Tomorrow Is Too Far (20 page)

A few minutes later two hands appeared over his shoulder, grasped his and two voices wished him good luck. His ears popped as the hatch slammed shut.

‘Minus twenty-seven minutes and counting,’
said the speaker just above his head in Daniels’s dry tones.
‘Are you comfortable, Joe?’

‘Yes,’ said Carson.

‘Would you like to talk to Doctor Marshall?’

‘Yes.’

But when Jean came on he found that he could not say anything which was not utterly banal. Daniels murmured something about not wanting to intrude on what was undoubtedly going to be a tender farewell and he had work to do in Control, anyway. In the large fraction of a second that it took for him to open and close the office door behind him, Carson heard screaming. Or perhaps wailing would be a better description of the sound, because it seemed to be a product of distress rather than pain.

Tillotson was supposed to have made a noise like that during re-entry before his capsule burned up, but who was the third guinea-pig and what were they doing to him...?

‘I don’t know, Joe. When I was talking to John Pebbles someone got the wires crossed for a few seconds and I heard it, too. All Daniels would say was that the man was safe, the capsule parachute has opened and been spotted by their private chopper and I will be going out in my professional capacity to the place they’re taking him. He said to try not to let it worry you, Joe.’

‘Hah! ‘

‘He also said that I should use my discretion about telling you who the man is when I do find out.’

Carson waggled his head violently, trying to shake his brains into more effective thinking. He was sure that he now had all the important pieces of the puzzle, but they just would not fit together no matter how he moved them around. While he was still thinking hard the distant door opened and closed again and he heard Daniels say something quietly to Jean.

Maybe if he was given another piece...

‘What about Pebbles?’

‘Calmer now, but still confused. He hasn’t said anything that you don’t already know about the project or himself. Do you want to talk to him?’

‘Not yet,’ said Carson. ‘But try him with that tape, then let me listen to his reaction. Daniels? Can you answer one question? What are the effects--
effects
, remember--of your instantaneous space-drive on human passengers...?’

Several minutes dragged by, during which he heard Jean phoning to someone to bring her tape-recorder to the office, before Daniels replied. When he spoke he sounded guarded, worried and, so far as the listening Carson was concerned, not at all reassuring.

‘You are very persistent, Joe. By now I would have thought that you had enough to think about out there, but since thinking is all you will be able to do I suppose it does no harm to confuse you further. The effects of what we call a plus trip on human beings and small experimental animals are negligible and quite painless. The effects of a minus trip on animals are also, we are pretty sure, painless. But there is a loss of physical co-ordination and severe mental confusion which lasts several weeks--in animals, that is. You will be the third man to make a minus trip.

‘We had hoped that Wayne Tillotson, being much brighter and better co-ordinated than a mouse or a guinea-pig, would have been able to fight or throw off these effects and maintain control of his vehicle during re-entry or at least allow us to handle it from here if he didn’t feel capable of it. With Pebbles and yourself we are taking no chances--you have no control.

‘The effect of the drive, as you call it, on non-organic material--the capsule, its systems and equipment, your clothing--is nil. On your body as a whole, not very much. But on your mind and nervous system ... Well, even I am guessing here, but you have to realise that basically the drive is a ... a philosophical thing and it may well be that, the universe and the minds it contains are interdependent … ‘

Daniels laughed, not unkindly, and added,
‘That should be enough for anyone to think about. You are at minus eight minutes, Joe,’

Before Carson could reply, Jean said,
‘I’m not sure that I approve of using this, but I will ... ‘

The tape cut in at that point. It had been prepared by a company who were not even remotely connected with the project, so the things it said were general rather than specific. But it dealt with everything Carson knew or suspected about Pebbles before, during and after his stay at the clinic and an unspecified industrial complex. It called Pebbles by his real name and it was in Russian. In short it was a psychological bomb designed to demolish an already weakened case of amnesia.

It exploded on target at precisely minus fourteen seconds.

