O'Hara did reach the seventieth degree of latitude and did reach the Curtain fringe. That much he reported in radiocasts made at intervals of three minutes. Then, soon after he began the 300-mile leg of his flight along the Curtain, according to Colonel Alfred Tournant, base commander at Wrangell, O'Hara reported a sudden gale, with violent southward winds and electrical disturbance, but nothing that his craft should not have been able to penetrate. Then, at 12:34, according to Colonel Tournant, O'Hara's voice came in: "O'Hara, Flight Twelve, Latitude 74, Longitude 163, Milliroentgens .255--a little close to it, eh? Miles per hour 897 and retarding--there's a gigantic thunderhead piling up and I--Tournant? You listening? I don't like this--lightning's too thick--Tournant? Request permission to change course instantly! Milliroentgens .268--I'm heading north toward the Pole. Miles per hour 1004--but I'm not--getting away--" A blast of static drowned his voice. And that was all. That was really all the details there were about O'Hara's vanishing. Within a dozen words he was talking jestingly and then calling Tournant in sudden alarm. And changing course. And then those final words: "--but I'm not--getting away--" On the tenth of March Colonel Tournant arrived unexpectedly in London and the _Observer_ sent me to interview him. He'd had a splendid record with the Patrol and was considered the coming man in it, quite probably its next Vice Marshal. The _Observer_ did not need to send me--nothing in London except the Bureau of Security itself could have kept me from seeing him. He received me in his rooms at Claridge's, and after we shook hands, he indicated a well-laden liquor cabinet. "You should find something there you like," he said. "Let me help you. You--ah--you knew Captain O'Hara?" "From childhood," I replied. "My best and perhaps my only friend." Colonel Tournant smiled quickly. He was a small and dapper man--what I should have considered the raw material for a martinet--thickly mustached, brown-eyed, and with the dark tan of most men in the Patrol, a very nervous, brittle manner, a pacer. "Yes, you'd think that," he said. "O'Hara gave everyone that impression. I can tell from the way you speak, though--you're also an émigré, aren't you? Descended from O'Hara's Yanks? Some of the words you and he use, some of the inflections. He was my best friend, too, though not from childhood. How old do you suppose I am?" The question startled me. There seemed to be no connection. "Forty-five," I guessed. He flicked his fingers through his hair. "Gray enough for it," he said, his smile a little forced. "It happens that I'm thirty-two, six years older than O'Hara was. And here I am in London for my terminal--I'm utilized." "You're utilized! But we supposed--" "I know," he snapped. "You supposed that you were interviewing the next Vice Marshal of the Patrol. The truth is I'm finished. At thirty-two, I'm finished."