Tomorrow Is Too Far by James White Read Free Book Online

Someone--perhaps as a joke--used Mr Pebbles to transport the combustibles to the site of the fire. As you probably know he is a very impressionable type, easily led but not, so far as I could judge from only a few minutes’ conversation with him, a moron.
    ‘If I knew something about his background,’ Carson concluded, ‘I might be able to stop people making use of him like this.’
    ‘In that case,’ she said, smiling. ‘I don’t mind discussing him with you. Physically he is A-1--no sick leave since he joined us, no industrial accidents or injuries. Since the pre-employment medical we haven’t seen him here. I’m afraid there isn’t much to tell.’
    Carson nodded. ‘Nevertheless I can’t help feeling impressed by the way you reel off his medical history--or lack of it--without reference to the records. Can you do that with all twelve thousand of us, Doctor?’
    Marshall laughed. ‘Only the memorable ones.’
    Carson said seriously. ‘I’m more interested in his mental condition. Bill Savage showed me his dossier, but it said nothing beyond the fact that he was retarded and classified as disabled. It did not go into his handicap in detail, and I’ll need to know about that if I’m to talk to him without making him nervous and stop people playing dangerous jokes on him.
    ‘Would you mind,’ he added, ‘telling me everything you can remember about the behaviour of this memorable employee?’
    She did not reply at once. Looking at her Carson thought that she was one of the most vital and attractive girls he had ever seen. Her wonderful complexion and skin was probably the result of her being light on cosmetics and heavy on the soap and water and not, as Carson had once believed as a very young man, because the things female doctors and nurses had to do caused a permanent blush. He wondered why she had not been married years ago, and whether she was really the iceberg everyone said she was; or was she simply too dedicated to her profession? ’I wasn’t present at his pre-employment physical, you understand,’ she said suddenly. ‘My only direct contact with him was while I was administering the visual acuity tests...’
    Considering the man’s disability and the job he was intended to fill the tests had been a formality. If he could have distinguished the outline of the chart he was through! But it was obvious from the start that the test was worrying Pebbles. He looked confused and frightened and oddly helpless. He stammered and sweated and could not even make an attempt at reading the chart. At one point she had been afraid that he would break down and cry.
    She had explained to him that it was only necessary to read the first three lines, she pointed to the three lines he had to read and then she had left him alone in the room for a few minutes expecting that he would cheat by moving closer and memorising the lines she had indicated. But when she had returned he was still staring at the chart, moving his lips and looking puzzled. She thought that nobody could be that stupid but she wanted to be sure.
    It was rather like trying to draw out a shy and emotionally disturbed child---she already had had some experience in that area--except that the child was six feet tall and built like Tarzan.
    His trouble, it had gradually become clear, stemmed from the fact he was only just learning to read. Proudly he had shown her a magazine he had in his hip pocket. It was the first part of a children’s encyclopaedia of the type published in a series of weekly instalments. There was a big, garish letter ‘A’ on the cover surrounded by pictures of animals, amphibians, aeroplanes, astronomical telescopes and so on. The interior illustrations were very simple and the type-face large and open. Pebbles had said that the doctor at the clinic had given him the book when he had left to come to the aircraft factory. He had shown her the three pictures of different kinds of aeroplanes in the book and the fifty or so