The atom curtain

by Nick B. Williams

"My task? I could not count upon a providential thunderstorm to get me through the Curtain again."

"Providence we cannot reckon in planning the future of a hemisphere, and never have. It is true that chance—pure chance—enabled you, and Anstruther before you, and others now dead before both of you, to pass through the Curtain. But it was not Providence. Any man flying in the correct direction at the exact second that you were flying—and at any point in the Curtain—would have got through."

"I'm not sure I understand you. At any point in the Curtain at that exact second?"

"Within those exact ten seconds, O'Hara, hundreds of pilots in your International Patrol must ram into the Curtain every decade, yet if all of them were to hit it at the correct speed, flying the correct course, at the correct time, they would all get through. Chance enters into it only in that you happened to be doing all of these. Once each year, and for an interval of ten seconds, our Carolina reactor shuts off automatically and the Hanford or West Coast reactor takes over supplying the power for the Curtain. That has been happening now for the two hundred and seventy years since the establishment of the Curtain—the reactors were so arranged in the beginning. Completely automatic, you understand, as are the Tubes, the photosynthetrons, the East and West Coast distillation plants, the Deluges—as everything must be within this hemisphere. And there is this interval of ten seconds between the shutting off of the Carolina reactor and the generation of the Hanford reactor—ten seconds in which the Curtain does not exist!"

O'Hara closed his eyes. The taste of blood, saline and hot, was in his mouth—his heart now pounding with trip-hammer force. For here, within a sentence, was the determining great secret of the two halves of the earth—"There is an interval of ten seconds in which the Curtain does not exist!"

"It cannot vary by even a fractional concept of time," the Father was continuing. "And there, O'Hara, is how your task can be accomplished. You have your known factor of time, and in the lower Rockies, you have your plane. When it is brought to Washington, it can be duplicated on a more adequate scale, for the Sons, under guidance, are not bad workmen. Time and method are problems we can master, and there is only the issue of your willingness to obtain from beyond the Curtain—"

"My willingness? Do you believe, Father, that men—men as I've always known them, not your masses and Sons—would voluntarily enter into this proposition?"

"Do you believe that they would not? For a full belly, for a life without exertion, without the strain of thought—really, O'Hara, I have not forgotten what your world was like."

"Remove the strains they know, and they will discover other strains. In time, for instance, they will rebel against becoming your automatons."

"I am aware of that—I am now dealing with Anstruther. But that at least is a problem I can solve. Let me show you how I deal with human problems, O'Hara—let me show you the city of Emporia, where you first saw my people. Observe upon the wall behind this dais a metal screen, such as you saw in every hall and every corridor of Emporia, and as exist in every city of this hemisphere, even our dead cities—remember Spokane? The giant tower with its solarium? Remember you were curious and flew down close to it? Remember Denver? Those cities we abandoned soon after the establishment of the Curtain, as soon as our subterranean metropolises were built—for in those days we were not certain just how quickly the nations beyond the Curtain might construct atomic plants. True, we had our scintillometers, we were constantly on our guard, we had our rockets ready, but the physical plant could be built, prepared for instant operation, and we had by then no accurate reports of what your scientists might be thinking—we had learned that thinking was more vital than the last incidents of construction. We had no surety except our rocket barrages that you would not get these suppositional plants into production before we could destroy you, which meant of course that we too might be destroyed. We had with us the frightful memory of that Third World War, and how very close the outcome seemed at first. So we took no risks. We went beneath the earth, leaving dead cities where once we had lived. We built new cities up into the Arctic, outpost cities, as far as the northern coast of Canada, leaving only that chain of mountains, where the engineering problems were prohibitive, beyond the network of our automatic civilization. Now, this metal panel—" The Father's fragile fingers poised above the unmarked keys. "I touch, as you observe, and instantly you are seeing what is happening across the continent in Emporia."