"I'm saving my own butt, too."

"This thing makes me nervous. It's far from relaxing out here, wondering what's going to break next."

"I know," she said. "I don't know if two engines provide redundancy or twice the trouble. For now, they're running fine and diesels are supposed to be fairly reliable. "That doesn't help us too much. Either they break or they don't."

When she looked out at the horizon, she saw the same thing I saw. "It's insane", she said, "how an internal combustion engine works and how many of them there are. That was one really bad idea that ruined the world. Yet, here we sit atop two of them pushing us through the ocean."

"I've done a calculation like this in my head when sitting up there flying. We're running these engines at about 1900 RPM. There's an explosion every two RPMs. Half of 1900 is 950, but there are six cylinders, so to make this easy, say 1000 times six, 6,000 per minute but there are two engines, so 12,000 explosions per minute or 200 explosions every second, what, ten or twelve feet below our butts. Or 720,000 explosions an hour."

We gazed ahead at the horizon for about 6,000 explosions. "So, you're right," I said. "That's insane."

"And that doesn't consider all the electrical crap on this heap," she added.

She leaned into my shoulder with her curly, fresh smelling, burgundy hair. "Hey," I said. "Did you shower today?"