James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

“Twelve knots.”

“We aren’t required to do this,” Neil informed the bos’n. “I’ll bet you anything it’s against union rules. We simply aren’t required. Range?”

“Sixteen yards.”

Curious, he mused, how each predator had staked out its own culinary territory. From on high came the Cameroon vultures, swooping down like degenerate angels as they laid claim to the corneas and tear ducts. From below came the Liberian sea snakes, ruthlessly devouring the succulent meat of the buttocks. The surface belonged to the sharks — vicious makos, malicious blues, crazed hammerheads — nibbling away at the soft bearded cheeks and picking at the tender webbing between the fingers. And, indeed, the instant Neil drew a bead on the hammerhead, it turned abruptly and swam west, fully intending to bite the hand that made it.

He tracked the shark via the telescopic sight, aligning the crosshairs with the hammerhead’s cartilaginous hump as he looped his finger around the trigger. He squeezed. With a sudden throaty explosion the harpoon leapt from the muzzle. Rocketing across the sea, it struck the surprised animal in the brow and burrowed into its brain.

Neil took a large swallow of moist African air. Poor beast — it didn’t deserve this, it had committed no sin. Even as the shark spun sixty degrees and headed straight for the knee, the AB felt nothing toward it save pity.

“Throw the switch, buddy!”

“Roger, Eddie!”

“Throw it!”

Singing with pain, spouting blood, the shark hurled itself on the fleshy shore, raging so furiously that Neil half expected it to sprout legs and come crawling after him. He clasped the harpoon gun against his fishnet shirt, reached toward the transmitter on his utility belt, and threw the switch.

“Run!” cried Eddie. “Run, for Christ’s sake!”

Neil turned, sprinting across the squishy terrain. Seconds later he heard the warhead explode, the awful grunt of TNT crushing live tissue and vaporizing fresh blood. He looked back. The shock wave was wet and red, a bright sloshy blossom filling the sky with bulbous lumps of brain.

“You okay, buddy? You aren’t hurt, are you?”

As Neil mounted the kneecap, the debris came down, a glutinous rain of shark thoughts, all the hammerhead’s dead hopes and shattered dreams, spattering the AB’s jeans and shirt.

“I swear, I’m goin’ straight to Rafferty!” he wailed. “I’m gonna stick this harpoon gun right smack in his face and tell him I didn’t sign on for this shit!”

“Settle down, Neil.”

The hammerhead’s blood smelled like burning hair. “My grandfather never had to blow up sharks!”

“In thirty-five minutes we’re outta here.”

“If Rafferty won’t take me off this stupid duty, I’m gonna harpoon him! I’m not kiddin’! Bang, right between the eyes!”

“Think how good that shower’s gonna feel.”

And the truly strange thing, Neil realized, throbbing with freedom — the strange, astonishing, terrifying thing — was that he wasn’t kidding.

“There’s no more God, Eddie! Don’t you get it? No God, no rules, no eyes on us!”

“Think about Follingsbee’s Chicken McNuggets. I’ll even slip you one of my Budweisers.”

Neil propped his gun against the shaft of a particularly thick hair, leaned toward the barrel, and, wetting his sun-baked lips, kissed the hot, vibrant metal. “No eyes on us…”

It was appropriate, Oliver Shostak felt, that the Central Park West Enlightenment League followed only a loose approximation of Robert’s Rules of Order, for neither rules nor order had anything to do with the organization’s raison d’ кtre. People didn’t understand that. Say “rationalist” to the average New Age chuckle-head, and you conjured up unappetizing images: killjoys obsessed with rules, boors fixated on order, logic-mongers skating around on the surface of things, missing the cosmic essence. Phooey. A rationalist could experience awe as readily as a shaman. But it had to be quality awe, Oliver believed, awe without illusions — the sort of awe he’d felt upon intuiting the size of the universe, or sensing the unlikeliness of his birth, or reading the fax from the SS Carpco Valparaíso currently residing in his vest pocket.

“Let’s get started,” he said, signaling to the attractive young Juilliard student playing the harpsichord on the far side of the room. She lifted her hands from the keyboard; the music stopped in midmeasure, Mozart’s deliciously intricate Fantasia in D Minor. No gavel, of course. No table, no minutes, no agenda. The eighteen members sat in an informal circle, submerged in the splendor of soft recamier couches and lush velvet divans.

Oliver had appointed the room himself. He could afford it. He could afford anything. Thanks to the near-simultaneous ascents of feminism, fornication, and several major venereal diseases, the planet was using latex condoms in unprecedented quantities, and in the late eighties his father’s amazing invention, the Shostak Supersensitive, had emerged as the brand of choice. By the turn of the decade, astonishing quantities of cash had begun flowing into the family’s coffers, an ever-rising tide of profit. At times it seemed to Oliver that his father had somehow patented the sex act itself.

He sipped his brandy and said, “The chair recognizes Barclay.”

Deciphering Cassie’s fax had been easy. It was in Heresy, the numerical code they’d invented in tenth grade to obscure the records of the organization they’d founded, the Freethinkers Club. (Besides Cassie and Oliver, the club had boasted only two other members, the lonely, homely, and hugely unpopular Maldonado twins.) This is no joke. Come see for yourself. We are really towing…

As the League’s vice president rose, the entire membership drew to attention, not simply to hear Barclay’s report but to bathe in his celebrity. In recent years the United States of America had managed to accommodate a full-time debunker — a counterweight to its twenty thousand astrologers, five thousand past-life therapists, and scores of scoundrels routinely cranking out bestsellers about UFO encounters and the joy of runes — and that debunker was golden-haired Barclay Cabot. Barclay, handsome devil, had media presence. The camera liked him. He’d done all the major talk shows, demonstrating how charlatans appeared to bend spoons and read minds when in fact they were doing nothing of the kind.

He began by reviewing the crisis. Two weeks earlier, the Texas legislature had voted to purge all the state’s high schools of any curriculum materials that failed to accord so-called scientific creationism “equal time” with the theory of natural selection. Not that the Enlightenment League doubted the outcome of a showdown between the God hypothesis and Darwin. The fossils shouted evolution; the chromosomes screamed descent; the rocks declared their antiquity. What the League feared was that America’s textbook publishers would simply elect to duck the whole issue and, readopting their spineless expedient of the forties and fifties, omit any consideration of human origins whatsoever.

Meanwhile, every Sunday, creationism would continue to be taught unchallenged.

In conspiratorial tones, Barclay outlined his committee’s plan. Under cover of night, a small subset of the League, a kind of atheist commando unit, would crawl across the luxurious lawn of the First Baptist Church of Dallas — “the Pentagon of Christianity,” as Barclay put it — and jimmy open a basement window. They would sneak into the church. Infiltrate the nave. Secure the pews. And then, unholstering their Swingline staplers, they would take up each Bible in turn and, before replacing it, neatly affix a thirty-page precis of On the Origin of Species between the table of contents and Genesis.