How Jones Goes Read online

  How Jones Goes

  by

  Lawrence Dagstine

  How Jones Goes

  Copyright 2013 - Lawrence Dagstine

  Homepage: https://www.lawrencedagstine.com

  Cover Art Copyright 2012 - Bob Veon

  All Rights Reserved

  This story is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this story are either fictitious or used fictitiously. Any similarities to real people, either living or dead, are purely coincidental. No part of this story may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without permission from the author.

  Jones has disappeared, and I don't think I can stand it in this bin without Jones. It's not just that he has disappeared, and so isn't here: it's the way he went. Well, let's take it from the beginning.

  If it's a rest you're wanting, some respite from the Sturm und Drang of life in these Americas at the dirty end of the 21st century, don't you make the (my!) big mistake of acting crazy to get yourself put away in a bin. All right, I do know the only way to get into a hospital at all these days-unless you're a millionaire, have the kind of job that carries Gold Cross with it, or are dying with useful spare parts to spare-is to act too crazy to be safe on the street and get yourself certified and binned. But believe one who's tried it: you're two three times better off on the outside, sweating twelve hours a day to keep up with the cybersystem, sleeping five to a room, spending five hours of the rest of the day processing pollutants out of tap water, and trying to believe the food the government says is safe is safe; even if you had a fine friend like Jones inside with you. Much better off.

  Since the taxpayer stopped taxpaying for exponential annual increase in research funds, cost-benefit analysis has hit science some blows, and research has to pay or else; while the population explosion and the soaring incidence of pollution-induced disease had finished Medicare before it hardly began-let's not forget the economy-and patients have to pay their way in some kind of coin.

  This bin (a half-heartedly converted military camp down in New Jersey) lives by doing cut-rate contract research for European countries and corporations, and they keep the prices down by getting plenty of mileage out of the experimental preparations (that is, the people here apart from the staff). Professor Kohler is using me to find out whether or not modern day shock treatment will suppress artificial psychoses induced by lysergic acid derivatives; Doctor (of philosophy, psychopharmacologist) Tran is trying to see if he can develop a non-addictive major analgesic before he kills me; I have been pressed into some Australian researcher's somatic group therapy trials; and Doctor (medic, specializing sexology) Moira Bloch is trying to induce functional impotence in me by crash hypnosis, in aid of the population problem. It's all voluntary, of course: they have to ask you to sign their piece of paper, and if you won't sign they can't touch you. The government is very hot on that; but after they've given you the crash course of spider 98, the complex of huts where they keep the people who don't volunteer and attract a diagnosis of antisocial tendencies, most of us do volunteer; even Jones volunteered.

  What with the post-shock amnesias, the acid fugues, the painful withdrawals from addictions to Tran's unlucky shots, the violence in the somatic group therapy (only last week I won a black eye and two cracked ribs fending off a butch ex-teamster who had been shot full of barb and told to act out his philithy phantasies), and of course the sexual obsessions implanted in me by fire-eyes Bloch's graunched hypnoses, it's a wonder I can manage to keep the ward clean and do the laundry and the dishes (that's my occupational therapy, for reality-testing and to keep my manual dexterities in fine tune).

  Doctor Helen (sour brunette from Seattle, psychiatric intern) Born, who supervises the symbolic group therapy, didn't love Jones: like me, only much more so, Jones was bright, well and curiously read, been around, and he could put pickled Born down in argument without straining; which made her tell him (in spite of the fact that her idea of a warm human response was, notoriously, a smoldering fit of the sulks) that paranoiacs are all alike, they can make any kind of cold sense but no kind of warm sense-which was why Jones was a mere preparation while she was a quack.

  Jones had gotten into this bin here by pestering the FBI, the air force, the space force, sundry congressmen, anybody who would stand still for it: telling them he was a Martian investigator, come to discover why the surface of Olorn appeared so diseased from a great distance, and that we Olornians must do what he (Jones) said-before we wiped ourselves out in some ecocrash. Well, as they told him, more than a dozen sensible men have been to Mars to see (keeping their hair short and changing their underpants daily: all the way thither, there, and back again), and we just know, like scientifically, that there's no life on Mars at all like Jones: which makes Jones a nut, grade A; especially as he kept insisting he was the only (inconsistently) man alive who knew how to save us from an early and irremediable disaster, because people who see themselves like that do very often kill people without warning, for reasons that don't make any consensually valid kind of sense to the consensus.

  It didn't bother Jones when Born, one of the other quacks, or one of his enemies among the patients threw the no-life-on-Mars objection at him. Of course there's no Jones-like life on Mars now, he used to say, because the true Martians had made a few itsy mistakes with the Martial ecosystem and had had to move off, most of them to some other star a few years off; but a few to what Jones would call Olorn (pronounced "fer-lawn", and supposed to be the name of our Earth in the Old High Martial tongue), where they degenerated in a few centuries into henge-builders, metaphysicians, cave-painters, prophets, Homeridae, geometers, and primitive rabble of that kind. Hadn't we ever wondered, he used to ask, why he from Mars was just plain what we call human on Olorn? Well, that was why, it was obvious once you knew the history.

  Now, I just don't have the brains Jones had (you know how it is, I can appreciate a thought once someone else has thought it, no matter how far out, but I can't think such thoughts myself). I could never have gotten myself into the bin by thinking up a ramified, rebuttal-proof (you should have heard his refutations of refutations of his claims) delusional system like Jones's lovely messiah-from-Mars routine and other surreal antics.

  What I did, I just tried to tell everybody the plain truth all the time. I had discovered as a child that people think you are at least mad and probably had, too, if you do that. For instance, I used to teach my students at Columbia (till they fired me) that there is no such thing as knowledge, nothing can be known, and what passes for scientific knowledge is just the current fashion in preconceptions and about as durable as this season's skirt length or keynote color. And I still tell the quacks here the same thing: if I was comfortably dead like Hume or Kant, they might cite me in the jargonized papers and reports they keep endlessly writing. As I'm uncomfortably alive, they write me down in the case file as dysfunctionally out of touch with consensually valid reality, and wonder aloud where I can hear them about the possibility of curing skepticism by surgical intervention (cutting things out of my head or implanting things in it). But what got me in here, I guess, was my campaign insisting that we would have to do a crash kill of nine in ten of the people on Earth, to avoid a more toxic ecocrash (including myself, as a philosopher with none of the skills, such as horsemanship, that would be needed in a de-industrialized world): well, you know who my father is-I am too important to laugh off or put in jail, but there is no harm in saying I am mad and disregarding my simple arithmetic on that count.

  Nobody, least of all the Born, believed that the symbolic group therapy would do anybody any good, bar providing well-paid work for Born and passing the time for the preparations (sorry,
patients). She didn't think she would change the minds of people who were all either more intelligent or tougher characters than she was, and we didn't think we would succumb to the going theodicy and become reconciled to life, either in here or out there. The Born used to treat the sessions as pure entertainment: cabaret, circus with clowns for the kiddies, Roman circus with Christians for grown-ups, carny with monsters; like the boxing in prisons, this got quite a reputation as a free show, and we used to have to put up with visiting researchers, medics, politicos, and sundry girlfriends from all over the state and even from the big cities.

  The star turn was the Born trying to knock down Jones' ramified messiah-from-Mars routine: she spent a lot of her spare time browsing about in the xenological literature about life on other bodies in the solar system, and she used to pitch Jones some real wild screwballs.

  For instance, she used to say that diggers on Mars had found nothing in the Martial strata to suggest an evolution of even large living things with rudimentary brains, so how did Jones account for the existence