THE ATOM CURTAIN By NICK BODDIE WILLIAMS ACE BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y. Copyright, 1956, by Nick Boddie Williams All Rights Reserved Printed in U.S.A. [Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] HE BROKE THE BARRIER TO A CONTINENT IN EXILE! For two hundred and seventy years America had been totally cut off from the rest of the world by an impenetrable wall of raging atomic fury. To the frightened countries of the Old World, what had once been the greatest of all powers was now the most fearful of all mysteries. No man ached to know what lay behind that frightful barrier more than Emmett O'Hara, restless air-sentinel of the International Patrol--whose American ancestors had been stranded in Britain the day the Atom Curtain was raised. Then, on December 20, in the year 2230, while on routine patrol, O'Hara did the impossible. He broke through the barrier--and lived! But the full story of O'Hara's discoveries and adventures in Atomic America is so utterly breath-taking that readers are sure to rate it a classic of modern science-fiction. * * * * * Nick Boddie Williams says he hit on the idea of writing _THE ATOM CURTAIN_ "while debating with an editorial writer what might possibly happen to nations behind the Iron Curtain, and how much more likely all of it would be to happen if the Curtain were Atomic, rather than Iron. It's about the same line of thinking that led Doyle to write _The Lost World_, or any number of men to dwell upon cut-off places. But of course I couldn't write about Eurasia, for I've never been there. It was written at the time we were debating the setting up of a fixed line far out from our shores (the Taft plan, the Hoover idea), which became, a little luridly, the approximate line of my Atomic Curtain. A good many philosophical ideas got mixed up in what was essentially an adventure story, but I can't be accused of following any one line, except perhaps Darwin's." Williams, who works on the _Los Angeles Times_, considers himself a newspaperman rather than a writer. Nevertheless he has had stories published in _Colliers_, _Saturday Evening Post_, _Woman's Home Companion_, and others. PART ONE Now at last I must make this accusation and disclose the truth. I make it with the hard realization of the dangers that are inherent for us all. I make it knowing that these risks have terrified those whom we chose to govern us, and I make it only because their terror has paralyzed their minds. And you and I--the world as we know it--cannot wait any longer.