"Yes, isn't it? But I do want to see you. I've just gotten in from Cairo after four days' flying and I need a drink and Nedra doesn't drink and I hate to drink alone. I've opened up my flat in Bloomsbury. How fast can you make it?" I pressed my face within my hands. Then, listening for the sound of the voice, I said, "O'Hara?" "Do you realize you're wasting time and I haven't much to waste?" he said. "I want to see you. Now shake it up, old boy, I've poured for you--" "O'Hara, is it really you?" "Can you make it by six?" "But it's--" "I know--impossible. But can you do it?" When I knocked, he opened the door. He stood there casually, grinning at me as if I had just come back from an errand to the corner grocer's. The collar of his brilliant blue uniform was open at the throat. The three bars and half-globe were missing. His jet-black hair was tousled carelessly. "Well, come in," he said and pulled me into the sitting room of the flat. "I've got us something for supper. Here, drink this up." "O'Hara!" I cried. And he laughed. "I'm glad to see you, too." He gripped my shoulder and then thrust a glass into my hand. "Drink it up. That's good. The principle of the funnel." "But where--? Colonel Tournant told me--" "Now, here's another, though you may nurse it longer if you wish," O'Hara said, and filled my glass. "The supper will keep, it's tinned stuff anyway. Colonel Tournant told you, eh? I'll give him the shock of his life. Aren't you going to sit down?" "Not until you tell me where you've been?" "Really," he said, "you'd better sit down. Because it so happens that I am going to tell you. That's the chair for you. Attend to your drink. And while you're doing that, I'll take you back for a moment to the 74th degree of latitude and the 163rd degree of longitude, one year ago plus four days." He raised his glass. When he put it down it was empty. "If you saw Tournant, you know that much," he said. "But I don't think he could have told you what I found there." "The sudden gale?" I asked. "The thunderhead--" A cry came from the room beyond us. A strange, low cry, mournful, somehow distressing, very sad, as if someone were lonely beyond the point of bearing, and I confess I leaped up and turned toward O'Hara. "Now, that's a deceiving noise," he said, perfectly calm. "You think it sounds heartbroken, don't you? I assure you, it isn't. I'll get around to that in time, but not if you keep fidgeting. Yes, it was that sudden gale--" I managed to remember where we'd been. O'Hara was talking very rapidly.