“On the other hand,” the red-faced man continued, “some people take to it like a duck takes to water. I was nearly forty when I got my first harness, and within a week I was cloud- running with the best of them.”

“Very good,” Hasson said, edging away.

“Yes, and I still fly in a tough area. Bradford The kids up there think nothing of coming in close, deliberate-like, and dropping you twenty or thirty metres.” The stranger paused to chuckle. “Doesn’t bother me, though. Strong stomach.”

“That’s great.” Hasson hurried to the door, then it occurred to him that a garrulous companion might be just what he needed to numb his mind during the Atlantic crossing. He paused and waited for the other man to catch up with him. “But you’re going to Canada the easy way.”

“Have to,” the man said, tapping himself on the chest. “Lungs won’t take the cold any more — otherwise I’d save myself the price of a plane ticket. Bloody robbery, that’s what it is.”

Hasson nodded agreement as he walked back to the lounge with his new companion. Personal flying was both easy and cheap, and with the advent of the counter-gravity harness conventional aviation had fallen into an abrupt decline. At first it had been simply a matter of economics, then the skies had become too clustered with people — millions of liberated, mobile, foolhardy, uncontrollable people — for aircraft to operate safely, except in strictly policed corridors. The formerly lucrative passenger traffic across the North Atlantic had been replaced by cargo planes carrying handfuls of passengers on sparse schedules, and the cost per head had risen accordingly.

Rejoining the other passengers, Hasson leaned that the older man’s name was Dawlish and that he was on the way to Montreal to visit an ailing cousin, possibly in the hope of inheriting some money. Hasson conversed with him for ten minutes, reassured by the sense of calmness that was spreading radially through his system as the Serenix capsules began to do their work. His knowledge that the feeling was artificially induced made it nonetheless precious, and by the time the launch arrived to take the passengers on Flight Bo162 out to the plane he was experiencing a muted euphoria.

He sat near the front during the ride across choppy water to reach the flying boat, feeling a pleasurable excitement at the thought of spending three months abroad. The boat looked prehistoric, with grills over the turbine intakes and armour plating on the airfoil leading edges, but now Hasson had some confidence in the looming machine’s ability to take him anywhere in the world. He climbed on board — inhaling the distinctive aroma of engine oil, brine-soaked rope and hot food — and got a window seat near the rear of the passenger compartment. Dawlish sat down opposite him with his back to the movable partition which allowed the cargo space to be expanded or contracted as required.

“Good machines these,” Dawlish said, looking knowledgeable. “Based on the Thirties Empire boat design. Very interesting story to them.”

As Hasson half-expected, Dawlish launched into a discourse an the romance of the flying boat, a rambling account which took in its disappearance from world aviation in the Fifties because of the difficulty of pressurising the hull for the high-altitude operation demanded by jet engines, its reappearance in the 21st Century when, of necessity, all aircraft had to fly low and slow.

At another time he might have been bored or irritated, but on this occasion Dawlish was performing a useful function and Hasson concentrated gratefully on the flow of words while the boat’s four engines were being started and it was taxied round into the wind. In spite of the capsules he felt a pang of unease as the take-off run seemed to go on for ever, culminating in a thunderous hammering of wave-tops on the underside of the keel, but all at once the noise ceased and the boat was in rock-steady flight. Hasson looked at the solidity of the deck beneath his feet and felt safe.

“… monopropellant turbines would work just as well at altitude,” Dawlish was saying, “but if you fly low anybody you run into is likely to be reasonably soft and the shielding will stand the impact. Just imagine hitting a frozen body at nearly a thousand kilometres an hour! The Titanic wouldn’t be …” Dawlish broke off and touched Hasson’s knee. “I’m sorry, lad — I shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing.”

“I’m all right,” Hasson said sleepily, making the belated discovery that for a man in his exhausted state four Serenix capsules had been too much. “You go right ahead. Get it out of your system.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” Hasson sincerely wished to be diplomatic, but it had become difficult to perceive shades of meaning in his own words. “You seem to know a lot about flying.”

Apparently annoyed at Hasson’s tone, Dawlish glanced around him from below sagging eyelids. “Of course, this isn’t real flying. Cloud-running, that’s the thing! You don’t know what real flying is until you’ve strapped on a harness and gone up five hundred, six hundred metres with nothing under your feet but thin air. I only wish I could tell you what it’s like.”

“That would be …” Hasson abandoned the attempt to speak as the conscious world tilted ponderously away from him.

He was three thousand metres above Birmingham, as high as it was possible to go without special heavy-duty suit heaters, at the centre of a sphere of milky radiance created by his flares… a short distance away from him the body of his dead partner, Lloyd Inglis, floated upright on height-maintenance power, performing a strange aerial shuffle … and, just beyond the range of the flares, Lloyd’s murderer was waiting in ambush…

There was no human sound as the attack began — only the growing rush of air as the two men’s CG harnesses cancelled each other’s fields, allowing then to drop like stones.,.

It took a minute for them to fall three thousand metres — a hideous, soul-withering minute in which the howl of the terminal velocity wind, was the blast from the chimneys of hell. During that minute the low-level commuter lanes, glowing like a galaxy with the personal lights of tens of thousands of fliers, expanded hungrily beneath him, opening like a carnivorous flower. During that minute, pain and shock robbed him of the powers of thought, and his mind was further obliterated by the obscene grinding of the psychotic killer’s body against his own…

And then — when it was so late, when it was so desperately late — came the successful disengagement, the breaking free, followed by the futile upward drag of his harness … and the impact … the ghastly impact with the round… the shattering of bone, and the explosive bursting of spinal discs.

Hasson opened his eyes and blinked uncomprehendingly at a world of sky-bright windows, curved ceiling panels, luggage racks, and the subdued pulsing of aero engines. I’m in an aircraft he thought. What am I doing in an aircraft. He sat upright, groggy as a boxer recovering from a knockout blow, and saw that Dawlish had fallen asleep in the seat opposite him, a micro- reader still clasped in one blue-knuckled hand. The realisation he had been unconscious for some time was accompanied by a rush of memories and he rediscovered the fact that he was on his way to Canada, faced with the challenge of a new identity and a new way of life.

The prospect was daunting, but not as daunting as the idea of meeting the challenge in his present condition of drug-fuddled incapacity, held up by a psychotropic crutch. He waited for a few minutes, breathing deeply, then got to his feet and walked to the toilet at the forward end of the passenger compartment. The soundproofing within the toilet was not as good as in the rest of the aircraft, and for a moment he was disconcerted by the pounding of atmospheric fists on the skin of the hull, but he braced himself against the partition and took the medicine dispenser from his pocket. He wrenched the top off it and, without giving himself time for second thoughts, poured a steam of green-and- gold capsules into the toilet bowl.