"O'Hara, tell me—"
"We're going through the Curtain, Nedra."
And she nodded somberly.
At fifty thousand feet O'Hara leveled off. As he accelerated past two thousand miles an hour he checked and re-checked his calculations of the day and hour. His problem, as he analyzed it, was to reach the Curtain before 12:35:01 P.M., and to continue swinging into it and away from it until—at the miraculous proper moment—his scintillometer reading dropped below the danger point, and then, upon the inward arc of his ellipse of flying, to smash through.
It would be best to approach first in a dive from his maximum altitude, at his maximum speed. It was true that he might thus smash into the Curtain before the ten-second interval in which it did not exist, during the changing of the reactors, but at least this time he would know what he was about to do—he would not be senseless from a bolt of lightning.
This was his plan. And it worked.
It shot him back across the Arctic, deep into Asia, deep into the hemisphere of Delhi, Rome and Paris and the Twelve Old Men of Geneva.
"You've got to have luck for anything like that," O'Hara admitted. "The luck of a Columbus. Would you have bet on us?"
He laughed, then he corked the bottle. There would be no more tippling in that little flat in Bloomsbury.
"I would not bet against your luck, O'Hara."