A Little Night Flying

The dead cop came drifting in towards the Birmingham control zone at a height of some three thousand metres. It was a winter night, and the sub-zero temperatures which prevailed at that altitude had solidified his limbs, encrusted the entire body with black frost. Blood flowing through shattered armour had frozen into the semblance of a crab, with its claws encircling his chest. The body, which was in an upright position, rocked gently on stray currents, performing a strange aerial shuffle. And at its waist a pea-sized crimson light blinked on and off, on and off, its radiance gradually fading under a thickening coat of ice.

Air Police Sergeant Robert Hasson felt more exhausted and edgy than he would have done after an eight-hour crosswind patrol. He had been in the headquarters block since lunchtime, dictating and signing reports, completing forms, trying to wrest from the cashier’s office the expenses which had been due to him two months earlier. And then, just as he was about to go home in disgust, he had been summoned to Captain Nunn’s office for yet another confrontation over the Welwyn Angels case. The four on remand—Joe Sullivan, Flick Bugatti, Denny Johnston and Toddy Thoms—were sitting together at one side of the office, still in their flying gear.

“I’ll tell you what disturbs me most about this whole affair,” Bunny Ormerod, the senior barrister, was saying with practised concern. “It is the utter indifference of the police. It is the callousness with which the tragic death of a child is accepted by the arresting officers.” Ormerod moved closer to the four Angels, protectively, identifying with them. “One would think it was an everyday occurrence.”

Hasson shrugged. “It is, practically.”

Ormerod allowed his jaw to sag, and he turned so that the brooch recorder on his silk blouse was pointing straight at Hasson. “Would you care to repeat that statement?”

Hasson stared directly into the recorder’s watchful iris. “Practically every day, or every night, some moron straps on a CG harness, goes flying around at five or six hundred kilometres an hour, thinking he’s Superman, and runs into a pylon or a tower-block. And you’re dead right—I don’t give a damn when they smear themselves over the sides of buildings.” Hasson could see Nunn becoming agitated behind his expanse of desk, but he pressed on doggedly. “It’s only when they smash into other people that I get worked up. And then I go after them.”

“You hunt them down.”

“That’s what I do.”

“The way you hunted down these children.”

Hasson examined the Angels coldly. “I don’t see any children. The youngest in that gang is sixteen.”

Ormerod directed a compassionate smile towards the four black-clad Angels. “We live in a complex and difficult world, Sergeant. Sixteen years isn’t a very long time for a youngster to get to know his way around it.”

“Balls,” Hasson commented. He looked at the Angels again and pointed at a heavy-set, bearded youth who was sitting behind the others. “You—Toddy—come over here.”

Toddy’s eyes shuttled briefly. “What for?”

“I want to show Mr Ormerod your badges.”

“Naw. Don’t want to,” Toddy said smugly. “Sides, I like it better over here.”

Hasson sighed, walked to the group, caught hold of Toddy’s lapel and walked back to Ormerod as if he was holding nothing but the piece of simulated leather. Behind him he heard frantic swearing and the sound of chairs falling over as Toddy was dragged through the protective screen of his companions. The opportunity to express his feelings in action, no matter how limited, gave Hasson a therapeutic satisfaction.

Nunn half rose to his feet. “What do you think you’re doing, Sergeant?”

Hasson ignored him, addressing himself to Ormerod. “See this badge? The big “F” with wings on it? Do you know what it means?”

“I’m more interested in what your extraordinary behaviour means.” One of Ormerod’s hands was purposely, but with every appearance of accident, blocking his recorder’s field of view. Hasson knew this was because of recent legislation under which the courts refused to consider any recorded evidence unless the entire spool was presented—and Ormerod did not want a shot of the badge.

“Have a look at it.” Hasson repeated his description of the badge for the benefit of the soundtrack. “It means that this quote child unquote has had sexual intercourse in free fall. And he’s proud of it. Aren’t you, Toddy?”

“Mister Ormerod?” Toddy’s eyes were fixed pleadingly on the barrister’s face.

“For your own good, Sergeant, I think you should let go of my client,” Ormerod said. His slim hand was still hovering in front of the recorder.

“Certainly.” Hasson snatched the recorder, plucking a hole in Ormerod’s blouse as he did so, and held the little instrument in front of the Angel’s array of badges. After a moment he pushed Toddy away from him and gave the recorder back to Ormerod with a flourish of mock-courtesy.

“That was a mistake, Hasson.” Ormerod’s aristocratic features had begun to show genuine anger. “You’ve made it obvious that you are taking part in a personal vendetta against my client.”

