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Machine Learning Guide for Oil
and Gas Using Python

A Step-by-Step Breakdown with

Data, Algorithms, Codes, and
Applications

Hoss Belyadi
Obsertelligence, LLC

Alireza Haghighat
IHS Markit
Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Biography

Acknowledgment

Chapter 1. Introduction to machine learning and Python

Introduction

Artificial intelligence

Data mining

Machine learning

Python crash course

Anaconda introduction

Anaconda installation
Jupyter Notebook interface options

Basic math operations

Assigning a variable name

Creating a string

Defining a list

Creating a nested list

Creating a dictionary

Creating a tuple

Creating a set

If statements

For loop

Nested loops

List comprehension

Defining a function

Introduction to pandas

Dropping rows or columns in a data frame

loc and iloc

Conditional selection

Pandas groupby

Pandas data frame concatenation

 Pandas merging

Pandas joining

Pandas operation

Pandas lambda expressions

Dealing with missing values in pandas

Dropping NAs

Filling NAs

Numpy introduction

Random number generation using numpy

Numpy indexing and selection

Chapter 2. Data import and visualization

Data import and export using pandas

Data visualization

Chapter 3. Machine learning workflows and types

Introduction

Machine learning workflows

Machine learning types

Dimensionality reduction
Chapter 4. Unsupervised machine learning: clustering algorithms

Introduction to unsupervised machine learning

K-means clustering

Hierarchical clustering

Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise

(DBSCAN)

Important notes about clustering

Outlier detection

Local outlier factor using scikit-learn

Chapter 5. Supervised learning

Overview

Linear regression

Logistic regression

Metrics for classification model evaluation

Logistic regression using scikit-learn

K-nearest neighbor

Support vector machine

Decision tree

Random forest

Extra trees (extremely randomized trees)

 Gradient boosting

Extreme gradient boosting

Adaptive gradient boosting

Frac intensity classification example

Handling missing data (imputation techniques)

Rate of penetration (ROP) optimization example

Chapter 6. Neural networks and Deep Learning

Introduction and basic architecture of neural network

Backpropagation technique

Data partitioning

Neural network applications in oil and gas industry

Example 1: estimated ultimate recovery prediction in shale

reservoirs

Example 2: develop PVT correlation for crude oils

Deep learning

Convolutional neural network (CNN)

Convolution

Activation function

Pooling layer

Fully connected layers

 Recurrent neural networks

Deep learning applications in oil and gas industry

Frac treating pressure prediction using LSTM

Chapter 7. Model evaluation

Evaluation metrics and scoring

Cross-validation

Grid search and model selection

Partial dependence plots

Size of training set

Save-load models

Chapter 8. Fuzzy logic

Classical set theory

Fuzzy set

Fuzzy inference system

Fuzzy C-means clustering

Chapter 9. Evolutionary optimization

Genetic algorithm

Particle swarm optimization

Index
Copyright
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are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than
as may be noted herein).

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changing. As new research and experience broaden our
understanding, changes in research methods, professional
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Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their
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Biography
Hoss Belyadi is the founder and CEO of Obsertelligence,
LLC, focused on providing artificial intelligence (AI) in-
house training and solutions. As an adjunct faculty member
at multiple universities, including West Virginia University,
Marietta College, and Saint Francis University, Mr. Belyadi
taught data analytics, natural gas engineering, enhanced oil
recovery, and hydraulic fracture stimulation design. With

over 10 years of experience working in various

conventional and unconventional reservoirs across the
world, he works on diverse machine learning projects and
holds short courses across various universities,
organizations, and the department of energy (DOE). Mr.
Belyadi is the primary author of Hydraulic Fracturing in
Unconventional Reservoirs (first and second editions) and is
the author of Machine Learning Guide for Oil and Gas Using
Python. Hoss earned his BS and MS, both in petroleum and
natural gas engineering from West Virginia University.
Dr. Alireza Haghighat is a senior technical advisor and
instructor for Engineering Solutions at IHS Markit, focusing
on reservoir/production engineering and data analytics.
Prior to joining IHS, he was a senior reservoir engineer at

