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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;
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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