Towing Jehovah

Lunch box in hand, Neil climbed the tree, progressing branch by branch, as if scaling a mainmast. As he settled into a high crook, both of the Valparaíso’s engines started up, their hisses and chugs echoing across Van Horne Island, and within minutes she was sailing out of the harbor. The tow chains tightened, their links grinding together like the wisdom teeth of some immense insomniac dragon. The ship kept moving, all ahead full. Panic seized the AB. It was not too late. He could still give himself a reprieve, charging down to the beach and screaming for the tanker to stop. If worse came to worst, he could even try swimming after her.

His stomach muscles spasmed. His digestive juices burbled. Drawing out his Ben-Gurion medal, he rubbed his thumb across the old man’s profile. There, that was better, yes, yes. Any day now, any hour now, the tree would grow warm — warmer — hot — begin smoking — catch fire.

And it would not be consumed.

Neil Weisinger opened his Bugs Bu

Part Three

EDEN

ON THE SECOND OF September, at 0945 hours, the Carpco Valparaíso steamed free of the fog. The vibrant, piercing clarity of the world — the sparkle of the North Atlantic, the azure glow of the sky, the brilliant white feathers of the passing petrels — made Thomas Ockham weep with joy. This was how the blind beggar must have felt when, told by Christ to visit the Pool of Siloam and wash the muddy spittle from his eyes, he suddenly found he could see.

At 1055 Lia

At first neither Thomas nor anyone else on board realized how radically the corpse had soured. Their i

Ironically, the softening of the flesh meant that Van Horne was finally able to get his chicksans into a carotid artery: a pathetic gesture at this point, but Thomas understood the captain’s need to make it. On September 5, at 1415, Charlie Horrocks and his pump-room gang began the great transfusion. Although they’d never sucked cargo on the run before, in less than six hours Horrocks’s men had managed to shoot eighty-five thousand gallons of salt water out of the ballast tanks and into the sea while simultaneously cha

And it worked. From the very first, the ship began ru

The officers kept their watches faithfully. The deckies chipped and painted conscientiously. The stewards collected fillets dutifully. But only when the sailors started responding to their obligations with their customary grumpiness, only when the Val’s companionways began ringing with profane complaints and hair-raising curses, did Thomas grow confident that normalcy had returned to the ship.

“It’s over,” he told Sister Miriam. “It’s finally over. Thank God for Immanuel Kant.”

“Thank God for God,” she replied tartly, biting into a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

As Labor Day dawned, cold and overcast, the priest saw that he could no longer deny, either to himself or to Rome, how woefully behind schedule Operation Jehovah had fallen. Indeed, their cargo was now so malodorous that he wondered, half seriously, if this sign of their misadventure could have spread eastward across the ocean, all the way to the gates of the Vatican. His fax was frank and detailed. They were two thousand miles from the Arctic Circle. The ship had gone aground on an uncharted Gibraltar Sea island (37 north, 16 west), trapping them on a mountain of rust for twenty-six days. During this interval, not only had the ethical relativism seeded by the Idea of the Corpse blossomed into total chaos, but putrefaction and neurological disorganization had doubtless befallen the body itself. Yes, the Kantian categorical imperative was now keeping everyone in line, and, yes, the captain’s transfusion scheme had boosted their speed significantly, but neither of these happy facts could begin to compensate for the hiatus on the island. Only when it came to the famine did Thomas censor himself, declining to specify the source of their salvation. Pope I

The synod took only one day to absorb, debate, and act upon the bad news. On September 8, at 1315, Di Luca’s reply poured forth.

Dear Professor Ockham:

What can we say? Van Horne has failed, you have failed, Operation Jehovah has failed. The Holy Father is devastated beyond words. According to the OMNIVAC-2000, not only is the divine mind now lost, the concomitant flesh has been corrupted too. By the time the freezing process begins, the degeneration will be so profound as to dishonor Him Whose remains we were elected to salvage. At this point, clearly, a different strategy is indicated.

We have decided to suffuse the Corpus Dei with a liquid preservative, a procedure the OMNIVAC believes will go smoothly, Van Horne having already siphoned off 18 percent of the blood.

Toward this end, Rome has chartered a second ULCC, the SS Carpco Maracaibo, filling her hold with formaldehyde in the port of Palermo and dispatching her west across the Mediterranean. The Maracaibo’s officers and crew have been advised they’re on a mission to commandeer a prop from a pla