“That would be heaven,” I said, metal clanking as the crew secured the camper and HMMWV to the floor with chains and netting.

The steps leading up from the cargo bay were painted with the name of the plane, which in this case, appropriately, was Heavy Metal. The cockpit was huge, with an electronic flight control system, and head-up displays like fighter pilots used. Steering was done with sticks instead of yokes, and the instrumentation was completely intimidating.

I climbed up on a swivel seat, behind two pilots in green jumpsuits, who were too busy to pay us any mind.

“You got headsets so you can talk, but please don’t when the pilots are,” Laurel told us. “You don’t have to wear them, but it’s pretty loud in here.”

I was clamping on my five-point harness and noting the oxygen mask hanging by each chair.

“I’m going to be down here and will check on you from time to time,” the lieutenant went on. “It’s about three hours to Utah, and the landing shouldn’t be too abrupt. They got a runway long enough for the space shuttle, or that’s what they say. You know how the Army brags.”

She went back downstairs as pilots talked in jargon and codes that meant nothing to me. We began to take off a mere thirty amazing minutes after the plane had landed.

“We’re going on the runway now,” a pilot said. “Load?” I assumed he meant the loadmaster below. “Is everything secure?”

“Yes, sir,” the voice sounded in my headset.

“Have we got that checklist completed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We’re rolling.”

The plane surged forward, bumping over the field with gathering power that was unlike any takeoff I had ever known. It roared more than a hundred miles an hour, pulling up into the air at an angle so sharp it flattened me against the back of my chair. Suddenly, stars spangled the sky, the lights of Maryland a winking network.

“We’re going about two hundred knots,” a pilot said. “Command Post aircraft 30601. Flaps up. Execute.”

I glanced over at Lucy, who was behind the co-pilot and trying to see what he was doing as she listened to every word, probably committing it to memory. Laurel returned with cups of coffee, but nothing would have kept me up. I drifted to sleep at thirty-five thousand feet as the jet flew west at six hundred miles an hour. I came to as a tower was talking.

We were over Salt Lake City and descending, and Lucy would never come to earth again as she listened to cockpit talk. She caught me looking but was not to be distracted, and I had never really known anyone like her, not in my entire life. She had a voracious curiosity about anything that could be put together, taken apart, programmed and, in general, made to do something she wanted. People were about the only thing she couldn’t figure out.

Clover Control turned us over to Dugway Range Control, and then we were receiving instructions about landing. Despite what we had been told about the length of the runway, it felt like we were going to be torn out of our seats as the jet crescendoed over a tarmac blinking with miles of lights, air roaring against raised slats. The stop was so abrupt, I didn’t see how it was physically possible, and I wondered if the pilots might have been practicing.