‘Wait!’ said Carson urgently. ‘I want to hear this ...! ‘

‘At minus eleven seconds! Turn up your gain, Joe. Right up, so you can hear it above the sound of the motors … ‘

Carson turned up the volume as Daniels had suggested until the voice sounded as though it would blow off the hatch, then he had ignition and discovered that it was not nearly loud enough. The combined racket of rocket motors and receiver made it difficult to think. He felt the ship began to creep into the sky, then pick up speed until something big and strong and invisible was trying to push him through the bottom of his couch ...

The voice of Daniels and Jean blared in over the other one saying
‘It looks good, Joe’
and
‘Safe home, dear’
and then there was only the voice of John Alexei Ouspensky Pebbles talking fast and not very coherently in two languages.

‘.. .And it was just like this project. Nobody knew what would happen exactly--the lab animals had not appeared to suffer very much more than a few weeks mental confusion and their instinctive behaviour patterns did not. change. A man would be able to do much better, they thought, so I volunteered and they killed me, Joe. They wiped out my mind. Now I know what they did, from the memories of a week before they did it and my life since Nurse Sampson found me on the beach.

‘They suspected that the minus trip would rewind some of the memory tape, but instead it was wiped clean. They didn’t realise that a man’s brain can’t run backwards, so they killed my personality, memories, everything! They were my friends just like you and Jean and Daniels are my friends, and now you are going to kill me, too ...!’

With great difficulty Carson inflated a chest which seemed to have a baby elephant sitting on it, and said, ‘But John, you didn’t die permanently. It took nearly five years but you got it all back …’

‘I don’t know that, Joe--I still can’t remember very well what I was like. It has been a new life since then, a different one--a different me. And now I’m going to lose even that. ..!’ The voice bellowing in his ear above the thunder of the rockets broke into furious Russian for a few seconds before reverting to English. ‘... You can’t do this to me again. Please. Don’t let them do it to me, Joe. Don’t let them do it to you ... ‘

Daniels’s voice roared in.

‘I’m sorry, I can’t leave you out there even if you really wanted me to--the minus trip is the only way of getting you back, now. You have only five seconds, John. I’m sorry. At the speed the galaxy is spinning we can’t delay ... ‘

‘Joe! Jean! Don’t let ... ‘

Abruptly the voices ceased their bellowing. A few seconds later the second stage fell away and the weight left Carson’s chest. But there was an even greater load he had to get off his chest.

‘Daniels! ‘

‘I’m really sorry, Joe. All that was as much of a surprise to me as it was to you--we need time to think about it. But I didn’t want anything to happen that would ... unsettle you. But there is no time to talk about it because in a few minutes you will be ... ‘

‘Shut up and
listen
! ‘ said Carson furiously. He felt suddenly enlightened, horribly afraid, completely ashamed of his part in the Pebbles business and angrier than he had ever been in his life. ‘Daniels, listen to me! Daniels, you are
not
going to sick Donovan on to John Pebbles. To hell with security and your project--he isn’t and never was a spy and I don’t want him harmed by Donovan or any other ... ‘

Jean’s voice came in then.

‘I’ll see that nothing happens to him. But if he arrives back in the same condition as last time, he will scarcely be a security risk. And neither will you, Joe. Will they, Mr Daniels...?’

She sounded angrier even than Carson, and almost on the point of tears.

‘No, Doctor, of course not. There would be no point now that we know the other side are working on it, too. They must have been keeping it just as secret from their people as we are from ours, and probably for the same reasons. But how Pebbles arrived on that beach, naked--Wayne did the first plus trip naked, of course, because we weren’t sure of the effects clothing might have in those days and we wanted to play safe. Pebbles must have gone off course, splashed down close inshore, and sunk. Part of the capsule parachute was found farther along the beach and the rest of it is either still attached to the sunken vehicle or it was carried away by the ebb. He must have remembered--or known instinctively--how to swim .. ’

Jean broke in,
‘Joe will be able to remember something or ... or someone ...?’

