Noises came up clearly. One could hear the cars' engines, and dogs barking, and an occasional human shout. People looked up and waved to us as we passed. A world removed, I thought. I was in a child's world, idyllically drifting with the wind, sloughing off the dreary earthbound millstones, free and rising and filled with intense delight.
John Viking flipped the lever and the flame roared, shooting up into the green-and-yellow cavern, a scarlet and gold tongue of dragon fire. The burn endured for twenty seconds and we rose perceptibly in the sudden ensuing silence.
'What gas do you use?' I said.
'Propane.'
He was looking over the side of the basket and around at the countryside, as if judging his position. 'Look, get the map out, will you. It's in a pouch thing, on your side. And for God's sake don't let it blow away.'
I looked over the side, and found what he meant. A satchel-like object strapped on through the wickerwork, its outward-facing flap fastened shut with a buckle. I undid the buckle, looked inside, took a fair grip of the large folded map, and delivered it safely to the captain.
He was looking fixedly at my left hand, which I'd used as a sort of counterweight on the edge of the basket while I leaned over. I let it fall by my side, and his gaze swept upwards to my face.
'You're missing a hand,' he said incredulously.
'That's right.'
He waved his own two arms in a fierce gesture of frustration. 'How the hell am I going to win this race?'
I laughed.
He glanced at me. 'It's not damned funny.'
'Oh yes it is. And I like winning races… you won't lose it because of me.'
He frowned disgustedly. 'I suppose you can't be much more useless than Popsy,' he said. 'But at least they say she can read a map.' He unfolded the sheet I'd given him, which proved to be a map designed for the navigation of aircraft, its surface covered with a plastic film, for writing on. 'Look,' he said. 'We started from here.' He pointed. 'We're travelling roughly north-east. You take the map, and find out where we are.' He paused. 'Do you know the first bloody thing about using your watch as a compass, or about dead reckoning?'
I had a book about dead reckoning, which I hadn't read, in a pocket of the light cotton anorak I was wearing; and also, I thanked God, in another zippered compartment, a spare fully charged battery. 'Give me the map,' I said. 'And let's see.'
He handed it over with no confidence and started another burn. I worked out roughly where we should be, and looked over the side, and discovered straight away that the ground didn't look like the map. Where villages and roads were marked clearly on the map, they faded into the brown and green carpet of earth like patches of camouflage, the sunlight mottling them with shadows and dissolving them into ragged edges. The spread-out vistas all around looked all the same, defying me to recognise anything special, proving conclusively I was less use than Popsy.
Dammit, I thought. Start again.
We had set off at three o'clock, give a minute or two. We had been airborne for twelve minutes. On the ground the wind had been gentle and from the south, but we were now travelling slightly faster, and north-east. Say… fifteen knots. Twelve minutes at fifteen knots… about three nautical miles. I had been looking too far ahead. There should be, I thought, a river to cross; and in spite of gazing earnestly down I nearly missed it, because it was a firm blue line on the map and in reality a silvery reflecting thread that wound unobtrusively between a meadow and a wood. To the right of it, half hidden by a hill, lay a village, with beyond it, a railway line.
'We're there,' I said, pointing to the map. He squinted at the print and searched the ground beneath us.
'Fair enough,' he said. 'So we are. Right. You keep the map. We might as well know where we are, all the way.'
He flipped the lever and gave it a long burn. The balloons ahead of us were also lower. We were definitely looking down on their tops. During the next patch of silence he consulted two instruments which were strapped onto the outside of the basket at his end, and grunted.
'What are those?' I said, nodding at the dials.
'Altimeter and rate-of-climb meter,' he said. 'We're at five thousand feet now, and rising at eight hundred feet a minute.'
'Rising?'
'Yeah.' He gave a sudden, wolfish grin in which I read unmistakably the fierce unholy glee of the mischievous child. 'That's why Popsy wouldn't come. Someone told her I would go high. She didn't want to.'
'How high?' I said.
'I don't mess about,' he said. 'When I race, I race to win. They all know I'll win. They don't like it. They think you should never take risks. They're all safety conscious these days and getting softer. Hah!' His scorn was absolute. 'In the old days, at the beginning of the century, when they had the Gordon Bennet races, they would fly for two days and do a thousand miles or more. But nowadays… safety bloody first.' He glared at me. 'And if I didn't have to have a passenger, I wouldn't. Passengers always argue and complain.'
He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one with a flick of a lighter. We were surrounded by cylinders of liquid gas. I thought about all the embargoes against naked flames near any sort of stored fuel, and kept my mouth shut. The flock of balloons below us seemed to be veering away to the left; but then I realised that it was we who were going to the right. John Viking watched the changing direction with great satisfaction and started another long burn. We rose perceptibly faster, and the sun, instead of shining full on our backs, appeared on our starboard side.
In spite of the sunshine it was getting pretty cold. A look over the side showed the earth very far beneath, and one could now see a very long way in all directions. I checked with the map, and kept an eye on where we were.
'What are you wearing?' he said. 'What you see, more or less.'
'Huh.'
During the burns, the flame over one's head was almost too hot, and there was always a certain amount of hot air escaping from the bottom of the balloon. There was no wind factor, as of course the balloon was travelling with the wind, at the wind's speed. It was sheer altitude that was making us cold.
'How high are we now?' I said. He glanced at his instruments. 'Eleven thousand feet.'
'And still rising?' He nodded. The other balloons, far below and to the left, were a cluster of distant bright blobs against the green earth.
'All that lot,' he said, 'will stay down at five thousand feet, because of staying under the airways.' He gave me a sideways look. 'You'll see on the map. The airways that the airlines use are marked, and so are the heights at which one is not allowed to fly through them.'
'And one is not allowed to fly through an airway at eleven thousand feet in a balloon?'
'Sid,' he said, grinning. 'You're not bad.'
He flicked the lever, and the burner roared, cutting off chat. I checked the ground against the map and nearly lost our position entirely, because we seemed suddenly to have travelled much faster, and quite definitely to the south-east. The other balloons, when I next looked, were out of sight.
In the next silence John Viking told me that the helpers of the other balloons would follow them on the ground, in cars, ready to retrieve them when they came down.
'What about you?' I asked. 'Do we have someone following?'
Did we indeed have Peter Rammileese following, complete with thugs, ready to pounce again at the further end? We were even, I thought fleetingly, doing him a favour with the general direction, taking him south-eastwards, home to Kent.
John Viking gave his wolfish smile, and said, 'No car on earth could keep up with us today.'