Free Tomorrow Is Too Far by James White

everything they said to him and his clothes were always muddy and rumpled. Then one day he arrived looking as if he had fallen into a muddy ditch and somebody had taken him into the club-house to dry off. They discovered that he was not a tramp, that except for the fresh mud his clothes were clean and that he was not a nut--just retarded, childish.
    So they found odd jobs for him to do. He could not talk very well and some of the mistakes he made in word and deed were very ... elementary. When he was not tidying the club-house or helping make sandwiches behind the bar, he could always be found standing beside a plane and looking into the cockpit, his face like that of a child trying to do a difficult problem in mental arithmetic.
    On the weekend of the yearly international rally, when aircraft from all over had flown in to take part in the first day’s flying display, John Pebbles had turned up in a dark suit with only his shoes muddy and no tie. The CFI’s wife had insisted that Jeff Donnelly give him a club tie--he had learned how to clean his shoes by then--because he never took the money they tried to give him from time to time. He did not seem to understand money, nor was he capable of using public transport to get from where he lived to the airfield, hence the muddy shoes. Somehow he had become the club mascot, replacing the export reject cross-eyed idol somebody had brought back from India, and without being too forceful about it the members let it be known that this was one lame dog who was not to be kicked.
    Two weeks after the rally Wayne Tillotson visited the club to get, as he was fond of putting it, the taste of flying supersonic computers out of his mouth. On impulse he had taken John Pebbles in the passenger seat and, being a cautious man, strapped him in very firmly in case their mascot got violent. But the precaution was unnecessary--Pebbles’s reaction, according to Tillotson, had been one of excitement approaching ecstasy. Again on impulse he had allowed Pebbles to take control.
    They were gone for over two hours and when they returned Tillotson could not talk about the trip in detail. Pebbles had tried to say a lot but he did not at that time have the vocabulary and he was so excited that he stuttered like a machine-gun. Shortly afterwards Tillotson got him a job in Hart-Ewing’s.
    It was not a very good or well-paid job, Donnelly understood, but Pebbles did not smoke or drink or have girl-friends, so he had been able to spend most of his pay on flying lessons. He qualified very quickly and stopped being the club mascot, although if anything the members liked him even more and were intensely proud of him for the way he had overcome his disability. Later he got his instructor’s rating which allowed him to fly more while actually being paid a small fee for doing so, and he had checked out on several twin-engined types and was talking of trying for his commercial licence.
    Flying, studying and working at Hart-Ewing’s was all that he seemed to do. Apparently he was trying to broaden his studies as much as possible, but he still dropped conversational bricks and made elementary, but embarrassing, mistakes on social occasions.
    When they heard about his background newcomers to the club sometimes worried about the possibility of his having a mental relapse while flying with them ...
    ‘ ... I’m no psychologist,’ Jeff went on quickly, ‘but he seems to be improving mentally rather than falling back. We all thought he was retarded at first--you know, a grown man with the mind of a child. In many ways he still is a child, but not in an aeroplane! I wish I knew what went wrong with him as a kid, Joe. It’s as if his intelligence was there all the time, building up pressure, just waiting for someone to pull the plug out.
    ‘More than anyone else,’ Donnelly ended seriously, ‘it was Tillotson who pulled out the plug. Pebbles has never looked back since then.’
    ‘This,’ said Carson, ‘is an