‘I expect so, Doctor. But right now there is something you should think about, Joe. You are not going the long way under conventional rocket power to the rendezvous point. Instead you will make an instantaneous plus trip to that point in space, then hang around for an hour.. ‘
--he made a noise which was probably meant to be a laugh--‘..
to avoid, well, too many comings and goings. When we give the signal from here you will return, instantaneously, to orbit around the earth.

‘In a way this is an honour, Joe. Usually we send them out only a few hours equivalent distance--five or six million miles, that is--on rocket power, which can take anything up to a week, before bringing them back with the yellow button. But you we are sending out for a full day, more than eighteen million miles, using the drive both ways.

‘Wayne was scheduled to make the first plus and minus trip...

‘If you look to the left of the big clock on the main panel--the one with the red and yellow hands--you will see a red and a yellow button. Between them is a counter registering seconds. When it reaches zero press the yellow button. There is no discomfort during a plus trip.

‘It might help your morale a little if you pushed the button, Joe. But if you don’t, we will.’

Carson looked at the counter, which was flickering down through the one hundred and twenties, then out of the port. The scene was so much sharper, more awe-inspiring and beautiful than he had expected that he found himself growing a little calmer. He still doubted that the view was worth getting himself killed for even if his body would not technically die. Then he began to wonder if he was not mad for having any doubts at all about a thing like that. Reluctantly he tore his eyes away from the scene outside and back to the counter.

His silence seemed to be making Daniels uncomfortable.

‘What. I don’t understand is how the other side got on to this idea. Admittedly the journals and papers which started me thinking along these lines were available to them as well, but ... ‘

‘There is a time for steam engines and a time for aeroplanes and now,’ Carson said bitterly as he reached for the yellow button, ‘it is time-travel time … ‘

There was no discomfort, no sensation of any kind other than the shock of surprise at seeing the earth suddenly switched off and replaced by stars and a Sun which was too far away. Carson had never felt so alone in all his life.

Tomorrow
, he thought,
is too far
.

It was not time-travel in the accepted Wellsian sense, where a few decades of travel into the future placed the time-machine and its operator in the same house and room that he had left, but in an older, perhaps ruined version of the same building, or where a similar jaunt into the past materialised them on rough ground before the place had been built. Time-travel stories of that kind had taken too much for granted.

The present-day time-traveller had to be an astronaut as well. When he pressed the big yellow or red button he materialised in the past or future in exactly the same point in space--but in the meantime the earth, the solar system and the galaxy had either moved on or had not arrived there yet...

The earth rotated once every twenty-four hours to give it a rotational velocity at the equator of over one thousand miles per hour--Carson was not sure of the rotational speed at the latitude of the launching pad--and, making due allowances for the perturbations caused by major-planet gravitational effects, the earth’s orbital speed as it circled the sun was about eighteen point five miles per second. Meanwhile the sun and the millions of other stars comprising the spiral arm of the galaxy which it occupied wheeled ponderously around the galactic centre at a velocity of two hundred and fifteen miles per second.

Time-travel involved no spatial displacement. It was just that everything in creation was moving in several different directions at once.

Carson could imagine the early experiments and the jubilation when one of the test objects--probably a radio transponder or similar instrument capable of signalling its presence over vast distances--vanished to appear again many millions of miles out in space. They would have thought that an instantaneous space drive was almost within their grasp and that the exploration of the planets and neighbouring solar systems was only a few years off. Instead they had discovered a space-drive which required conventional rocket propulsion to get out to or return from the time-travel point if the astronaut was not to return a mindless idiot.

Travel towards the future was safe, apparently, but into the past meant oblivion, personality death, a one hundred per cent thorough brain-wash.

Why?

The question required a quick answer, but somehow the necessity for finding it did not drive Carson into a panic, make him lose control of himself or start pleading with Daniels to be let off the hook. Out here, amid all this grandeur, it seemed to him that any display of purely human weakness would be in impossibly bad taste.