Yesterday, after the last glimmer of land vanished, vanished, in his recollection, as if the entire continent had been nothing more than a mirage, he was sorry he had allowed himself to be bullied and shamed into going on this voyage. He had been afraid of what his brothers would think of him if he’d stayed behind, of what his father would think, and most of all, of what he would think of himself—fears that seemed trivial compared to the anxiety the featureless sea later awakened in him. No trees, hills, and headlands to give you at least a hint of where you were. When you were far out upon it, every part of the ocean looked like every other part; although your wake or the dial on a log said that you were moving, you did not seem to be going anywhere but floating on a monotonous circle of infinite dimensions, its horizons ever receding and never reached. But he now saw in this art of celestial navigation the means to conquer his terror of that emptiness. If he could master the sextant and the bewildering tables, if he could build a bridge from the sea to the heavens, then he need never again feel lost and disoriented out here. The sun, the stars, and the planets would be his trees, hills, and headlands.

The computations were as simple as Will had promised—sixth grade stuff—but following the steps in the procedure was tedious. Finally, Drew set down his pencil and let out a breath, pretty much feeling the way he did after a tough examination.

“What do you come up with?” asked Will, combing his hair with his fingers.

Shyly, he pushed the piece of paper, blackened with numbers, across the table.

“Last year, with our dad? Nat put us in Salt Lake City,” he said, hoping to deflect criticism in case he had made an error.

“And how did you do?”

“I didn’t get as far as doing all this. Dad thought it was too complicated for me, on account of I was only twelve.”

Will studied the figures for a while, plotted the fix on the chart, and, after pausing to light a cigarette, declared that Drew had not done badly for a novice.

“I didn’t?”

“You got us a lot closer than Salt Lake City. Rhode Island—Providence, to be exact. About eighty miles from where we now sit. Show you your mistakes,” he said, and turned the page of calculations around so Drew could read them. “Right here, you forgot to note if the declination was plus or minus, that’s a pretty common error, and here, in these two places, you did the addition as if there are one hundred minutes in a degree. You forgot that there are only sixty minutes, and that’s a common error, too. Thirty minutes and forty minutes don’t make seventy minutes, they make one degree, ten minutes.”