Irene shook her head. The damp strands flew around her face and stuck to her cheek. She touched her fingers to her hair in wonder. “It feels … I don’t know. It feels like somebody else. How does it look?”

“Sensational.”

“Don’t kid me.”

“I’m not kidding. Come on, have a look.”

Sam got his shaving mirror out of his kit bag and held it out in front of Irene. She stared back at this woman who was not her, who could not possibly be Irene, modern and tousle-haired and freckled and sunburnt and liberated, her eyes such a pungent shade of blue they might have been pieces of sky. She couldn’t take her eyes off those curls. She lifted them one by one and held them to the sun.

“You see?” said Sam. “Sensational.”

Meanwhile, the rest of humanity was working itself up into a state of unprecedented frenzy over the fate of the lost pilots. In the space of forty-eight hours, thanks to the miracle of the modern newswire, Sam and Irene had become just about the most famous people on earth. Members of the press had camped out in their dozens outside the Oakland home of Mrs. Samuel Mallory, who stayed indoors with her daughter and had her food brought in so she wouldn’t have to speak to anybody.

The press didn’t have to camp out outside the home of Mr. Hank Foster. Irene’s father obliged them by joining the hoopla himself. He chewed the fat with the newsmen, he shared stories and photographs of Irene, he made optimistic, colorful comments about the likely fate of the pilots that were quoted around the world. Meanwhile, the Sydney Morning Herald issued regular statements from Mr. George Morrow, on behalf of the pilots and the navy, in which no detail was too small, no speculation too outlandish, no possible mention of the sponsoring corporations unmentioned.