"Remember that I wrote you our Wrangell base is not too far from where
the continents of Asia and North America once joined, where Bering
Strait broke through. It's a weather factory, storms are put together
there. Winds often swirl well beyond hurricane force, howling in
all that icy desolation as if there were the slightest sense to it,
for there's nothing at all to terrify." He was leaning forward now,
recalling it. "On that day I wasn't terrified. I didn't like it but I'd
beaten winds as bad as that. So I kept on the course laid out for my
patrol that day, holding my speed around nine hundred miles an hour and
sticking to an arc that gave me milliroentgen readings of .250 an hour.
Not too close to the Curtain for an old hand at it."
He paused to fill his glass. He glanced just once toward the room
beyond, then back to me. "You know, I'd never taken chances with the
Curtain. I'd seen it's effect, and I'd never really gotten over losing
Anstruther. I want to make it clear that I was not taking chances--I
was flying it safely, accurately, giving myself the full margin.
The gale was bothersome but the flight was going perfectly. Nothing
unusual. Around 12:30 I began plowing through an electrical field,
sheet lightning, vast livid flashes, but it wasn't until two minutes
later, 12:32 P.M., that I first saw the thunderhead.
"One glance was all I had--time to report it on my radiocast--and
instantly the thing was blowing up. It seemed to erupt, caught in
an updraft, and belched blackly high above me in enormous toppling
billows, the Arctic's unleashed fury roaring with a thousand forked,
flaming tongues.
"My scintillometer's buzzing caught my ear. It was up to .268. I was
veering straight for the Curtain. I swung at once, heading toward the
Pole, due north away from the Curtain, and shot my speed above one
thousand miles an hour, but the thunderhead seemed now to be collapsing
on me and I could not accelerate swiftly enough to get from underneath.
I could not break loose. I knew that within an instant I was going to
be in the vortex of that swirling mass of wind and shrieking fire. Then
it exploded.
"I remember that distinctly--it exploded into flame. And it blacked me
out.
"I came out of concussion slowly--seconds, probably, but I seemed to be
dragging myself back into consciousness. My craft was 500 feet above
the ice. And there was no thunderhead. The wind was strong, around 120
miles an hour, but my speed was stabilized at 1125 miles per hour, and
my milliroentgen count was .320. Very dangerous. And worse, my craft
was headed south again. I swung it back toward the Pole.
"That should have cut my MR count. But within seconds the
scintillometer was jumping up to .325, then .350. I was approaching the
Curtain, and while headed due north!
"I turned back south. The MR count was dropping instantly. It didn't
make sense. It was not possible, because I'd been between the Pole
and the Curtain when I had blacked out. It was then that I made an
automatic check on my position. Latitude 73--I'd gotten far off course
during the time I'd been blacked out. Longitude 136--I checked that
again. But that was it. The longitude was 136 degrees."
O'Hara knew exactly where that position placed him. But he did
precisely what any laboratory technician would have done--he repeated
his experiment, trying to find an error in his calculations. There was
none and he knew it. He knew, even before that final check, that he had
got through the Atomic Curtain.
Somehow, he had got past the wall of death that had cut off the Western
Hemisphere for almost two hundred and seventy years. He now was flying
above the ice field that abutted the upper reaches of the North
American continent.
He glanced at his fuel gauge, and then turning south he set his
motors at their maximum cruising speed. If he was trapped within the
Western Hemisphere, the terra incognita that had fascinated him since
he was old enough to read, he knew that he must fly as far below the
desolation of the Arctic as his craft would go. And then--
"Then we shall see," O'Hara told himself. "Yes, we shall see--at last."