Tomorrow Is Too Far

by James White

  ‘I think you’ve got it, Joe.. ,’ began Daniels excitedly, reacting to something Carson had said earlier, then stopped because Carson had gone on talking.

  On the panel a few inches away the red hands told him that he had less than twenty minutes and the red button stared at him, a little like Donovan’s gun. He was going to commit suicide in ... sixteen minutes, and he wondered if there was any other way of getting back without effectively killing himself...

  ‘I am hoping that my own case may be somewhat different,’ he went on quickly, ‘in that I did not come the long way out. The only thinking I have done which will be unlearned at the jump back took place during the hour I have been out here--an hour, remember, instead of several days as was the case with Tillotson and Pebbles. I am hoping that the mental shock of having this hour removed from my mind will be less than that suffered by my predecessors. If this is so my “cure” should not take as long as John’s did, either, because I expect to be surrounded by familiar things and people--people who know what has happened to me--from the start.’

  ‘The people who surrounded John Pebbles did not know what they were supposed to do and did not even speak his language.’

  Carson took a deep breath, then ended, ‘What do you think, Jean. Does all this sound reasonable?’

  But it was Daniels who replied first.

  ‘I think you have the answer, Joe! And you’re damn right we’ll take care of you and help bring back your memory as fast as we can. Jean has already started. Apparently there is a whole range of medication that could help ... she will probably tell you about it herself. I’ve got to go to Control right now to oversee your minus jump. You have about ten minutes. See you. And ... thanks, Joe.’

  Jean said, ‘How do you feel?’

  Carson felt angry suddenly as well as afraid. She was treating him as a patient already. But then he was her patient already and he would remain her patient for months or years to come. All at once it did not matter to him that he was going to forget everything, if he could be sure of forgetting his need for her.

  ‘I never wanted to be your patient, Jean,’ he said bitterly. ‘I was hoping for a less professional relationship.’

  It took much longer than two hundred seconds for the reply to come back. Then he heard her laughing, or rather making the strained, odd-sounding noise that a person makes who doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She said, ‘I know what I said about preferring healthy friends to sick patients, Joe. But please don’t worry about that. I mean it. You are a special case and ... and just because a baby has to be looked after for a while does not mean that it is sick ...’

  He had only a few minutes left and there did not seem to be anything else to say. Carson leaned towards the port and with his left hand near the red button he used his right to block off the glare from the sun. He thought about Jean and he stared at the spectacle outside, trying uselessly to print it and her indelibly on his mind. He thought that if something was to go wrong out here he could dive for all eternity without ever hitting the ground, but the thought did not worry him very much. He was too busy trying to remember everything that had ever happened to him and drink in all this splendour, the vast and incredible beauty of it all, because it was the last thing he would experience in his present life...

  The counter said minus five seconds.

  ‘Jean,’ he said very seriously, ‘Please don’t let me forget you...’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He felt very pleased with himself the day he learned how to make it light or dark at will by opening and closing his eyes. He did not know what day or light or dark or eyes were, or what was meant by opening and closing, but he could do it and it was great fun. Then a time came when it stayed dark whether he opened or closed his eyes. This made him feel angry and he cried. He did not at that time know what being angry or crying was, but he did it anyway and the light came on.

  The faces of a man and a girl looked down at him. The girl put her hand on his forehead and began to stroke it. He did not know what man, girl, faces, hand and forehead were either, but he could see and feel. He stopped crying.

  ‘Are you sure he is all right?’ said the man.

  ‘Look at the way he is opening and closing his eyes,’ said the girl. ‘He’s playing a game of some sort. That’s a very good sign ...’

  The words and sights and sounds went into his mind and circled endlessly, looking in vain for a place to live.

  Without knowing how or why, he felt sure that later they would find a home and he would be able to remember what it was that he had seen and heard. And the next day when he discovered how to play with his fingers, the sight and sound and soft feel of the girl was very pleasing to him, even though he did not know what that meant, either.

  They put him down on the floor and he found out how to roll about, crawl and walk by holding on to the furniture. He learned to eat off a spoon instead of sucking at a bottle. He looked forward to eating because it meant the girl putting her arm around his shoulder to hold him steady and he could push the side of his face against her. When she taught him how to hold and use his own spoon and sit at a table to eat, he cried at first. But then she diverted his attention by showing him the glass and flowers and trees at the bottom of the lawn and the clouds in the sky, and she demonstrated gently how the window glass could hurt his head if he tried to push through it. Or she would teach him how to go to the toilet by himself or play a game where he got in and out of complicated clothing ...

  But she always put her arms around him and held him close before he went to sleep.

  He still did not know what the things were that he was experiencing except between the times when he went to sleep and woke up. Then things happened which frightened him sometimes, but he thought he almost understood them.

  Without knowing what mind and black and glass were he thought of his mind as being behind a sheet of black glass. When he learned or saw or touched something new a tiny, shining hole appeared in the black glass with cracks of association radiating from it in all directions. He was sure that the things which were always happening around him should widen and lengthen the cracks, extend the associational network, link up those tiny, shining stars of knowledge.

  He did not know what cracks and associational networks and stars and frustrations were, but stars made him feel excited and afraid and it was very frustrating not to know what it was that his mind was thinking about.

  ‘No,’ said the sight-sound-smell-touch of the girl who was standing beside his chair with her hand on his head. ‘There is no real need for alphabet building blocks, or kindergarten teaching aids, or basic reading and maths. He should remember how to read, not have to have it taught to him all over again, even if he is a very fast learner. This time I’ll begin with illustrated encyclopaedias, aviation journals, samples of company paperwork. I’d like you to bring in a TV, and set up a projector and screen ...’

  ‘Rushing things a little, aren’t you?’ said the man on his other side, adding quickly, ‘I wasn’t criticising, Doctor. I know how you must feel after these past few years.’

  ‘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 i
n 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 o
f 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.’