Read Tomorrow Is Too Far for Free Online

gone home, so there would be nobody here to tidy up until tomorrow when Daniels unlocked his office.
    Carson examined the drawing as closely as possible without touching it or allowing his breath to disturb the spilled ash, then he sat down carefully in one of the chairs to think.
    He could not be absolutely sure that the drawing and ashtray set-up was a trap, but his certainty was as close to one hundred per cent as made no difference. That being the case he had to decide whether the trap had been set merely as a precaution or because they thought someone--perhaps Carson himself--was on to them. Again he could not be sure, but he seriously doubted the latter possibility.
    Having Sands question Pebbles about the transfer of the waste to the storeroom was the sort of thing expected of Carson, just as he was expected to fuss and ask questions about the fire for weeks afterwards. The unexpected things he had done--the long-term and heavily disguised enquiries, the business with the lights tonight when he had identified Tillotson and his presence here in Daniels’s office--were not yet known to them. The reason for the trap might simply be Tillotson’s recent fright.
    It would be interesting to see if they continued to set traps after they had an opportunity of seeing his memo to the electricians ...
    All at once Carson felt an overwhelming, angry impatience with the whole stupid project. He knew there was something important going on and that it was his duty to know about it. He dearly wanted to question Daniels, Tillotson and the others directly--he was sure that he knew enough to stampede them into telling him the whole story. After all, a project of this importance needed a security officer.
    Or did it...?
    The thought that somewhere in the company there was a shadow security officer, someone charged with the protection of the really valuable and important work, someone whose organisation might take a very poor view of Carson prying into something which was not his concern made him feel frightened as well as angry and inadequate.
    Who was the other security man and which organisation did he represent? Certainly, if he existed at all, he was operating outside the security department Carson headed.
    This was his business and whether they wanted it or not they would have his protection. Carson wriggled uncomfortably in the chair and began to consider the anatomy of a project, any project.
    At the top were the men responsible for the original idea or for developing someone else’s original idea. In the middle were the people who helped break down the idea into large numbers of detailed drawings and the engineers who decided how best to convert these drawings into three dimensional metal on someone’s bench. In this age of over-specialisation it was not expected that the man who produced the detailed hardware should understand, or even care, about the part his particular chunk of hardware played in the project as a whole.
    But somewhere within the vast Hart-Ewing complex hardware for this ultra-secret project was being made, modified, re-made and sometimes scrapped--there were always teething troubles with a new project, even the relatively simple and non-secret ones. Carson did not think he would get very far questioning the men at the bottom--there were too many thousands of them. A better bet would be the middle men, the engineers and draughtsmen who had to iron out the bugs and generally see that all the pieces fitted together. They should be able to help him, except that all the indications were that they also were unaware of what was really going on. There were too many middle men to keep a secret of this magnitude so they were being used and subtly misdirected by the people at the top, just as Pebbles had been used but on a more impersonal level.
    The idea, he had already decided, was to use the people they were using to find out what they were using them for ...
    As he was switching off the lights and relocking the