If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring about a dangerous moment. Once they were moving at the wind’s speed, of course, there would be very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply blimp along. But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly stationary, the howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably, and this might disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the ice-choked breakers, or onto the lee shore. He could see Ann thinking this through herself. Still— whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the bone-jarring impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary thing, one way or the other.

Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was a bloody mess. “Worth a try!” she shouted.

So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and with a final look at Ann— their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could not articulate, but which warmed him— he put his fingers on the switches. Hopefully the altitude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished he had spent more time flying.

As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a nearly weightless moment at the top, just before the fall down into the next icy trough. In one of these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat fell down the waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar— then bounced right up and away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so that they were hanging in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next wave would capsize them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging away over ice and water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head over heels in their restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat righted itself, and began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to side, front to back— oops then all the way over again, topsy-turvy— then righted, and swinging again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on— his shoulder harness came free and his shoulder slammed against Ann’s, even though he had been pressed against her. The tiller was bashing his knee. He held on to it. Another crash together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched her, and after that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other’s shoulders, in danger at every slam of breaking each other’s bones. They looked at each other for a second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from some cut or other, or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked impassive. Up they shot into the sky.