And Sam Mallory was not one of them.

Irene didn’t remember all the details. She didn’t know what type of airplane Sam Mallory had been flying or why exactly he had been forced to ditch the machine in the ocean, several hundred miles short of Hawai’i, in the dark of night. Something about a faulty fuel line. All she remembered was that he and his copilot—Irene didn’t recall the name—had been reported far ahead of his nearest competitor when she went to sleep that night, and when she woke the news was everywhere, in thick black headlines, in chattering radio receivers:

GOEBEL AND DAVIS WIN DOLE DERBY

Smith Second; Three Airplanes Lost at Sea

Naturally, the press was not going to let this terrible disaster go to waste. Day after day, the radios and newspapers reported back from the frantic search for the downed airplanes. They found the first one fairly quickly. But the fate of the Miss Doran and the rather foolishly named Icarus—Mr. Mallory’s airplane—remained unknown. Irene would stop by the drugstore on her way home from work to listen to the latest bulletins, delivered in breathless yet stalwart tones by Mr. Floyd Gibbons of the National Broadcasting Corporation. How much food and water the pilots had carried with them. The shifting weather patterns. The dimensions and capabilities of the emergency rafts carried aboard. (As it turned out, Sam Mallory’s airplane had not carried a raft at all, on account of the extra weight.) The concentration of man-eating sharks in that area of the Pacific Ocean from where the lost airplanes had issued their last transmissions.

Seven days passed, eight, nine. Irene no longer stopped by the drugstore after work; it was simply too heart-wrenching to listen to Mr. Gibbons, in a voice of attempted cheer, lay out various scenarios by which either of the two airplanes might have survived. He had discussed Mr. Mallory’s history as a stunt pilot—The man known in Hollywood for his willingness to attempt any proposed maneuver, no matter how perilous or technically impossible, even the deliberate crash of an airplane—and before all that, his years as a barnstormer, hopscotching the country to perform for crowds of amazed corn pokes. Before even that, his stint in the Army Air Service, dogfighting above the bloody French battlefields. For some reason, Mr. Gibbons—a celebrated war hero himself—considered that this checkered history of death-defying subsistence, hairline survival, and crackerjack piloting had perfectly prepared Mr. Mallory for his present ordeal. Irene couldn’t stand his optimism. It seemed naïve to her, almost disrespectful, when the man and his copilot had obviously made a meal for the sharks by now.

And then came the morning—Irene remembered it perfectly—when she arrived home from the beach to a newspaper headline so incredible, so almost hysterically jubilant, the words seemed to overflow and run off the page.

MALLORY FOUND ALIVE!!