"I read a great deal," I retorted. "Contemporary things, the important
things, not long-forgotten books of useless American history."
"But you remember, don't you, why the Third World War stopped?"
"Oh, yes. It was thorium."
"Thorium," he whispered. "Yes, that was it--thorium. The greatest
of their improvisations! For when they devised the techniques for
the fission of thorium, so infinitely more plentiful in supply than
uranium, no combination of powers that lacked the formulae could
longer challenge them. They wrote the peace that they wanted with
those formulae. And that peace forbade atomic fission for the rest of
the world. No nation dared touch it, no scientist anywhere, except
in America, dared to experiment with it, knowing that the slightest
radiation detectable by Washington's scintillometers might bring within
the next half hour obliteration, complete obliteration.
"And actually, that was the conquest of the world. Yet they chose
instead of ruling their conquered world to erect around and above the
Western Hemisphere that vast umbrella of radioactivity, the Atomic
Curtain. And the two continents of North and South America were lost
behind it as utterly as if they had been swallowed in the seas that
girt their shores."
"Even with their thorium, they must have been afraid," I said.
O'Hara scoffed at me. "Of what? Maybe of themselves, maybe of their own
power, but certainly of nothing else. They could have destroyed the
other nations of the world, and the others were so well aware of it
that they have not since risked the science of fission, still dreading
the rain of warheads that might come screeching through the Atomic
Curtain. Even today, although a century and a half has passed, we're
still so obsessed with that dread that we maintain the International
Patrol, ceaselessly flying the outer fringe of radiation in the stupid
hope that if that rain of warheads comes, we shall have a warning of
it. But what good would a warning do? A few minutes to pray, perhaps.
For there's no defense and so it is a stupid, useless dread, made
terrible because beyond the Curtain all is mystery to us, something
that we no longer understand--"
"And cannot help," I pointed out.
But O'Hara did not hear me. "That's it," he cried. "The Mystery!
The greatest of all powers, unknown to us, a terra incognita. I'm
surprised that we, dreading them so much and knowing nothing of their
mind, do not worship them, for dread and ignorance and mystery are the
requisites for a god. A race of gods!"
"They may be all of that," I said. "I rather like the notion that I am
descended from a race of gods. Inflates my ego, which can bear a little
of it. Can't I go to sleep now?"
"Not even a race of gods could possibly keep you from that," O'Hara
said, and he put out the light.
It was a fixation. What he had said was true enough--for later on I
did get around to those long-forgotten useless books that gathered
cobwebs in a cluttered Oxford subcellar--but for most of us, scrabbling
like insects to earn a living for ourselves, the two lost continents
of the Western Hemisphere were not much more important than the rings
of Saturn--a phenomenon that did not drastically affect the price of
eggs. We knew, of course, that the World Council kept its International
Patrol circling as near the Atomic Curtain as its aircraft dared to go,
but that was a problem for the Twelve Old Men of Geneva, much as the
gradually extending icecaps of the two poles were their problem. Theirs
and O'Hara's--and the Sunday supplements.
The point is, we had lived with the vague knowledge of the Atomic
Curtain all our lives, and the whole thing was too fantastic either
to understand or to matter to the average run of us. It was like the
toadstools of our forests--they were quite poisonous, but so long as
we did not have to touch them, we ignored them. I remember a passage
from one of those books I finally unearthed at Oxford--a curious thing,
possibly a fake, and yet dressed out in the most pompous language,
purporting to be the considered opinion of some distinguished man of
science at what apparently was a famous university, a place called
Harvard, and confirming a suspicion that life was possible on Mars.
Yet nowhere in the American histories of that year, nor in any of
the contemporary American publications, could I find any evidence
of general alarm about it. So there was life on Mars. Presumably no
one bought extra ammunition for his gun, nor hoarded food, nor drank
himself to death, nor went to church more arduously because of any such
remote impracticality. Who was going to Mars? And who--to bring this
analogy down into our times--except the pilots of the International
Patrol meant to venture toward the well-defined and fortunately distant
zones contaminated by the Atomic Curtain?
