Towing Jehovah

As soon as he was finished, Dolores Haycox jabbed her thick index finger toward Van Horne. “You told us it was asphalt,” she whined. “Asphalt, you said.”

“I lied,” the captain admitted.

From the middle of the crowd, the squat and wan chief engineer, Crock O’Co

The priest’s voice remained measured and calm. “You may be correct, Mr. O’Co

“A snare set by Satan,” Zook replied instantly. “He’s testing our faith.”

“A UFO made of flesh,” said Chief Steward Sam Follingsbee.

“The Loch Ness Monster,” said Karl Jaworski.

“One of them government biology experiments,” said Ralph Mungo, “gotten way outta hand.”

“I’ll bet it’s just rubber,” said James Echohawk.

“Yeah,” said Willie Pindar. “Rubber and fiberglass and such…”

“Okay, maybe a deity,” said Bud Ramsey, the chicken-necked, weasel-faced second assistant engineer, “but certainly not God Himself.”

Silence settled over the wardroom, heavy as a kedge anchor, thick as North Sea fog.

The sailors of the Valparaíso looked at each other, slowly, with pained eyes.

God’s dead body.

Oh, yes.

“But is He really gone?” asked Horrocks in a high, gelded voice. “Totally and completely gone?”

“The OMNIVAC predicted a few surviving neurons,” said Father Thomas, “but I believe it’s working with faulty data. Still, each of us has the right to entertain his own private hopes.”

“Why doesn’t the sky turn black?” demanded Jaworski. “Why doesn’t the sea dry up and the sun blink out? Why aren’t the mountains crumbling, forests toppling over, stars falling from heaven?”

“Evidently we’re living in a noncontingent, Newtonian sort of universe,” Father Thomas replied. “The clock continues ticking even after the Clockmaker departs.”

“Okay, okay, but what’s the reason for His death?” asked O’Co

“At the moment, the mystery of our Creator’s passing is as dense as the mystery of His advent. Gabriel urged me to keep thinking about the problem. He believed that, by journey’s end, the answer would become clear.”

What followed was a theological free-for-all, the only time, Neil surmised, that a supertanker’s entire crew had engaged in a marathon discussion of something other than professional sports. Di

“Guess what, sailors?” Van Horne jumped from the mahogany bar to the Oriental rug. “I’m canceling all duties for the next twenty-four hours. No chipping, no painting — and you won’t lose one red cent in pay.” Never before in nautical history, Neil speculated, had such an a

About a third of the deckies, Neil among them, sang out with a choked and hesitant “Aye.”

“Are we ready to lay our Creator in a faraway Arctic tomb?” asked Van Horne. “Let me hear you. Aye!”

This time over half the room joined in. “Aye!”

A high, watery howl arose, shooting from Zook’s mouth like vomitus. The Evangelical dropped to his knees, clasping his hands in fear and supplication, shivering violently. To Neil he looked like a man enduring the monstrously conscious moment that follows hara-kiri: a man beholding his own steaming bowels.

Father Thomas sprinted over, helped the distraught AB to his feet, and guided him out of the wardroom. The priest’s compassion impressed Neil, and yet he sensed that such gestures alone would not save the Valparaíso from the terrible freedom to which she was about to hitch herself. Inevitably the climax of The Ten Commandments flashed through his brain: Moses hurling the Tablets of the Law to the ground and thus depriving the Israelites of their moral compass, leaving them uncertain where God stood on adultery, theft, and murder.

“Ship’s company — dismissed!”

Then said Jesus unto His disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow me.”

Amen, thought Thomas Ockham as, wrapped in the tight rubbery privacy of his wetsuit, he made his way beneath the Gulf of Guinea. Except that the Cross in this instance was a huge kedge anchor, the Via Dolorosa an unmarked cha

The dozen divers who constituted Team A had distributed themselves evenly along the kedge: Marbles Rafferty at the crown, Charlie Horrocks on the left fluke, Thomas on the right, James Echohawk and Eddie Wheatstone handling the shank, the others holding up the stock, the ring, and the first five links of the chain. Sixty yards to the south, Joe Spicer’s Team B was presumably keeping pace, bearing their own kedge, but a curtain of bubbles and murk prevented Thomas from knowing for sure.

Arms raised, palms turned upward, the twelve men worked their flippers, carrying the anchor over their heads like Iroquois portaging a gargantuan war canoe. Within twenty minutes the divine pate, slightly balding, appeared. Thomas lifted his wrist, checked his depth gauge. Fifty-four feet, just right: their buoyancy compensators were inflated sufficiently to counterweight the anchor but were not so full as to float the divers above their target. Local inhabitants drifted by — a giant grouper, a pea-green sawfish, a school of croakers — either grieving in silence or keening below the threshold of Thomas’s hearing, for the only sounds he perceived were his own bubbly breaths and the occasional clang of an oxygen tank hitting the kedge.

Wriggling to the left, the divers swam past a great swaying carpet of hair and aligned themselves with His ear. At Rafferty’s signal, each man reached down and switched on the searchlight strapped to his utility belt. The beams played across the ear’s numerous folds and cra