Larsson stuck his head through into the pilot's area.
"Mind if I come up?"
The big man wormed his way forward and collapsed into the copilot's seat.
"Pretty country," he said, waving ahead and down.
Pretty but savage, Havel thought.
He liked that; one of the perks of this job was that he got to go out in it himself, hunting or fishing or just backpacking… and you could get some of the hairiest hang gliding on earth here.
"None prettier," the pilot replied aloud.
Poor bastard, Havel thought to himself. Good-looking wife, three healthy kids, big house in Portland, vineyard in the Eola Hills, ranch up in Montana-he knows he should be happy and can't quite figure out why he isn't anymore.
He concealed any offensive stranger's sympathy, and switched the other set of headphones to a commercial station.
"Damnedest thing!" the big man said after a while, his face animated again.
"Yes?" Havel said.
"Odd news from back East," Larsson said. "Some sort of electrical storm off Cape Cod-not just lightning, a great big dome of lights over Nantucket, half a dozen different colors. The weather people say they've never seen anything like it."
Mary Larsson brightened up; she was Massachusetts-born herself.
"That is strange," she said. "We used to summer on Nantucket when I was a girl-"
Mike Havel grinned to himself and filtered out her running reminiscences and Larsson's occasional attempts to get a bit in edgewise; instead he turned to the news channel himself. The story had gotten her out of her mood, which would make the trip a lot less tense. Behind her the three Larsson children were rolling their eyes but keeping silent, which was a relief.