Yet I must admit that something of O'Hara's fascination for it crept
contagiously into the letters that came back to me from those far-flung
and frigid bases out of which he flew for the Patrol. There was news in
them, too, although I did not always recognize it.
The first of these letters reached me within a month after I squeaked
onto the staff of the _Observer_. O'Hara had by then completed his
basic indoctrination with the International Patrol and was serving his
initial hitch in the least desirable of the Patrol's assignments, with
nothing behind him but the Antarctic seas and the vast polar cap, not a
city worth the name closer than Hobart, in Tasmania, completely across
the Antarctic Circle from his base.
It must have been dull work, flying from the Falkland Islands to
South Shetland, deafened by roaring jets and blinded by the frightful
gales that swirled around Cape Horn, and for variety he had the
constant ticking of his scintillometer telling him how closely he was
approaching the southern boundary of the Atomic Curtain, quite narrow
there, encompassing the Cape itself and the wild seas immediately
beyond.
Dull work? I remember O'Hara's first letter: "The black sky meets the
blacker water upon a horizon even more intensely black, a horizon that
is a ribbon of mourning constantly below the level of my eyesight,
as if these were dead seas and dead heavens. But the coloration is
deceptive, for they are not dead. The howling violence that must have
been the planet's birthing wail still echoes here, the raging winds
that must have screeched throughout infinity when Earth ripped loose
from the Sun--and beyond, ten miles ahead of me, perhaps, the Wall of
Death invisibly stands shimmering.
"One second's miscalculation at the speed I fly and I'd be into it.
Freezing one instant, roasted to the bone the next. How thick is that
wall? The guess that we credit oftenest is twelve miles. A scant twelve
miles of radioactivity, and I could fly that far in the time it would
take you to snap shut the fingers of your hand--perhaps my craft on its
momentum would plunge through. I think it would. I think I could aim it
for the southern tip of South America, and by the time that you could
walk across the editorial room there at the _Observer_ in London, I
would have smashed across the Atomic Curtain and landed on that coast
that once was Patagonia. Isn't that a challenge? A terrific challenge,
to be the first within two hundred and seventy years to reach the two
lost continents! But it has the undeniable drawback that I would be
dead, and so could not gloat like stout Balboa on a peak in Darien.
"I saw the Curtain doing its merry routine one day last week. I was
flying quite low, not a hundred feet above the surface of the sea,
making a customary check upon the water's radioactivity. We do this
every flight, to check upon the contamination of the water, which
usually is quite constant, flowing out from below the Curtain a
distance of fifty miles but decreasing in activity with an almost
mathematical precision. Yet when there is a really powerful gale
blowing southward or westward from the Curtain, from the tip of what
once was called Chile or Argentina, both now encompassed by the
Curtain, the surface currents sometimes are reversed from the Cape--the
fabled Cape Horn of early mariners--and the contamination flows much
further toward the Antarctic before it diffuses.
"Of course our base in the Falklands is mildly contaminated, all these
fringe areas are, and all of us have a touch of the atomic sickness,
just as those living in the tropics have malaria. You know what it's
like--nausea sometimes, and always diarrhea, a tendency toward bleeding
gums and conjunctivitis and--well, yes, dammit, falling hair, baldness.
I shall resemble the egg of the great auk in another ten years of this.
Sounds terrible. Actually, though, these are only tendencies, for we
do not expose ourselves beyond the lowest background counts upon our
scintillometers. We're taking no chances--this is a Patrol, not a
combat unit, for there's nothing to combat. Nothing, nothing but that
invisible curtain, at a fixed latitude and a fixed longitude for every
foot of its tens of thousands of miles, with only the variances of the
surface contamination that I mentioned. Which brings me back to what I
meant to tell you.
"I was patrolling one hundred feet above the ocean's surface when I
saw ahead of me, not quite to that black ribbon of a horizon I have
described, a strange dark object, apparently floating on the sea.