Hasson laughed. “Toddy isn’t your client. You were hired by Joe Sullivan’s old man to get him out from under a manslaughter charge, and big simple Toddy just happens to be in the same bag.”

Joe Sullivan, sitting in the centre of the other three Angels, opened his mouth to retort, but changed his mind. He appeared to have been better rehearsed than his companions.

“That’s right,” Hasson said to him. “Remember what you were told, Joe—let the hired mouth do all the talking.” Sullivan shifted resentfully, staring down at his blue-knuckled hands, and remained silent.

“It’s obvious we aren’t achieving anything,” Ormerod said to Nunn. “I’m going to hold a private conference with my clients.”

“Do that,” Hasson put in. “Tell them to peel off those badges, won’t you? Next time I might pick out an even better one.” He waited impassively while Ormerod and two policemen ushered the four Angels out of the room.

“I don’t understand you,” Nunn said as soon as they were alone. “Exactly what did you think you were doing just now? That boy has only to testify that you manhandled him …”

“That boy, as you call him, knows where we could find the Fireman. They all do.”

“You’re being too hard on them.”

“You aren’t.” Hasson knew at once that he had gone too far, but he was too obstinate to begin retracting the words.

“What do you mean?” Nunn’s mouth compressed, making him look womanly but nonetheless dangerous.

“Why do I have to talk to that load of scruff up here in your office? What’s wrong with the interview rooms downstairs? Or are they only for thugs who haven’t got Sullivan money behind them?”

“Are you saying I’ve taken Sullivan’s money?”

Hasson thought for a moment. “I don’t believe you’d do that, but you let it make a difference. I tell you those four have flown with the Fireman. If I could be left alone for half an hour with any one of them I’d …”

“You’d get yourself put away. You don’t seem to understand the way things are, Hasson. You’re a skycop—and that means the public doesn’t want you about. A hundred years ago motorists disliked traffic cops for making them obey a few commonsense rules; now everybody can fly, better than the birds, and they find this same breed of cop up there with them, spoiling it for them, and they hate you.”

“I’m not worried.”

“I don’t think you’re worried about police work either, Hasson. Not really. I’d say you’re hooked on cloud-running every bit as much as this mythical Fireman, but you want to play a different game.”

Hasson became anxious, aware that Nunn was leading up to something important. “The Fireman is real—I’ve seen him.”

“Whether he is or not, I’m grounding you.”

“You can’t do that,” Hasson blurted instinctively.

Nunn looked interested. “Why not?”

“Because …” Hasson was striving for the right words, any words, when the communicator sphere on Nunn’s desk lit up redly, signalling a top priority message.

“Go ahead,” Nunn said to the sphere.

“Sir, we’re picking up an automatic distress call,” it replied with a male voice. “Somebody drifting out of control at three thousand metres. We think it must be Inglis.”

“Dead?”

“We’ve interrogated his compack, sir. No response.”

“I see. Wait till the rush hour is over and send somebody up for him. I’ll want a full report.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going up for him now,” Hasson said, moving towards the door.

“You can’t go through the traffic streams at this hour.” Nunn got to his feet and came around the desk. “And you’re grounded. I mean that, Hasson.”

Hasson paused knowing that he had already stretched to the limit the special indulgence granted to members of the Air Patrol. “If that’s Lloyd Inglis up there, I’m going up to get him right now. And if he’s dead, I’m grounding myself. Permanently. Okay?”

Nunn shook his head uncertainly. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

“Perhaps.” Hasson closed the door and ran towards the tackle room.

He lifted off from the roof of the police headquarters into a sky which was ablaze with converging rivers of fire. Work-weary commuters pouring up from the south represented most of the traffic, but there were lesser tributaries flowing from many points of the compass into the vast aerial whirlpool of the Birmingham control zone. The shoulder-lights and angle-lights of thousands upon thousands of fliers shifted and shimmered, changes of parallax causing spurious waves to progress and retrogress along the glowing streams. Vertical columns of brilliance kept the opposing elements apart, creating an appearance of strict order. Hasson knew, however, that the appearance was to some extent deceptive. People who were in a hurry tended to switch off their lights to avoid detection and fly straight to where they were going, regardless of the air corridors. The chances of colliding with another illegal traveller were vanishingly small, they told themselves, but it was not only occasional salesmen late for appointments who flew wild. There were the drunks and the druggies, the antisocial, the careless, the suicidal, the thrill-seekers, the criminal—a whole spectrum of types who were unready for the responsibilities of personal flight, in whose hands a counter-gravity harness could become an instrument of death.

