"Why not? It's no disgrace." He shrugged. "I asked for it. I've lost my stomach for the work. If it got O'Hara, I know damn well I'm too old for it. For if ever there was a pilot whom I considered superior, who would not—well, disintegrate—it was O'Hara. He had everything to qualify him for the work, coolness and brains, resourcefulness, an utter lack of fear. Yet the Curtain got him."
"The Curtain? Excuse me, Colonel, I understood it was that thunderhead. He said in that last radiocast of his that he could not get away—"
"Don't be an ass," Tournant snapped. "O'Hara knew weather. Besides, I personally flew one hundred hours in the sector of his final call and there was no wreckage. I flew that much! And I sent four squadrons into it. We'd have found the feather of an albatross had it been there. Thunderhead be damned. The Curtain got O'Hara—do you recall the sequence of readings in his final radiocast? Milliroentgens .255 and then again in seconds milliroentgens .268—notice that jump? In seconds, mind you! And within those seconds he believed that he was turning toward the Pole, which meant away from the Curtain. Do you want to know what took place? His mind disintegrated. The best of minds—the most stable of minds, and O'Hara certainly had that—can take so much of that constant strain and then without warning it happens." He stared at me pugnaciously, then he snapped his fingers. "Like that, my scribbling friend, the mind blinks out and that's an end of your pilot. No, thanks. I've had enough. I shall cultivate roses—tea roses. And when I die, they'll not need to handle my body with tongs. Have another drink?"
I considered my empty glass a moment and then I said, "Yes, for a toast. To O'Hara."
We drank it together.
And that drink set the stage, I like to think, as completely as it could be set for the day after Christmas, December 26th, 2229. For what nicer thing can a man do for a lost friend than to embalm his memory in the best of Scotch? Yes, the stage was set, but it so happened that on the twenty-sixth of December I was writing about quite another stage—I was doing my annual squib on the glories of Peter Pan, the timeless pageant of the season, and how Jill Ferguson best typified the centuries-old tradition of the ageless boy. I had got as far as the second paragraph, and was beginning to feel the spirit of the thing, when the telephone on my desk at the Observer began ringing. I picked it up.
"Caught in the purple prose again," a voice came over the wire. "You're writing about the pageants, aren't you?"
"Is it any of your business?" I snapped.
"I'm making it my business."
"Are you, indeed? Just who the devil are you?"