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stilled if the hydraulics were gone.
    They swooped up, just as out of control as when they fell, but at least it was away from the deadly ground.
    “That was bad,” Jeff hissed.
    We can’t land, Max thought. The captain can’t land it with no way to steer. He could imagine the frantic upset in the cockpit, the fury the pilot must feel at instruments that refused to yield to his skill.
    Max looked toward the windows across the aisle. Two rows ahead Mary knelt at the feet of a male teenager, trying to pull off his pink boots. His leather jacket was trimmed with chains and buckles. They trembled with each attempt at freeing his foot from the boot. Above Mary’s head Max saw that the effect of the downward and upward swoops had left the DC-10 lower, perhaps no higher than a few thousand feet. He could see a chain of buildings and silos off to the right, maybe the outskirts of a city.
    But the captain can’t get us down smoothly, Max reasoned. What could he do? Wait until they ran out of fuel? Unable to steer, the pilot would have to chance the first cleared space. He might have to attempt a landing any second, without warning. Max glanced out the windows again. He saw a mall with a Sears pass them in the distance. The store was several floors high and they were way above it. No, they weren’t low enough for a sudden landing.
    “I should have let you buy us the flight insurance,” Jeff said.
    “What are you talking about?” They didn’t look at each other while speaking. They kept their heads facing forward, braced for the worst. The sun slanted across Max’s jaw and neck, heating him.
    “When you found out this was a DC-10 you wanted to buy some.”
    “I wanted to take another flight!” Max sighed, exasperated not by Jeff’s manipulative alteration of the facts (that was typical) but because he couldn’t hold himself back from being drawn into an argument. I’m about to die and I still can’t ignore him, he thought bitterly.
    “Oh? Yeah…but you also wanted to get some insurance, right?”
    “Are you actually worried—”
    The plane flopped in the air again, dropping into the hollow of the wave and riding up its back, an awkward surfer. They were silent until it was level. Mary had gotten one of the teenager’s boots off and was at work on the other as they took the wave. She ended up with her head between his knees. When she rose from this position she had a pained expression on her face. Max assumed she had been inadvertently kicked in the stomach by the pink boot. She got to her feet and moved away without the second boot. The teenager hurried to work on removing it himself.
    Jeff banged Max with his elbow: “What were you going to ask?”
    “What do you care about the insurance?”
    “We have wives and children, remember? When it seemed like we were going to crash that’s all I could think about. I mean, if we die, there’s no business. How are they going to make it?”
    Max relished this moment. He moved his head to see the effect: “Jeff, I got news for you. I overheard the co-pilot talking to the head flight attendant. We’re not going to make it.”
    The greyhound was stilled. Jeff’s mouth stayed open, his teeth exposed to the air, but the panting was arrested and his eyes no longer nervously scanned the periphery. “What’d they say?”
    “The rear engine blew up. There are no hydraulics. They can’t steer.”
    For a moment he had no reaction. Then Jeff nodded and his great eyes were dulled by a film of something, not tears, but a kind of liquid glass, a protection against pain. “What about manually? Can’t they—?”
    “Not in something this big.”
    Jeff accepted it, nodding again. His attitude was much braver than Max had expected. No whining, just curiosity. Max felt ashamed of himself for his desire to torment Jeff and now wanted to comfort him. “You know, there’ll be plenty of money for Nan and Debby and the kids. The average settlement on a plane crash is three