The atom curtain

by Nick B. Williams

"Let me make the situation clear. I had been without hope. It had seemed incredible that I could escape with Nedra and my son from the labyrinth of Washington, retracing my way along the glittering and utterly deserted corridors through panels that slid open without detectable human motivation, back to the Tube and through it back into Emporia, now a dead metropolis, and up again by its only shaft to the surface of the earth and through the patrols of the Degraded in western Kansas once again into those mountains where Nedra's kinsmen were. No one—I had had the clansmen's word for this—had ever escaped once he had sunk into the cities of the lowlands. It was that absolute hopelessness that had driven me unresisting forward to the Father, and yet now—

"Now I believed there was a way to do it. I had only to learn from the Father the mechanism of the integrocalculators, the key-studded board he kept beneath his blue-veined hands, and to make my peace with Anstruther who surely understood this maze of a city and who, as the Father himself had said, controlled a dissident faction of the Sons, and the way would be clear for Nedra and my child and me.

"That's hope for you. The impossible at once becomes a very simple thing. I had only to do this, and only to arrange that. I wonder now how I supposed the Father, so readily to be outwitted, had been able to endure for two hundred and seventy years behind the Atomic Curtain. The truth is of course that I was not thinking—I was engaging in the opposite of thought, which is hope. And hope blinded me. Or rather, purpose blinded me. I had been so long without either."

He had been, he said, quite certain of his direction when he started walking away from the dais. He had seen Nedra going toward the apartment built into the distant wall, and he had thought that he had only to go that way himself to join her. Yet in the absorption of his speculations he walked for some fifteen minutes without the distance once occurring clearly to him, and it was only the sensation of walls closing in upon him that finally halted him.

He was in a corridor. Somehow he had passed from the vast hall of the Father.

"I was to learn that in the city of Washington there were no walls as we know them. They had the thickness and the height of walls, but the Father, constantly watching in the screen above his bed, could with the touch of his little finger disarrange and reassemble those immense sections of stone and metal in a thousand patterns, all preconceived it is true, to cope with all conceivable situations. I was to see the giant gears that could elevate within an instant the lowest depths of the city to the topmost level and transfer the Dome itself, that amazing architectural illusion, into the very bowels of the earth, miles below the muddy bottom of the Potomac. In all of the city only the Tube was fixed, and that solely because the shifting of its continental span was too monstrous an engineering feat even for those masters of the early days immediately after the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. It would have involved the balancing of the crust of the earth itself, and as in the case of Archimedes with his global lever, where was there such a fulcrum?

"But the city, Washington, was a myriad of interchangeable parts, and at no moment since its construction could there possibly have been a master plan for it—nothing that any enemy could definitely say was thus and so, the plexus here, the exact place to strike at. Within the broad limit of its thousand patterns and countless thousands of lesser integral dispersions it existed only as the Father wanted it, and through his keyboard could instantly set it up.

"I say that the lone exception was the Tube. That is true, the Tube was fixed, but its terminus could be sent whirling away from it, sealing it off. Conceive of the city, if you wish, as a series of spheres, one within the other, like a child's gyroscope, revolving when the impulse came from the integrocalculators, or expanding through the integration of chords from a larger outer sphere which then contracted into the lesser orbit. Too tough? It was for me.

"It was much too tough a problem for me, and when I found myself enclosed within the comparatively narrow confines of that corridor, beyond the Father's—and Nedra's hall—I felt for the first time since Nedra's return with her newborn child that complete and imbecilic frustration that must come over those poor deviled rodents that psychologists force to pop through little doors to establish their reflex patterns. I stood stock still, my brain suddenly as empty as the corridor about me, numbed beyond comprehension for how long I do not know, until at last I became conscious of the spasms of my fingers."

And within the passing of the next five minutes, said O'Hara, his mind went through the progressive stages of the full cycle of evolution—inert at first, then active only as a salt solution might react electrically, then numbly timorous as a hypersensitive vegetable, and finally aware. The worm recoils from surfaces too hot or cold. He was aware like that, until somewhere along toward the rapid reassertion of the human mind he met and conquered, if not fear, at least the impossibility of fearing.