Tomorrow Is Too Far (8 page)

It was not a very good or well-paid job, Donnelly understood, but Pebbles did not smoke or drink or have girl-friends, so he had been able to spend most of his pay on flying lessons. He qualified very quickly and stopped being the club mascot, although if anything the members liked him even more and were intensely proud of him for the way he had overcome his disability. Later he got his instructor’s rating which allowed him to fly more while actually being paid a small fee for doing so, and he had checked out on several twin-engined types and was talking of trying for his commercial licence.

Flying, studying and working at Hart-Ewing’s was all that he seemed to do. Apparently he was trying to broaden his studies as much as possible, but he still dropped conversational bricks and made elementary, but embarrassing, mistakes on social occasions.

When they heard about his background newcomers to the club sometimes worried about the possibility of his having a mental relapse while flying with them ...

‘ ... I’m no psychologist,’ Jeff went on quickly, ‘but he seems to be improving mentally rather than falling back. We all thought he was retarded at first--you know, a grown man with the mind of a child. In many ways he still is a child, but not in an aeroplane! I wish I knew what went wrong with him as a kid, Joe. It’s as if his intelligence was there all the time, building up pressure, just waiting for someone to pull the plug out.

‘More than anyone else,’ Donnelly ended seriously, ‘it was Tillotson who pulled out the plug. Pebbles has never looked back since then.’

‘This,’ said Carson, ‘is an unbelievable story, but I believe you.’

‘Gee, thanks.’

‘... In fact,’ Carson went on, ‘it is remarkably like a wish-fulfilment dream. You know, boy watches planes taking off and landing, gets the chance of a flight, finds he is a natural born pilot, qualifies for more complex aircraft culminating in him becoming a top test pilot and being considered for inclusion in the next batch of trainee astronauts . . .’

Astronauts
, he thought;
Tau Ceti
...

‘... But pilots are not born, they are made,’ Carson continued. ‘In my case with extreme difficulty. It’s rather disquieting to think that someone who doesn’t know enough about money to ride on a bus is teaching me to fly....’

A shade apprehensively, Donnelly said, ‘I didn’t mean to worry you, Joe. He has come a long way since ... ‘

‘Relax,’ said Carson. ‘I told you that I don’t intend changing my instructor at this stage. Besides, if we are all figments of John Pebbles’s wish-fulfilment dream, I don’t think I would be able to...’

On the way home he drove past Pebbles’s address and stopped at the police station two streets farther on. He knew the station inspector from way back and should, by pulling the old pals act, be able to keep his enquiries unofficial even though they had never liked each other when they had worked together. George Russell had been big, loud, sarcastic and insensitive in those days and apparently only his voice had changed for the better.

‘Pebbles isn’t exactly a public enemy,’ said Inspector Russell quietly. ‘He broke a window once playing ball in the street with kids less than half his age and size, but he paid for it. Are you chasing spies again, Joe?’

‘No, George,’ said Carson, and explained, ‘he is a dimwit about some things and there is danger of his getting into serious trouble at the factory because he is so easily led. I need a little background information about his home life and so on--to help me understand him before I start talking to him like a very stern father.’

‘You always were a lousy policeman, Joe, and you haven’t changed a bit,’ said Russell, laughing. ‘With crime--the detection of criminals--you were very good indeed. But punishment--especially the punishment of habitual or petty criminals--always seemed to bother you. I suppose that was why you resigned from the force

‘That was it,’ said Carson drily. ‘There weren’t enough master criminals to keep me occupied. But about Pebbles...?’

Russell laughed again. ‘I didn’t think you needed to check on mental defectives--oh, all right, I’m just pulling your leg. He boards with a widow called Kirk. Well, not exactly a widow--her husband left her shortly after their first child, a mongol boy, was born and hasn’t been seen since. She really loved that boy even though there were complications which meant that he couldn’t live much past nine or ten years. When he died about four years ago she went to pieces for a while, until Pebbles came along. Now she treats him as her son, is intensely proud of the way he is improving, going to night school and so on. I think she tells herself that if her own boy had lived he might have been able to make good just like Pebbles has done.

