Her Last Flight(56)
Sam made a fed-up noise and dropped his arm into the water. When it came out, a red crab dangled from his fingers. “Dinner,” he said.
He dropped the crab in the can, and the pair of hermits scuttled over and under each other. Sam peered in, expression of wonder.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been crabbing,” said Irene.
“I grew up in Kansas, for God’s sake.”
“Still. You’ve lived in California for years.”
“Never went crabbing, though. You have to start young with these things. Your dad has to teach you.”
“Well, now I’m teaching you,” said Irene.
Sam looked up from the water can. The sun was heading down. Sam’s face, already deeply tanned, had turned to gold in the horizontal light. He was grinning. He grinned all the time now, like they were on some kind of exotic vacation instead of marooned together on a barren island, supplies running low. Irene smiled back, because you couldn’t help smiling back at a grin like that, Sam Mallory’s grin.
“You’re teaching me a lot of things, I guess,” he said.
That night they cooked the crabs in the small pit they’d excavated from an old guano mine, a scar left in the ground by the American Guano Company some fifty years before. Inside this pit, they made the tiny, efficient fires that distilled seawater into something potable, and now they boiled the crabs in the seawater—the fresh water was far too precious—and it turned out all right. For fuel they dried handfuls of tough sea grass and bound it into sticks. Irene could build a decent fire, too, but Sam seemed to have some elemental connection with the whole business, from first spark to dying flame to ember.
After dinner, they lay in the sand and stared at the stars, as they did most nights. There wasn’t anything else to do when the sun went down, nothing to see by, so they talked and watched the night sky. Sam was intimate with all the constellations, but Irene hadn’t paid much attention to the stars at all until she started learning the principles of celestial navigation.
“The same stars that guided Magellan,” Sam pointed out.
“We’re just a star ourselves, after all. Who knows, maybe we’re guiding some other traveler on some other world.”
“That’s blasphemy, Foster.”
“God’s infinite, after all. Why should He content Himself with one little earth?”
Sam didn’t reply. Irene listened to the rumble of Sandy’s purring from the patch of sand next to Sam’s ribs. After a while, she turned her head. The moon was a sliver of a thing now, setting already, but she could pick out just enough of Sam’s face to see that he was asleep.
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.