Ten years ago, then, Commander (no, Lieutenant) Falcon had invited him to a preview a three-day drift across the northern plains of India, within sight of the Himalayas. “Perfectly safe,” he had promised. “It Will get you away from the office and will teach you what this whole thing is about.”

Webster had not been disappointed. Next to his first journey to the Moon, it had been the most memorable experience of his life. And yet, as Falcon had assured him, it had been perfectly safe, and quite uneventful.

They had taken off from Srinagar just before dawn, with the huge silver bubble of the balloon already catching the first light of the Sun. The ascent had been made in total silence; there were none of the roaring propane burners that had lifted the hot-air balloons of an earlier age. All the heat they needed came from the little pulsed-fusion reactor, weighing only about two hundred and twenty pounds, hanging in the open mouth of the envelope. While they were climbing, its laser was zapping ten times a second, igniting the merest whiff of deuterium fuel. Once they had reached altitude, it would fire only a few times a minute, making up for the heat lost through the great gasbag overhead.

And so, even while they were almost a mile above the ground, they could hear dogs barking, people shouting, bells ringing. Slowly the vast, Sun-smitten landscape expanded around them. Two hours later, they had levelled out at three miles and were taking frequent draughts of oxygen. They could relax and admire the scenery, the on-board instrumentation was doing all the work, gathering the information that would be required by the designers of the still-unnamed liner of the skies.

It was a perfect day. The southwest monsoon would not break for another month, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. Time seemed to have come o a stop, they resented the hourly radio reports which interrupted their reverie. And all around, to the horizon and far beyond, was that infinite, magnificient landscape, drenched with history, a patchwork of villages, fields, temples, lakes, irrigation canals…