the pit of his stomach that breakfast would never fill.

He 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 hi 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 hi 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 who 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.