Yet the flight was becoming monotonous to the point of lulling him. The letdown that followed his discovery that the upper reaches of the continent were so remarkably similar to Siberia had increased, and with the passage of time he felt his eyelids inexorably closing. There was nothing to it. The dreaded continent was a fable made mysterious only by distorted memories of its history. It was, after all, a hoax—an empty shell, and he was penetrating deep—
His next thought jerked him erect in the cockpit of his craft. Suppose it was in fact an empty shell? Suppose there was nothing in this immensity behind the Curtain, the land which had been his fathers' fathers, but these ice-choked rivers and frozen tundras and forests and these tortured and interlocking mountain chains? Suppose it was dead—without life?
And it well might be. O'Hara himself had been exposed steadily now for the better part of an hour to a degree of contamination that the International Patrol considered beyond dangerous, and in his flights to the east and west he had plunged through belts exceeding .300 milliroentgens an hour. Was it not probably that these Americans in establishing their Atomic Curtain had simultaneously contaminated their two continents beyond endurance? The suicide of a race?
In an instant of panic, O'Hara swung in a tight arc to the north. He had, he felt, only the one chance to escape—a dash at maximum speed back to the Curtain and through it.
But, as instantly, he discarded that. Whatever it was that had got him through the Curtain in the first place could not be expected to work twice. He was convinced that it had been a kind of providential accident, something to do with that splitting blast of electrical power in the thunderhead, and he was here, within this Western Hemisphere, inescapably cut off.
His reason, too, came quickly to his rescue. These mountains and the far slope toward the Pacific Coast were smothered in their forests. And trees were life—biological life. If there was plant life there would be germination, bacteria—surely animal bacteria, surely animal life at however low a scale. Though perhaps not men.
Perhaps not men! Then this was indeed the grand adventure. He headed south again.
All these speculations and the resultant skittering about, as O'Hara said, had eaten into his flying time and he had not made the progress that he had anticipated, yet it was not quite two o'clock, not ninety minutes after he had crashed through the Curtain, when O'Hara saw a compelling flash of light upon his right. It was the first time that he had been conscious of the increasing clarity of the sun, no longer so obscured by clouds or ice fogs. O'Hara spiraled down toward a wide plateau, ringed with a lesser inner range of mountains.
The flash, he discovered, was reflected from a rectangular object, rather like a huge jewel, set into the face of a tall pile of masonry that reached some thirty stories high, a single needle rising from the snow-clad plain. Losing altitude fast, very nearly making of it a power dive, O'Hara pulled out of it level with the tower—for that was what it proved to be, a giant tower of stone and metal, expertly fashioned, a glittering and soaring pinnacle unlike anything that he had ever seen.
The flash was a reflection from the gemlike surface, which apparently was glass. The upper story seemed to be a kind of solarium, with six facets so arranged that they caught the sun constantly. The stories below it lacked openings of any sort, and O'Hara concluded that if in fact the tower had once been used for offices or dwellings those who lived there had relied entirely upon indirect lighting.