Aligned at the foot of the runway, I waited for the tower’s final signal and eased the throttle to its maximum setting. Released from its brakes, the Harvard lumbered forward like a shortsighted rhino, hunting for every crack in the worn concrete. At full throttle, the engine seemed to tear itself from the fuselage spars, and I waited for the elderly craft to disintegrate at the end of the runway. But the Harvard had trained generations of American fliers. I pushed the stick forward to raise the tail off the ground. At 70 knots I drew back on the column and the aircraft rose comfortably into the air, its broad wings breasting the thermals that rose from the heated runways. I climbed to three thousand feet, trimmed the elevators, and set the engine for cruise. The winter fields of southern Saskatchewan, its frozen lakes and empty highways, stretched to the horizon. Beyond Saskatoon, the vast wildernesses of northern Canada extended to the planet’s edge, touched only by the aurora borealis and the condensation trails of military jets surfing on the upper limits of the atmosphere. Here the great radars of the Norad chain and the Russian defence system bayed at each other like lions staked to the ice.

Loosening my harness, I listened to the steady drone of the engine and watched the white land shift beneath me. Officially, I was to practise stalls and spins, and navigate a course to Swift Current before returning to Moose Jaw, but like most of the trainee pilots I had no intention of following my instructions. The evening at the Iroquois had left me with a two-day hangover and an infected shoulder bite. Neither would be helped by being thrown around thousands of feet of overlit air. As always, I went up into the sky to calm myself, to think of Miriam, to rest and to dream.

*   *   *

Flying, which had obsessed me since the war years in Shanghai, had brought me to this remote town in the Canadian West. I had left Cambridge after two years, completely cured of any need to become a doctor. Despite the Cavendish laboratory, the university was excluded from the more urgent world of the American nuclear bombers flying from their Cambridgeshire airfields, readying themselves for the final global war. The Berlin Airlift, the Korean War, a rearming Europe belonged to a realm I had seen born over the paddy fields of the Yangtze estuary. Dr. Elizabeth Grant had freed me from my dreams of the dead, but a far greater army of casualties was preparing itself for the planetary dissecting room.