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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The atom
curtain
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The atom curtain

Author: Nick B. Williams

Release date: March 10, 2024 [eBook #73135]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ace Books, Inc, 1956

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATOM

CURTAIN ***
 THE ATOM CURTAIN

By NICK BODDIE WILLIAMS

ACE BOOKS, INC.

23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

Copyright, 1956, by Nick Boddie Williams

All Rights Reserved

Printed in U.S.A.

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any

evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was
renewed.]
 HE BROKE THE BARRIER TO A CONTINENT IN EXILE!

For two hundred and seventy years America had been totally cut off
from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of raging atomic
fury. To the frightened countries of the Old World, what had once
been the greatest of all powers was now the most fearful of all
mysteries.
No man ached to know what lay behind that frightful barrier more
than Emmett O'Hara, restless air-sentinel of the International Patrol
—whose American ancestors had been stranded in Britain the day
the Atom Curtain was raised.
Then, on December 20, in the year 2230, while on routine patrol,
O'Hara did the impossible. He broke through the barrier—and lived!
But the full story of O'Hara's discoveries and adventures in Atomic
America is so utterly breath-taking that readers are sure to rate it a
classic of modern science-fiction.

Nick Boddie Williams says he hit on the idea of writing THE ATOM
CURTAIN "while debating with an editorial writer what might
possibly happen to nations behind the Iron Curtain, and how much
more likely all of it would be to happen if the Curtain were Atomic,
rather than Iron. It's about the same line of thinking that led Doyle
to write The Lost World, or any number of men to dwell upon cut-off
places. But of course I couldn't write about Eurasia, for I've never
been there. It was written at the time we were debating the setting
up of a fixed line far out from our shores (the Taft plan, the Hoover
idea), which became, a little luridly, the approximate line of my
Atomic Curtain. A good many philosophical ideas got mixed up in
what was essentially an adventure story, but I can't be accused of
following any one line, except perhaps Darwin's." Williams, who
works on the Los Angeles Times, considers himself a newspaperman
rather than a writer. Nevertheless he has had stories published in
Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, Woman's Home Companion, and
others.

