Tomorrow Is Too Far Read Free

designed, perhaps, to make Carson look ridiculous. But initiating proceedings to carry out a security re-check on any employee was not something to be done as a joke. The procedure was much more thorough and wide-ranging than that carried out for a simple pre-employment check. As well as the long and costly investigation with its intensive surveillance and invasion of privacy, the implications for the man concerned were, to say the very least, serious...
    The telephone derailed his train of thought, but only temporarily because it was Silverman.
    ‘Think of the Devil,’ said Carson drily, then went on, ‘Ted, I want to talk to you about the master-spy you’re harbouring in your department...’
    Silverman laughed uproariously for several seconds before gaining control of the paroxysm with evident difficulty. ‘Joe, you’ll be the death of me! Master-spy, ha-ha. Obviously Donovan has been talking to you. Donovan is a good man, Joe, seriously. Conscientious, keen--maybe too keen, but that really isn’t a fault now, is it? I barely mentioned Pebbles to him, you know, but he jumped at it--practically bayed like a bloodhound--and insisted on making out an official report. Wish I had a few keen people like that in my department...’
    Carson tried to imagine Donovan baying like a bloodhound or telling a lie and could do neither. Somebody was bending the truth.
    ‘ .. But I didn’t mean him to take it that seriously,’ Silverman was saying. ‘Pebbles is a good man, Joe. Hardworking. If he gets this new job I’ll be sorry to lose him, but I like to see people of his kind bettering themselves. Within limits, of course … ‘
    ‘Is he coloured?’
    Silverman laughed again. ‘Are you suggesting I’m a racialist, Joe? No, he’s white, and the matter isn’t all that important. But I don’t think we should discuss it over the phone. Security, you know.’ He had another paroxysm of mirth which he switched off suddenly to add, ‘I’ll see you at lunch. And Joe, don’t forget to bring your cigarette-lighter-shaped tape-recorder...’
    ‘Lunch it is,’ said Carson, hanging up on the inevitable laughter.
    Before returning to his paperwork Carson paused for a few minutes to wonder what it was about Pebbles that was so unimportant yet urgent. Was it possible that Silverman was on to something--something so tenuous or circumstantial that he risked making a fool of himself by reporting it directly? Carson doubted it. At the same time he could not help thinking that it would be nice if, just once, he could catch himself a spy.
    Carson stared at his heaped IN tray without seeing it, sighed and slipped into his favourite day-dream.
    It need not be a Fuchs or a Pontecorvo or even one of the professionals for whom the other side would be willing to swap a couple of imprisoned amateurs. He would settle for a simple case of passing on classified information for sale to the newspapers or another company. If he could even interrupt a minor act of sabotage and apprehend the culprit, that would satisfy him and serve to make people take his department and himself just a little more seriously.
    Carson knew that he was not taken seriously, and neither was his department. That, of course, was nobody’s fault but his own. When he had first come to Hart-Ewing’s he had been very keen and just a little too smart--he had decided that to be a really efficient security officer he should project the image, not of an energetic new broom but of a rather average, bumbling character who was something of a fussy old woman. This meant that he could not take part in the many after-hours social and sporting activities sponsored by Hart-Ewing’s, that he could make a few if any close friends within the company and that he would probably grow fat through lack of strenuous exercise.
    He had told himself that being popular or even well-liked was not everything and, for the first year or so in the job, Carson had actually believed it. He had worked very