Immediately I changed course toward it, but when I had reached the
absolute limit of radioactivity that we are permitted the dark object
was still ten or more miles ahead of me.
"It must have been, at that instant, extremely close to the Curtain
itself. If it was not within it! Yet it was plowing toward me through
heavy seas, the first moving object I had ever seen in this sector.
"I was forced to turn back. Within the fraction of a second I had
lost it. But barring a gale, I had sufficient fuel for some minutes'
cruising. I made a tight arc and approached again. The object was still
there, and still approaching.
"I'm sure that had my squadron commander been spying upon me, he would
have grounded me for life. For in the next ten minutes I flew perhaps
a hundred oval patterns, approaching the object, retreating from
contamination, then reapproaching, again and again, trying to keep in
contact with it until it got close enough for inspection. By that time
my fuel could not be further safely expended, and I wirelessed back to
our Falklands base with my report, then continued on to South Shetland.
"A snowstorm screamed down on me minutes before I landed and I came in
blind. Had I spent another five minutes at those oval patterns I would
not have made it. Frightened me a little. I suppose I can become too
damned enamored of that mystery out there.
"But delay your literary fancies a minute. There is a sequel--for we
flew double patrols throughout the following week. The dark object
was not sighted again upon the surface of the sea--the blizzard, I
presume, obscured its week of passage. Then just yesterday a Patrol
craft over South Orkney Island picked up a disturbing buzz upon its
scintillometer. There should have been no such extreme contamination
that far south and west of the Curtain. We threw a dozen craft into the
sector within half an hour, and finally, wrecked on the craggy shores
of Coronation Island, we found our dark object.
"It was hot, very hot--too dangerous to examine closely. We put an
amphibian down alongside Coronation and they worked for several hours
with telescopic cameras. The pictures have just been developed here.
And I really did have something!
"What we've got, as nearly as we can determine from rather grainy
prints, is a kind of ship, fashioned of undressed logs, a very crude
and unseaworthy vessel I am sure, but also with the virtue of being
unsinkable. There is a cabin of sorts amidships of it with some sheets
of a shining material, similar to asbestos, tacked onto it. And close
to that, extremely blurred upon our prints, are three black objects
that we have decided must be men. That is, they must have been men
once, before they drifted into the Atomic Curtain. They are charcoal
now, but the pattern of arms and legs, however distorted in their
horrible death, shows distinctly. Three men upon a boat of logs, from
where?
"The Sandwich Islands, possibly. It would represent a tremendous
voyage, thousands of miles through the worst of weather, but where else
could men come from in these desolate seas?
"Unless you want to go along with me in the most improbable of
fantasies--unless they came from behind the Atomic Curtain! From the
Western Hemisphere, from the Lost Continents! Too absurd, of course.
We know the level that their civilization had achieved. They would not
now be using boats so crudely built of logs, and most assuredly, if
they did build it, they would not sail it into their Atomic Curtain.
No--purely fantasy, and yet I like it. I would give my next promotion
to go aboard that vessel! But I am not yet prepared to give my life,
which it would cost me. Ten years from now, possibly, when the
contamination has abated, if it does abate--jot that down, remember
it--ten years from now, on Coronation Island in the Antarctic, there
still may be the wreckage of a boat that can reveal to us what Man
behind the Atomic Curtain nowadays is like!
"Ah, well--"
Yes, there was news in that letter, but I mistook it instead for a
bit of a feature, and did quite nicely with it in a little piece
that must have given old Jules Verne a turn or two within his grave.
Improbabilia--the pseudoscientific flare. Good reading for small boys
on rainy Saturdays!
O'Hara was back in London two years later, on his way to Stockholm
for reassignment. I picked him up at his flat in Bloomsbury. He wore
by then the three gold bars and half-globe of a lieutenancy, and in
his brilliant blue uniform he seemed more than ever to me a man set
apart, for not many Patrol pilots and none like O'Hara were walking the
streets of London, so far removed from their duty routes. He had put
on weight, a good deal of it, yet he had managed somehow to absorb it
compactly--six feet three and a good two hundred and thirty pounds, his
dark face burned and weathered, only less dark than a Polynesian, and
his thick, clustered hair jet black--for his prediction had not come
true, he was no auk's egg.
