Part 9

Ross knew what he meant. “Unlikeliest thing in the world,” he said. “But I think she went fast and never knew what hit her.” He thought of the formula and “They’d know on Earth—and know what to do about it too.” Earth the enigma, from which all planetary peoples were supposed to be derived. Earth—the dot on the traditional master charts, Earth—from which and to which no longliners ever seemed to travel. Haarland had told him no F-T-L ship had in recent centuries ever reported again after setting out for Earth. Another world sunk in barbarism? But Flarney had said—no; that was not data. That was the confused recollections of a very old man, possibly based on the confused recollections of another very old man. Perhaps it had got mixed up with the semilegendary origin story.

Poor sweet Helena! He hoped it had happened fast, that she had been thinking of some pleasant prospect on Halsey’s Planet. In her naïve way she’d think it just around the corner, a mere matter of following instructions....

* * * * *

So thought Ross, the pessimist.

In his gloom he had forgotten that this was exactly what it was. In his snobbishness he never realized that he was guilty of the most frightful arrogance in assuming that what he could do, she could not. In his ignorance he was not aware that since navigation began, every new instrument, every technique, has drawn the shuddery warnings of savants that uneducated skippers, working by rote, could not be expected to master these latest fruits of science—or that uneducated skippers since navigation began have cheerfully adopted new instruments and techniques at the drop of a hat and that never once have the shuddery warnings been justified by the facts.

Up the aisle somebody was saying in a low, argumentative tone, “I saw the drum myself. Naturally it was marked Dulsheen Creme, but the guards here never did give a damn whether their noses were dull or bright enough to flag down a freighter and I don’t think they’ve suddenly changed. It was booze, I tell you. Fifty liters of it.”

“Gawd! The hangovers tomorrow.”

“We’ll all have to watch our steps. I hope they don’t do anything worse than getting quietly drunk in their quarters. Those foot-kissing orderlies’ll get a workout, but who cares what happens to an orderly?”

“They haven’t been on a real tear since I’ve been here.”

“Lucky you. Let’s hope they don’t bust loose tonight. It’s a break in the monotony, sure—but those girls play rough. Five prisoners died last time.”

“They beat them up?”

“One of them.”

“What about the others? Oh! Oh, Gawd—fifty liters, you said?”

Bernie began to whimper: “Not again! Not those plug-uglies! I swear I’ll throw myself through the spacelock if they make a pass at me. Ross, isn’t there anything we can do?”

“Seems not, Bernie. Maybe they won’t come in. Or if they do, maybe they’ll pass you by. There certainly isn’t any place to hide.”

A raucous female voice roared through the annunciator: “Bed check five minutes, boys. Anybody got any li’l thing to do down the hall, better do it now. See you lay-terrr!” Hiccup and drunken giggle.

For the first time in his life Ross suddenly and spontaneously acted like a tri-di hero, with the exception that he felt like a silly ass through it all.

“Got an idea,” he muttered. “Get out of your bunk.” He pulled the wad of cellosponge, old Whitker’s present, from his pocket and yanked it in half, one for him and one for Bernie.

The Pullover said faintly: “Thanks, but I don’t have to——”

Ross didn’t bother to answer. He was carefully fluffing the stuff out to its maximum dimensions. He unzipped his coveralls and began wadding them with cellosponge.

“I get it,” Bernard said softly. He stepped out of his one-piece garment and followed suit. In less than a minute they had creditable dummies lying on their bunks.

The others watched their activity with emotions ranging between awe and envy. One giant of a man proclaimed grimly to whoever cared to listen: “These are a couple of smart guys. I wish them luck. And I want you guys to know that I will personally break the back of any sneaking rat who tips off a guard about this.”

“Sure, Ox. Sure,” came a muted chorus.

Arranged in a fetal sleeping position, face down, the dummies astonished even their creators. It would take a lucky look in a fair light to note that the heads were earless, fibrous globes.

“They’ll do,” Ross snapped. “Come on, Bernie.”

They walked quietly from the dormitory in their singlet underwear toward the dormitory latrine—and past it. Into the corridor. Through a doorless opening into a storeroom piled with crates of rations. “This’ll do,” Ross said quietly. They ducked into a small cavern formed by sloppy issuing of stock and hunched down.

“The dummies will fool the bed check. It’s only a sweep with a hundred-line TV system. If the guards do raid the dormitory tonight we’ll have to count on them ignoring the dummies or thinking they’re a joke or being too busy with other things to care. They’ll be drunk, after all. Then in the morning things’ll be plenty disorganized. We’ll be able to sneak back into formation—and that’ll be that for a matter of years. They can’t often bribe the pilots with enough to guarantee a real ripsnorting drunk. Now try and get some sleep. There’s nothing more we can do.”

They actually did doze off for a couple of hours, and then were awakened by drunken war whoops.

