"Or rammed against the Curtain?" "Yes. Quite probably." "And through it?" "You're remembering one of those silly letters I wrote you when I first got out there. I don't know--there's no evidence. But I should think his craft would atomize, I don't think he'd get through it. Whatever it was, Anstruther simply lost his bearings--his readings definitely establish that he was not near the Curtain when he cracked, his last actual reading in milliroentgens was well within his safety limit--and then, when his mind blew up, he misinterpreted what his instruments were showing. And that killed him. Somehow, and it doesn't really matter how, that killed him. Have we time for pudding? I'm off for Stockholm at three-ten." I did not go to Croydon to see him off. They are not keen on that in the Patrol. Farewells, I imagine, are depressing, although it would not have depressed O'Hara. Nothing was very likely to depress him for long, even Anstruther's fate. Cadets came and went, and if their officers took to heart too much that unfortunate 30 per cent there were always the sanitary rules of the Twelve Old Men of Geneva, who had conceived out of their latent if stupid fear the organization of the globular operations of the Patrol. Those who became morose simply were pensioned off. Utilized, as they expressed it--they were utilized, used up, discarded. But in style and comfort, like old race horses. A year passed before O'Hara wrote that he had got his captaincy. He was based then on Wrangell Island, one hundred miles from where the Curtain swerves toward the outmost top of Siberia, crossing the Anadyr Mountains to enclose the lost passage to the Indies, Bering Strait. "Think how they searched for it," he wrote, speaking of the Strait. "The ancient Norse king, Bloodyaxe, hunting whale and walrus through the moving ice as far toward the east as Novaya Zembla on this Siberian coast, Sebastian Cabot in the time of Henry VIII seeking the northern sealane to Cathay--or have you dug this far yet in your histories? And John Rut of Plymouth and Hugh Willoughby who perished with his men on the Kola Peninsula, and old Barents the invincible, and Henrik Hudson driven back westward by the polar ice and so forced to explore the continent that's long since lost again, Hudson Bay and Hudson River, and dying with his young son finally while drifting in a small boat in the seas that he had opened up; until in 1728 old Vitus Bering working for the great Czar Peter pushed eastward from Okhotsk and ascertained at last the Strait--yes, history, my boy, the grand epic of the Northeast Passage, hundreds dying valiantly, and now their work forever lost, their passage closed by the impenetrable Curtain.