"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."