"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!