"What happened?" I asked him. "The atomic sickness?"
We were lunching together at Swall's, where the roast is excellent, and
O'Hara finished his before he answered me. "I'd forgotten that," he
said at last. "You get over it. I suppose you build up a tolerance for
it. The first year is a little rough--you can spot a cadet immediately
by his red-rimmed eyes and the unhealthy color that comes through
windburn pallidly, like an underglow of yellow. And this although
they're never bucking more than .165 milliroentgens an hour. Then all
at once, within a month's time, you're over the hump and it goes away
and you're safe enough at .225--you're safe enough, that is, for short
periods of time, and unless you're a damned fool and ram yourself into
the Curtain. You don't tolerate that--though you never realize it. For
you don't have time. You're cinders rather instantly."
"You lose cadets?"
"A percentage--a definite percentage--three out of ten. They simply
cannot seem to learn that all of this has been estimated exactly and
that there is no margin for error. The Curtain is constant, and the
pattern of your flight must be constant, barring the variations caused
by gales, for which there is a single rule--get the hell down south
before your craft is slammed into the Curtain. We had a new man last
summer, though--"
He paused, his shoulders hunching forward and his eyes seeing beyond
me, beyond Swall's, back into the Antarctic. His fingers tapped three
times, slowly, upon the table.
"Yes?" I said.
O'Hara jumped. It seemed incredible, but he did exactly that, he
jumped, as if I had screamed out at him.
"Excuse me," he said, and laughed quickly. "Lost myself for a moment.
Because we've never known precisely what it was. A mistake in his
readings, certainly. He must have been confused, which can and does
occur when inexperienced men are making those long overwater hops.
Perhaps their vision blurs. And possibly--well, we ought not to get
that type, they should screen them out, but there's considerable
pressure for replacements, losing 30 per cent. If a candidate can
pass the twenty-twenty test he's taken, but there should be a sharp
downgrading on fatigue and on emotional reaction."
"Surely they get emotion ratings?"
"Yes--up to a point. But it's still not selective enough. It wasn't in
Anstruther's case."
"The new man you mentioned?"
"Yes. He was in my squadron basing on the Falklands. Nice lad, well
set up, an angel face--blond with blue eyes. Well educated, too, and
rather religious. He had intended going into the ministry until this
Patrol bug got him. I liked the boy--reminded me a great deal of myself
when I first got out there. You know--eager, imaginative. I think
that was the trouble--too imaginative. On that last flight of his, a
pattern he'd flown a dozen times by then, down to South Shetland, it
happened that I was catching his calls at our wireless hut. That's no
part of my job but I was disturbed about him. Only a hunch, or was
it more than that? I suspect that I knew, out of my own experience I
knew, how he felt about those hops and I should have cashiered him.
But I didn't do it--you hate to do it, you've got no reason that makes
sense, you'd look hysterical putting it into a report, for the boys
in medical had given him the go-ahead. And so I was listening to his
calls, that feeling of my guilt just dormant, just across the border
line from actually wirelessing him to swing away from the Curtain while
he could--to turn back."
O'Hara's fingers made those three rapid taps upon the table once more.
Then he continued:
"It was all so routine. I keep insisting to myself that I had no
warning whatever--it was all completely routine. A series of latitude
and longitude readings, the constant repetition of his milliroentgen
count, quite safe. He was keeping his distance from the Curtain and
had worked his way to the latitude of the Cape, the point beyond which
there's no extraordinary danger, for the Curtain ends about there and
the rest of it is simply overwater flying to the South Shetland base. I
was beginning to relax. I was telling myself that men with premonitions
are the spiritual cousins of water dousers and the little gents who
peer myopically at crystal balls. And then all at once the droning of
Anstruther's voice broke off.