Eclipse/Montage resources for nearly 5 years. As a

reservoir engineer, he was involved in well performance
evaluation with data analytics, rate transient analysis of
unconventional assets (Utica and Marcellus), asset
development, hydraulic fracture/reservoir simulation, DFIT
analysis, and reserve evaluation. He was an adjunct faculty
at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) for 5 years, teaching
courses in Petroleum Engineering/Energy, Business and
Finance departments. Dr. Haghighat has published several
technical papers and book chapters on machine learning
applications in smart wells, CO2 sequestration modeling,
and production analysis of unconventional reservoirs. He
has received his PhD in petroleum and natural gas
engineering from West Virginia University and a master's
degree in petroleum engineering from Delft University of
Technology.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
drawback that I would be dead, and so could not gloat like stout
Balboa on a peak in Darien.
"I saw the Curtain doing its merry routine one day last week. I was
flying quite low, not a hundred feet above the surface of the sea,
making a customary check upon the water's radioactivity. We do this
every flight, to check upon the contamination of the water, which
usually is quite constant, flowing out from below the Curtain a
distance of fifty miles but decreasing in activity with an almost
mathematical precision. Yet when there is a really powerful gale
blowing southward or westward from the Curtain, from the tip of what
once was called Chile or Argentina, both now encompassed by the
Curtain, the surface currents sometimes are reversed from the Cape
—the fabled Cape Horn of early mariners—and the contamination
flows much further toward the Antarctic before it diffuses.
"Of course our base in the Falklands is mildly contaminated, all
these fringe areas are, and all of us have a touch of the atomic
sickness, just as those living in the tropics have malaria. You know
what it's like—nausea sometimes, and always diarrhea, a tendency
toward bleeding gums and conjunctivitis and—well, yes, dammit,
falling hair, baldness. I shall resemble the egg of the great auk in
another ten years of this. Sounds terrible. Actually, though, these are
only tendencies, for we do not expose ourselves beyond the lowest
background counts upon our scintillometers. We're taking no
chances—this is a Patrol, not a combat unit, for there's nothing to
combat. Nothing, nothing but that invisible curtain, at a fixed latitude
and a fixed longitude for every foot of its tens of thousands of miles,
with only the variances of the surface contamination that I
mentioned. Which brings me back to what I meant to tell you.
"I was patrolling one hundred feet above the ocean's surface when I
saw ahead of me, not quite to that black ribbon of a horizon I have
described, a strange dark object, apparently floating on the sea.
Immediately I changed course toward it, but when I had reached the
absolute limit of radioactivity that we are permitted the dark object
was still ten or more miles ahead of me.
"It must have been, at that instant, extremely close to the Curtain
itself. If it was not within it! Yet it was plowing toward me through
heavy seas, the first moving object I had ever seen in this sector.
"I was forced to turn back. Within the fraction of a second I had lost
it. But barring a gale, I had sufficient fuel for some minutes' cruising. I
made a tight arc and approached again. The object was still there,
and still approaching.
"I'm sure that had my squadron commander been spying upon me,
he would have grounded me for life. For in the next ten minutes I
flew perhaps a hundred oval patterns, approaching the object,
retreating from contamination, then reapproaching, again and again,
trying to keep in contact with it until it got close enough for
inspection. By that time my fuel could not be further safely
expended, and I wirelessed back to our Falklands base with my
report, then continued on to South Shetland.
"A snowstorm screamed down on me minutes before I landed and I
came in blind. Had I spent another five minutes at those oval
patterns I would not have made it. Frightened me a little. I suppose I
can become too damned enamored of that mystery out there.
"But delay your literary fancies a minute. There is a sequel—for we
flew double patrols throughout the following week. The dark object
was not sighted again upon the surface of the sea—the blizzard, I
presume, obscured its week of passage. Then just yesterday a
Patrol craft over South Orkney Island picked up a disturbing buzz