Hasson set his police flare units at maximum intensity. He climbed cautiously, dye gun at the ready, until the lights of the city were spread out below him in endless growing geometrics. When the information display projected on to the inner surface of his visor told him he was at a height of two hundred metres he began paying particular attention to his radar. This was the altitude at which rogue fliers were most numerous. He continued rising rapidly, controlling the unease which was a normal reaction to being suspended in a darkness from which, at any moment, other beings could come hurtling towards him at lethal velocity. The aerial river of travellers was now visible as separate laminae, uppermost levels moving fastest, which slipped over each other like luminous gauze.

A further eight hundred metres and Hasson began to relax slightly. He was turning his attention to the problem of homing in on Inglis when his proximity alarm sounded and the helmet radar flashed a bearing. Hasson twisted to face the indicated direction. The figure of a man flying without lights, angled for maximum speed, materialized in the light of Hasson’s flare units. Veteran of a thousand such encounters, Hasson had time to calculate a miss distance of about ten metres. Within the fraction of a second available to him, he aimed his gun and fired off a cloud of indelible dye. The other man passed through it—glimpse of pale, elated face and dark unseeing eyes—and was gone in a noisy flurry of turbulence. Hasson called HQ and gave details of the incident, adding his opinion that the rogue flier was also guilty of drug abuse. With upwards of a million people airborne in the sector at that very moment it was unlikely that the offender would ever be caught, but his flying clothes and equipment had been permanently branded and would have to be replaced at considerable expense.

At three thousand metres Hasson switched to height maintenance power, took a direction-finder reading on Inglis’s beacon and began a slow horizontal cruise, eyes probing the darkness ahead. His flares illuminated a thickening mist, placing him at the centre of a sphere of foggy radiance and making it difficult to see anything beyond. This was close to the limit for personal flying without special heaters and Hasson became aware of the cold which was pressing in on him, searching for a weakness in his defences. The traffic streams far below looked warm and safe.

A few minutes later Hasson’s radar picked up an object straight ahead. He drew closer until, by flarelight, he could make out the figure of Lloyd Inglis performing its grotesque shuffle through the currents of dark air. Hasson knew at once that his friend was dead but he circled the body, keeping just outside field interference distance, until he could see the gaping hole in Inglis’s chest plate. The wound looked as though it had been inflicted by a lance …

A week earlier Hasson and Inglis had been on routine patrol over Bedford when they detected a pack of about eight flying without lights. Inglis had loosed off a miniflare which burst just beyond the group, throwing them briefly into silhouette, and both men had glimpsed the slim outline of a lance. The transportation of any solid object by a person using a CG harness was illegal, because of the danger to other air travellers and people on the ground, and the carrying of weapons was rare even among rogue fliers. It seemed likely that they had chanced on the Fireman. Spreading their nets and snares, Hasson and Inglis had flown in pursuit. During the subsequent low-level chase two people had died—one of them a young woman, also flying without lights, who had strayed into a head-on collision with one of the gang. The other had been a pack leader who had almost cut himself in two on a radio mast. At the end of it, all the two policemen had had to show for their efforts had been four unimportant members of the Welwyn Angels. The Fireman, the lance-carrier, had got away to brood about the incident, safe in his anonymity.

Now, as he studied the frozen body of his former partner, Hasson understood that the Fireman had been inspired to revenge. His targets would have been identified for him in the news coverage given to the arrest of Joe Sullivan. Swearing in his bitterness and grief. Hasson tilted his body, creating a.horizontal component in the lift force exerted by his CG harness. He swooped in on the rigid corpse, locked his arms around it and, immediately, both bodies began to drop as their counter-gravity fields cancelled each other out. No stranger to free fall, Hasson efficiently attached a line to an eye on Inglis’s belt and pushed the dead man away from him. As the two separated to beyond field interference distance the upward rush of air around them gradually ceased. Hasson checked his data display and saw that he had fallen little more than a hundred metres. He paid the line out from a dispenser at his waist until Inglis’s body was at a convenient towing distance, then he flew west, aiming for a point at which it would be safe to descend through the commuter levels. Far beneath him the traffic of the Birmingham control zone swirled like a golden galaxy, but Hasson—at the centre of his own spherical universe of white misty light—was isolated from it, cocooned in his own thoughts.

