Meanwhile, as the days slid into weeks, they worked on the Centauri. They both wanted the ship to be ready to fly as soon as help arrived; they desperately wanted to finish the journey in triumph. Sam had figured out that the engine itself was undamaged, that all the trouble came down to nothing more than a broken fuel line, so all he needed to do was to repair it. Except he had no extra hose, nothing to splice the old ends together again. Irene shaded her eyes and frowned at him.

“Don’t know why you’re bothering with that. They’ll have a fuel line for us.”

“Who’ll have a fuel line?”

“The navy. Once they find us. They’ll have a brand-new fuel line you can install in half an hour.”

“It’s something to do, isn’t it? So I don’t go nuts.” Sam jumped down from the wing. “What’s for dinner?”

“Cockles and mussels, alive alive oh.”

“Sweet Molly Malone,” he sang, thick Irish baritone, and snatched her hand to whirl her around. “As she pushed her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow—”

Irene broke away. “You’re in an awfully good mood, for a fellow keeping alive on shellfish and distilled seawater.”

“And peanut butter.”

“Peanut butter’s almost finished.”

He squinted at the sky. “I keep telling you we should shoot down a bird or two.”

“Like how? Make a slingshot? Anyway, we hardly have enough fuel to distill the water, let alone cook a full-sized booby.”

“We’ll find a way,” he said. “We could live here forever, I’ll bet.”

Certainly it was starting to seem like they’d lived on Howland forever. The dawn had marked their twentieth day since landing on the island, with no sign of any life upon the surrounding ocean except the occasional pod of bottlenose dolphins. A traitorous corner of Irene’s brain was starting to think the unthinkable, that nobody was searching for them, that Sam and Irene were presumed lost, or had simply been forgotten among a thousand more important world affairs.

This was not the case, of course. An exhaustive search was still under way, no hint of giving up, no sir! Hundreds of men combed the Pacific for some sign of the missing pilots, and thousands more wrote and reported and speculated on their whereabouts, and hundreds of millions more gobbled up every crumb of news cooked up by the preceding. The only trouble was, they continued to look in the wrong place. After turning over every stone and blade of grass on Baker Island to the south, the navy had begun trawling the waters to the east, under the assumption—so George Morrow announced to the waiting press—that Sam and Irene had run out of fuel on their way to Baker and made an emergency landing on the water. Mr. Morrow reminded reporters that Mr. Mallory had stayed alive for eleven days on his floating airplane last year, so he was experienced in the techniques for survival. He and the U.S. Navy continued to harbor every expectation for a happy outcome.

So the USS Farragut drew its solemn, methodical lines across the open ocean, while Sam and Irene fished for hermit crabs and gazed at the stars from their pile of coral sand some hundred miles to the northwest, and it seemed this state of affairs might continue indefinitely, or at least until some bright spark in the navy, or perhaps Mr. Morrow himself, should have the clever idea to expand the search to include the few additional islands in the larger vicinity.

As of the twenty-second of August, however, Sam and Irene had received no hint of this unprecedented search under way to the south of them, to say nothing of the ballyhoo gripping the globe. Their horizon remained empty. Their radio remained inoperable. So far as they could hear and see, they were the only two people on the face of the earth.

In the end, it wasn’t Mr. Morrow at all who got the clever idea to look for Sam and Irene on Howland Island. It was Hank Foster who checked out some maps from the library, some old navigational charts, and hovered over them with compass and ruler and magnifying glass. On that day, the twenty-second of August, he shot the usual breeze with the reporters gathered in the café at Rofrano’s Airfield, where he spent most of his waking hours nursing cups of coffee that might or might not have contained a little something extra. “Boys,” he said to them, “I’ll tell you what, I don’t know why they haven’t looked for my Irene on Howland Island.”

Within hours, most of America and a good part of the rest of the world had learned not only the name of Howland Island but its exact longitude and latitude, its proximity to the other features of the Pacific Ocean, its history, its geologic composition, its native flora and fauna, its boobies and terns, its guano pits and Polynesian rats, its poverty of fresh water, and its general capability for supporting human life for various lengths of time.

Within a day, the U.S. Navy had dispatched a ship north-northwest at full steam, along with a reporter and a photographer from United Press International, on the express orders of Mr. George Morrow.

As evening fell on Howland Island, the twenty-third of August (Howland squatting there on the other side of the International Date Line, remember), the USS Farragut plowed through the ocean a hundred and fifty miles away, and Sam and Irene lay side by side on the sand of the island’s windward side, listening to the surf—there seemed to be some weather out there on the wide blue sea, somewhere—and watching the stars. They returned to the question of whether they would ever be rescued, whether they would live out their lives on these thousand acres.

“God forbid,” Irene said. “Think about your daughter.”

“Except for Pixie, sure.”

“And flying. Sure would be nice to go up in the air again.”

“That too.”

This evening there had been none of the usual banter between them, keeping up spirits. Irene busied herself with the distilling apparatus. Sam cooked the crabs in their shells. They ate and drank almost without speaking, because food and water were now precious things, in short supply, and required some concentration. As the sky darkened, Irene had thought Sam looked like a shaman, poking his stick into the glowing ashes, not saying a word. Eventually he settled back in the sand. When the last ember died, Sandy stalked between them, washed herself thoroughly, and curled up next to Sam’s ribs.

Finally Irene spoke. “Did you see that pack of dolphins swimming to the north this afternoon?”

“Pod. Pod of dolphins. Yep, I saw them.” He laid down the stick and looked at her. “They’ll catch up with us soon. The navy, I mean, not the dolphins.”

“Oh, I know they will. It’s just funny they haven’t shown up yet, that’s all. It’s not like we’re hiding or anything.”

“Yeah, it’s funny, all right. Won’t be too much longer, though. We’ll be on our way, back to civilization.”

“A hot bath would be grand. Chicken dinner, mashed potatoes. About a pound of butter melting on top. Tall glass of cold lemonade, all you can drink.”

“All of that,” he said, “but I’m sure going to miss these stars. Won’t you?”

Irene looked up at the spangled sky. “Yes.”

“It gets you thinking, a universe like that. You start to figure how small you are. How short your time underneath the sky.”

“Sam—”

“Irene, I’m going to do it. I’m going to divorce her. Soon as we get back stateside. Before you ask, it’s got nothing to do with anything but me and her. I just can’t go on the way things are.”

“But how? Won’t she do the same thing she did before?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I figure I should clear some dough from this little adventure, once we get back. Write a book, make some speeches. I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

“What about your daughter?”

“She can’t keep me from Pixie, no matter how she tries,” he said, with determination. “I’ll hire the best lawyer around to see to that. If I have to, I’ll take Pixie myself. I don’t like to take a girl from her mother, but a mother like that . . . I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think a girl’s going to love her mother, whatever happens.”

He put his head in his hands. Irene reached out to cover his knee.

“Sam. You know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Anything you can do?” He lifted his head and looked at her. “You know I’m in love with you, don’t you? You know if I could wave a wand and it would be the three of us, you and me and Pixie—”

“No, don’t.”

“—I’d do whatever I could to wave that wand. Because that would be heaven for me. To have you both. I’d give up anything for that.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t give up flying.”

“If I had to, though?”

“I’d never ask you to,” Irene said, without thinking, and Sam turned and seized her hands.

“What are you saying?” he said. “What are you telling me, Irene?”

“Nothing! You’ve got a wife, Sam.”