“When will you be back?”

He kissed her. “I’ll call you,” he said. “Promise.”

But he hadn’t called. Everyone had been polite and pleasant, but they had kept him away from telephones. First at Hickam Field in Honolulu, then at the Naval Air Station in Guam, where he had arrived at two in the morning, and had spent half an hour in a room that smelled of aviation gasoline, staring dumbly at an issue of the American Journal of Psychology which he had brought with him, before flying on. He arrived at Pago Pago just as dawn was breaking. Norman was hurried onto the big Sea Knight helicopter, which immediately lifted off the cold tarmac and headed west, over palm trees and rusty corrugated rooftops, into the Pacific.

He had been on this helicopter for two hours, sleeping part of the time. Ellen, and Tim and Amy and his mother’s birthday, now seemed very far away.

“Where exactly are we?”

“Between Samoa and Fiji in the South Pacific,” the pilot said.

“Can you show me on the chart?”

“I’m not supposed to do that, sir. Anyway, it wouldn’t show much. Right now you’re two hundred miles from anywhere, sir.”

Norman stared at the flat horizon, still blue and featureless. I can believe it, he thought. He yawned. “Don’t you get bored looking at that?”

“To tell you the truth, no, sir,” the pilot said. “I’m real happy to see it flat like this. At least we’ve got good weather. And it won’t hold. There’s a cyclone forming up in the Admiralties, should swing down this way in a few days.”

“What happens then?”

“Everybody clears the hell out. Weather can be tough in this part of the world, sir. I’m from Florida and I saw some hurricanes when I was a kid, but you’ve never seen anything like a Pacific cyclone, sir.”

Norman nodded. “How much longer until we get there?”

“Any minute now, sir.”

After two hours of monotony, the cluster of ships appeared unusually interesting.