"That could happen any time. And yet the silence slapped me. It was
like that exactly, a cold slap in my face. Not over four seconds of
complete silence. Then Anstruther's voice came back again and it was a
scream.
"But not terror. I want to emphasize that it was not terror. The
boy simply cracked. Excitement. But a shocking excitement to me,
jubilation. As if he were cheering his crew to victory--a shattering
vibration in the wireless and these words: 'It's gone! It's gone!
There's no count. I can't find it--it's gone--the Curtain--'
"And then nothing. Never another word. Never a trace of him or the
craft."
"And you think--?"
"No, we don't," O'Hara said. "We speculate, but there is no basis for
thinking anything. Not the slightest clue, not the shred of a fact.
Flying at better than a thousand miles an hour he could have done
anything, once he'd lost control of himself like that. The bottom of
the sea."
"Or rammed against the Curtain?"
"Yes. Quite probably."
"And through it?"
"You're remembering one of those silly letters I wrote you when I first
got out there. I don't know--there's no evidence. But I should think
his craft would atomize, I don't think he'd get through it. Whatever
it was, Anstruther simply lost his bearings--his readings definitely
establish that he was not near the Curtain when he cracked, his last
actual reading in milliroentgens was well within his safety limit--and
then, when his mind blew up, he misinterpreted what his instruments
were showing. And that killed him. Somehow, and it doesn't really
matter how, that killed him. Have we time for pudding? I'm off for
Stockholm at three-ten."
I did not go to Croydon to see him off. They are not keen on that in
the Patrol. Farewells, I imagine, are depressing, although it would not
have depressed O'Hara. Nothing was very likely to depress him for long,
even Anstruther's fate. Cadets came and went, and if their officers
took to heart too much that unfortunate 30 per cent there were always
the sanitary rules of the Twelve Old Men of Geneva, who had conceived
out of their latent if stupid fear the organization of the globular
operations of the Patrol. Those who became morose simply were pensioned
off. Utilized, as they expressed it--they were utilized, used up,
discarded. But in style and comfort, like old race horses.
A year passed before O'Hara wrote that he had got his captaincy. He
was based then on Wrangell Island, one hundred miles from where the
Curtain swerves toward the outmost top of Siberia, crossing the Anadyr
Mountains to enclose the lost passage to the Indies, Bering Strait.
"Think how they searched for it," he wrote, speaking of the Strait.
"The ancient Norse king, Bloodyaxe, hunting whale and walrus through
the moving ice as far toward the east as Novaya Zembla on this Siberian
coast, Sebastian Cabot in the time of Henry VIII seeking the northern
sealane to Cathay--or have you dug this far yet in your histories? And
John Rut of Plymouth and Hugh Willoughby who perished with his men on
the Kola Peninsula, and old Barents the invincible, and Henrik Hudson
driven back westward by the polar ice and so forced to explore the
continent that's long since lost again, Hudson Bay and Hudson River,
and dying with his young son finally while drifting in a small boat in
the seas that he had opened up; until in 1728 old Vitus Bering working
for the great Czar Peter pushed eastward from Okhotsk and ascertained
at last the Strait--yes, history, my boy, the grand epic of the
Northeast Passage, hundreds dying valiantly, and now their work forever
lost, their passage closed by the impenetrable Curtain.
"Time telescopes up here. Within a day I can be above the Anadyr
Gulf, the eastern reaches of the Bering Sea and not six hundred miles
from where our ancestors launched rockets to obliterate the port of
Vladivostok in the Third World War--the great base that was in Alaska,
at Nome--I can be over the Anadyr Gulf at dawn, cross the Anadyr
Mountains to our base at Wrangell and before my fuel's gone land at
Bear Island, guarding the Kolyma River that flows northeast from
Siberia. Refueling, I can hit New Siberia Island or our Lena River
operations base at Barkin, take off with more fuel for the Yenisei,
touch at Franz Josef Land, tag up in Ice Fjord in the Spitzbergens,
drop down to Stockholm and be with you for roast beef at Swall's by
night--provided ground crews nowhere along the line are dogging it.
