Tomorrow Is Too Far (16 page)

A submarine, perhaps?
Carson added, but under his breath. They were getting so very close to the beginning now. Surely the end of the mystery was in sight.

‘You didn’t have any clothes on,’ Jean went on, when Pebbles had shaken his head. ‘Can you remember anyone taking them off. Or you taking them off or struggling out of them because you were in the water and could not swim so well with them on? You
can
swim, John?’

‘Yes,’ said Pebbles. ‘I always could. When Nurse Sampson started to teach me at the clinic’s pool she said that she didn’t have to, that I could swim very well. I ... I did it without thinking. I’m sorry, I can’t remember getting undressed.’

‘Betty,’ said Jean, turning to the nurse, ‘are you sure there was no clothing near him, or marks on his body of clothing recently worn? I’m thinking of the indentations left by, say, a tight belt or tight sock tops or even a wrist-watch. You see, he was in such good physical condition--whoever it was who had been taking care of him had done such a good job of it--that the sheer cruelty of leaving him without clothing before dawn on a beach at that time of year just doesn’t fit. Do you see what I’m getting .at? Why take away his clothes?’

They didn’t, want to give us the name of his tailor
, said Carson with silent cynicism. There was no need for him to speak when Jean was asking all the right questions.

‘I didn’t see any clothing and with John in that condition I didn’t waste very much time looking,’ Betty Sampson said sharply. Perhaps she was irritated by what she thought was an implied criticism or it might simply have been the cold making her tense. The smooth chocolate skin of her face was roughened by goosebumps, and when she spoke again the hissing rain reinforced the sibilants in her words, making her sound like a stage oriental.

‘Besides, the marks made by clothing, even tight clothing, fade in a few hours. And we examined him very closely--we thought he might be a drug addict, you see, or a diabetic in hypoglycaemic shock or maybe an epileptic.’ She looked an apology at Pebbles for referring to him so often in the third person, then went on, ‘His arms showed a number of fairly recent punctures--they could have been made anything from a week to three weeks earlier--but blood tests showed no residual traces of drugs, or anything unusual, in his bloodstream … ‘

And so it went on, the two girls questioning and Pebbles trying hard and hiding nothing but not helping at all. Carson’s impatience and anger was growing until it was almost a pain. A few days ago he had told Jean that Pebbles was innocent--as innocent as an unfused bomb--and that he should be treated gently and deconditioned by Jean and himself rather than interrogated by one of the intelligence agencies. Carson was beginning to wonder if he had said those things just to avoid sounding like a louse.

But the cold-blooded, callous way that John Pebbles had been used, how the clinic and Mrs Kirk had been used to give him an unbreakable cover, how Hart-Ewing’s and Dreamy Daniels had been used and manipulated made him angry in a way he had never been angry before. He was a little like Bill Savage, he supposed, in that he preferred to think of men as people instead of useful or potentially useful things. This thing called Pebbles could be very useful to Carson as well as to its masters and after all, what did a bomb casing care about a few dents and scratches when its fate was to be blown to pieces anyway ... ?

He found himself looking up at the dark, shredded clouds while raindrops scored near misses on his eyes, imagining the clean, cold rain and spray rotten with radio-activity and the clear, still air above them empty of aircraft and nobody on the moon or Mars or on the extrasolar planets beyond which were now almost within reach. A weapon against which there was absolutely no protection was bad because the only deterrent was to use it first.

This was too big a thing for one man’s feelings to be given any weight, much too big for it to be important whether a certain doctor thought Carson a louse or even whether he thought the same himself...

Carson became aware that Jean was talking to him. He said, ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking. Let’s go back to the car. The club isn’t far from here and we can all get a nice, hot lunch...’

It was what you said that was important to most people, not what you thought.
Carson was thinking that starting tomorrow he was going to get very tough with John Pebbles.

