That’s all I’ve got to do. It’s easy.

Turn. If you don’t turn now we’ll -

Shuddup.

Wait.

The ball was quite large now, floating as if motionless but expanding at a rate my eye could measure against two lines of reference: the sides of the windscreen. It was expanding very fast now, like a visual explosion. The fins were becoming a windmill.

Allow for the risk of target attraction, the mesmeric influence that will sometimes take the pilot all the way home to extinction. Allow for the margin of error. Allow for luck.

Turn now.

Yes. Now.

The control column shivered in my hands and the rudder bar resisted as I kicked at it and hauled the column back and felt the long wave of vibration coming into the airframe as the jets thrust it into the new trajectory with the stubby delta wings cutting the air and the ailerons taking the overload of pressure against their upper surfaces. The spheroid configuration of the missile sank immediately below the windscreen but it was still there and still trying to home in to the target; it would already have started turning for me, upwards and to the side as the Finback spiralled into the rolling climb and I waited, letting the mind go and the body instruct the machine. This was all I had to do. The organism would have striven to do a thousand other things, rather than be destroyed; but there was no need for them.

I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen.

It felt, though, that it was going to happen. The whole balance of this aerodynamic structure had been altered and by a factor so extreme that I could feel it reacting as if it were alive: it had become skeletal, animalistic, vibrant with nerves that quivered in the controls and the seat and the canopy above me. Even its voice had adopted new and undefinable tones as its shape was forced against the static air at its fullest angle, making a gigantic reed of its cowlings, curves and linear sections and sending them singing as finely as the song of the wind above the roar of the sea.

Information.

I would appreciate some information. Are the conditions such that within the next half second I shall be proved to have reacted too slowly, too late? If so, spare me the technical findings, the degree of heat engendered at the heart of the explosion from here inside this cockpit, the force exerted outwards from the centre, the subtler effect upon blood pressure, heart rate and cranial activity in the microsecond before the body flowers into a surrealistic sunburst, its blood bright in the sky. Spare me that.

But I would like to know where that bloody thing is and how close it is. I would like just this much information.

Sweat running and the left eye streaming and the mouth like a husk and the air pumping into the g-suit and squeezing my legs and the pelvic area as the force of the turn pushed me against the seat and held me there so that I couldn’t move. Trying to look into the mirrors but a lot of blood going down and away from the head because this is a very -

You just go into a very tight g-turn.

Yes. Exactly. Blackly, and the singing in the nerves. If it had missed the target, missed, it would have singing, nothing to see in the black, the roaring fading and coming back, would have gone ballistic and come down Christ knows where.

Look in the mirrors. Yes but it’d be too small by now. Has it missed me, then, has it missed me?

MISS.

Good old Thompson, what about a spot more tea?

Suit getting the pressure up and the blood going back and I eased the controls and brought her out of the roll and checked the altimeter, seven thousand feet

They’ve got more than one.

What?

They’ve got dozens of those things.

Head went cold and I sat up and brought her level and looked down through the bottom panels of the canopy and saw another one lifting off a launcher a mile away and seven thousand feet down, long and thin and white with the winter sunshine making a highlight on the warhead, coming up very fast with a second one lifting off behind it, no bloody go.

They were out for a kill and they knew how to do it and it didn’t matter where I went: these things were medium range and the gauges on the facia were reading out a six-minute deadline for me on the after-burners and I couldn’t shut them off because I needed the speed.

Voices in the headset, and a lot of static.

The cockpit was an oven, baking a body alive.

Some kind of campaign necessary: a glorious ten-second campaign to prove we went down at least with banners flying and the head held high, so forth.

This is it. They’re going to kill us, they -

Oh for Christ’s sake shuddup.

Half-roll and dive. There isn’t time to think and then act: the thinking has got to be done while the action’s running. And remember the mountains.

The only thing to do was dive because I had to turn into their trajectories and their trajectories were identical. And remember the altimeter because at Mach 2.5 everything looks farther away than it is: there’s no optical illusion, it’s just that every time you blink at this speed you’re a thousand feet closer to what you’re aiming at and I was now aiming at the ground, six thousand, five thousand, four.

Half-roll to come back on them. The low hills spun through 180 degrees in the windscreen and I saw the two missiles, one large, one small, both spherical and lined up and expanding. Remember the mountains and their direction from this new position: they would be due east when I came out of the dive and the snow cloud would be still moving across from the south and blotting out half the Khrebet Tarbagatay range but that wouldn’t affect me unless I had to change course.

And remember your briefing.

Then they were coming, both of them, one very big and the other floating a little distance from it in visual terms. I didn’t have to do anything complicated: I just had to wrench the Finback out of its trajectory at a speed approaching one thousand knots and against the force of gravity and hope that nothing would break.

Pull out. Pull out now before we -

Of course.

Blind in one eye because of the sweat but when I dragged at the stick the big metal sphere floated down past the bottom of the windscreen and out of sight and the smaller one followed, but more slowly. The stick was shuddering in my hands and the whole machine was coming alive as the airstream was forced against the ailerons. The high thin scream of the ancillaries overlaid the bellowing of the jets and the voices in the headset sounded unreal, their meaning lost in the tumult that was shaking the aircraft.

Blood pooling into the lower half of the body and the suit reacting, squeezing. The organism was in terror because somewhere below and behind it the two missiles were trying to turn or were already turning and moving in to the target and there was no action, simply no action at all to be taken except to maintain the muscular strength necessary to hold the controls in their present attitude so that the Finback would eventually pull out of the dive before the ground came up and blotted it into a smudge.

One thousand.

The right eye had moved to look at something and snatch at an item of data for me and I examined it: we were flying in a diminishing curve at one thousand feet above the ground and my head was tilting upward to look through the windscreen because it wasn’t going to be the first missile or the second missile it was going to be the surface of the earth that would provide the other component of the impact, so be it, go out cursing Parkis I hope you rot in hell.

We must have cleared the missiles but it was academic because the needle was down to four hundred feet and colours were filling the windscreen and sliding downward, trees, building, gold on a dome, downward, as the nose began coming up and the buffeting began and broke off and began again until the thing was shaking like a dog and we flying level through ground pockets and shifts of air with the perspective of a town scape streaming across the windscreen towers, rooftops, domes and suddenly the trees again, spreading past and behind in a tangle of winter lacework against the frosted land.