‘She’s not quite right in the head,’ Russell concluded, ‘but harmless and well liked. Don’t worry her with this, Joe.’

‘I won’t even have to talk to her,’ said Carson as he rose to go. He could not help adding, ‘You
have
changed quite a lot, George ...’

Any real information about Pebbles’s background would probably entail asking personal questions of the man himself. Perhaps if he tried to talk to him at Hart-Ewing’s instead of at the club, showed a friendly interest in his new job, something might develop. Among the test gantries and aircraft sections undergoing their continuing series of simulated take-offs, wind-buffetings, engine vibration and landing shocks there would be no problems about which knife or spoon to use or how to keep food on the plate while eating.

But Pebbles was not available for questioning or as an object of friendly interest. Charlie Desmond, his new department head, said that he was owed two weeks leave and had decided to take it before settling into the new job. Carson suggested that, while he was there, it might be a good idea to check door and window fastenings and the department’s fire-fighting arrangements. Charlie said to be his guest and delegated Bob Menzies, one of his engineers, to go around with him.

While they were speaking the constant thump of simulated loads hitting wing and undercarriage specimens under test punctuated every word, hurrying on the conversation and doing nothing at all to soothe Carson’s nerves or reduce his impatience. Pebbles’s absence worried him for some reason and for reasons equally vague he felt that the project was reaching a critical point. If only there was more information ...

Menzies was not affected by the noises off and talked easily and freely. About Pebbles he did not know anything for sure, but there were rumours that he was spending a working holiday doing a training course somewhere, probably as a preparation for his new job. Not for the clerical position in the EH93 test section, Menzies added--there was another rumour that when he returned Pebbles would be moving again to a better job in the module test area.

A little later when Carson displayed mild interest--no one but himself knew the effort that mildness cost him--in the big, shining cone of a life support and command module which occupied a cradle in one of the storerooms he was told that Menzies was not sure why it was there. The modules came in from time to time, they were defective and at a guess he would say that they were sold as scrap, or one of the Government agencies might have bought a few for training and simulation purposes.

But the best man to ask about that was Dreamy Daniels. The chief designer and his crowd were in the storeroom half the night, sometimes--measuring and fitting test equipment, Menzies supposed, to find out why such important hunks of hardware had to be rejected in the first place and to decide on a good story if one of themselves was responsible ...

‘ .. I’m a cynic, Mr Carson, if you haven’t guessed that much already,’ Menzies said laughing. ‘Oh, would you like to climb in. They even have a padded acceleration couch in this one ...’

‘Thank you,’ said Carson as he wriggled feet first into the hatch. He began to feel cynical, too, but for a different reason.

The couch was sinfully comfortable and, so far as he could see, complete with harness, air supplies and associated life support equipment. Facing him at waist level there was a control panel also complete except for one large round hole which seemed to stare at him like a computer pirate through its empty eye socket. Through the opening there was enough light to show a space of perhaps four cubic feet and a bunch of cable looms, their individual strands opened and tagged where they were supposed to join the missing piece of equipment. Everything else in the module looked bright and new and complete, lacking only power to be fully functioning.

It had become impossible for him to believe that an intricate and expensive fabrication like this could reach such an advanced stage before someone discovered an error which necessitated it being scrapped.

But if this vehicle was not to be scrapped then it had to be the end-result of the secret project, or perhaps the equipment destined for that empty space was what the project was all about. At the same time the vehicle was small, almost as small as the early Mercury capsules. Did its size suggest that the Government was giving it only limited support? Perhaps the idea was potentially valuable but too radical to warrant the cost of pushing a greater weight into space. Or the missing device might do the pushing itself and be very dangerous to the crew...