PART ONE

Now at last I must make this accusation and disclose the truth.
I make it with the hard realization of the dangers that are inherent
for us all. I make it knowing that these risks have terrified those
whom we chose to govern us, and I make it only because their
terror has paralyzed their minds. And you and I—the world as we
know it—cannot wait any longer.
We must not underestimate these risks. We take the chance of
losing everything that mankind has accomplished in the tens of
thousands of years since our first ancestor shed his tail and rose
erect and walked in the full consciousness that he, alone of all God's
creatures, had a soul.
But it is a risk we must take. We must take it now, while there is still
time, or we condemn our world—the countless billions of Europe and
Asia and Africa—forever to our chronic agonies of hunger and
disease, which I now know are needless.
Between what we stand to lose and what it is possible to achieve, if
we act wisely and in time, there is a middle course which means
freedom from starvation and pestilence. The truth is that we need
fear only our greed. If we can content ourselves with enough, and
not insist upon too much, if we act with iron resolution in this
immediate future, we can revivify our static history. The facts as I
know them convince me of this, and more to the point, they have
convinced far abler minds, although not those of the World Council
of Nations, which in the final analysis means the Twelve Old Men of
Geneva. It is their minds which you and I must now convince. Or we
must set the Twelve Old Men aside.
And so I am compelled before the bar of public opinion to accuse
these Twelve Old Men. It was they alone, acting in secrecy, who
ordered that the sensational O'Hara Report be buried deep within
the archives of the International Patrol at Geneva, never—they
thought—to be made public. They have buried the Report and they
have attempted to blot out even the vague rumor that it did exist.
Those few who actually read it, the officials at Croydon Airport here
in London who first received it and sent it sealed upon its way to
Geneva, have been transferred to the more remote corners of the
earth, never two of them together and none of them knowing where
the other is. Not more than a fraction of the upper hierarchy in
government has even heard of the Report and that fraction has gone
and will continue to go to extreme lengths to prevent inquiries
concerning it. It is the greatest hush-hush document of all time.
But within hours of its receipt at Croydon, I, Arthur Blair, obtained a
first-hand summary of the Report. For reasons which will become
obvious I was ordered by my paper, the Observer, to obtain the text
of it, and for reasons which were even more imperative to me I
sought to do it. I went at once to Croydon, where I was rewarded
only by blank and noncommittal stares, as if I were inquiring after
the secrets of the fourth dimension or the precise geographical
location of the lost continent of Mu.
I did not resent that attitude. I had expected it. But what I did not
anticipate was the reaction of the Twelve Old Men. I was in Paris, on
my way to Geneva, before I realized how far they meant to go to
silence me. The warning was delivered by a small, clean-shaven little
man in a business suit who called while I was absent from my hotel
room. When I returned, he smilingly assured me that he had no
interest in me—the condition of my luggage proved him a liar—and
in the next breath told me that my chance of leaving Paris alive, if
my direction was Geneva, was less than zero.
The little man in the business suit impressed me. A more oblique
approach and possibly some short cuts were indicated. In
consequence I went from Paris quite openly to the resort of Trieste.
I spent three weeks there, as obviously "resorting" as I could, until
the night I chose for departing aboard a chartered fishing boat that
landed me eventually at Salonika.
An old acquaintance of mine at Salonika, an incurable romantic,
suspecting me of extraordinary journalism—a missing blonde,
perhaps—provided me with what I asked, a private plane for the
Prefecture of Turkey.
That plane was shot down two minutes after leaving Salonika. I
happened not to be aboard it, although my labeled luggage was. I
had the satisfaction of reading an account of my accidental death in
the Istanbul press when I arrived there two days later.
I felt certain that I had thrown off any pursuit and that I could now
proceed safely direct to Geneva. You may imagine my concern when
my host in Istanbul, who knew me only by a pen name I had used
obscurely years before, offered me my morning coffee and then
sipped his own, and immediately keeled over.
A charge of murdering my host was subsequently filed against me.
That charge is outstanding today. I do not doubt the evidence is
there to convict me, manufactured evidence, were I located and
returned to the Prefecture of Turkey.
But I have no intention of being located until the world knows what I
have to tell. I had no such intention from the moment I saw my
host's complexion changing to that ugly blue that goes with cyanic
poisoning. And before the spittle upon his writhing lips was dry—it
was intended that they should have been my lips—I had disappeared
again.
All this scrambling is a personal matter, an adventure I suppose, of
no importance save to those who befriended me. Some of them are
dead and beyond the dangerously long arm of the World Council's
Bureau of Security. Some of them are not dead or aware that they
ran the risk of death, for I did not share the purpose of my frantic
journey home. Yet I cannot—I dare not—trace any further the slow
zigzagging pattern by which I returned to London.
My journey was a failure. I did not get the text of the O'Hara Report.
I am never going to get it, for the august authority which decreed
my persecution has consigned it to oblivion. That authority was
unquestionably the Twelve Old Men.
Yes, theirs must be this terrible responsibility. Theirs alone must be
the blame if future generations of our world are doomed so
