The electrician had been busy with his gear and the checker was talking to the navigator through the flight deck window when I'd looked into the wheelbay and made the decision. To vanish into the wheelbay of a DC-6 takes approximately three seconds and kids do it in Cuba and some of them survive.

It's easier when you don't think too much.

You have to believe there's going to be enough room when the wheels come up and you have to believe you can go on holding on like this with the open doors leaving you poised above the surface of the earth at a lethal height if you lose your grip and drop and go on dropping. You have to -

Mechanical movement beginning.

I couldn't see the wheels: they were well aft of the bay. All I could see in the light of the exhaust flames were the hydraulic cylinder and the two long coil springs and they were moving now, working in unison.

Darkness began rising.

Keep yourself braced.

The jungle below had the faint sheen of moonlight on its leaves and the rising darkness was the black rubber of the tyres as they came swinging forward and upward, blotting out the ground. They were immense and I dragged a breath in and arched my spine and felt the sharp heads of the hose-clip screws digging into my shoulder as I pulled upward against the conduits and waited, hearing the faint scream of the wind-rush in the roaring background. The wheels were still spinning and I could feel the sting of stone fragments as they were flicked away from the ribbed treads by centrifugal force.

Keep braced and don't weaken.

Then there was sudden and total darkness as the strut locked home and the doors of the bay came together, shutting me in. I hadn't imagined that this degree of sound could increase but the three-thousand-horsepower radial engine was immediately forward of the wheelbay and the closing doors had trapped its sound, confining it, until its volume swelled to a vibration inside the skull.

Into this constant thunder came a higher note that alerted me to unconsidered hazards but for a moment I couldn't identify its source. Conceivably it was an alarm buzzer sounding somewhere above my head but it would be heard from the flight deck and I discounted it. My right foot was trembling and heating up and the faint whine was diminishing gradually and I took a better grip on the conduit and raised my foot an inch and the sound stopped at once: the heel of my shoe bad been in contact with one of the tyres and they were still spinning and I was warned.

Don't drop.

If I dropped I wouldn't live: the wheels would flick me against the forward bulkhead and jam my body there with their momentum.

But I was tiring now.

Noise fatigues the organism. So does fear.

I was afraid.

There was no action to take. I had to do nothing, in order to live, except hold on and try not to think. The wheels would lose their rotary inertia within minutes but I didn't know how long I could force the muscles in my hands to remain contracted with the fingers hooked over the conduit or how long it would be before the conduit broke away from its clips and sent me down. Once the wheels had stopped spinning I could drop across them and rest but if I did it too soon it would be fatal. It was a matter of time.

Euphoria.

A sense of twilight.

The noise roared far away, in the caverns of Nirvana.

Watch it.

A sense of floating, of life adrift in weightlessness, of deep and eternal peace.

Three great swans flew across the aching dome of infinity, and were caught in its vortex, spinning. The sky cracked like an egg.

Get out of this. Pull yourself out.

Consciousness flickering, like a loose light bulb.

Colours swirled, ebbing and flowing to the theta rhythms of hypnagogic sleep. The sun burst, and the birds turned black and struck horror in the psyche.

Pull up and pull out. Move.

My hands floating in the-

Move for Christ's sake or you'll -

Adrift in the streaming depths of Lethe, where-

Move your hands, hit something. Feet, kick something. Pull out.

Heart thudding.

Darkness, the real thing, and the engine roaring.

I kicked and floated back the other way, nearly losing the sense of reality as the clouds drew down and blinded — watch it, pull out! Kicked again and floated to the right, and I knew now what was happening: I was lying prone across the enormous tyres and when I kicked at the bulkhead the force was turning the wheels and they were swinging me across in an arc against the firewall.

Consciousness was painful: the organism was being born again into the deafening storms of reality and in the confusion the forebrain was trying to function, desperate to get its messages through to the motor nerves.

Please note that you are lying on the wheels and when the undercarriage goes down you will automatically drop into space.

I didn't register the significance of this because the euphoria was still fogging my head; but I realized that I was in the conscious state, with the beat rhythms taking over. There had been oxygen deprivation and this was the hangover and it was unpleasant: headache, nausea, shivering.

Tried to stand up but of course no room so I grabbed at things to steady myself, physical orientation necessary, but watch it! Cables, don't grab at the cables or you'll crash the whole bloody bazaar.

Something was trying to get through. Some kind of information.

My head lolled and brushed the conduit and the ear-muffler went askew and the roaring came through my skull like a freight train and I pulled the thing back over my ears. My weight had shifted and I swung back on the wheels, hitting the firewall. The noise was worse here because the engine was on the other side, so I swung back to the rear end of the wheel-bay and bruised my arm and felt the pain pushing consciousness into the open, as if I were coming out of a tunnel.

Information: we were probably going down, and the oxygen was increasing; hence my return to consciousness. I couldn't think why we were going down but I hoped we meant to do it and we weren't doing it because I'd been hanging on to those flight-control cables.

Discount unreasonable fears: it felt as though we were in stable flight conditions, inclined nose-down by ten or fifteen degrees. But something urgent was still trying to get through and I didn't like the way my head was still fogging. My hands were cold but there was no icing anywhere: the metal conduits were perfectly dry. The air temperature at ten thousand feet above the Amazon in spring would be somewhere about 45 degrees and the heat of the radial engine would raise that considerably. After an hour's night, the conditions-

Time.

Check the time.

07:20.

This was the warning that had been trying to get through. It was a three-hour flight from Manaus to Belem near the Atlantic coast and we'd been flying for that period of time and the distinct nose-down attitude of the aircraft plus the return of oxygen availability meant that we were probably approaching Belem Airport.

The final piece of information was very urgent indeed but I didn't have time to look at it because something gave a metallic click below me and a rush of air screamed through the wheelbay doors as they started to open and the tyres began dropping away and I grabbed for the conduit, my fingers clawing and not finding it, clawing again and touching the skein of control cables — don't — as the mass of rubber began rolling forward and the air howled into the bay.

I felt the conduit and pulled upwards, kicking my weight off the wheels as they went down. Daylight was flooding in and I caught a glimpse of water shining below as I found some kind of a purchase for the heels of my shoes, pulling hard on the conduit and feeling it buckle but hold. With the dazzling light after the hours of total darkness there came the heat of low altitude, and the faint brackish smell of the ocean as we swung in a wide circle, settling lower with the engines idling and the landing-gear down and locked.