After that, he said, he was much too busy for theatricals. The peaks were coming up toward the belly of the plane like sharks' snouts in an open sea. He stalled to cut his landing speed, and at the last second pancaked on a meadow free of trees, cushioned by deep snow. His craft was not damaged. With fuel, and without the waist-deep snow, he could have taken off again. These were the things a flyer automatically would check, the normal things. He was out of the craft, checking the terrain, when the third thing came to him and he stood there, cursing in the four languages that he knew best. He had forgotten his wireless. As instantly as he had gotten through the Curtain, whether help was or was not possible, he should have messaged his Wrangell base, for the only factor of this personal disaster that had actual significance was that the Curtain could be pierced--not once in ten thousand times, perhaps, but it could be done. And that information should have been relayed at once to Wrangell. For the next half hour O'Hara worked furiously for contact, with only the nasty mocking whine of space coming back to him. He had flown too far. They could not hear him. "It closed my record in the logs of the Patrol. Like Anstruther, I'd vanished, leaving nothing but hysterical last words, as valueless to science and my people as the twitterings of starlings on a summer evening." Night deepened his gloom. He shut himself inside his craft, placing his automatic on the seat beside him, a loneliness that was like coma sapping him. "Old Hendrik Hudson--drifting in an open boat among the floes. I think I really understood at last. For time had ceased to telescope for me. Time, too, had frozen. As it must in death." But once, awakened in the night by a sudden howling that was shriller than the wind would be, he gripped his automatic, peering out, watching a ball of fire not far above the surface of the ground that vanished suddenly, as if puffed out. It did not come again. Or if it did, he was asleep, his will a victim of exhaustion and despondency. When he awoke, the sun was high above the surrounding peaks. O'Hara broke out his emergency rations, afterward climbing from the craft to scoop up and swallow a handful of snow. "What am I waiting for?" he wondered. Yet he hated to leave the craft. It was his fortress, both physical and mental, his one link with the world beyond the Atomic Curtain--though a useless link now, he knew. It was futile to stay with it and, so far as he could foresee, futile to leave it. At last the very pressure of idleness drove him to action and he took his automatic, loaded it and strapped it beneath his flyer's jacket, then with his ice ax chopped down a score of small conifers and arranged them around and above his craft in a crude camouflage. He turned toward the forest that encircled the meadow and began trudging through the snow. But just beyond the first line of trees he stopped.