“I guess it’s a common enough name.”

Mr. Foster had finished the eggs. He took a last corner of toast and swiped it on the plate to gather up the last streaks of yolk. Popped it into his mouth and winked at her.

“You know something, pumpkin? I always did think airplanes would be right up your alley.”

After breakfast and a bath, Irene drove her father to Burbank in his car, a green Model A, not because he’d been drinking (though she was pretty sure he had) but because she knew he liked her to drive. He had taught her himself, once she was thirteen and could reach the pedals. He dozed most of the way to Burbank, even though Irene put the top down in the heat and allowed the scorching California wind to blow right through him. His eyes opened just as Irene swung the car into the row of vehicles already lined up in the airfield parking lot.

“This is it?” he said.

“It’s not much, but it’s home.”

He raised his eyebrows at that. Irene expected him to ask a dozen questions, how long had she been flying, how had she found the place to begin with, who had taught her to fly, why she’d kept the whole business from him all these months. But he only nodded, as if he understood perfectly, and reached for the door handle.

The airfield was already filling with people. They had billed this afternoon as the first public demonstration of the new Rofrano Centauri, but in fact Sam and Irene had already made several test flights. Without fanfare, they had flown it together down to San Diego and back, Sam in the cockpit and Irene in the navigator’s seat just behind him, while the earth lay flat and fascinating as a map beneath them.

But nobody else knew anything about that. The fanfare, the crowds now gathering at the airfield, they had nothing to do with the inside of the Centauri’s revolutionary aluminum fuselage, which contained only Sam and Irene.

Irene spotted Sam right away. He stood next to the hangar, hands on hips, grinning his wide-mouthed grin before a semicircle of newspapermen and airplane fanatics. The California sun blazed away on his hair. His face had tanned bronze to match. As he spoke, he caught sight of Irene, hurrying past with her father, and his eyebrows went up. Irene shrugged and continued on to the cafeteria, where she sat her father down with a cup of coffee.

“I thought I was going to see an airplane,” he said.

“You’ll see it, all right. I can’t let you in the hangar, that’s all.”

“Your own father?”

“Rules are rules. A hangar’s a dangerous place if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Now, pumpkin—”

“Drink your coffee, all right? I’ll let you know when the excitement starts.”

When she returned to the hangar, Sam still held court outside. She nodded to the security guard and slipped in by the side door. There were no windows on this building, nothing to allow passersby any glimpse of the machine that lay inside. Irene flipped on the lights, and out of the blackness appeared this beautiful silver bird.

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?”

“I spent two hours this morning with Rofrano, looking over every inch of her. Not a hair out of place. She’s ready.”

“And you?”

Sam crossed his arms and turned on his side, leaning against the plane. “I’ve been ready for months. You?”

“Course I’m ready.”

“You don’t sound sure about that.”

“Of course I’m sure!”

“Not turning yellow on me, are you?” He said it with a grin, as if to say Of course you’re not yellow, you of all girls. “Anyway, you brought your old dad to see you off.”

“That was an accident. He turned up this morning from some kind of business trip, high as a kite. He’d seen the papers. I couldn’t leave him home.”

“Jehosephat, Irene. You haven’t told your father?”

Now Irene crossed her arms. “I wrote a letter, is what I did. You can say things right in a letter. I figured I’d mail it right before we take off.”

“Irene Foster,” he said, shaking his head, “you’ve got more sand in you than any man I’ve met. You’re going to fly across the entire Pacific Ocean in a metal bird in the sole company of a bum like me, and you don’t care to tell your own father about it?”

“I don’t, no. I didn’t want him anywhere near this place, and especially not those newsmen out front. Now it’s too late, I guess.”

Sam turned his back against the fuselage. Irene stared at his cheekbone, his closed eye, his tense jaw, his matted hair, and asked if he had slept here in the hangar last night. Without moving, he said he had. Nerves, he said. Me too, she told him. So he cracked open one eye and lifted up one corner of his mouth and asked why she hadn’t joined him?

Irene could have answered this question all kinds of ways. Plenty of people already thought that she and Sam were having a love affair, after all. The newspapers hinted it so brazenly that the history books, written in the years to come, would take some form of romantic entanglement between Irene Foster and Sam Mallory as fact. Could you blame them? Put two attractive, red-blooded people, man and woman, adventurers both, together inside a closed cockpit, and naturally some form of chemistry was bound to brew between them. Stood to reason! Anyway, you could just tell, when they were together. That banter, for one thing. The way they looked at each other. And that time she picked a piece of lint from his sleeve? That was the kicker. Everyone in the press room agreed this was something a woman would only do to a man with whom she was intimate.