Before flying, Irene hadn’t given the moon much thought. She knew it guided the tides, of course, which were of some importance in surfing, but she didn’t pay attention to the how and why, to the actual progress of the rock in question. Her prior ignorance now stunned her. How could she not have noticed, for example, that a full moon rose exactly at sunset, and set exactly at sunrise? That a new moon—if she could actually see it—did exactly the opposite? The moon was her companion. It shed light on the black ocean. It occupied a predictable place in the sky, a landmark, a beacon. As she swept above the water, searching for some scrap of an island, the moon lit her way. If she found Baker, she would find it by the reflection of moonlight on a patch of sand.

Or else Sam would. He had taken off the radio headset and lifted a pair of binoculars to his eyes. The temperature was getting a little warmer, because they were so close to earth, or possibly because of the anxiety packed tight inside the airplane, and he had stripped off his thick, sheepskin-lined leather jacket and stood now in his flight suit, not moving, fixed on the landscape outside the window. A landscape on which no interruption appeared. Nothing. Water and more water, all the way to the horizon. The minutes ticked by. Ten, fifteen. The needle in the gauge of the main fuel tank hovered just above empty.

Irene scrawled, Switch to aux tank soon.

The note took ten or twelve seconds to write. While she was writing it, she was seized with certainty that when she looked back up, when she strained her gaze through the cockpit window, she would see Baker Island. She would see some silver ridge amid all those delicate white threads and curlicues that constituted the moonlit Pacific Ocean, and it would grow larger and more prominent and it would be Baker Island. She knew this like she knew the shape of her own hand, the rhythm of her own breath. She chucked the pencil stub in its can and clipped the note, one-handed, to the clothesline, and turned to the window in triumph.

Nothing.

The Centauri wobbled. Maybe it was the air, maybe it was her hand on the stick. She glanced at the fuel gauge and the clock. They had traveled nearly forty miles now in the first side of the square. Nearly time to bank and turn. Behind her, Sam was moving. Switching the fuel lines. The auxiliary tank held another sixty gallons. If Irene flew the Centauri with perfect efficiency, she could squeeze another hundred and twenty miles from those sixty gallons.

She made the turn. Started down the next side of the imaginary square.

Surely Baker Island would turn up any second.

Two more sides.

Eighty miles.

No island.