"Certainly not. It is a private matter. But the boys at Croydon saw her when we landed there. I remember their surprise—more surprised even, I suppose, than when I wirelessed that I was coming in, and that knocked them flat. Are you coming with me?"
"Yes."
"Then get behind me," he cautioned. "And hand me that gadget."
It was a length of intricately carved wood, about four feet long, tapering toward one end and worn smooth by the palms of many hands. O'Hara took it, tossed it into the air and caught it expertly by the smaller end, a trick that must have taken practice. "Very useful," he said, "if living is important—though I'm not too sure that it is. We live too long, most of us, and at last we begin to think that living is an end in itself. And so we want it easier and easier, with never a thought that it can become too easy."
"You haven't found it easy lately, have you, O'Hara?"
"Not until I landed at Croydon," he replied. "But that was four hours ago and it's gotten boring." He gripped the club of carved wood tightly. "Now, open that door—"
So it had gotten boring, had it? Within three hours O'Hara had vanished, both he and Nedra, as if they had never existed. I should have known that I was not going to get documentation for any such articles in the Observer. I must have been bemused by my real joy at seeing O'Hara again after supposing that he was lost forever. Then, too, the impact of what he had told me had blunted my sense of the realities of life. For the moment I saw it all only as a tremendous story—a story particularly tremendous to O'Hara and myself because of our mutual origin.
For we were children together, went to school together, were inseparable until he chose for his career the thankless if adventurous life of a pilot in the International Patrol. I cannot say that I chose my own career—I drifted into it, as so many journalists do, trying my hand first at this and that and gradually retreating into the job of writing about what others, with more spirit or greater advantage, were doing in this world.
Yet it never occurred to me in those early days that the biggest job that I would undertake would be writing about O'Hara. Nor to him, I am sure. Adventure—yes, he had expected adventure, but not of the sort to interest anyone except himself and possibly his surviving relatives. The doubtful thrills of supersonic speed, the sensation of flirting with death from atomic poisoning, the constant prospect of plunging through the polar icecap at better than two thousand miles an hour—these, perhaps, O'Hara anticipated as the ultimate possibilities of his career in the Patrol. And then, always, he would be closest to the riddle that since his childhood had absorbed him, flying his charted course along the outer fringes of that dense wall of radiation that enclosed like the half of a glass globe the Western Hemisphere—the Atomic Curtain.
Neither of these were careers a native of the Prefecture of Britain would have selected, but the truth is that they were among the best open to us. Our two families had come together to England in that great migration from North America which immediately preceded the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. I remember O'Hara, then not quite eighteen years old, questioning his father one night when I was visiting him, as I often did, for he was my idol in those days, much bigger than I and much bolder. I had never dared to ask these things.