The memory of the two charred pieces of paper came back to him. They had mentioned interstellar distances--when up until now manned spaceflight had yet to go beyond the Moon--and psychological damage to lab animals, and had suggested the use of a human guinea-pig so that exact data on these psychological effects would be available. Carson found himself imagining that he was in space, the instrument panel no longer missing its eye and an enigmatic something behind the panel at GO. His mental picture of the panel and of the awesome glimpse of eternity through the port was so real and sharp that he was angry when Menzies tapped him on the shoulder.

‘You’ve been in there for nearly twenty minutes, Mr Carson,’ he said with just a trace of impatience. ‘You’re nearly as bad as John Pebbles--he likes playing astronaut, too. Of course, don’t we all...?’

‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ said Carson. But he spent another few minutes in the capsule anyway, memorising the drawing reference numbers on the support brackets which would hold the missing piece of equipment behind the control panel. Herbie Patterson would be able to tell him which factory they had come from and, by a process of clerical cross-checking, something about the gadget they had been designed to support.

Herbie Patterson died late the following evening. Always a very thorough and tidy man, he managed to kill himself thoroughly but not with tidiness.

In the admin building there was a central well with stairs running up to all five floors and lift housing covered with a protective grill occupying most of the well space. Apparently Herbie had climbed all five flights of stairs--a feat which would almost certainly have killed him anyway--and thrown himself over the chest-high hand-rail at the top. Because of the narrowness of unobstructed space in the well he had hit the housing grill-work and handrails several times on the way down, leaving a shoe on the stairs leading up from the third floor and finally striking, partly demolishing and impaling himself on the wreckage of an empty crate on the ground floor.

Donovan found him, phoned Carson and Dr Kennedy, then spent the time until their arrival keeping the few others who were working late that night from seeing too much of the body.

According to the senior patrol officer Mr Patterson had passed him without speaking--which was very unusual--less than ten minutes before his fall. Donovan said that he did not look well. Carson had spoken to Herbie earlier that afternoon when he asked him to check on the capsule drawing reference numbers. Then he had been his usual, bitterly complaining self. Dr Kennedy suggested that he might have learned suddenly of his heart condition and had decided to speed things up. Herbie never had much patience with inefficiency, in people, machinery or malfunctioning organs...

The incident put a three-day hold on Carson’s project enquiries while he tried vainly to get the picture of Herbie’s shattered and bloody body out of his dreams. As well, Mrs Patterson took her husband’s death very hard even though she had been expecting him to go at any time, and their oldest child was only thirteen. But by the time the funeral arrangements were made and he had helped the widow straighten out her late husband’s affairs, the project with all of its unresolved problems began to fill his mind once again.

But there were still no answers to the really important questions.

Sometimes he sat in his office and thought longingly of what he would do if only he could question these people, really question them with someone like George Russell looming over them as an unsettling influence while Carson asked leading questions. But he could not ask questions. Officially the subject he wished to discuss did not exist, and their security was really tight.

From the evidence he had been able to gather it now seemed clear that the number of people aware of the project, as opposed to the thousands who were contributing to it in ignorance, was fairly small. Carson estimated their number at between twenty and thirty, placed strategically to deal with awkward questions regarding materials requisitions, design queries, pre-production planning, tooling, inspection and the ultimate disposal of the so-called scrapped sub-assemblies and assemblies. It had taken some really inspired thinking to devise and mount the operation in such a way that the necessary hardware was produced, developed and modified without anyone knowing what was really going on.

Dreamy Daniels was subject to long bouts of inspired thinking, otherwise he would not have been the design chief, but he was not the type to be bothered with finicky details like burning classified documentation, and neither were the other design people. The only other possibilities were that the project either carried its own security or had none at all. It was possible, but not at all likely, that Daniels had talked the authorities into supporting a major project without official security involvement by arguing that guards and highly classified paperwork drew attention to the thing they were trying to hide. But this did not explain the highly professional way in which they covered their traces. Someone who really knew his stuff was watching over them.