“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.