From the stamping grounds of Vitus Bering, year 1728, to Swall's in
London, year 2230--within a day's flying. And so, what's time?
"But that's a fat route I've outlined for you--that's the easy stuff,
the points we'd like to be flying between. For actually after the
Curtain passes the longitude of Wrangell it curves much closer to where
we presume we'd find the North American continent, south of the pole
on the far side from us, crossing the vast seaborne ice sheets in its
path toward the northern tip of Greenland. And for anything like an
effective patrol we must fly deep isosceles triangles toward it from
our land bases strung across the top of Europe and Asia. We cannot fly
for long close to the Curtain in the Arctic--we must fly toward it and
then back, a series of exploratory fingers extended out to it, which is
tougher than our Antarctic patrols. Over water--which means ice--and
out of sight of land almost entirely. Navigation problems. Adds to the
strain--there now, the nasty word! Must not say that.
"But I've seen more of Northern Europe and Siberia in the last twelve
months than all the expeditions of the czars and Muscovite Bolsheviks
explored in their thousand years. The debris of their two cultures lies
scattered across the top of this vast Eurasian land mass, with immense
glassy pockets where their cities once stood, the scars of the Third
World War. And through the air that we are flying that first cloud of
rockets came from the continent of North America, leveling all Russia
down to the latitude of Moscow before the ultimatum and the surrender.
A creeping barrage of rockets, and I've seen the evidence that it
spared nothing, neither cities nor forests nor ice floes nor the barren
tundras. It's all down there below us when we're flying, the record
of that last war, the really Great war that shattered the political
pattern of Europe and Asia and forced the eventual formation of the
World Council of Nations and the division of the earth outside the
Curtain into its system of prefects, bearing their old and now quite
meaningless national names.
"Yes, here in the frozen north was the earth remolded into the system
we now know, before the Western Hemisphere retreated finally behind the
Curtain.
"And so to us of the Patrol time seems to telescope. The past is
with us. We are, in truth, the guardians of the past, for if there
is a future--which means change--it lies beyond the Curtain, among
the peoples of the Western Hemisphere, who alone now possess the
knowledge that could rear and maintain this Wall of Death. Or is it
actually, for them, a Wall of Life? What are they doing there in those
lost continents? What wonders have they now achieved in their two
hundred and seventy years of isolated and unimpeded progress? And what
remains as the grand adventure for the rest of us unless it is the
penetration--?
"Ah, you see, I am very close to utilized. And that nasty word creeps
through my mind again, the word we must not whisper among ourselves in
the Patrol--strain! Soon, I do not doubt, I shall be back forever in
London, washed up much as poor Anstruther was washed up, a victim of
proximity to the Curtain. Prepare a pleasant little snuggery for me."
But O'Hara was not coming back to London as soon as he pretended
to anticipate. I have included these letters from him here only to
indicate the acuteness of his mind, how very close he often was to the
scientific truths while he rambled on in his most extravagant mood. But
this is not a scientific paper--my aim is political, and in particular
it is economic, if anyone nowadays distinguishes between the two. My
aim is Truth and the revelation of it, as I got it from Emmett O'Hara
on that evening of his return, a few days more than one year after he
disappeared while flying on patrol out of his base on Wrangell Island.
Two days before Christmas, December 23, 2228, I heard that O'Hara had
vanished. His father telephoned me as soon as they got the cable,
asking if it were possible for me, through the _Observer_, to obtain
further information. I was able to learn a few details, but there
wasn't much to learn.
O'Hara had left the International Patrol's base at Wrangell on a
routine long-distance flight toward the Curtain at 12:15 P.M., December
20th. His flight pattern called for him to proceed to the seventieth
degree of latitude and to fly along it until his scintillometer
recorded .250 milliroentgens an hour, which was the maximum permissible
even for a veteran. He was then to pivot westward, proceeding for
three hundred miles along the Curtain's fringe, then turn back toward
Wrangell and arrive by 1 P.M., the slow time because he would be taking
readings constantly and must keep his craft well throttled to do it.
