James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

Declining the bait, the navigator turned back to Thomas. “Celebrating Mass today?”

“Fifteen hundred hours.”

“I’ll be there.”

Good, the priest thought — you, Follingsbee, Sister Miriam, Karl Jaworski, and nobody else. The sparsest parish this side of the prime meridian.

As Thomas started toward the radio shack, wondering which profited the world more — the rhapsodic atheism of a Hawking or the unshakable faith of a Zook — he nearly collided with Lianne Bliss. Eyes darting, she dashed up to the navigator, swiveling him like a barber aiming a customer at a mirror.

“Joe, call the boss!”

“Why?”

“Call him! SOS!”

Six minutes later Van Horne was on the bridge, hearing how a Hurricane Beatrice survivor named Cassie Fowler had evidently landed a rubber dinghy on Saint Paul’s Rocks.

“Could be a trap,” said the captain to Bliss. Fresh water dripped from his hair and beard, residue of an interrupted shower. “You didn’t break radio silence, did you?”

“No. Not that I didn’t want to. What do you mean, a trap?”

Saying nothing, Van Horne marched to the twelve-mile radar and stared intently at the target: a flock of migrating boobies, Thomas suspected. “Get on the horn, Sparks,” ordered the captain. “Tell the world we’re the Arco Fairbanks, due south of the Canaries. Whoever reports in, give ’em Fowler’s coordinates.”

“Is it necessary to lie?” asked Thomas.

“Every order I give is necessary. Otherwise I wouldn’t give it.”

“May I call the woman?” asked Bliss, starting back into the shack.

Van Horne ran his index finger around the radar screen, encircling the birds. “Tell her help is on the way. Period.”

At sundown Bliss returned to the bridge and offered her report. The Valparaíso was evidently the only ship within three hundred miles of Saint Paul’s Rocks. She’d contacted a dozen ports from Trinidad to Rio, and among those few Coast Guard officers and International Red Cross workers who understood her frantic mix of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, not one commanded a plane or chopper with enough fuel capacity to get halfway across the Atlantic and back.

“What did Fowler say when you called her?” asked Thomas.

“She wanted to know if I was an angel.”

“What did you tell her?”

Bliss shot an angry scowl toward Van Horne. “I told her I wasn’t authorized to answer.”

Setting A Brief History of Time atop the Marisat terminal, Spicer strode to the helm and snapped off the autopilot. “Course two-seven-three, right?”

“No,” said Van Horne. “We’re holding.”

“Holding?” said Zook, grabbing the wheel.

“You’re joking,” said Spicer.

“I can’t throw twenty-four hours away, Joe. That’s everything we gained from Beatrice. Put us back on iron mike.”

Thomas bit down, his molars clamping the soft flesh of his inner cheeks. Never before had he faced such a dilemma. Did the Christian course lie west, along the equator, or southeast, toward God? How many divine brain cells equaled a single human castaway? A million? A thousand? Ten? Two? His skepticism regarding the OMNIVAC’s prediction did little to relieve his anxiety. Even one salvaged neuron might eventually prove so scientifically and spiritually valuable it would start to seem worth a dozen castaways — two dozen castaways — three dozen — four — the lives of all the castaways since Jonah.

Except that Jonah had been delivered, hadn’t he?

The whale had vomited him out.

“Captain, you must bring us about,” said Thomas.

Snatching up the bridge binoculars, Van Horne issued an angry snort. “What?”

“I’m telling you to bring us about. Turn the Val around and point her toward Saint Paul’s Rocks.”

“You seem to have forgotten who’s commanding this operation.”

“And you seem to have forgotten who’s paying for it. Don’t imagine you can’t be replaced, sir. If the cardinals hear you neglected an obvious Christian duty, they won’t hesitate to airlift in a new skipper.”

“I think we should talk in my cabin.”

“I think we should bring the ship about.”

Van Horne raised the binoculars and, inverting them, looked at Thomas through the wrong ends, as if by diminishing the priest’s size he could also diminish his authority.

“Joe.”

“Sir?”

“I want you to plot us a new course.”

“Destination?”

Mouth hardening, eyes narrowing, Van Horne slid the binoculars into their canvas bin. “That guano farm in the middle of the Atlantic.”

“Good,” said Thomas. “Very good,” he added, wondering how, exactly, he would justify this detour to Di Luca, Orselli, and Pope Innocent XIV. “Believe me, Anthony, acts of compassion are the only epitaph He wants.”

WHEN CASSIE FOWLER awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?

It was, of course, a pious place. A small ceramic Christ with blue eyes and cherry red lips hung bleeding on the far wall. A gaunt, rawboned priest hovered by her pillow. At the foot of her bed a large man loomed, his gray beard and broken nose evoking every Old Testament prophet she’d ever taught herself to mistrust.

“You’re looking much better.” The priest rested his palm against her blistered cheek. “I’m afraid there’s no physician on board, but our chief mate believes you’re suffering from nothing worse than exhaustion combined with dehydration and a bad sunburn. We’ve been buttering you with Noxzema.”

Gradually, like cotton candy dissolving in a child’s mouth, the fog evaporated from Cassie’s mind. On board, he’d said. Chief mate, he’d said.

“I’m on a ship?”

The priest gestured toward the prophet. “The SS Valparaíso, under the command of Captain Anthony Van Horne. Call me Father Thomas.”

Memories came. Maritime Adventures… Beagle II … Hurricane Beatrice… Saint Paul’s Rocks. “The famous Valparaíso? The oil-spill Valparaíso?”

“The Carpco Valparaíso,” said the captain frostily.

As Cassie sat up, the medicinal stench of camphor filled her nostrils. Pain shot through her shoulders and thighs: the terrible bite of the equatorial sun, her red skin screaming beneath its coating of Noxzema. Good God, she was alive, a winner, a golden girl, a beater of the odds. “How come I’m not thirsty?”

“When you weren’t babbling your brains out,” said the priest, “you consumed nearly a gallon of fresh water.”

The captain stepped into the light, holding out a tangerine. He was better looking than she’d initially supposed, with a Byronesque forehead and the sort of sorrowful, vulnerable virility commonly found in male soap-opera stars on their way down.

“Hungry?”

“Famished.” Receiving the tangerine, Cassie worked her thumb into its north pole, then began peeling it. “Did I really babble?”

“Quite a bit,” said Van Horne.

“About what?”

“Norway rats. Your father died of emphysema. In your youth you wrote plays. Oliver — your boyfriend, we presume — fancies himself a painter.”

Cassie grunted, half from astonishment, half from annoyance. “Fancies himself a painter,” she corroborated.

“You’re not sure you want to marry him.”

“Well, who’s ever sure?”