"Time telescopes up here. Within a day I can be above the Anadyr Gulf, the eastern reaches of the Bering Sea and not six hundred miles from where our ancestors launched rockets to obliterate the port of Vladivostok in the Third World War--the great base that was in Alaska, at Nome--I can be over the Anadyr Gulf at dawn, cross the Anadyr Mountains to our base at Wrangell and before my fuel's gone land at Bear Island, guarding the Kolyma River that flows northeast from Siberia. Refueling, I can hit New Siberia Island or our Lena River operations base at Barkin, take off with more fuel for the Yenisei, touch at Franz Josef Land, tag up in Ice Fjord in the Spitzbergens, drop down to Stockholm and be with you for roast beef at Swall's by night--provided ground crews nowhere along the line are dogging it. From the stamping grounds of Vitus Bering, year 1728, to Swall's in London, year 2230--within a day's flying. And so, what's time? "But that's a fat route I've outlined for you--that's the easy stuff, the points we'd like to be flying between. For actually after the Curtain passes the longitude of Wrangell it curves much closer to where we presume we'd find the North American continent, south of the pole on the far side from us, crossing the vast seaborne ice sheets in its path toward the northern tip of Greenland. And for anything like an effective patrol we must fly deep isosceles triangles toward it from our land bases strung across the top of Europe and Asia. We cannot fly for long close to the Curtain in the Arctic--we must fly toward it and then back, a series of exploratory fingers extended out to it, which is tougher than our Antarctic patrols. Over water--which means ice--and out of sight of land almost entirely. Navigation problems. Adds to the strain--there now, the nasty word! Must not say that. "But I've seen more of Northern Europe and Siberia in the last twelve months than all the expeditions of the czars and Muscovite Bolsheviks explored in their thousand years. The debris of their two cultures lies scattered across the top of this vast Eurasian land mass, with immense glassy pockets where their cities once stood, the scars of the Third World War. And through the air that we are flying that first cloud of rockets came from the continent of North America, leveling all Russia down to the latitude of Moscow before the ultimatum and the surrender. A creeping barrage of rockets, and I've seen the evidence that it spared nothing, neither cities nor forests nor ice floes nor the barren tundras. It's all down there below us when we're flying, the record of that last war, the really Great war that shattered the political pattern of Europe and Asia and forced the eventual formation of the World Council of Nations and the division of the earth outside the Curtain into its system of prefects, bearing their old and now quite meaningless national names.