But next day Pebbles was gone. Despite a large number of carefully offhand enquiries, Carson could not find out why or where. He did not show on the following two days either. Carson began to wonder if he had already been contacted and was in the process of being deconditioned, if one of his own people had beaten him to the punch. He thought of the language tuition tapes he had just bought that were waiting for Pebbles’s next visit to the flat.

Jean Marshall had not wanted him to experiment with the language records too soon. Rushing things like this, she had insisted, might give rise to all sorts of emotional disturbances in their patient, especially if Carson’s theory was correct.

She seemed to think that they had all the time in the world.

On the fourth day of Pebbles’s absence Carson took an afternoon off and spent it going through the local newspaper files for the approximate date of Pebbles’s discovery on the beach. He found out nothing beyond the fact that the area had been covered by a late-autumn fog around that time, and nobody had reported seeing small boats, submarines or even UFOs. He wondered if the plastic material Nurse Sampson had mentioned, and which she had insisted was not rubber dinghy material, was some kind of parachute.

He had just about decided that there was nothing he could do until Pebbles returned when, early on the fifth day, Simpson in Publicity rang to say that he had something for him.

It turned out to be a large envelope full of magazine clippings. Carson took them back to his office to examine them at leisure, not expecting very much from them, but ten minutes later he was on the phone to Simpson.

‘Of course I’ll help you, if I can,’ said the publicity man. ‘But your voice sounds funny, Joe--have you a sore throat or is this a bad line ...?’

Carson tried to contain his excitement and lower the pitch of his voice as he gave the title, page and date of the magazine and added, ‘I’m very interested in one of the pictures. It shows a group of pilots surrounded by inset pictures of, I think, the aircraft they fly. But the caption does not give the names of the individual pilots. Is there any way of finding out who they are?’

Simpson was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I’m not sure, Joe. I recognise the magazine and date, of course--it was an issue devoted to one of the big international aerospace shows which was held the preceding month. Companies and even government information agencies buy space on these occasions and try to place as much editorial material as possible--it’s a matter of national prestige, you see. The item you’re interested in sounds like a puff about the pilots taking part in that country’s flying dis-play.

‘That particular magazine is a very small one,’ Simpson went on, ‘so I would think that the only way you would have of finding out the pilots’ names would be to scan the larger magazines published at the same time. They would also have covered the show and might possibly have used the same picture with a more detailed caption.’

‘Could you ...’ began Carson.

‘I could try, Joe, but you could probably do the job quicker and easier yourself by calling in on Ben Mitchell at the library. He keeps bound volumes of all the principal aviation magazines back to the Wright brothers. You have the date, now, so it is just a matter of checking through the different magazine files for that period ...’

On the way to the technical library Carson called in at Engineering Test to check whether Pebbles had returned or not. He had not, but Daniels was there ostentatiously displaying no interest in the crated and supposedly substandard module which was being loaded on to an articulated truck belonging to a local transport company. To be junk, Carson thought, the module was being very carefully handled.

The presence of God, sometimes known.as the Chief of Design, was making everyone appear unusually industrious and not disposed towards idle conversation. Even Donovan, who was standing beside the cab with the driver and whose duty it was to see that non-company transport did not take short cuts between parked aircraft and risk knocking off a tail or wing-tip, was watching Daniels out of the corner of his eye and had very little time for his own chief.

Carson went to the nearest outside telephone and called Jean Marshall. She was having a day off at home in lieu of a spell of night duty worked the preceding week. When she answered he said, ‘Jean, how would you like to follow a truck...?’

A little later as he was entering the building which housed the technical library, Carson called at the patrol office to lay some groundwork for his probable presence in the library later that night. He discovered that there would be a meeting in Daniels’s office at seven-thirty that evening.

He knew that it was going to be an important one...

In the library he used the outside phone to call Jean again and was lucky enough to catch her before she left. There was nobody within earshot but he avoided being specific--this was not, after all, an automatic, unmanned exchange--as he asked her if she would mind letting herself into the flat and taking a call he was expecting sometime after seven o’clock. She could amuse herself with the tape-recorder until he arrived later. He hoped she would be back in time to do this because it was a very important call...

