But I have no intention of being located until the world knows what I have to tell. I had no such intention from the moment I saw my host's complexion changing to that ugly blue that goes with cyanic poisoning. And before the spittle upon his writhing lips was dry—it was intended that they should have been my lips—I had disappeared again.
All this scrambling is a personal matter, an adventure I suppose, of no importance save to those who befriended me. Some of them are dead and beyond the dangerously long arm of the World Council's Bureau of Security. Some of them are not dead or aware that they ran the risk of death, for I did not share the purpose of my frantic journey home. Yet I cannot—I dare not—trace any further the slow zigzagging pattern by which I returned to London.
My journey was a failure. I did not get the text of the O'Hara Report. I am never going to get it, for the august authority which decreed my persecution has consigned it to oblivion. That authority was unquestionably the Twelve Old Men.
Yes, theirs must be this terrible responsibility. Theirs alone must be the blame if future generations of our world are doomed so needlessly to subhuman levels. It is they who have decided—unless we can break through the lethargy of hypercautious minds—that in this year of A.D. 2230, more than two hundred and eighty-five years after the first splitting of the atom, the Sahara must still remain the Sahara, a vast wasteland capable of feeding all our starving and multiplying billions were only water made available. It is they who decree by their conspiracy of silence that the deserts of Australia and Arabia and China are as parched today, and the tundras of Siberia as utterly fruitless, as they were in the years before the miracle of Los Alamos. It is they, these dread-chilled Twelve Old Men, who are insisting that the Western Hemisphere, which at one time seemed destined to redeem us all from want, must remain for further centuries a whispered mystery behind its impenetrable Atomic Curtain.
Why are they doing this to us? Why were they so determined that I must be silenced? Are they brutal men, incapable of understanding how our billions suffer? No, the answers are not so simple. Their minds grope vague through the twilight world of doubt and fear, for they do not trust us—by their very natures they cannot trust us—to guide ourselves according to the facts laid down in the O'Hara Report.
But I insist that the people must know these facts. The people must get the truth—as I got the truth—from Emmett O'Hara himself.
Yes, I got the truth from Emmett O'Hara himself, soon after he filed at Croydon the text of his astonishing Report. That is why my life is at forfeit—not that the Twelve Old Men are sure I know, but they suspect it. They are capable at least of decision in one respect, they will do anything to preserve the status quo. But they are panicked at the possibilities that Emmett O'Hara has brought back to us. They cannot bring themselves, these doubting old men, to believe that he is acting in the interests of both our world and that which lies behind the Atomic Curtain, the fabled Western Hemisphere. And they will never accept, unless we force them—and there is almost no time left to do it now—the offer that O'Hara brought to us.
That offer will come to us formally, and we will have to act on it at once, at any moment in these next few days. And I pledge you this, that if we accept, our world begins to live again. And theirs.
I wish for your peace of mind that I could tell you precisely what has happened to O'Hara and that magnificent creature whom he introduced to me as his wife. And she was his wife, I think. Certainly she was his woman, bound to him by all the custom of that strange society from which she came. And if O'Hara had the time, in the brief interval between the filing of his Report and his abrupt and traceless disappearance, I would like to think that he further complied with the laws under which he was born and reared, although I know it would not have mattered to anyone except myself—O'Hara would not have cared. And she would not have given a snap of her exquisite and completely capable fingers. What could possibly have seemed of value in our conventions to those two? When you know what they knew—or at least what O'Hara knew—when you have experienced the nadir of disillusion and the zenith of human living, what could seem of essential value except the savor of the next moment's breath?
As I say, O'Hara vanished. He filed this Report of his in London at four o'clock on the afternoon of his return, which was the day after Christmas. He immediately went to his old flat in Bloomsbury from which he telephoned to me at the Observer, and at six o'clock I dined with him. By eight o'clock I had heard from him the substance of his Report. It was then that I met his wife, if wife she was.