Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space colonies -- Fiction
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-Jonesism, 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 formula.
It was enigmatically mentioned in one pamphlet, which almost
incomprehensibly advanced the claims of the Biological faction to
supremacy among the Joneses United: “Let us never forget, comrades, that
the initiation of the great struggle was not caused by our will or by
the will of our sincere and valiant opponents, the Culturists. The
inexorable law of nature, L_{T}=L_{O}e-^{T/2N}, was the begetter of that
holocaust from which our planet has emerged purified——”
Was it now?
The entrance to a musty, airless wing had once been bricked up. The
mortar was crumbling and a few bricks had fallen. Above the arched
doorway a sign said Military Archives. On the floor was a fallen metal
plaque whose inscription said simply Dead Storage. He kicked the loose
bricks down and stepped through.
That was it. The place was lightless, except for the daylight filtering
through the violated archway. Ross hauled maps and orders and period
newspapers and military histories and handbooks into the corridor in
armfuls and spread them on the floor. It took only minutes for him to
realize that he had his answer. He ran into the street and shouted for
the doctor.
Together they pored over the papers, occasionally reading aloud choice
bits, wonderingly.
The simplest statement of the problem they found was in the paper-backed
“Why We Fight” pamphlet issued for the enlisted men of the Provisional
North Continent Government Army.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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