He locked himself into a cubicle, leaned against the door for a moment, then took out his medicine dispenser and fed two more capsules into his mouth. The two he had swallowed in the car had not yet taken effect, and as he stood in the sad little closed universe of partitions and tiles, praying for tranquillity, it dawned on him how complete his breakdown had been. He had seen other men crack up under the strain of too much work, too many hours of cross-wind patrols at night when the danger of collision with a rogue flier made the nerves sing like telephone wires in a gale, but always he had viewed the event with a kind of smug incomprehension. Underlying his sympathy and intellectual appreciation of the medical facts had been a faint contempt, a conviction that, given his mental stability, the wilted air cops, the sick birds, would have been able to shrug off their woes and carry on as before. His sense of security had been so great that he had totally failed to recognise his own warning symptoms -the moods of intense depression, the irritability, the growing pessimism which drained life of its savour. Without realising it, Hasson had been terribly vulnerable, and in that fragile condition-shorn of all his armour — he had gone into the arena against a grinning opponent who wore a black cloak and carried a scythe…

A sudden claustrophobia caused Hasson to open the cubicle door. He went to a wash basin, put cold water in it and was splashing some on his face when he became aware of somebody standing beside him. It was one of the passengers from his own flight, a man of about sixty who had a florid complexion and sardonically drooping eyelids.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” the man said in a north country accent.

“What?” Hasson began drying his face.

“Nothing to be ashamed of. That’s what I was telling them out there. Some people just can’t use a harness, and that’s that.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Hasson fought down an urge to tell the stranger he had done a great deal of flying but was temporarily barred from it for medical reasons. If he started justifying himself to everybody he met he would be doing it for the rest of his life and there was also the fact that the story was a lie. There was no physical necessity for him to avoid personal flight.