But Parkis couldn't have known.

The throb of the tractor went on and I wished it would stop because I wanted to listen to the sky and its silence. The whisper had gone now. The plane was still there, clinging to its ceiling with the jet throttled back, ten tons of potent machinery moving about directly above my head. The pilot was isolated, eleven miles from the nearest human being: myself. His isolation — and his contradictory closeness to me in the lens — appealed to me in an odd way.

Even with the peripheral light shut off by the binoculars the glare was strong because he was near the sun, so I leaned on my elbow again and rested my eyes on the green fields for a bit.

The tractor was dragging something heavy with a bright curved blade and the earth came up in a wave. Birds had drifted in and were foraging in the furrows. Farther away a truck was sending up dust along the Pfelberg-Nohlmundt road. The air was dead calm: the dust settled where it had risen. The truck was audible now and I could hear the tailboard chains jumping. Above the sounds of the truck and the tractor another one was beginning. It was continuous and fine.

When I lay back and put the binoculars up, the plane flicked at once into the lens because it was bigger now. The vapour had stopped and the corkscrew motion was much tighter. The configuration was dart-like: the Striker SK-6 was a swing-wing and at that altitude the mainplanes would normally be in furled position twenty degrees from the fore-aft line of the fuselage and not showing much.

The sound was pitching higher and I could see the dark blobs of the air-intakes. The whole image was getting progressively bigger and now I could see the exact attitude: the plane was pointing downwards at a rotating angle near the vertical. I used the sun-flash to measure the rotation, counting aloud. One revolution per three seconds. The plane was in a 20 r.p.m. constant vertical spin.