She was shaking, she was dizzy. Sam’s hand covered hers on the stick. The airplane jerked and rattled as they brought it back under control. She thought, why? Why had he subjected her to this? He was the senior pilot, the better pilot, the stunt pilot who had performed a thousand improbable aeronautical feats, who had cheated death over and over. Why hadn’t he taken control the instant the engine stopped? Why make Irene do this impossible thing and kill them both?

But his arms were right there. His face stood firm next to hers. STEADY, he shouted, so she could hear him, so she could smell his hair, his familiar skin. His confidence poured from his palm and into the back of her hand.

THAT’S IT. His voice was firm, not worried at all. KEEP YOUR SPEED UP.

Irene’s heart chattered away but her mind cleared. Her vision made a tunnel of the path before them. It was like the roller coaster when she was eleven, the whole world narrowing to a single corridor, to the patch at the end where you landed.

The airplane fell softly. The silver ground rose and grew before her. There was no wind to rattle her, nothing to think about but the descent of the Centauri to earth. The island was flat and covered with sand and grass, as near to a landing strip as you could ask for on an uninhabited island in the middle of the ocean. YOU’VE GOT IT, Sam shouted in her ear. His hand lifted from hers. He stepped back and buckled himself into the navigator’s seat. It was like any other landing, like that time Sam shut one engine off and made her land in the Mojave Desert. The earth came up to meet them. The still, dark grass and the brush and BANG! The wheels slammed into the ground, bumped and slammed again, tore through bushes, sand and leaves flying up around the windows, spinning and bumping and coming at last to rest in the long, quiet night, an hour before dawn.

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947

Because Olle’s away in Honolulu, trying to keep his brother-in-law Kaiko from climbing out of his hospital bed, Lindquist has to cover his flights for him. She doesn’t fly the airplanes often, she explains to me, as we drive to the airfield—first because of the risk of some cosmopolitan tourist recognizing her and second because most people would rather eat rabbit droppings than take off in an airplane piloted by a woman.

“So you see,” she says, “it was all for nothing, everything I did. All those flights, all those speeches and books, the endless publicity. George used to say that we had entered the age of woman, that people were fascinated by women breaking free to do adventurous things, but look around you.”