Meanwhile, as the days slid into weeks, they worked on the Centauri. They both wanted the ship to be ready to fly as soon as help arrived; they desperately wanted to finish the journey in triumph. Sam had figured out that the engine itself was undamaged, that all the trouble came down to nothing more than a broken fuel line, so all he needed to do was to repair it. Except he had no extra hose, nothing to splice the old ends together again. Irene shaded her eyes and frowned at him.

“Don’t know why you’re bothering with that. They’ll have a fuel line for us.”

“Who’ll have a fuel line?”

“The navy. Once they find us. They’ll have a brand-new fuel line you can install in half an hour.”

“It’s something to do, isn’t it? So I don’t go nuts.” Sam jumped down from the wing. “What’s for dinner?”

“Cockles and mussels, alive alive oh.”

“Sweet Molly Malone,” he sang, thick Irish baritone, and snatched her hand to whirl her around. “As she pushed her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow—”

Irene broke away. “You’re in an awfully good mood, for a fellow keeping alive on shellfish and distilled seawater.”

“And peanut butter.”

“Peanut butter’s almost finished.”

He squinted at the sky. “I keep telling you we should shoot down a bird or two.”

“Like how? Make a slingshot? Anyway, we hardly have enough fuel to distill the water, let alone cook a full-sized booby.”

“We’ll find a way,” he said. “We could live here forever, I’ll bet.”

Certainly it was starting to seem like they’d lived on Howland forever. The dawn had marked their twentieth day since landing on the island, with no sign of any life upon the surrounding ocean except the occasional pod of bottlenose dolphins. A traitorous corner of Irene’s brain was starting to think the unthinkable, that nobody was searching for them, that Sam and Irene were presumed lost, or had simply been forgotten among a thousand more important world affairs.