Free Tomorrow Is Too Far by James White Page B

knife or spoon to use or how to keep food on the plate while eating.
    But Pebbles was not available for questioning or as an object of friendly interest. Charlie Desmond, his new department head, said that he was owed two weeks leave and had decided to take it before settling into the new job. Carson suggested that, while he was there, it might be a good idea to check door and window fastenings and the department’s fire-fighting arrangements. Charlie said to be his guest and delegated Bob Menzies, one of his engineers, to go around with him.
    While they were speaking the constant thump of simulated loads hitting wing and undercarriage specimens under test punctuated every word, hurrying on the conversation and doing nothing at all to soothe Carson’s nerves or reduce his impatience. Pebbles’s absence worried him for some reason and for reasons equally vague he felt that the project was reaching a critical point. If only there was more information ...
    Menzies was not affected by the noises off and talked easily and freely. About Pebbles he did not know anything for sure, but there were rumours that he was spending a working holiday doing a training course somewhere, probably as a preparation for his new job. Not for the clerical position in the EH93 test section, Menzies added--there was another rumour that when he returned Pebbles would be moving again to a better job in the module test area.
    A little later when Carson displayed mild interest--no one but himself knew the effort that mildness cost him--in the big, shining cone of a life support and command module which occupied a cradle in one of the storerooms he was told that Menzies was not sure why it was there. The modules came in from time to time, they were defective and at a guess he would say that they were sold as scrap, or one of the Government agencies might have bought a few for training and simulation purposes.
    But the best man to ask about that was Dreamy Daniels. The chief designer and his crowd were in the storeroom half the night, sometimes--measuring and fitting test equipment, Menzies supposed, to find out why such important hunks of hardware had to be rejected in the first place and to decide on a good story if one of themselves was responsible ...
    ‘ .. I’m a cynic, Mr Carson, if you haven’t guessed that much already,’ Menzies said laughing. ‘Oh, would you like to climb in. They even have a padded acceleration couch in this one ...’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Carson as he wriggled feet first into the hatch. He began to feel cynical, too, but for a different reason.
    The couch was sinfully comfortable and, so far as he could see, complete with harness, air supplies and associated life support equipment. Facing him at waist level there was a control panel also complete except for one large round hole which seemed to stare at him like a computer pirate through its empty eye socket. Through the opening there was enough light to show a space of perhaps four cubic feet and a bunch of cable looms, their individual strands opened and tagged where they were supposed to join the missing piece of equipment. Everything else in the module looked bright and new and complete, lacking only power to be fully functioning.
    It had become impossible for him to believe that an intricate and expensive fabrication like this could reach such an advanced stage before someone discovered an error which necessitated it being scrapped.
    But if this vehicle was not to be scrapped then it had to be the end-result of the secret project, or perhaps the equipment destined for that empty space was what the project was all about. At the same time the vehicle was small, almost as small as the early Mercury capsules. Did its size suggest that the Government was giving it only limited support? Perhaps the idea was potentially valuable but too radical to warrant the cost of pushing a greater weight into space. Or the missing device might do the pushing itself and be very