upon its scintillometer. There should have been no such extreme
contamination that far south and west of the Curtain. We threw a
dozen craft into the sector within half an hour, and finally, wrecked on
the craggy shores of Coronation Island, we found our dark object.
"It was hot, very hot—too dangerous to examine closely. We put an
amphibian down alongside Coronation and they worked for several
hours with telescopic cameras. The pictures have just been
developed here. And I really did have something!
"What we've got, as nearly as we can determine from rather grainy
prints, is a kind of ship, fashioned of undressed logs, a very crude
and unseaworthy vessel I am sure, but also with the virtue of being
unsinkable. There is a cabin of sorts amidships of it with some
sheets of a shining material, similar to asbestos, tacked onto it. And
close to that, extremely blurred upon our prints, are three black
objects that we have decided must be men. That is, they must have
been men once, before they drifted into the Atomic Curtain. They are
charcoal now, but the pattern of arms and legs, however distorted in
their horrible death, shows distinctly. Three men upon a boat of logs,
from where?
"The Sandwich Islands, possibly. It would represent a tremendous
voyage, thousands of miles through the worst of weather, but where
else could men come from in these desolate seas?
"Unless you want to go along with me in the most improbable of
fantasies—unless they came from behind the Atomic Curtain! From
the Western Hemisphere, from the Lost Continents! Too absurd, of
course. We know the level that their civilization had achieved. They
would not now be using boats so crudely built of logs, and most
assuredly, if they did build it, they would not sail it into their Atomic
Curtain. No—purely fantasy, and yet I like it. I would give my next
promotion to go aboard that vessel! But I am not yet prepared to give
my life, which it would cost me. Ten years from now, possibly, when
the contamination has abated, if it does abate—jot that down,
remember it—ten years from now, on Coronation Island in the
Antarctic, there still may be the wreckage of a boat that can reveal to
us what Man behind the Atomic Curtain nowadays is like!
"Ah, well—"
Yes, there was news in that letter, but I mistook it instead for a bit of
a feature, and did quite nicely with it in a little piece that must have
given old Jules Verne a turn or two within his grave. Improbabilia—
the pseudoscientific flare. Good reading for small boys on rainy
Saturdays!
O'Hara was back in London two years later, on his way to Stockholm
for reassignment. I picked him up at his flat in Bloomsbury. He wore
by then the three gold bars and half-globe of a lieutenancy, and in
his brilliant blue uniform he seemed more than ever to me a man set
apart, for not many Patrol pilots and none like O'Hara were walking
the streets of London, so far removed from their duty routes. He had
put on weight, a good deal of it, yet he had managed somehow to
absorb it compactly—six feet three and a good two hundred and
thirty pounds, his dark face burned and weathered, only less dark
than a Polynesian, and his thick, clustered hair jet black—for his
prediction had not come true, he was no auk's egg.
"What happened?" I asked him. "The atomic sickness?"
We were lunching together at Swall's, where the roast is excellent,
and O'Hara finished his before he answered me. "I'd forgotten that,"
he said at last. "You get over it. I suppose you build up a tolerance
for it. The first year is a little rough—you can spot a cadet
immediately by his red-rimmed eyes and the unhealthy color that
comes through windburn pallidly, like an underglow of yellow. And
this although they're never bucking more than .165 milliroentgens an
hour. Then all at once, within a month's time, you're over the hump
and it goes away and you're safe enough at .225—you're safe
enough, that is, for short periods of time, and unless you're a
damned fool and ram yourself into the Curtain. You don't tolerate that
—though you never realize it. For you don't have time. You're cinders
rather instantly."
"You lose cadets?"
"A percentage—a definite percentage—three out of ten. They simply
cannot seem to learn that all of this has been estimated exactly and
that there is no margin for error. The Curtain is constant, and the
pattern of your flight must be constant, barring the variations caused
by gales, for which there is a single rule—get the hell down south
before your craft is slammed into the Curtain. We had a new man
last summer, though—"
He paused, his shoulders hunching forward and his eyes seeing
