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 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 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