Now, it’s easy for the modern reader to forget what a revolution the Rofrano Centauri caused in American civil aviation. These days, she hangs by cables in a gallery all her own of the California Museum of Flight in Sacramento, viewed and photographed by thousands every year. Her iconic lines decorate any number of books and articles and motion pictures on the history of airplanes. But in July of 1928, nobody had seen anything like her before. Irene thought she looked like a giant winged bullet. Her fifty-four-foot wings were molded directly on the aluminum skin of a fuselage thirty-eight feet in length. There was not an edge or a corner on her. Her two enormous propeller engines threw blades the length of a grown man. She could hold three hundred gallons of fuel in her regular tanks, and another hundred in an auxiliary tank. On paper, the Centauri could fly for over three thousand miles at a hundred and fifty miles an hour before she had to land and refuel.

Of course, flying in the air was not like flying on paper. You had wind, for one thing, blowing you this way and that way according to its own unpredictable formula, and you had navigational error. Hidden under Irene’s bed at home were several books on navigation, both by sea and by air, dead reckoning and celestial and radio methods. (The Centauri was equipped with a two-way radio and a backup receiver, as well as an emergency beacon.) She had studied them all, had practiced them over and over during those flights to San Diego and to Oakland, out to sea and back again, and Sam said she was a natural, that her mind had an intuitive grasp of the geometric logic that was navigation.

Still, the Pacific Ocean was a gigantic landscape, a third of the distance around the globe itself, barren and featureless without end, and one tiny airplane was like an ant adrift on the Sahara Desert, looking for islands the size of rocks. A mistake of a fraction of a degree could send you hundreds if not thousands of miles off course.

The door rattled behind her.

“Who’s the fella?” asked Sam. “Looks a little old for you.”

Irene hesitated a second or two. “My father.”

“No kidding! Why didn’t you introduce me?”

“Because we have work to do.”

“Where’d you stash him?”

“In the cafeteria, putting himself on the outside of a cup of coffee. He’s what you might call the worse for wear.”

“I see.”

That was another thing about Sam. You didn’t need to explain yourself; he let you decide just exactly how much to tell him, or not. He didn’t force you to share your sorrow. He didn’t force you to share his. He laid his hand on the skin of the Centauri, near the seam of the cockpit door, and said, “Weather forecast looks about right.”

“What about the ship?”