Lloyd Inglis—the beer-drinking, book-loving spendthrift—was dead. And before him there had been Singleton, Larmor and McMeekin. Half of Hasson’s original squad of seven years ago had died in the course of duty … and for what? It was impossible to police a human race which had been given its three-dimensional freedom with the advent of the CG harness. Putting a judo hold on gravity, turning the Earth’s own attractive force back against itself, had proved to be the only way to fly. It was easy, inexpensive, exhilarating—and impossible to regulate. There were eighty million personal fliers in Britain alone, each one a superman impatient of any curb on his ability to follow the sunset around the curve of the world. Aircraft had vanished from the skies almost overnight, not because the cargo-carrying ability was no longer needed, but because it was too dangerous to fly them in a medium which was crowded with aerial jaywalkers. The nocturnal rogue flier, the dark Icarus, was the folk hero of the age. What, Hasson asked himself, was the point in being a skycop? Perhaps the whole concept of policing, of being responsible for others, was no longer valid. Perhaps the inevitable price of freedom was a slow rain of broken bodies drifting to Earth as their powerpacks faded and …

The attack took Hasson by surprise.

It came so quickly that the proximity alarm and the howling of air displaced by the attacker’s body were virtually simultaneous. Hasson turned, saw the black lance, jack-knifed to escape it, received a ferocious glancing blow, and was sent spinning—all in the space of a second. The drop caused by the momentary field interference had been negligible. He switched off his flares and flight lights in a reflexive action and struggled to free his arms from the towline which was being lapped around him by his own rotation. When he had managed to stabilize himself he remained perfectly still and tried to assess the situation. His right hip throbbed painfully from the impact, but as far as he could tell no bones had been broken. He wondered if his attacker was going to be content with having made a single devastating pass, or if this was the beginning of a duel.

“You were quick, Hasson,” a voice called from the darkness. “Quicker than your wingman. But it won’t do you any good.”

“Who are you?” Hasson shouted as he looked for a radar bearing.

“You know who I am. I’m the Fireman.”

“That’s a song.” Hasson kept his voice steady as he began spreading his snares and nets. “What’s your real name? The one your area psychiatrist has on his books.”

The darkness laughed. “Very good, Sergeant Hasson. Playing for time and trying to goad me and learn my name all at once.”

“I don’t need to play for time—I’ve already broadcast a QRF.”

“By the time anybody gets here you’ll be dead, Hasson.”

“Why should I be? Why do you want to do this?”

“Why do you hunt my friends and ground them?”

“They’re a menace to themselves and to everybody else.”

“Only when you make them fly wild. You’re kidding yourself, Hasson. You’re a skycop and you like hounding people to death. I’m going to ground you for good—and those nets won’t help you.”

Hasson stared vainly in the direction of the voice. “Nets?”

There was another laugh and the Fireman began to sing. “I can see you in the dark, ’cause I’m the Fireman; I can fly with you and you don’t even know I’m there …” The familiar words were growing louder as their source drew near, and abruptly Hasson made out the shape of a big man illuminated by the traffic streams below and by starlight from above. He looked fearsome and inhuman in his flying gear.

Hasson yearned for the firearm which was denied to him by British police tradition, and then he noticed something. “Where’s the lance?”

“Who needs it? I let it go.” The Fireman spread his arms and—even in the dimness, even with the lack of spatial reference points—it became apparent that he was a giant, a man who had no need of weapons other than those which nature had built into him.

Hasson thought of the heavy lance plummeting down into a crowded suburb three thousand metres below and a cryogenic hatred stole through him, reconciling him to the forthcoming struggle, regardless of its outcome. As the Fireman came closer, Hasson whirled a net in slow circles, tilting his harness to counteract the spin the net tried to impart to him. He raised his legs in readiness to kick, and at the same time finished straightening out the towline which made Inglis’s body a ghastly spectator to the event. He felt nervous and keyed up, but not particularly afraid now that the Fireman had discarded his lance. Aerial combat was not a matter of instinct, it was something which had to be learned and practised, and therefore the professional always had the edge on the amateur, no matter how gifted or strongly motivated the latter might be. For example, the Fireman had made a serious mistake in allowing Hasson to get his legs fully drawn up into the position from which the power of his thighs could be released in an explosive kick.

Unaware of his blunder, the Fireman edged in slowly, vectoring the lift of his harness with barely perceptible shoulder movements. He’s a good flier, Hasson thought, even if he isn’t so good on combat theory and …

The Fireman came in fast—but not nearly as fast as he should have done. Hasson experienced something like a sense of luxury as he found himself with time to place his kick exactly where he wanted it. He chose the vulnerable point just below the visor, compensated for the abrupt drop which occurred as both CG fields cancelled out, and unleashed enough energy to snap a man’s neck. Somehow the Fireman got his head out of the way in time and caught hold of Hasson’s outstretched leg. Both men were falling now, but at an unequal rate because Hasson was tethered to Inglis whose CG field was too far away to have been cancelled. In the second before they parted, the Fireman applied the leverage of his massive arms and broke Hasson’s leg sideways at the knee.

