You’re not fighting the airplane, she said, you’re fighting the computer, and the computer is fighting you, and as long as the two of you argue it is going to shake this aircraft apart between you.

How do you know that, he said.

Because I have felt a flight control fight a man before, she said, and did not say the rest of it, did not say and I watched where that fight ended.

He looked at her for the length of a held breath, a captain deciding in the middle of an emergency whether to trust a stranger in a sweater, which is one of the hardest things a person in command is ever asked to do.

Then he made the decision, and reached up, and did the one careful thing that took the two quarreling systems out of each other’s grip.