She came to a violent, skidding stop with a smashing of brakes, two feet away from her plane. She sprinted out of the car, untied the Rider, kicked the chocks out from under its wheels, jumped into the cockpit, punched the starter button, started the plane, and left the ground behind within seconds. For the first and last time in her life she neither checked out her ship before she got into it, nor went through the necessary run-up procedure to test the motor before takeoff.She had found Mac’s letter less than a half hour earlier, and she had known immediately that if she didn’t get into the sky she couldn’t live through the pain. She had no way to handle it. She had no capacity to exist with this all-obliterating plunge into intolerable suffering. She had to flee from it or go mad. She put the nose of the ship up as high as it would go and climbed at the top possible speed, up and up into the gloomy, overcast sky, her stall signal shrieking again and again, so that she was kept busy correcting the attitude of the ship to keep from falling into a nosedive.
