"Certainly not. It is a private matter. But the boys at Croydon saw her
when we landed there. I remember their surprise--more surprised even, I
suppose, than when I wirelessed that I was coming in, and that knocked
them flat. Are you coming with me?"
"Yes."
"Then get behind me," he cautioned. "And hand me that gadget."
It was a length of intricately carved wood, about four feet long,
tapering toward one end and worn smooth by the palms of many hands.
O'Hara took it, tossed it into the air and caught it expertly by the
smaller end, a trick that must have taken practice. "Very useful," he
said, "if living is important--though I'm not too sure that it is. We
live too long, most of us, and at last we begin to think that living
is an end in itself. And so we want it easier and easier, with never a
thought that it can become too easy."
"You haven't found it easy lately, have you, O'Hara?"
"Not until I landed at Croydon," he replied. "But that was four hours
ago and it's gotten boring." He gripped the club of carved wood
tightly. "Now, open that door--"
So it had gotten boring, had it? Within three hours O'Hara had
vanished, both he and Nedra, as if they had never existed. I should
have known that I was not going to get documentation for any such
articles in the _Observer_. I must have been bemused by my real joy at
seeing O'Hara again after supposing that he was lost forever. Then,
too, the impact of what he had told me had blunted my sense of the
realities of life. For the moment I saw it all only as a tremendous
story--a story particularly tremendous to O'Hara and myself because of
our mutual origin.
For we were children together, went to school together, were
inseparable until he chose for his career the thankless if adventurous
life of a pilot in the International Patrol. I cannot say that I chose
my own career--I drifted into it, as so many journalists do, trying my
hand first at this and that and gradually retreating into the job of
writing about what others, with more spirit or greater advantage, were
doing in this world.
Yet it never occurred to me in those early days that the biggest job
that I would undertake would be writing about O'Hara. Nor to him, I
am sure. Adventure--yes, he had expected adventure, but not of the
sort to interest anyone except himself and possibly his surviving
relatives. The doubtful thrills of supersonic speed, the sensation
of flirting with death from atomic poisoning, the constant prospect
of plunging through the polar icecap at better than two thousand
miles an hour--these, perhaps, O'Hara anticipated as the ultimate
possibilities of his career in the Patrol. And then, always, he would
be closest to the riddle that since his childhood had absorbed him,
flying his charted course along the outer fringes of that dense wall
of radiation that enclosed like the half of a glass globe the Western
Hemisphere--the Atomic Curtain.
Neither of these were careers a native of the Prefecture of Britain
would have selected, but the truth is that they were among the best
open to us. Our two families had come together to England in that
great migration from North America which immediately preceded the
establishment of the Atomic Curtain. I remember O'Hara, then not
quite eighteen years old, questioning his father one night when I was
visiting him, as I often did, for he was my idol in those days, much
bigger than I and much bolder. I had never dared to ask these things.
"Why did our people leave America?" he asked. "It was their country,
wasn't it?"
"Yes, their country," his father answered solemnly, for that
word--_country_--still had a peculiarly religious sound to it, however
outmoded it had now become. "But they--your ancestor and those who
agreed with him--believed that what America was going to do was wrong."
"Excuse me, sir, I don't see why it was," O'Hara said. "If the
Americans--the Yanks"--and how he loved that word--"didn't like the
rest of the world, why shouldn't they have cut themselves off from it?"
"I'm sorry, Emmett, you're too immature to understand," his father
answered.
"Isn't that the answer that men give when they themselves do not
understand?" O'Hara persisted, and I held my breath.
But his father considered that, as he always considered anything
O'Hara said--they were people of logic, people of the exploring turn
of mind. At last he said, "Yes, that is true. I've never really
understood why they did it. When I was your age, I asked my father
these same questions. It seemed unfair that we should have given up
what I had so often heard was a considerable position in that world--in
North America--to come to this crowded hemisphere as emigrants, as
a suspected people, second class by birth and law, and solely in
obedience to the dictates of an ideal. But your grandfather himself was
a little vague upon these points--after all, he did not remember the
trip, he had only heard of it, how his people had been forced to give
up all possessions, to begin life anew in a country already too poor to
support its own citizens."
"You mention an ideal, sir," O'Hara said. "What is it?"
"It was that this was one world, or should have been one world, not
irrevocably halved by the Atomic Curtain. It was that if Providence had
wished them separate worlds, It would have made them so."
"Then it was a mistaken ideal," O'Hara said, "for if Providence had
intended this to be one world, it would be now."
His father smiled. "That's enough, my young philosopher. To bed with
you!"
And so we went to bed, but not to sleep, for O'Hara was excited by the
conversation. He lay flat upon the counterpane, his cheekbones pressed
against the butts of his palms and his dark eyes restless, seeming
lighted by the intense curiosity of his young mind, talking on and on
for hours, long after I was drowsy.
"It's always been like that," he told me. "Down through the countless
centuries of time--when a people have made a bad decision and have lost
everything by it, they have described their motive as obedience to an
ideal. Remember your American history?"
"How could I remember it?" I asked. "Nobody teaches that."
"They used to teach it. And they still have the books at Oxford. Great
reading, too--the Revolution, the Civil War, the three World Wars.
You'd be astonished how often that theme recurs in them--obedience to
an ideal. Yes, I suppose it's true, those of us who left the Western
Hemisphere before the Atomic Curtain blamed it on an ideal. And I'd
bet it's equally true that those who stayed, knowing that they would
forever be isolated from the world that you and I know, invoked the
same apology--an ideal guided them. Eternal peace, freedom from want
and from fear--"
A clock was striking somewhere in the house. It was one o'clock. I
shivered without knowing why.
"And did they find it, I wonder?" O'Hara's voice resumed. "What has
happened to the Americans in these two hundred and seventy years since
they launched the Atomic Curtain? And what would have happened to the
rest of us--to Europe and Asia and Africa--if they had not launched it?
For they were a wonderful people, wonderful improvisers, wonderfully
inventive. Oh, I don't mean the little things that we have here,
electric lights, the radio--but the big things, the sublime things
that changed history--or seemed about to change it. The atomic bomb of
Los Alamos, the hydrogen bomb of Bikini and the tests at Yucca Flats,
those alone were leading the world into new, strange paths, glorious
paths for the scientific mind, and all the world was following them
swiftly. All of us were to have the blessings along with the horrors of
atomic fission, until--"
"I know that much," I said. "Until the Third World War."