The Navigator’s face, however, was worried. A passenger seeing him might have thought that he feared some impending disaster. Actually, like many another mortal, he was worrying about the monthly bills. Last evening, instead of thinking epic thoughts about the morrow’s flight through space, he had sat down at the dining-room table with his wife, and spent several hours going over the family budget. Three small children with contradictory tendencies toward too large tonsils and too small sinus openings kept a man guessing. Yet this month there had been no doctor’s bills; the water bill, however, was high.

Then he suddenly smiled, realizing a series of connections which on the previous evening had escaped him. It should have been simple to a man in his profession. While the Pacific High stood firm, California had dry weather. The garden would require water, but the children would not need the doctor to drain their sinuses. And of even more importance to the family, as long as these conditions held, his own flight of fourteen hundred miles across the open ocean was hardly more dangerous than a street-car ride.

He did not look at the weather-map—he saw it plain in his mind. From San Francisco the great concentric ovals of the High pointed off southwestward. Around those ovals, clockwise, the wind blew steadily. Today, with the course charted south of the High, he was sure of a favoring tail-wind which would bring the plane to Honolulu with gas-tanks still comfortably full. On the return voyage, if the luck held, he might have a course along the north side of the High with the same steady tail-winds.

That nest of ovals upon the weather-map looked dull and uninspiring enough. He himself, not primarily a meteorologist, had no clear idea of what the High meant in the whole cosmic scheme. But he had a vivid sense of how those ovals affected his own air-route. They shunted off the storms toward British Columbia, and so gave generally fair weather for the Honolulu run; and also they formed a great benign swirl of air which with ingenuity might be made, paradoxically, to serve both going and coming. When the High broke up, there was a different story.

Looking ahead, the Navigator now saw a ship. By the rate at which it seemed to come dashing toward him, he again became conscious of the plane’s own rapid motion.

5

Since the glacier-ice began to melt from the mountains and the crags to show their shapes, the quiet lake has lain at the foot of the gorge. No one knows who first crossed the Pass.

While the ice still lingered, mountain-sheep must have worn the first trails—faint dull traces across the granite. After some centuries the black-tailed deer followed; by then the ice would have been gone. Next come Pai-ute or Washoe, gathering seeds and pine-nuts. So recently as if it might have been yesterday, some trapper may have watered his horses at the lake, and leaning on his long rifle squinted into the westering sun as he worked out in his mind a route upward from ledge to ledge.