“It’s them!” Bernie wailed.

“Shut up. They’re heading for the dormitory. We’re safe.”

“Safe!” Bernie echoed derisively. “Safe until when?”

Ross threatened him with the side of his hand and Bernie was quiet, though his lips were mumbling soundlessly. The guards lurched giggling past and Ross said:

“We’ll sneak into the lockroom. There won’t be anybody there tonight; at least we’ll get a night’s sleep.”

“Big deal,” grumbled Bernie, but he followed, complaining inarticulately to himself. Ross thought tiredly: All this work for a night’s sleep! And saw, half-formed, the dreadful procession of days and nights and years ahead....

They reached the lockroom and stumbled in breathlessly.

“Dearie!” Two guards, playing a card game on the floor with a ring of empty bottles around them, looked up in drunken delight. “Dearie!” repeated the bigger of the two. “Angela, _look_ what _we’ve_ got!”

Ross said stupidly. “But you shouldn’t be here——”

The guard made a clumsy pass at fluffing up her back hair and giggled. “Duty comes first, dearie. Angela, just lock that door, will you?” The other guard scrambled unevenly to her feet and weaved over to the door. It was locked before Ross or Bernie could move.

The big guard stood up too, leering at Bernie. “Wow!” she said. “New merchandise. Just be patient, dearie. We’ve got a little something to attend to in a couple of minutes, but we’ll have _lots_ of time after that.”

Then things began to happen rapidly. There was Angela the guard, inarticulate, falling-down drunk; she waved bonelessly at a brightly flickering light on the far side of the lockroom. There was the other guard, reaching out for Bernie with one hand, pawing at a bottle with the other. There was Ross, a paralyzed spectator.

And there was Bernie.

Bernie’s eyes bulged wide as the guard came toward him. He babbled hysterically, “No! Nonononono! I said I’d kill myself and I——”

He stiff-armed the big guard and leaped for the lock door. Ross suddenly came to life. “Bernie!” he bellowed. “Hold it! Don’t jump!”

But it was too late. The one guard sprawling, the other staggering helplessly across the floor, Bernie was clear. He scrabbled at the lockwheels, spun them open. Ross tensed himself for the sudden, awful rush of expanding air; he leaped after Bernie just as Bernie flung the lock door open and jumped.

Ross jumped after.

There was no rush of air. They were not in space. Around them was no ripping, sucking void, no flaming backdrop of stars; around them were six walls and a Wesley board, and Helena peering at them wide-eyed and delighted.

“Well!” she said. “_That_ was fast!”

* * * * *

Ross said, “But——”

Helena, hanging from the acceleration loops, smiled maternally. “Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “Ross don’t you think we’re far enough away yet?”

Ross said hopelessly, “All right,” and cut the drive. The starship hung in space in the limbo between stars. Azor, “Minerva,” and the rest were light-years behind, far out of range of challenge.

Helena wriggled free from the loops and rubbed her arms where the retaining straps had gripped them. “After all,” she said demurely, “you _told_ me how to run the ship, and _really_, Ross, I’m not quite _stupid_.”

Ross said, “But——”

“But what, Ross? It isn’t as if I were some sort of brainless little thing that had never run a machine in her life. My goodness, Ross——” She wrinkled her nose. “_You_ should remember. All those days in the dye vats? Don’t you think I had to learn a little something about machines _there_?”

Ross swore incredulously. To compare those clumsy constructs of wheels and rollers with the subtle subelectronic flows of the Wesley force—and to make it work! He said, unbelievingly, “And the ‘Minerva’ helped you vector in? They gave you the co-ordinates and radared your course?”

“Certainly.” Helena turned to Bernie, who was staring dazedly around him. “Are you all right, dear?” she asked.

Ross turned his back on them and faced the Wesley Christmas tree of controls. Don’t question it, he told himself; take a miracle for what it is. God wanted you out of “Minerva”—and God moves in most mysterious ways His wonders to perform.

Anyway, they had to get going. When the court had exiled Helena in the starship they had gone through the customary rituals; not only was everything that looked like a weapon gone, along with all but a teacup of fuel for the auxiliary jets, but the food locker was stripped entirely. He put everything else out of his mind and began to calculate a setting.

Bernie said over his shoulder, “Home, huh? That place you call Halsey’s Planet?”

Ross shook his head. “Not this time. I got this far and I’m still alive; maybe I can finish the job. Anyway, I’ll try. The first solid suggestion I’ve had ever since I took off was what that half-witted old moron——” He ignored a little gasp from Helena. “——said back on ‘Minerva.’ If Flarney had lived, he would have gone there; we’ll go there now.” He finished manipulating the calculator and began to set it up on the board. He said, “The name of the place is—Earth.”

..... 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 0.8952, a whopping ten per cent discrepancy. Further, the principal inert gas in 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 in 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 could, 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 Tim 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.