needlessly to subhuman levels. It is they who have decided—unless
we can break through the lethargy of hypercautious minds—that in
this year of A.D. 2230, more than two hundred and eighty-five years
after the first splitting of the atom, the Sahara must still remain the
Sahara, a vast wasteland capable of feeding all our starving and
multiplying billions were only water made available. It is they who
decree by their conspiracy of silence that the deserts of Australia
and Arabia and China are as parched today, and the tundras of
Siberia as utterly fruitless, as they were in the years before the
miracle of Los Alamos. It is they, these dread-chilled Twelve Old
Men, who are insisting that the Western Hemisphere, which at one
time seemed destined to redeem us all from want, must remain for
further centuries a whispered mystery behind its impenetrable
Atomic Curtain.
Why are they doing this to us? Why were they so determined that I
must be silenced? Are they brutal men, incapable of understanding
how our billions suffer? No, the answers are not so simple. Their
minds grope vague through the twilight world of doubt and fear, for
they do not trust us—by their very natures they cannot trust us—to
guide ourselves according to the facts laid down in the O'Hara
Report.
But I insist that the people must know these facts. The people must
get the truth—as I got the truth—from Emmett O'Hara himself.
Yes, I got the truth from Emmett O'Hara himself, soon after he filed
at Croydon the text of his astonishing Report. That is why my life is
at forfeit—not that the Twelve Old Men are sure I know, but they
suspect it. They are capable at least of decision in one respect, they
will do anything to preserve the status quo. But they are panicked at
the possibilities that Emmett O'Hara has brought back to us. They
cannot bring themselves, these doubting old men, to believe that he
is acting in the interests of both our world and that which lies behind
the Atomic Curtain, the fabled Western Hemisphere. And they will
never accept, unless we force them—and there is almost no time left
to do it now—the offer that O'Hara brought to us.
That offer will come to us formally, and we will have to act on it at
once, at any moment in these next few days. And I pledge you this,
that if we accept, our world begins to live again. And theirs.
I wish for your peace of mind that I could tell you precisely what has
happened to O'Hara and that magnificent creature whom he
introduced to me as his wife. And she was his wife, I think. Certainly
she was his woman, bound to him by all the custom of that strange
society from which she came. And if O'Hara had the time, in the
brief interval between the filing of his Report and his abrupt and
traceless disappearance, I would like to think that he further
complied with the laws under which he was born and reared,
although I know it would not have mattered to anyone except myself
—O'Hara would not have cared. And she would not have given a
snap of her exquisite and completely capable fingers. What could
possibly have seemed of value in our conventions to those two?
When you know what they knew—or at least what O'Hara knew—
when you have experienced the nadir of disillusion and the zenith of
human living, what could seem of essential value except the savor of
the next moment's breath?
As I say, O'Hara vanished. He filed this Report of his in London at
four o'clock on the afternoon of his return, which was the day after
Christmas. He immediately went to his old flat in Bloomsbury from
which he telephoned to me at the Observer, and at six o'clock I
dined with him. By eight o'clock I had heard from him the substance
of his Report. It was then that I met his wife, if wife she was.
At eight-fifteen I left them, and went immediately to the Observer,
where for two hours I was in conference with the Editorial Director,
Edgar Soames, who told me that the story could not be published
without the complete documentation of the text. The Observer, as
Soames pointed out, had its reputation as a journal of fact to
remember and not even the paramount importance of my story
could be permitted to override that.
Very well, documentation. I returned to O'Hara's flat in Bloomsbury
by eleven o'clock. O'Hara was not there, or was that splendid red-
haired creature who—well, they were gone, and their few belongings
were gone, and the flat itself, so I was told repeatedly by the
manager of the properties, had not been occupied at all for the past
three years. Surely I was mistaken—O'Hara? Never heard of an
Emmett O'Hara!
No, the manager had never heard of an Emmett O'Hara. And neither,
I soon discovered, had anyone else. He seemed to be a delusion I
had suffered. I had spent those two hours listening to his amazing
Report, and there had never been such an O'Hara in the
International Patrol and the letters that I had earlier received from
him had never been written. Or they were forgeries, perhaps—
yellow journalism!
Someone had moved very swiftly. But whether it was O'Hara himself,
or whether it was the Bureau of Security, I could not determine. It is
essential for me—and the rest of us—in this hour of imminent crisis
to rely upon faith in his indomitable skill and courage, and to believe
he managed his escape. Although he had had his luck twice over.
That was a phrase that O'Hara used himself. "I have had my luck
twice over," he told me, and then he laughed, that deep roar of
mirth that I remembered from our school days together.
"Twice over?" I answered. "A thousand times, I should say."
"I don't mean this business I've been telling you," O'Hara said. "Or
rather, not the hazard of death. Although," he smiled, "there is the
hazard of death in this part of it too. Will you come into the next
room, I want you to see Nedra."
"Nedra?"
"Yes," he said. "Nedra. You didn't think I'd leave her there?"
I stared at him. "Is this in your Report?"
"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."
O'Hara smiled queerly. "So you do read some?"
"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