beyond me, beyond Swall's, back into the Antarctic. His fingers
tapped three times, slowly, upon the table.
"Yes?" I said.
O'Hara jumped. It seemed incredible, but he did exactly that, he
jumped, as if I had screamed out at him.
"Excuse me," he said, and laughed quickly. "Lost myself for a
moment. Because we've never known precisely what it was. A
mistake in his readings, certainly. He must have been confused,
which can and does occur when inexperienced men are making
those long overwater hops. Perhaps their vision blurs. And possibly
—well, we ought not to get that type, they should screen them out,
but there's considerable pressure for replacements, losing 30 per
cent. If a candidate can pass the twenty-twenty test he's taken, but
there should be a sharp downgrading on fatigue and on emotional
reaction."
"Surely they get emotion ratings?"
"Yes—up to a point. But it's still not selective enough. It wasn't in
Anstruther's case."
"The new man you mentioned?"
"Yes. He was in my squadron basing on the Falklands. Nice lad, well
set up, an angel face—blond with blue eyes. Well educated, too, and
rather religious. He had intended going into the ministry until this
Patrol bug got him. I liked the boy—reminded me a great deal of
myself when I first got out there. You know—eager, imaginative. I
think that was the trouble—too imaginative. On that last flight of his,
a pattern he'd flown a dozen times by then, down to South Shetland,
it happened that I was catching his calls at our wireless hut. That's
no part of my job but I was disturbed about him. Only a hunch, or
was it more than that? I suspect that I knew, out of my own
experience I knew, how he felt about those hops and I should have
cashiered him. But I didn't do it—you hate to do it, you've got no
reason that makes sense, you'd look hysterical putting it into a
report, for the boys in medical had given him the go-ahead. And so I
was listening to his calls, that feeling of my guilt just dormant, just
across the border line from actually wirelessing him to swing away
from the Curtain while he could—to turn back."
O'Hara's fingers made those three rapid taps upon the table once
more. Then he continued:
"It was all so routine. I keep insisting to myself that I had no warning
whatever—it was all completely routine. A series of latitude and
longitude readings, the constant repetition of his milliroentgen count,
quite safe. He was keeping his distance from the Curtain and had
worked his way to the latitude of the Cape, the point beyond which
there's no extraordinary danger, for the Curtain ends about there and
the rest of it is simply overwater flying to the South Shetland base. I
was beginning to relax. I was telling myself that men with
premonitions are the spiritual cousins of water dousers and the little
gents who peer myopically at crystal balls. And then all at once the
droning of Anstruther's voice broke off.
"That could happen any time. And yet the silence slapped me. It was
like that exactly, a cold slap in my face. Not over four seconds of
complete silence. Then Anstruther's voice came back again and it
was a scream.
"But not terror. I want to emphasize that it was not terror. The boy
simply cracked. Excitement. But a shocking excitement to me,
jubilation. As if he were cheering his crew to victory—a shattering
vibration in the wireless and these words: 'It's gone! It's gone!
There's no count. I can't find it—it's gone—the Curtain—'
"And then nothing. Never another word. Never a trace of him or the
craft."
"And you think—?"
"No, we don't," O'Hara said. "We speculate, but there is no basis for
thinking anything. Not the slightest clue, not the shred of a fact.
Flying at better than a thousand miles an hour he could have done
anything, once he'd lost control of himself like that. The bottom of the
sea."
"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.
"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.
"Yes, here in the frozen north was the earth remolded into the
system we now know, before the Western Hemisphere retreated
finally behind the Curtain.
"And so to us of the Patrol time seems to telescope. The past is with
us. We are, in truth, the guardians of the past, for if there is a future
—which means change—it lies beyond the Curtain, among the
peoples of the Western Hemisphere, who alone now possess the
knowledge that could rear and maintain this Wall of Death. Or is it
actually, for them, a Wall of Life? What are they doing there in those
lost continents? What wonders have they now achieved in their two
hundred and seventy years of isolated and unimpeded progress?
