The noise of the truck along the road had faded. The throb of the tractor was being gradually overlaid by the shrilling of the plane.

From the height where the dive had started it would have taken roughly sixty seconds for the sound to reach the ground: by that amount I was listening to the past; but as the dive went on the distance closed and sound was catching up on vision. It was now uncomfortable on the ear-drums. I couldn't estimate speed because the plane was almost head-on to the binoculars. In a vertical dive there wouldn't be any power on but the Striker was built to stand 1500 knots and it could reach that speed by gravity. All I knew was that this scream was the sound of something going very fast.

Time started telescoping now and I was worrying. The plane was big enough at this stage to see without the binoculars and I dropped them and cupped my hands to block out the glare and watch the thing coming on at the ground without any sign of pulling out or any sign of being able to pull out. The shrilling was so bad now that it was difficult to go on thinking rationally because the primitive brain was telling me to get up and run somewhere safe while the modern brain was working out a few figures: the plane was now below half its attainable ceiling and coming on at something like its peak attainable airspeed which put it at a mile for every four seconds and that gave me fifteen seconds to get out and there was nowhere to go.

Then the whole sky went dark as the plane's shadow passed over me and the noise was so loud that I was on my feet and running by the time it hit the ground a hundred yards away. The impact was explosive and comparable to a medium-charge conventional bomb detonating just below ground level in soft conditions. Earth began falling on me soon after the shock-wave had passed and there was a spherical cloud of chalk billowing round the crater the plane had made. I was running into it and through it until the fore-brain took over and stopped me. There was no need to run any more.