"Of course our base in the Falklands is mildly contaminated, all these fringe areas are, and all of us have a touch of the atomic sickness, just as those living in the tropics have malaria. You know what it's like--nausea sometimes, and always diarrhea, a tendency toward bleeding gums and conjunctivitis and--well, yes, dammit, falling hair, baldness. I shall resemble the egg of the great auk in another ten years of this. Sounds terrible. Actually, though, these are only tendencies, for we do not expose ourselves beyond the lowest background counts upon our scintillometers. We're taking no chances--this is a Patrol, not a combat unit, for there's nothing to combat. Nothing, nothing but that invisible curtain, at a fixed latitude and a fixed longitude for every foot of its tens of thousands of miles, with only the variances of the surface contamination that I mentioned. Which brings me back to what I meant to tell you. "I was patrolling one hundred feet above the ocean's surface when I saw ahead of me, not quite to that black ribbon of a horizon I have described, a strange dark object, apparently floating on the sea. Immediately I changed course toward it, but when I had reached the absolute limit of radioactivity that we are permitted the dark object was still ten or more miles ahead of me. "It must have been, at that instant, extremely close to the Curtain itself. If it was not within it! Yet it was plowing toward me through heavy seas, the first moving object I had ever seen in this sector. "I was forced to turn back. Within the fraction of a second I had lost it. But barring a gale, I had sufficient fuel for some minutes' cruising. I made a tight arc and approached again. The object was still there, and still approaching. "I'm sure that had my squadron commander been spying upon me, he would have grounded me for life. For in the next ten minutes I flew perhaps a hundred oval patterns, approaching the object, retreating from contamination, then reapproaching, again and again, trying to keep in contact with it until it got close enough for inspection. By that time my fuel could not be further safely expended, and I wirelessed back to our Falklands base with my report, then continued on to South Shetland. "A snowstorm screamed down on me minutes before I landed and I came in blind. Had I spent another five minutes at those oval patterns I would not have made it. Frightened me a little. I suppose I can become too damned enamored of that mystery out there.