And what remains as the grand adventure for the rest of us unless it
is the penetration—?
"Ah, you see, I am very close to utilized. And that nasty word creeps
through my mind again, the word we must not whisper among
ourselves in the Patrol—strain! Soon, I do not doubt, I shall be back
forever in London, washed up much as poor Anstruther was washed
up, a victim of proximity to the Curtain. Prepare a pleasant little
snuggery for me."
But O'Hara was not coming back to London as soon as he
pretended to anticipate. I have included these letters from him here
only to indicate the acuteness of his mind, how very close he often
was to the scientific truths while he rambled on in his most
extravagant mood. But this is not a scientific paper—my aim is
political, and in particular it is economic, if anyone nowadays
distinguishes between the two. My aim is Truth and the revelation of
it, as I got it from Emmett O'Hara on that evening of his return, a few
days more than one year after he disappeared while flying on patrol
out of his base on Wrangell Island.
Two days before Christmas, December 23, 2228, I heard that O'Hara
had vanished. His father telephoned me as soon as they got the
cable, asking if it were possible for me, through the Observer, to
obtain further information. I was able to learn a few details, but there
wasn't much to learn.
O'Hara had left the International Patrol's base at Wrangell on a
routine long-distance flight toward the Curtain at 12:15 P.M.,
December 20th. His flight pattern called for him to proceed to the
seventieth degree of latitude and to fly along it until his scintillometer
recorded .250 milliroentgens an hour, which was the maximum
permissible even for a veteran. He was then to pivot westward,
proceeding for three hundred miles along the Curtain's fringe, then
turn back toward Wrangell and arrive by 1 P.M., the slow time
because he would be taking readings constantly and must keep his
craft well throttled to do it. He took off with an excessive fuel load, for
his rank as a captain permitted him to make any necessary
extensions of his flight, subject to confirmation of the change by
wireless.
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."
"That's news with an upper-case N," I pointed out. "Am I permitted to
disclose it?"
"Why not? It's no disgrace." He shrugged. "I asked for it. I've lost my
stomach for the work. If it got O'Hara, I know damn well I'm too old
for it. For if ever there was a pilot whom I considered superior, who
would not—well, disintegrate—it was O'Hara. He had everything to
qualify him for the work, coolness and brains, resourcefulness, an
utter lack of fear. Yet the Curtain got him."
"The Curtain? Excuse me, Colonel, I understood it was that
thunderhead. He said in that last radiocast of his that he could not
get away—"
"Don't be an ass," Tournant snapped. "O'Hara knew weather.
Besides, I personally flew one hundred hours in the sector of his final
call and there was no wreckage. I flew that much! And I sent four
squadrons into it. We'd have found the feather of an albatross had it
been there. Thunderhead be damned. The Curtain got O'Hara—do
you recall the sequence of readings in his final radiocast?
Milliroentgens .255 and then again in seconds milliroentgens .268—
notice that jump? In seconds, mind you! And within those seconds
he believed that he was turning toward the Pole, which meant away
from the Curtain. Do you want to know what took place? His mind
disintegrated. The best of minds—the most stable of minds, and
O'Hara certainly had that—can take so much of that constant strain
and then without warning it happens." He stared at me pugnaciously,
then he snapped his fingers. "Like that, my scribbling friend, the
mind blinks out and that's an end of your pilot. No, thanks. I've had
enough. I shall cultivate roses—tea roses. And when I die, they'll not
need to handle my body with tongs. Have another drink?"
I considered my empty glass a moment and then I said, "Yes, for a
toast. To O'Hara."
We drank it together.
And that drink set the stage, I like to think, as completely as it could
be set for the day after Christmas, December 26th, 2229. For what
nicer thing can a man do for a lost friend than to embalm his memory
in the best of Scotch? Yes, the stage was set, but it so happened
that on the twenty-sixth of December I was writing about quite
another stage—I was doing my annual squib on the glories of Peter
Pan, the timeless pageant of the season, and how Jill Ferguson best
typified the centuries-old tradition of the ageless boy. I had got as far
