Tomorrow Is Too Far (22 page)

‘I wonder if you do,’ she said in a tone which made him want to put his arms round her and stroke her head. ‘And I’d like a tape-recorder, too, playing unobtrusively day and night. The usual tapes, of course--voices, his own voice, traffic sounds, factory noises, favourite music...’

His associations between the sight and sound of people widened dramatically after that. He could tell them apart and even try to form the sounds of the words they called themselves. There was only one girl and fourteen men. One of the men called himself Daniels and he was living in a thing called a room in Daniels’s house. All the men took it in turns to watch and talk to him, and work the projector and change tapes and make sure he did not turn on all the taps in the bathroom or fall downstairs again. The girl came much more often than the men and she was always there before he went to sleep or when he awakened from a bad dream. The number of holes in the black glass wall in his mind grew, but slowly and they very rarely linked up.

He listened constantly to meaningless sounds and the voices of people speaking gibberish, and at night he listened to the same people in his dreams and almost understood them. But the dreams were not always frightening. The girl was in some of them, talking to him sometimes or playing with him and doing things which he had no words for and which made him very sorry to have to wake up.

Even though he knew that the TV set and the projection screen were not windows, it was easier to think of them that way. Today they were going to show mostly films, they had said, and both the girl and the man Daniels talked too loudly and dropped things during the preparations.

The first film showed a roaring, stiff-winged bird which he knew was called an aeroplane taking off, circling an airfield and landing after touching the ground three times. Two figures climbed out of it, one of which he recognised as himself and another which the girl called Pebbles. There followed a close-up of the cockpit, the dash, a still of Pebbles in the cockpit smiling at him ...

Pebbles.

He felt suddenly frightened. Another hole was being knocked in the black glass wall in his mind and this time he did not want it to happen. There were too many cracks radiating from it, going in too many directions. On the other side of the room he could see, dim in the reflected light from the screen, the girl watching him. For a reason which he did not understand, but which seemed important to him, he forced himself not to cry or call out to her.

The sequence ended and was replaced by another showing Daniels and several of the other people he knew sitting at tables with coloured lights on them. There was a deep, growling sound that he could feel in his stomach as well as hear through his ears. Everybody was talking at once and the picture changed to that of a shining tower with fire belching from its base ...

He tried hard not to be a cry-baby, to be what Daniels called a good soldier, but the film was knocking the biggest hole yet in his black glass wall and great, fat cracks were radiating from it in all directions, dividing and subdividing as they went. Some of them went towards the bright holes that were Pebbles and the factory and Daniels and the girl. They were linking up, associating, with everything he knew or had learned, even his dreams, and he was very frightened. In that flaming, thundering monster he was going to die...

Whimpering, he ran towards the dimly seen couch which held the girl.

‘Bingo! ‘ said Daniels, very quietly.

It was a long time before they were able to calm him down, and then only after the girl had given him four tablets and Daniels had managed to pour enough water into his mouth to allow him to swallow them. But still he clung tightly to the girl, pressing his face against her, trying to hide from his own thoughts. ‘You shouldn’t throw yourself at me that way,’ she said gently at one stage, ‘or hold me so tight. You’re bigger than I am and the breaking strain of my ribs is low. But it’s all right, I’m not angry …. ‘

‘What do you think, Doctor?’ said Daniels.

‘I think maybe ... tonight,’ said the girl.

‘Eleven days,’ said Daniels, ‘this time you did it in eleven
days
.’

He felt himself relaxing and beginning to feel sleepy. He began to dream, one of the nice dreams with the girl in it where they did things he did not know the name of. The dream was so vivid that it woke him up. He was shaking and he could feel his body reacting and all he could do was stare wide-eyed at her without knowing or being able to say what was wrong.

‘Now who’s rushing things?’ said Daniels, laughing.

Her face was pinker than usual as she said, ‘I think we should put you to bed now. I... I mean, mother love you can have, and welcome, but I don’t think you are quite ready for the other kind … ‘

She sounded as if she might be asking a question.

He awoke several times that night and she was always there, wrapped in a man’s dressing-gown, watching him or stroking his head or talking quietly and soothingly. It got so that he did not know when he was awake or asleep. She was always there, she had always been there--he could remember it happening before. He could remember. Suddenly he could see and hear and understand what he was seeing and hearing and remembering.

Pebbles...

Lavatory attendant,
Scheherazade
, the factory, the club, the flat, the picture in the aviation magazine, the voice saying
‘You have control, Mr Carson’
and
‘Joe! Jean! Don’t let them do it to me...!’
and the voice of Daniels saying ‘Pebbles is an embarrassment to us, Joe, now that we know who and what he is. Not a threat, you understand--I’m not even thinking of using Donovan, because Pebbles lost much more than you did when you both came back that day. I’m, well, thinking of doing something very wrong. I’m going to send him home.’

‘It’s obvious that they are hiding their project as we are hiding ours,’ Daniels had continued. ‘But there is only one man over there who could head it and I know how to contact him. I’ll see that he finds out about Pebbles. We can say that he has been wandering around like an idiot--right now, after that trip, we won’t have to lie about it--and that we only discovered his real identity from an illustration in an old magazine. He’ll be taken into their project, cared for and eventually recover and be interrogated by our project’s opposite numbers. They will be surprised and, I hope, delighted to get information from him on both projects. It might be enough to make the two non-existent projects join forces. We need a fresh viewpoint if we’re ever to lick this time-travel problem.

‘I’ve already mentioned my idea to the top man,’ Daniels had added. ‘He said I should be shot for being a traitor, but he didn’t actually forbid it...’

When was that?
Carson thought.
How old am I...?

