"The Sun Rises Twice."

The tale portrays a cultured pilot whose nearly fatal escapade exemplifies that he is someone for whom "the sun rises twice."

In The World in Ripeness (p. 18), Bates would recall that for his "Flying Officer X" stories, it was the "casual, unsuspecting, apparently irrelevant word that I was waiting for as my inspiration... One evening a pilot, an extraordinarily good and tough one, let fall the casual statement that sometimes, not returning from ops over Germany until dawn was breaking, he would see the sun rise twice, once from several thousand feet up and a second time after he had landed. I could scarcely wait to get this illuminating symbolic episode down on paper..."

Published in:

• The News Chronicle (February 23, 1942)
• Argosy (June 1942)
• Jerusalem Radio Forum (September 18, 1942)
• Royal Air Force Journal (October 17, 1942),
• The Greatest People in the World and Other Stories (1942)
• There's Something in the Air (1943)
• Something in the Air (1944)
• The Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (1952)
• Recent Short Stories (London: Odhams Press, 1960)
• Adventure Stories (2011)
• The Complete Stories of Flying Officer 'X' (Bloomsbury ebook, 2018)