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 yisit 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?