He operated the burner and looked at his watch and the ground and the altimeter, and seemed pleased with the way things were. Then he looked at me in slight puzzlement and I knew he was wondering, now that there was time, how I happened to be where I was.

'I came to Highalane Park to see you,' I said. 'I mean, you, John Viking, particularly.'

He looked startled. 'Do you read minds?'

'All the time.' I pulled my hand out of one pocket and dipped into another, and brought out the paperback on navigation. 'I came to ask you about this. It's got your name on the flyleaf.'

He frowned at it, and opened the front cover. 'Good Lord. I wondered where this had got to. How did you have it?'

'Did you lend it to anyone?'

'I don't think so.'

'Um…' I said. 'If I describe someone to you, will you say if you know him?'

'Fire away.'

'A man of about twenty-eight,' I said. 'Dark hair, good looks, full of fun and jokes, easy-going, likes girls, great company, has a habit of carrying a knife strapped to his leg under his sock, and is very likely a crook.'

'Oh yes,' he said, nodding. 'He's my cousin.'

His cousin, Norris Abbott. What had he done this time, he demanded, and I asked, what had he done before?

'A trail of bouncing cheques that his mother paid for.'

Where did he live, I asked. John Viking didn't know. He saw him only when Norris turned up occasionally on his doorstep, usually broke and looking for free meals.

'A laugh a minute for a day or two. Then he's gone.'

'Where does his mother live?'

'She's dead. He's alone now. No parents or brothers or sisters. No relatives except me.' He peered at me, frowning. 'Why do you ask all this?'

'A girl I know wants to find him.' I shrugged. 'It's nothing much.'

He lost interest at once and flicked the lever for another burn. 'We use twice the fuel up here as near the ground,' he said afterwards. 'That's why I brought so much. That's how some nosey parker told Popsy I was planning to go high, and through the airways.'

By my reckoning the airway was not that far off.

'Won't you get into trouble?' I said.

The wolf grin came and went. 'They've got to see us, first. We won't show up on radar. We're too small for the equipment they use. With a bit of luck, we'll sneak across and no one will be any the wiser.'

I picked up the map and studied it. At fifteen thousand feet we would be illegal from when we entered controlled airspace until we landed, all but the last two hundred feet. The airway over Brighton began at a thousand feet above sea level and the hills to the north were eight hundred feet high. Did John Viking know all that? Yes, he did.

When we had been flying for one hour and fifty minutes he made a fuel line change from cylinder to cylinder that resulted in a thin jet of liquid gas spurting out from the connection like water out of a badly joined hose. The jet shot across the corner of the basket and hit a patch of wickerwork about six inches below the top rail.

John Viking was smoking at the time.

Liquid propane began trickling down the inside of the basket in a stream. John Viking cursed and fiddled with the faulty connection, bending over it; and his glowing cigarette ignited the gas.

There was no ultimate and final explosion. The jet burnt as jets do, and directed its flame in an organised manner at the patch of basket it was hitting. John Viking threw his cigarette over the side and snatched off his denim cap, and beat at the burning basket with great flailing motions of his arm, while I managed to stifle the jet at source by turning off the main switch on the cylinder.

When the flames and smoke and cursing died down, we had a hole six inches in diameter right through the basket, but no other damage. 'Baskets don't burn easily,' he said calmly, as if nothing had happened. 'Never known one burn much more than this.' He inspected his cap, which was scorched into black-edged lace, and gave me a maniacal four seconds from the bright blue eyes. 'You can't put out a fire with a crash helmet,' he said.

I laughed quite a lot.

It was the altitude, I thought, which was making me giggle.

'Want some chocolate?' he said. There were no signposts in the sky to tell us when we crossed the boundary of the airway. We saw an aeroplane or two some way off, but nothing near us. No one came buzzing around to direct us downward. We simply sailed straight on, blowing across the sky as fast as a train.

At ten past five he said it was time to go down, because if we didn't touch ground by five-thirty exactly he would be disqualified, and he didn't want that; he wanted to win. Winning was what it was all about.

'How would anyone know exactly when we touched down?' I said.

He gave me a pitying look and gently directed his toe at a small box strapped to the floor beside one of the corner cylinders.

'In here is a barograph, all stuck about with pompous red seals. The judges seal it, before the start. It shows variations in air pressure. Highly sensitive. All our journey shows up like a row of peaks. When you're on the ground, the trace is flat and steady. It tells the judges just when you took off and when you landed. Right?'

'Right.'

'OK. Down we go, then.'

He reached up and untied a red cord which was knotted to the burner frame, and pulled it. 'It opens a panel at the top of the balloon,' he said. 'Lets the hot air out.'

His idea of descent was all of a piece. The altimeter unwound like a broken clock and the rate-of-climb meter was pointing to a thousand feet a minute, downwards. He seemed to be quite unaffected, but it made me queasy and hurt my ear drums. Swallowing made things a bit better, but not much. I concentrated, as an antidote, on checking with the map to see where we were going.

The Channel lay like a broad grey carpet to our right, and it was incredible but, whichever way I looked at it, it seemed that we were on a collision course with Beachy Head.

'Yeah,' John Viking casually confirmed. 'Guess we'll try not to get blown off those cliffs. Might be better to land on the beach further on…' He checked his watch. 'Ten minutes to go. We're still at six thousand feet… that's all right… might be the edge of the sea…'

'Not the sea,' I said positively. 'Why not? We might have to.' 'Well,' I said, 'this…' I lifted my left arm. 'Inside this hand-shaped plastic there's actually a lot of fine engineering. Strong pincers inside the thumb and first two fingers. A lot of fine precision gears and transistors and printed electrical circuits. Dunking it in the sea would be like dunking a radio. A total ruin. And it would cost me two thousand quid to get a new one.'

He was astonished.

'You're joking.'

'No.'

'Better keep you dry, then. And anyway, now we're down here, I don't think we'll get as far south as Beachy Head. Probably further east.' He paused and looked at my left hand doubtfully. 'It'll be a rough landing. The fuel's cold from being so high… the burner doesn't function well on cold fuel. It takes time to heat enough air to give us a softer touch-down.'

A softer touch-down took time… too much time.

'Win the race,' I said.

His face lit into sheer happiness. 'Right,' he said decisively. 'What's that town just ahead?'

I studied the map. 'Eastbourne.' He looked at his watch. 'Five minutes.' He looked at the altimeter and at Eastbourne, upon which we were rapidly descending. 'Two thousand feet. Bit dicey, hitting the roofs. There isn't much wind down here, is there… But if I burn, we might not get down in time. No, no burn.'

A thousand feet a minute, I reckoned, was eleven or twelve miles an hour. I had been used for years to hitting the ground at more than twice that speed… though not in a basket, and not when the ground might turn out to be fully inhabited by brick walls.