as the second paragraph, and was beginning to feel the spirit of the
thing, when the telephone on my desk at the Observer began
ringing. I picked it up.
"Caught in the purple prose again," a voice came over the wire.
"You're writing about the pageants, aren't you?"
"Is it any of your business?" I snapped.
"I'm making it my business."
"Are you, indeed? Just who the devil are you?"
"My name is O'Hara. Emmett O'Hara."
"That's a very rotten joke."
"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.
"Remember that I wrote you our Wrangell base is not too far from
where the continents of Asia and North America once joined, where
Bering Strait broke through. It's a weather factory, storms are put
together there. Winds often swirl well beyond hurricane force,
howling in all that icy desolation as if there were the slightest sense
to it, for there's nothing at all to terrify." He was leaning forward now,
recalling it. "On that day I wasn't terrified. I didn't like it but I'd beaten
winds as bad as that. So I kept on the course laid out for my patrol
that day, holding my speed around nine hundred miles an hour and
sticking to an arc that gave me milliroentgen readings of .250 an
hour. Not too close to the Curtain for an old hand at it."
He paused to fill his glass. He glanced just once toward the room
beyond, then back to me. "You know, I'd never taken chances with
the Curtain. I'd seen it's effect, and I'd never really gotten over losing
Anstruther. I want to make it clear that I was not taking chances—I
was flying it safely, accurately, giving myself the full margin. The gale
was bothersome but the flight was going perfectly. Nothing unusual.
Around 12:30 I began plowing through an electrical field, sheet
lightning, vast livid flashes, but it wasn't until two minutes later, 12:32
P.M., that I first saw the thunderhead.
"One glance was all I had—time to report it on my radiocast—and
instantly the thing was blowing up. It seemed to erupt, caught in an
updraft, and belched blackly high above me in enormous toppling
billows, the Arctic's unleashed fury roaring with a thousand forked,
flaming tongues.
"My scintillometer's buzzing caught my ear. It was up to .268. I was
veering straight for the Curtain. I swung at once, heading toward the
Pole, due north away from the Curtain, and shot my speed above
one thousand miles an hour, but the thunderhead seemed now to be
collapsing on me and I could not accelerate swiftly enough to get
from underneath. I could not break loose. I knew that within an
instant I was going to be in the vortex of that swirling mass of wind
and shrieking fire. Then it exploded.
"I remember that distinctly—it exploded into flame. And it blacked me
out.
"I came out of concussion slowly—seconds, probably, but I seemed
to be dragging myself back into consciousness. My craft was 500
feet above the ice. And there was no thunderhead. The wind was
strong, around 120 miles an hour, but my speed was stabilized at
1125 miles per hour, and my milliroentgen count was .320. Very
dangerous. And worse, my craft was headed south again. I swung it
back toward the Pole.
"That should have cut my MR count. But within seconds the
scintillometer was jumping up to .325, then .350. I was approaching
the Curtain, and while headed due north!
"I turned back south. The MR count was dropping instantly. It didn't
make sense. It was not possible, because I'd been between the Pole
and the Curtain when I had blacked out. It was then that I made an
automatic check on my position. Latitude 73—I'd gotten far off
course during the time I'd been blacked out. Longitude 136—I
checked that again. But that was it. The longitude was 136 degrees."
O'Hara knew exactly where that position placed him. But he did
precisely what any laboratory technician would have done—he
repeated his experiment, trying to find an error in his calculations.
There was none and he knew it. He knew, even before that final
check, that he had got through the Atomic Curtain.
Somehow, he had got past the wall of death that had cut off the
Western Hemisphere for almost two hundred and seventy years. He
now was flying above the ice field that abutted the upper reaches of
the North American continent.
He glanced at his fuel gauge, and then turning south he set his
motors at their maximum cruising speed. If he was trapped within the
Western Hemisphere, the terra incognita that had fascinated him
since he was old enough to read, he knew that he must fly as far
below the desolation of the Arctic as his craft would go. And then—
"Then we shall see," O'Hara told himself. "Yes, we shall see—at
last."