He took off with an excessive fuel load, for his rank as a captain
permitted him to make any necessary extensions of his flight, subject
to confirmation of the change by wireless.
O'Hara did reach the seventieth degree of latitude and did reach the
Curtain fringe. That much he reported in radiocasts made at intervals
of three minutes. Then, soon after he began the 300-mile leg of his
flight along the Curtain, according to Colonel Alfred Tournant, base
commander at Wrangell, O'Hara reported a sudden gale, with violent
southward winds and electrical disturbance, but nothing that his craft
should not have been able to penetrate. Then, at 12:34, according to
Colonel Tournant, O'Hara's voice came in:
"O'Hara, Flight Twelve, Latitude 74, Longitude 163, Milliroentgens
.255--a little close to it, eh? Miles per hour 897 and
retarding--there's a gigantic thunderhead piling up and I--Tournant?
You listening? I don't like this--lightning's too thick--Tournant?
Request permission to change course instantly! Milliroentgens
.268--I'm heading north toward the Pole. Miles per hour 1004--but I'm
not--getting away--"
A blast of static drowned his voice.
And that was all.
That was really all the details there were about O'Hara's vanishing.
Within a dozen words he was talking jestingly and then calling Tournant
in sudden alarm. And changing course. And then those final words:
"--but I'm not--getting away--"
On the tenth of March Colonel Tournant arrived unexpectedly in London
and the _Observer_ sent me to interview him. He'd had a splendid record
with the Patrol and was considered the coming man in it, quite probably
its next Vice Marshal. The _Observer_ did not need to send me--nothing
in London except the Bureau of Security itself could have kept me from
seeing him. He received me in his rooms at Claridge's, and after we
shook hands, he indicated a well-laden liquor cabinet.
"You should find something there you like," he said. "Let me help you.
You--ah--you knew Captain O'Hara?"
"From childhood," I replied. "My best and perhaps my only friend."
Colonel Tournant smiled quickly. He was a small and dapper man--what
I should have considered the raw material for a martinet--thickly
mustached, brown-eyed, and with the dark tan of most men in the Patrol,
a very nervous, brittle manner, a pacer. "Yes, you'd think that,"
he said. "O'Hara gave everyone that impression. I can tell from the
way you speak, though--you're also an émigré, aren't you? Descended
from O'Hara's Yanks? Some of the words you and he use, some of the
inflections. He was my best friend, too, though not from childhood. How
old do you suppose I am?"
The question startled me. There seemed to be no connection.
"Forty-five," I guessed.
He flicked his fingers through his hair. "Gray enough for it," he said,
his smile a little forced. "It happens that I'm thirty-two, six years
older than O'Hara was. And here I am in London for my terminal--I'm
utilized."
"You're utilized! But we supposed--"
"I know," he snapped. "You supposed that you were interviewing the next
Vice Marshal of the Patrol. The truth is I'm finished. At thirty-two,
I'm finished."
"That's news with an upper-case N," I pointed out. "Am I permitted to
disclose it?"
"Why not? It's no disgrace." He shrugged. "I asked for it. I've lost
my stomach for the work. If it got O'Hara, I know damn well I'm too
old for it. For if ever there was a pilot whom I considered superior,
who would not--well, disintegrate--it was O'Hara. He had everything
to qualify him for the work, coolness and brains, resourcefulness, an
utter lack of fear. Yet the Curtain got him."
"The Curtain? Excuse me, Colonel, I understood it was that thunderhead.