He could always eavesdrop on the meeting from his office as he had done the last time. But this meeting, he felt sure, was going to be a very important one and he did not want his eavesdropping to be interrupted by Donovan or one of the other patrolmen wanting to know if they could help him or make coffee. This way he could use the recorder attachment for telephone calls and later go over the tape of the meeting as often as he liked, and if the level of conversation dropped too low he could simply crank up the volume--if he was lucky, that was, and Jean returned from checking on the truck in time.

Carson felt lucky. Everything seemed to be going his way today.

He was lucky again in the library. Carson found the information he needed in just under two hours although he did not, of course, tell Ben Mitchell that. Instead he talked to the technical librarian about a series of articles he hoped to do some day on the subject of second generation space-flight, pointing up the fact that recent advances in the art were making it unnecessary for astronauts to be supermen and that the way was opening for purely commercial, or even pleasure, trips to the moon and planets.

Perhaps he overdid it a little, but Mitchell did not seem to think it strange that a security officer should want to write as a hobby, though he professed mild surprise that it was not spy stories. The librarian did not mind how late Carson stayed researching, but he reminded him that it was against regulations to take books and technical material off company limits. In the meantime Mitchell said that he would get photo-copies made of the pages and illustrations Carson was most interested in and let him have them in about twenty minutes.

He was thinking of those pages as he let himself into Daniels’s office a little after seven o’clock. They had shown the picture in his clipping enlarged, reduced and in one case chopped to show only the man he was interested in plus two of his companions, and they had also named names. The photographs would lose detail in the copying process, which was meant to reproduce text rather than half-tones, but the face was recognisable and it was the name that was important.

The name was not Pebbles.

He went to the external telephone on the inconspicuous corner table. At this time there were no operators on the board and Daniels, being an important man in the company, had a private night line to his office. A little selfconsciously he used his handkerchief to lift the receiver and the end of his ball-point to dial.

He heard the phone in his flat ringing and go on ringing. Jean had not arrived. His luck was beginning to change. Carson laid down the receiver and walked around the large office. The ringing signal could be clearly heard everywhere, so he could not simply leave it as it was while he drove back to the flat and lifted his own receiver. That left him with no alternative but to eavesdrop from his office via the internal phone, except that he had not locked his office so that no matter how fast he drove down there he would be too late to stop one of the patrolmen lifting his receiver and replacing it when nobody spoke. And on the internal automatic PBX that would break the connection.

It was now seven-fifteen. An early arriver for the meeting might turn up at any minute.

Suddenly the burring from the receiver stopped. Carson ran to the table and picked it up. ‘Jean, I haven’t much time ...’ he began.

‘Joe, I followed the truck to the freight terminal,’ she said excitedly, ignoring him. ‘The driver left it there, among hundreds of others just like it, and I drove away and came back again every time someone looked as if they might ask me what I was doing there. About an hour ago another front end drove up and hooked on to the trailer. There were two men in the cab, both in service denims, the vehicle was painted olive drab with military serial numbers in white. They threw a green tarpaulin over the crate and trailer name panel and drove away. With that olive drab horse and tarp its own mother would not have recognised the load.

‘And Joe,’ she rushed on, ‘they came back here! They showed some papers at the airfield gate, drove through and on to that old C-5A that arrived this morning, which took off a few minutes later. Somebody thinks a lot of our scrapped components, Joe . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Carson, practically sweating with impatience. She sounded so excited and pleased with herself. He should complement her but there was no time. He went on, ‘Jean, listen carefully. Set up to record through the phone. Try not to make any noise while you’re doing it, and afterwards don’t cough or sneeze or make any noise whatever unless you go into the other room. Any noise you make at that end might be picked up by the receiver here loudly enough to be noticed by someone in this room. And Jean, leave the flat door ajar so’s I won’t have to make a noise with the door-bell. Got all that?’