PART TWO
When he at last convinced himself that he had got through the
Atomic Curtain, O'Hara said, his first feeling was a wild and utterly
unreasoning elation.
"I've done it!" he kept repeating to himself, much as if he had booted
home a twenty-to-one shot at the races at Aintree. "I've actually done
it—the first man in two hundred and seventy years to smash through.
Now we shall see!"
But that exuberance did not long continue. For here he was,
presumably in the Western Hemisphere, the cradle of the future, a
terra incognita since that Third World War, and it seemed no different
from the polar regions that he had been flying for the International
Patrol. No different at all—the limitless gray reaches of the sky, the
same vast twisted sheets of polar ice pierced only at great intervals
by craggy, barren peaks—the islands of the Beaufort Sea, above the
northern coast of Canada.
O'Hara was cruising at two thousand miles an hour. His fuel gauges
indicated that he might keep going for three thousand miles,
depending on his altitude. It was necessary, he knew, to get above
forty thousand feet and to stay there for his best distance, and he
had to have distance toward the south—for the storms of December
would have driven snow deep along the lost continent of North
America. He was not equipped for any lengthy existence in snow.
His craft had the Patrol's usual paraphernalia—an inflatable boat, a
signal pistol, a .38 automatic with six clips of ammunition, emergency
water supply, emergency rations, the items considered indispensable
when a rescue team could be expected to begin search soon after
he failed to report to his base at Wrangell Island. But now, south of
the Curtain, no rescue team was coming. None could get through. In
consequence, his life depended on getting below the wasteland of
the Arctic.
These things, O'Hara said, ticked automatically through his mind in
those first few minutes after he realized that he had got through the
Curtain—these, and the overwhelming importance of the fact itself,
that the Curtain could be pierced. He had, of course, no idea how the
thing had been achieved. It had happened while he was
unconscious, but as he reasoned it, his craft must have spun from
north to south and then rammed through. Nor had he any data on
the milliroentgen count of the Curtain itself—he had no idea of the
contamination to which he had been exposed. He realized that at
this moment he should have been a charred mass of carbon, like the
bodies of those men on Coronation Island, in the Antarctic, after their
vessel of logs had drifted into the Curtain.
But the indisputable fact remained that he was not carbonized. He
could only accept it and take whatever precautions seemed most
likely to keep him alive, which now, at this moment, seemed to call
for flying south.
Within minutes he was crossing a coastline, and following the bed of
a frozen river that pointed roughly south. Far toward his right—the
west—the saw-toothed stubs of mountains poked their glittering ice-
sheathed peaks up from the continent, and O'Hara was
remembering the maps he'd studied as a boy. That way, the west,
must be Alaska. Again he checked his position in latitude and
longitude, then deciding that the river course below him must be the
Mackenzie, reaching down past Great Bear Lake in Canada toward
Great Slave Lake. And somewhere distant past the snow-packed
tundras toward the east would be the land-locked gulf of Hudson
Bay.
"Remember," O'Hara said, "I wrote that time telescopes in the
Patrol? It was telescoping for me now—I was back again with old
Hendrik Hudson, though thank God not in quite the same kind of
boat. I was opening up the West again, seeing the amazing
continent, the wonders that I'd seen before only as dotted lines and
red-and-blue ink sworls on long-forgotten maps. And in five minutes
—the five since I had passed the Curtain—I was exploring more of
this tremendous northland than old Hendrik ever dreamed of."
Wonders, yes—but wonders unfortunately very like those of the land
mass of Siberia, and so no different from what he'd known before he
smashed through the Curtain. O'Hara felt somehow as if the myths
of the Lost Continent had let him down. Until he noticed the
recording of his scintillometer.
It had dropped only to .305 milliroentgens an hour. That was high—
dangerously high according to the flying regulations of the Patrol, yet
it had been much higher further north, toward the Curtain. He could
only hope that with his progress south the count would gradually
decline. Then it occurred to him that radioactive water might be
running underneath the ice of the Mackenzie, draining southward
from the Curtain, and he swerved hard toward the east, leaving the
river bed some hundred miles behind before he made another
reading. The milliroentgen count, rather than dropping, had risen to
.325 an hour. And simultaneously O'Hara's memory dredged up a
curious fact—the Mackenzie flowed toward the north. It could not
possibly be contaminated from the Curtain.
O'Hara now turned again toward the west, crossing the Mackenzie
and heading for a tremendous region of ice-capped peaks, their vast
flanks swathed with the silver sheen of the greatest glaciers he had
ever seen—the northern reaches of the Rockies, he concluded, the
neckbones of the spinal column of the continent.
In this race westward, his milliroentgen count was sliding steadily,
until, above the mountain chain itself, the count seemed stabilized at
last at .285. Yet when he pushed beyond, toward the western coast
—the Pacific—the count immediately began to jump again. He made
the indicated correction in his flight, adhering to the southeast
curvature of the mountain chain, and concluding that he had
discovered a corridor of lesser contamination, its base upon the
Curtain in the north, and its two flanks, on the eastern and western
sides of the mountains, strongly radioactive.
He had now been below the Curtain—below, that is, the northern
ellipse of the Curtain, for it was known to enclose the Atlantic and
Pacific coasts as well—for thirty minutes, boring steadily south
despite the zigzag pattern of his exploration, and the character of the
terrain was changing, not less mountainous but with some
indications of a seasonal variation in the snow pack, for oftener now
the bare rock precipices and peaks showed through, and beyond the
upraised spine of the Rockies, toward the distant shimmering deep
blue of the Pacific, the snow itself had taken on a stippled
appearance—immense forests, O'Hara concluded, blanketed but
shaping the white countours upon them. And farther still, merging
into the rim of the ocean's curve, lay a varying band of dark brown
and black and vivid green, presumably a thickly forested shore,
completely free of snow. O'Hara made a quick calculation based on
his known altitude and an approximation of the distance to the
horizon. The result astonished him. The forest belt extended inland
for three hundred miles.
Yet the flight was becoming monotonous to the point of lulling him.
The letdown that followed his discovery that the upper reaches of the
continent were so remarkably similar to Siberia had increased, and
with the passage of time he felt his eyelids inexorably closing. There
was nothing to it. The dreaded continent was a fable made
mysterious only by distorted memories of its history. It was, after all,
a hoax—an empty shell, and he was penetrating deep—
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