Now that Irene had shut off the line to the right engine, they weren’t losing fuel at a disastrous rate. Still, if they didn’t sight Baker on time, if they had to start making sweeps in search of it, they only had about an hour left to do this. An hour, and the ocean was so vast! They might have miscalculated the tailwind out of Honolulu, they might be a hundred miles north or south of this dot on the map they had imagined themselves. What if—

Another note. Reduce altitude to 1500 ft.

Irene nodded and brought the airplane carefully down. Her heart beat in enormous, steady strokes. She felt them in her neck. Her head ached from the keenness of her attention. The air smelled of salt and oil and pungent aviation fuel. She realized she was thirsty.

She scribbled, Coffee.

Half a minute later, Sam pushed a cup into her hand.

She drank swiftly. It was hot, but not too hot. In the thicker atmosphere at fifteen hundred feet, they had slowed to ninety-two miles an hour, and they were burning a little more fuel. But they were closer to the surface, and they could more easily spy any telltale interruption in the dark ocean beneath them. Irene’s armpits were wet; the sweat trickled down her sides and gathered between her legs, and yet she was cold. She handed the empty cup back to Sam. She had stopped wondering why he hadn’t taken the controls. He hadn’t, that was all. Maybe he figured it was more tricky to find Baker than to land on it safely, and that was why he remained at the navigator’s table, communicating on the radio, taking the speed and heading of the Centauri every five minutes, making the calculation, laying the ruler flat along the map and drawing a neat line that meant absolutely nothing, might be a hundred miles away from their actual position.

Still she flew.

Twenty minutes passed. Thirty.

The cockpit window, high and narrow, didn’t afford much of a view. She scribbled another note to Sam, which was probably unnecessary: Start looking.

Thirty-five minutes.

Forty.

Irene’s eyes hurt from straining into the moonlight. A white square appeared to her left. She ripped it from the clothesline and read: Reduce altitude to 1000 ft.

She tipped the nose down carefully. It was so disorienting, flying at night. Sometimes you had this wild, irrational feeling that up was down, and down was up, and the vast textured blackness beneath you was actually the sky. And even though the full moon lay within view, edging downward now toward the western horizon, Irene experienced an instant’s panic that the white disk in the sky was not the moon itself, but its reflection on the water.