"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.