Ben Jones said softly to them, “Come on,” and led them into an adjoining room furnished with sleeping pads. He said apologetically, “The doctor’s nerves are shot tonight. Trouble is, he’s too Jonesfearing. Me, I can take it or leave it alone.” His laugh had a little too much bravado in it. “There’s a little bit of nonJones in the best of us, I always say—but not to the doctor. And not when he’s hitting the Jones juice.” He shrugged cynically and said, “What the hell? L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus T-over-two-N.”
Ross had him by his shirt frill. “Say that again!”
Ben Jones shoved him away. “What’s the matter with you, boy?”
“I’m sorry. Would you please repeat that formula? What you said?” he hastily amended when the word “formula” obviously failed to register.
Ben Jones repeated the formula wonderingly.
“What does it mean?” Ross demanded. “I’ve been chasing the damned thing across the Galaxy.” He hastily filled Ben Jones in on its previous appearances.
“Well,” Ben Jones said, “it means what it says, of course. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He studied their faces and added uncertainly, “Isn’t it?”
“What does it mean to you, Ben?” Ross asked softly.
“Why, what it means to anybody, pal. Right’s right, wrong’s wrong, Jones is in his Heaven, conform or else—it means morality, man. What else could it mean?”
Ross then proceeded to make an unmannerly nuisance of himself. He grilled their involuntary host mercilessly, shrugging aside all attempted diversions of the talk into what they were going to do with the three visitors. He ignored protestations that Ben was no Jonesologist, Jones knew, and drilled in. By the time Ben Jones exploded, stamped out, and locked them in for the night, he had elicited the following:
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 Jonesfearing 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 in 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 in 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 in 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 in 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 in 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