Old, the red button, the trips never remembered because in his mind they had never happened. Daniels and the girl ... Jean ... talking, laughing, almost crying as she had said, ‘When is it going to stop? How many trips, how many years are you going to do this to him?’ ‘Soon, we hope,’ Daniels had replied. ‘We are beginning to get a feed-back from our opposite numbers. They have been following a line which we overlooked, and vice-versa. I’d say that in two, maybe three years we will have instantaneous
space
-travel, anywhere, with no time penalty. I realise the strain this puts on you, Doctor, but you are getting better and faster each time. And remember, we only forced him to go the first time--after that he was quite insistent about volunteering. He really wants to go out there, Jean.’

‘I know he does and I wouldn’t think of stopping him. At times I’m quite proud of the idiot … ‘

There was a non-sound of mental gears crashing as Daniels tried to change the subject.

‘I never suspected that time-travel would have cosmetic applications. You should try a trip yourself one day. I’m sure Joe would not mind returning the compliment and nursing for you ... ‘

‘Are you suggesting, Mr Daniels, that I am beginning to look like a hag?’

‘Oh dear. How I manage to go on talking so clearly with my foot in my mouth never ceases to amaze me. I was only suggesting a theory to explain the absence of lines of worry, experience or wild living from his face, and his youthful air generally. We
know
, from the last trip but one, that he will live to a ripe old age. Is it possible that if the mind dictates and largely controls the physical condition of the body, then a regular mental spring-cleaning of this kind could have a very good effect on the ...’

How old am I?
Carson thought fearfully.
How many trips and how much time between them?

In the seething chaos that was his waking and dreaming mind the answers came, not in single words and sentences but as sharp, bright, palpable incidents complete with dialogue. The tiny holes and cracks in that big black sheet of glass were barely noticeable now. Someone had heaved a brick through it and the light was pouring in.

‘ .. This trip would, if you accepted it, involve drastic rejuvenation and loss of experience,’ Daniels was saying. ‘You would arrive with the physiological age and body of a boy of six and the mental ability of, well, I don’t have to go into that--let’s just say that the only memories you would have available for recovery when you got back would be those you experienced between birth and the age of six, so that you would never be really normal again. Set against this is the fact that you would materialise within fifty miles of the surface of...’

‘No.’

‘I don’t blame you. But there are still some nice spots for you to visit on a plus jump. Three months from now we can place you two hundred miles from Mars and next week, if you agree and the ship is ready in time, within spitting distance of Ganymede. Then late next year--the planetary and stellar motions are so complex it will take us nearly that long to work out the exact position and timing--a jump of four months will put you very close to Pluto … ‘

There had been eleven trips. He had not and did not remember them, of course, because they had been wiped from his mind along with everything else during the minus jump back. But he had seen films taken by automatic camera in his capsule. They had shown all these wonders and many more, they had shown interstellar space far beyond the edge of the solar system when he had jumped, not a few days or months, but forty years ahead, and they had shown himself, middle-aged and sometimes older, looking eagerly at a view he would never remember. He heard as well as saw himself talking in his old, weak, excited voice as he described the view and taped instrument readings and carried out experiments ordered by the project engineers. Once the film had shown him dead.

That had been the result of a temporal over-shoot. Daniels refused to tell him how far into the future he had gone on that occasion because no man should be told even the approximate date of his own death. He could not remember that incident, either, so that another host of philosophical questions remained unanswered. The other questions and paradoxes they managed to avoid ...

‘I agree that it would be more economical to make the double journey from the earth’s surface, perhaps from the interior of a large hangar,’ he remembered Daniels saying, ‘but there are two very good reasons why we cannot risk it. One, it would be practically impossible to explain away a space communications link with associated equipment serving a vehicle which apparently never leaves the ground, and two, if there was the slightest error in timing or equipment malfunction we might have the vehicle arriving back before it had set off and trying to occupy the same space. The resultant explosion might wipe out the city, maybe even the country, and very likely give an accidental start to the final war.’

‘But one of these days we’ll crack the problem, Joe. We’re very close to doing it now. When this work started I thought time-travel was
more
impossible than instantaneous travel through space, and I still think so. We took the wrong turning somewhere. Even at two hundred and fifteen miles per second your life is only long enough to take you about one twentieth of the way to the nearest extra-solar planets. But don’t worry, soon you’ll be able to go to the stars and look around and remember everything when you come back. But right now you will have to be satisfied with being poor old Joe Carson, the chief security officer with ... problems.’

Poor Joe Carson ...

He came fully conscious then, muttering and squirming in the bed and trying to get up. Immediately she was leaning over him, smoothing his hair and running her fingers along his cheek. Suddenly, but very gently, he reached up and drew her down until their lips met. For a few seconds she tried to pull free and then she spent the rest of the time trying to get closer.

It was coming back. All of it.

Poor Joe Carson, the man who had nervous break-downs the way other people had head colds. Over-work was the reason, everyone said, and that was why the company were keeping him on and employing an assistant for him who really did all the work. Eleven breakdowns in four years, wasn’t it? The first one had needed five months to recover from but in recent years he was rarely absent for more than a few weeks. It was strange how healthy and happy he looked when he was well, then suddenly he would be gone again for more treatment. It was the Marshall girl they were all really sorry for. Joe Carson had married her after his first breakdown, probably working on her sympathy, and they had been a loving and devoted doctor and patient ever since. But the girl did not seem to mind.

No
, thought Carson,
she doesn’t ...

The black window was gone now, completely smashed. Even the odd pieces adhering to the frame had dropped away. He relaxed his hold on her just enough to give room for their lips to move and said, ‘This is the part I always like. The Princess Charming and the Sleeping Beast bit...’

Suddenly she was lying beside him and dripping tears all over his face. ‘Oh, Joe,’ she said. ‘Welcome home...’