The surgeon said slowly and with wonder: “So that was my God!” He stretched out his hands before him. The fingers were rock-steady.
Ross left him and paced the corridor uneasily. Fine. Now he knew. Lost genes in genetically small populations. On Halsey’s Planet, some fertility gene, no doubt. On Azor, a male-sex-linked gene that provides men with the backbone required to come out ahead in the incessant war of the genders? Bernie was a gutless character. Here, all too many genes determining somatotype. On the planets that had dropped out of communication, who knew? Scientific-thought genes? Sex-drive-determining genes?
One thing was clear: any gene-loss was bad for the survival of a planetary colony. Evolution had—on Earth—worked out in a billion trial-and-error years a working mechanism, man. Man exhibited a vast range of variation, which was why he survived almost any conceivable catastrophe.
Reduce man to a single type and he is certain to succumb, sooner or later, to the inevitable disaster that his one type cannot cope with.
The problem, now stated clearly, was bigger than he had dreamed. And now he knew only the problem—not the solution.
Go to Earth.
Well, he had tried. There had been no flaw in his calculations, no failure in setting up the Wesley panel. Yet—this was Jones, not Earth; the city was only a city, not the planet that the star charts logged. And the planet, beyond all other considerations, was less like Earth than any conceivable chart error could account for. Gravitation, wrong; atmosphere, wrong; flora and fauna, wrong.
So. Eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however unlikely, is true. So there had been a flaw in his calculations. And the way to check that, once and for all, was to get back to the starship.
Ross wheeled and went back into the book room. “Doc,” he called, “how do we get out of here?”
The answer was: on their bellies. They trudged through the forest for hours, skirting the road, hiding whenever a suspicious noise gave warning that someone might be in the vicinity. The Peepeece knew they were in the woods; there was no doubt of that. And as soon as they got past the taboo area, they had to crawl.
It was well past dark before Ross and the doctor, scratched and aching, got to the tiny hamlet of Jonesie-on-the-Pike. By the light from the one window in the village that gave any signs of life, the doctor took a single horrified look at Ross and shuddered. “You wait here,” he ordered. “Hide under a bush or something—your beard rubbed off.”
Ross watched the doctor rap on the door and be admitted. He couldn’t hear the conversation that followed, but he saw the doctor’s hand go to his pocket, then clasp the hand of the figure in the doorway. That was the language all the galaxy understood, Ross realized; he only hoped that the householder was an honest man—i.e., one who would stay bribed, instead of informing the Peepeece on them. It was beyond doubt that their descriptions had long since been broadcast; the road must have been lined with TV scanners on the way in.
The door opened again, and the doctor walked briskly out. He strode out into the street, walked half a dozen paces down the road, and waited for Ross to catch up with him. “Okay,” the doctor whispered. “They’ll pick us up in half an hour, down the road about a quarter of a mile. Let’s go.”
“What about the man you were talking to?” Ross asked. “Won’t he turn us in?”
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 in 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 in 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
