During his first three days aboard the Enterprise, Oliver’s favorite amusement was to stand in the forward lookout post and sketch the PBYs as they left on their daily reconnaissance patrols. Scooting along on their flat bottoms, weaving amid the pack ice, the four flying boats would suddenly retract their stabilizer floats and begin their clumsy ascents, fighting their way skyward like a flock of arthritic herons rising from a marsh.
By the end of the week, the PBYs had flown seventy-three separate missions without spotting anything resembling a supertanker towing a golem.
“Think she got sidetracked by a hurricane?” asked Winston.
“How the hell should I know?” replied Oliver.
“If the body’s started to rot, it might be soaking up seawater,” said Barclay. “A few thousand extra tons could cut Van Horne’s speed in half.”
“Maybe the problem’s mechanical,” said Winston. “Merchant ships are built to fall apart. That’s how capitalism works.”
As far as Oliver was concerned, none of these theories could begin to account for the Valparaíso being so woefully behind schedule. On the morning of August 22, he went to the cabin of Ray Spruance’s portrayer and inquired whether the Enterprise had a fax machine.
“Enterprise, not ‘the’ Enterprise,” said the admiral, chewing on the stem of his briar pipe. “Sure we got one, a Mitsubishi-7000.”
“I want to send a message to our agent on the tanker.”
“Since when do we have an agent on the tanker?”
“A long story. She’s my girlfriend, Cassie Fowler. Something’s obviously gone wrong.”
“At this point, Mr. Shostak, any communication with Valparaíso would be a bad idea. Absolute radio silence figured crucially in the American victory at Midway.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Midway. I’m worried about my girlfriend.”
“If you don’t give a fuck about Midway, you don’t belong on this ship.”
“Jesus — do you people always have to live in the past?”
The admiral scowled, manifestly taken aback. He sucked on his pipe. “Yes, friend,” he said at last, “as a matter of fact we do always have to live in the past, and if you’d give it a minute’s thought, you’d want to live there too.” Eyes flashing, Spruance paced compulsively around his cabin, back and forth, like a caged wolf. “Do you realize there was a time when the United States of America actually made sense? A time when you could look at a Norman Rockwell painting of a GI peeling potatoes for Mom and get all choked up and nobody’d laugh at you? A time when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn like they’re supposed to be and there were no jigaboos shooting up our cities and every schoolday started with the Lord’s Prayer? It’s all gone, Shostak. People are scared of their own food, for Christ’s sake. In the forties nobody ate yogurt or Egg Beaters or goddamn turkey franks.”
“You know, Admiral, if you won’t let me contact Cassie Fowler, I might just go out and hire a different set of mercenaries.”
“Don’t diddle me. I like you, friend, but I won’t be diddled.”
“I’m serious, Spruance, or whatever the hell your name is,” snapped Oliver, pleased to be discovering unexpected reserves of impertinence within himself. “As long as I’m paying the piper, I’m also calling the tune.”
It took Oliver over an hour to compose a fax that met the admiral’s standards. The message had to convey curiosity about the Valparaíso’s position yet remain sufficiently ambiguous that if it fell into what Spruance insisted on calling “enemy hands,” and if that enemy succeeded in cracking the code (it was in Heresy), nobody would suspect the tanker’s cargo had been targeted. “You are my heart’s most valued occupant, dearest Cassandra,” Oliver wrote, “though in which chamber you currently reside I cannot say.”
At 1115 hours, the Enterprise’s radio officer, a scrawny Latino actor named Henry Ramirez, fed Oliver’s letter into the Mitsubishi-7000. At 1116, a message popped onto the concomitant computer screen.
TRANSMISSION TERMINATED — ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.
“Heavy weather?” asked Spruance’s portrayer. “There’s no storm activity anywhere in the North Atlantic today,” Ramirez replied.
An hour later, the radio officer tried again. TRANSMISSION TERMINATED — ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.
He made a third attempt an hour after that. TRANSMISSION TERMINATED — ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCE AT RECEPTION POINT.
But it wasn’t really “atmospheric disturbance,” Oliver decided; it was something far more sinister. It was the New Dark Ages, spilling across the globe, spreading their inky ignorance everywhere like oil gushing from the Valparaíso’s broken hull, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, a mere rich atheist could do about it.
Cassie seized the compass binnacle, hugging it with the desperation of a wino bag lady steadying herself on a lamppost. She could no longer imagine what a clear head was like, couldn’t remember a time when moving, breathing, or thinking had come easily. Clutching her inflamed belly, she stared at the twelve-mile radar. Fog, always fog, like the output of some demented cable station devoted to anomie and existential dread, the Malaise Channel.
And suddenly here was Father Thomas, holding out a cupped hand. A mound of Cheerios, doubtless from his own allotment, lay in his palm. His generosity did not surprise her. The day before, she’d seen him lean over the Val’s starboard rail and, in a benevolent and forbidden act, throw down a handful of goose barnacles for the poor moaning wretches in the shantytown.
“I don’t deserve them.”
“Eat,” ordered the priest.
“I’m not even supposed to be on this voyage.”
“Eat,” he said again.
Cassie ate. “You’re a good person, Father.”
Sweeping her bleary gaze past the twelve-mile radar, the fifty-mile radar, and the Marisat terminal, she focused on the beach. Marbles Rafferty and Lou Chickering were climbing out of the Juan Fernandez, having just returned from another manifestly disastrous sea hunt. They jumped into the breakers and, collecting their trolling gear, waded ashore.
“Not even an old inner tube,” sighed Sam Follingsbee, slumped over the control console. “Too bad — I got an incredible recipe for vulcanized rubber in cream sauce.”
“Shut up,” said Crock O’Connor.
“If only they’d found a boot or two. You should taste my cuir tartare.”
“I said shut up.”
Lifting the late Joe Spicer’s copy of A Brief History of Time from atop the Marisat, Cassie slipped it under the cowhide belt she’d borrowed from Lou Chickering. Miraculously, the book seemed to ease her stomach pains. She limped into the radio shack.
Lianne Bliss sat faithfully at her post, her sweaty fist clamped around the shortwave mike. “…the SS Carpco Valparaíso” she muttered, “thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north…”
“Any luck?”
The radio officer tore away her headset. Her cheeks were sunken, eyes bloodshot; she looked like an antique photograph of herself, a daguerreotype or mezzotint, gray, faded, and wrinkled. “Occasionally I hear something — bits of sports shows from the States, weather reports from Europe — but I’m not gettin’ through. Too bad the deckies aren’t here. Big news. The Yankees are in first place.” Lianne put her headset back on and leaned toward the mike. “Thirty-seven degrees, fifteen minutes, north. Sixteen degrees, forty-seven minutes, west.” Again she removed her headset. “The worst of it’s the moaning, don’t you think? Those poor bastards. At least we get our communion wafers.”
“And our barnacles.”
“The barnacles are hard for me. I eat ’em, but it’s hard.”
“I understand.” Cassie brushed the sea goddess on Lianne’s biceps. “The last time I was in a jam like this…”
“Saint Paul’s Rocks?”
“Right. I behaved shamefully, Lianne. I prayed for deliverance.”