This was not the case, of course. An exhaustive search was still under way, no hint of giving up, no sir! Hundreds of men combed the Pacific for some sign of the missing pilots, and thousands more wrote and reported and speculated on their whereabouts, and hundreds of millions more gobbled up every crumb of news cooked up by the preceding. The only trouble was, they continued to look in the wrong place. After turning over every stone and blade of grass on Baker Island to the south, the navy had begun trawling the waters to the east, under the assumption—so George Morrow announced to the waiting press—that Sam and Irene had run out of fuel on their way to Baker and made an emergency landing on the water. Mr. Morrow reminded reporters that Mr. Mallory had stayed alive for eleven days on his floating airplane last year, so he was experienced in the techniques for survival. He and the U.S. Navy continued to harbor every expectation for a happy outcome.

So the USS Farragut drew its solemn, methodical lines across the open ocean, while Sam and Irene fished for hermit crabs and gazed at the stars from their pile of coral sand some hundred miles to the northwest, and it seemed this state of affairs might continue indefinitely, or at least until some bright spark in the navy, or perhaps Mr. Morrow himself, should have the clever idea to expand the search to include the few additional islands in the larger vicinity.

As of the twenty-second of August, however, Sam and Irene had received no hint of this unprecedented search under way to the south of them, to say nothing of the ballyhoo gripping the globe. Their horizon remained empty. Their radio remained inoperable. So far as they could hear and see, they were the only two people on the face of the earth.

In the end, it wasn’t Mr. Morrow at all who got the clever idea to look for Sam and Irene on Howland Island. It was Hank Foster who checked out some maps from the library, some old navigational charts, and hovered over them with compass and ruler and magnifying glass. On that day, the twenty-second of August, he shot the usual breeze with the reporters gathered in the café at Rofrano’s Airfield, where he spent most of his waking hours nursing cups of coffee that might or might not have contained a little something extra. “Boys,” he said to them, “I’ll tell you what, I don’t know why they haven’t looked for my Irene on Howland Island.”