All of these thoughts shot across Irene’s mind one by one, without stopping for consideration. She didn’t have time to think. She had an airplane to contend with, an airplane that could putter along with one engine, as long as the pilot made the constant, necessary adjustments. Still Sam didn’t tap her shoulder, didn’t make her rise and return to her old seat. Irene kept flying. She got the knack of it. She glanced at the compass every ten or fifteen seconds, glanced at the altimeter (six thousand two hundred feet) and the speedometer (ninety-six miles an hour, much slower now) and the fuel gauge (eleven gallons remaining, dear God) in a continuous rotation. Each piece of information fed her brain. She felt preternaturally alert, as alive as an electrical wire, aware simultaneously of a dozen different things. A moment ago she had had to pinch herself to keep from dozing.

A note dragged into view on the clothesline: Maintain heading. Superb flying.

Irene was too busy to be shocked, but she felt the shock nonetheless, erupting down below somewhere, her stomach maybe. Sam wasn’t taking over. Irene was going to fly them to Baker Island on a single engine. She was going to land the airplane by moonlight on a coral island in the middle of the South Pacific, no airstrip or anything, no beacon, nothing but moon and stars.

Thank God for the full moon. Thank God for the clear air.

Irene kept one hand on the stick and scribbled on the paper with her other hand: Miles?

He replied, 86.

But that was just dead reckoning, she thought. They couldn’t know for certain. She hadn’t taken a celestial observation in two hours, and while the radio beacon in Samoa had insisted they were on course, it couldn’t tell them how far away they were, where precisely they existed on that curve drawn on the globe between Honolulu and the landing strip on Samoa. So these eighty-six miles were a guess. An answer worked out on pencil and paper. And on that estimate of distance depending the accuracy of their compass heading, and on the accuracy of that compass heading depending their ability to find Baker Island at all.

Still she flew. She had no choice. There was nothing to do but fly.

Fly and calculate. If they maintained speed at ninety-five miles an hour, they should reach Baker in about fifty-four minutes. They should glimpse the island sooner, maybe forty or forty-five minutes, depending on its visibility in the moonlight. In three-quarters of an hour, Irene and Sam would know whether their calculations were accurate.

If they weren’t?