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Excalibur
has been calling and calling; Captain Zarkon, even the Emperor Geoffrey himself, have been ordering you to turn back. It’s too dangerous, you are forbidden to go any further alone!”
    Major Tom says nothing but thrusts your X15 Astrofighter lower, lower, lower. Clouds shred like tissue paper on your wingtips, the fog swirls and thins patchily, then you are but of the cloud-base and below you is the surface. The Montgomery/Blair engines thunder as Major Tom throttles back; he is coming in for a landing and your stomach, now gripped firmly by six billion billion billion tons’ worth of gravity, is doing flipflops, a sicky-lurchy feeling that overcomes you as he throws the X15 into a left-hand bank.
    The ground is tip-of-the-nose close beyond the canopy, a forbidden planet standing on edge in midbank: red-brick neo-Georgian bungalows in fifteen hundred square feet of white-chained garden, trailers in the drive, boats and hatchbacks parked outside, rosebeds flowering, children on BMXs stopping, pointing, gaping.
    “Commence landing sequence.”
    You do not want to. You cannot go down there. To go down there is dying and worse. A billion billion billion miles away
Excalibur
, the Imperial throneship, hangs poised on the lip of jumpspace but its stupendous bulk is as insubstantial as a cloud compared to the painful truth of this place, so pin-sharp that you can even read the street name: Clifton Road. Suddenly you are no longer Wee Major Tom, half of the greatest fighting team the Galaxy has ever known. Suddenly you are a small boy who is twelve years old and more frightened than he has ever been before.
    “Commence landing sequence,” orders Major Tom.
    “No!” you wail, wanting beyond want to hear the words which will make it all right, the words which will make men glad to die in the hollowness of space. “I want to go back! Take me back!”
    “Commence landing sequence,” says Major Tom, and there is nothing in his voice but determination and command.
    “Landing sequence initiated,” you sob, touching heavy fingers to cold control panels. Landing shocks slide from their fairings and lock with a thump. The engine noise rises to a scream. Major Tom brings the X15 Astrofighter in low above the rooftops like Santa Claus on his sled and stops it dead in the air over the turning circle at the end of the street. Housewives’ morning coffees grow cold as their imbibers stand in their picture windows, babies in arms, to view the spectacle of the Astrofighter touching down. Whipped into tiny tornadoes, dust eddies chase down the street away from the downdraft. There is a gentle touch, as soft as a mother’s finger upon a nightmaresnared cheek: touchdown.
    “Power down,” says Major Tom, but before the noise of the engines has whispered away to nothing his canopy is open, his harness unbuckled, and he is running down the street to a house with number thirty-two on the gatepost and a lovely tan-and-white hearth-rug dog lying on the front step. Behind that picture window, too, there is a woman, with a coffee cup in one hand and the head of a small boy of about twelve under the other.
    Then the world folds up on itself like one of those origami fortune-tellers you used to make in school. Major Tom’s tight shiny uniform rips and shreds as he runs and the wind whips the scraps away to reveal a new uniform beneath, dark green with silver buttons. An X15 Astrofighter lifts into the air above Clifton Road on a pillar of light, canopy open, and climbs away into forever. Your uniform is gone, and the gentle pressure on your head is not the pressure of a helmet but the pressure of a small, slender hand and you realize that you are the boy in the picture window as the X15 dwindles into a shining dot and winks out. You are held, you are trapped under the gentle hand, marooned on the Planet of Nightmares.
    Now Major Tom is at the car and he waves at you and all you can do is wave back at him, for the words you want to