He said in that last radiocast of his that he could not get away--"
"Don't be an ass," Tournant snapped. "O'Hara knew weather. Besides,
I personally flew one hundred hours in the sector of his final call
and there was no wreckage. I flew that much! And I sent four squadrons
into it. We'd have found the feather of an albatross had it been
there. Thunderhead be damned. The Curtain got O'Hara--do you recall
the sequence of readings in his final radiocast? Milliroentgens .255
and then again in seconds milliroentgens .268--notice that jump? In
seconds, mind you! And within those seconds he believed that he was
turning toward the Pole, which meant away from the Curtain. Do you want
to know what took place? His mind disintegrated. The best of minds--the
most stable of minds, and O'Hara certainly had that--can take so much
of that constant strain and then without warning it happens." He
stared at me pugnaciously, then he snapped his fingers. "Like that, my
scribbling friend, the mind blinks out and that's an end of your pilot.
No, thanks. I've had enough. I shall cultivate roses--tea roses. And
when I die, they'll not need to handle my body with tongs. Have another
drink?"
I considered my empty glass a moment and then I said, "Yes, for a
toast. To O'Hara."
We drank it together.
And that drink set the stage, I like to think, as completely as it
could be set for the day after Christmas, December 26th, 2229. For what
nicer thing can a man do for a lost friend than to embalm his memory
in the best of Scotch? Yes, the stage was set, but it so happened that
on the twenty-sixth of December I was writing about quite another
stage--I was doing my annual squib on the glories of Peter Pan, the
timeless pageant of the season, and how Jill Ferguson best typified the
centuries-old tradition of the ageless boy. I had got as far as the
second paragraph, and was beginning to feel the spirit of the thing,
when the telephone on my desk at the _Observer_ began ringing. I picked
it up.
"Caught in the purple prose again," a voice came over the wire. "You're
writing about the pageants, aren't you?"
"Is it any of your business?" I snapped.
"I'm making it my business."
"Are you, indeed? Just who the devil are you?"
"My name is O'Hara. Emmett O'Hara."
"That's a very rotten joke."
"Yes, isn't it? But I do want to see you. I've just gotten in from
Cairo after four days' flying and I need a drink and Nedra doesn't
drink and I hate to drink alone. I've opened up my flat in Bloomsbury.
How fast can you make it?"
I pressed my face within my hands. Then, listening for the sound of the
voice, I said, "O'Hara?"
"Do you realize you're wasting time and I haven't much to waste?" he
said. "I want to see you. Now shake it up, old boy, I've poured for
you--"
"O'Hara, is it really you?"
"Can you make it by six?"
"But it's--"
"I know--impossible. But can you do it?"
When I knocked, he opened the door. He stood there casually, grinning
at me as if I had just come back from an errand to the corner grocer's.
The collar of his brilliant blue uniform was open at the throat. The
three bars and half-globe were missing. His jet-black hair was tousled
carelessly.
"Well, come in," he said and pulled me into the sitting room of the
flat. "I've got us something for supper. Here, drink this up."
"O'Hara!" I cried.
And he laughed. "I'm glad to see you, too." He gripped my shoulder
and then thrust a glass into my hand. "Drink it up. That's good. The
principle of the funnel."
"But where--? Colonel Tournant told me--"
"Now, here's another, though you may nurse it longer if you wish,"
O'Hara said, and filled my glass. "The supper will keep, it's tinned
stuff anyway. Colonel Tournant told you, eh? I'll give him the shock of
his life. Aren't you going to sit down?"
"Not until you tell me where you've been?"
"Really," he said, "you'd better sit down. Because it so happens that
I am going to tell you. That's the chair for you. Attend to your drink.
And while you're doing that, I'll take you back for a moment to the
74th degree of latitude and the 163rd degree of longitude, one year ago
plus four days."
He raised his glass. When he put it down it was empty.
"If you saw Tournant, you know that much," he said. "But I don't think
he could have told you what I found there."
"The sudden gale?" I asked. "The thunderhead--"
A cry came from the room beyond us. A strange, low cry, mournful,
somehow distressing, very sad, as if someone were lonely beyond the
point of bearing, and I confess I leaped up and turned toward O'Hara.
"Now, that's a deceiving noise," he said, perfectly calm. "You think it
sounds heartbroken, don't you? I assure you, it isn't. I'll get around
to that in time, but not if you keep fidgeting. Yes, it was that sudden
gale--"