Search the Sky

11

THE doctor said with weak belligerence, "Who do you think I am? Jones? I had to leave your Mends 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 tune 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 hi 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 rum 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-Jones-ism, 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 Guitarists. 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 hi 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 LT 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, 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 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 hi 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 hi?"

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 hi 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 hi 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 hi 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 wailing 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 double-take.

"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.