Pain and shock obliterated Hasson’s mind, gutting him of all strength and resolve. He floated in the blackness for an indeterminate period, arms moving uncertainly, face contorted in a silent scream. The great spiral nebula far below continued to spin, but a dark shape was moving steadily across it, and part of Hasson’s mind informed him that there was no time for indulgence in natural reactions to injury. He was hopelessly outclassed on the physical level, and if life were to continue it would only be through the exercise of intelligence. But how was he to think when pain had invaded his body like an army and was firing mortar shells of agony straight into his brain?

For a start, Hasson told himself, you have to get rid of Lloyd Inglis. He began reeling in his comrade’s body with the intention of unhooking it, but almost immediately the Fireman spoke from close behind him.

“How did you like it, Hasson?” The voice was triumphant. “That was to show you I can beat you at your own game. Now we’re going to play my game.”

Hasson tried drawing the line in faster. Inglis’s body bobbed closer and finally came within interference radius. Hasson and Inglis began to fall. The Fireman dived in on them on the instant, hooked an arm around Hasson’s body, and all three dropped together. The whirlpool of fire began to expand beneath them.

“This is my game,” the Fireman sang through the gathering slipstream. “I can ride you all the way to the ground, ’cause I’m the Fireman.”

Hasson, knowing the tactics of aerial chicken, shut out the pain from his trailing leg, reached for his master switch, but hesitated without throwing it. In two-man chicken the extinguishing of one CG field restored the other one to its normal efficacy, causing a fierce differential which tended to drag one opponent vertically away from the other. The standard countermove was for the second man to kill his own field at the same time so that both bodies would continue to plunge downwards together until somebody’s nerve broke and forced him to reactivate his harness. In the present game of death, however, the situation was complicated by the presence of Inglis, the silent partner who had already lost. His field would continue negating those of the other two, regardless of what they did, unless …

Hasson freed an arm from the Fireman’s mock-sexual embrace and pulled Inglis’s body in close. He groped for the dead man’s master switch but found only a smooth plaque of frozen blood. The jewelled horizons were rising rapidly on all sides now, and the circling traffic stream was opening like a carnivorous flower. Air rushed by at terminal velocity, deafeningly. Hasson fought to break the icy casting away from the switch on Inglis’s harness, but at that moment the Fireman slid an arm around his neck and pulled his head back.

“Don’t try to get away from me,” he shouted into Hasson’s ear. “Don’t try to chicken out—I want to see how well you bounce.”

They continued to fall.

Hasson, encumbered by his nets, felt for the buckle of the belt which held, among other things, the towline dispenser. He fumbled it open with numb fingers and was about to release Inglis’s body when it occurred to him he would gain very little in doing so. An experienced chicken player always delayed breaking out of field interference until the last possible instant, leaving it so late that even with his harness set at maximum lift he hit the ground at the highest speed he could withstand. The Fireman probably intended going to the limit this time, leaving Hasson too disabled to prevent himself being smashed on impact. Getting rid of Inglis’s body would not change that.

They had dropped almost two thousand metres and in just a few seconds would be penetrating the crowded commuter levels. The Fireman began to whoop with excitement, grinding himself against Hasson like a rutting dog. Holding Inglis with his left hand, Hasson used his right to loop the plasteel towline around the Fireman’s upraised thigh and to pull it into a hard knot. He was still tightening the knot as they bombed down into the traffic flow. Lights flashed past nearby and suddenly the slow-spinning galaxy was above them. Patterns of street lamps blossomed beneath, with moving ground cars clearly visible. This, Hanson knew, was close to the moment at which the Fireman had to break free if he was to shed enough downward velocity before reaching ground level.

“Thanks for the ride,” the Fireman shouted, his voice ripping away in the slipstream. “Got to leave you soon.”

Hasson switched on his flares and then jerked the towline violently, bringing it to the Fireman’s attention. The Fireman looked at the loop around his thigh. His body convulsed with shock as he made the discovery that it was he and not Hasson who was linked to the dead and deadly skycop. He pushed Hasson away and began clawing at the line. Hasson swam free in the wind, knowing that the line would resist even the Fireman’s great strength. As he felt his CG field spread its invisible wings he turned to look back. He saw the two bodies, one of them struggling frantically, pass beyond the range of his flares on their way to a lethal impact with the ground.

Hasson had no time to waste in introspection—his own crash landing was about to occur and it would require all his skill and experience to get him through it alive—but he was relieved to find that he could derive no satisfaction from the Fireman’s death. Nunn and the others were wrong about him.

Even so, he thought, during the final hurtling seconds, I’ve hunted like a hawk for far too long. This is my last flight.

He prepared himself, unafraid, for the earth’s blind embrace.