Barclay strode to the hearth, warming his hands over the roiling flames. “You’ve probably never heard of Pembroke and Flume’s World War Two Reenactment Society, but it’s pretty much what the name implies — a couple of ambitious young impresarios who buy up mothballed B-17s and battleships and such. They hire hungry actors, unemployed merchant sailors, and discharged Navy fliers, then travel around simulating the major encounters between the Axis and the Allies.”
“Last summer, Pembroke and Flume put on their version of Rommel’s Africa campaign, substituting the Arizona desert for Tunisia,” said Winston, joining Barclay by the fire. “The winter before, they did the Ardennes counteroffensive in the Catskills. This year, as it happens, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Midway, so they’ve got a Hollywood crew working up on Martha’s Vineyard, reconstructing the entire base out of Styro-foam and plywood. On August first, dozens of classic Japanese warplanes will take off from three-quarter-scale fiberglass facsimiles of the carriers Akagi, Soryu, Hiryu, and Kaga, then bomb the base to smithereens. The next day, all four Jap flattops will be sunk by a squadron of dive bombers from the vintage American carrier Enterprise — the pride of Pembroke and Flume’s collection.”
“Which is actually something of a cheat,” said Barclay. “The Yorktown and the Hornet also sent planes, but Pembroke and Flume are operating on a budget. On the other hand, they do use live bombs. The audience gets its money’s worth.”
“Bread and circuses,” said Winston, sneering. “Only in late-capitalist America, eh?”
“The relevant fact is this: once they’re done with Midway, Pembroke and Flume have no immediate prospects,” said Barclay. “They’ll be eager to let us hire ’em.”
“Hire ’em to do what?” asked Meredith.
“Restage the battle all over again — with fresh ammunition. Between their dive bombers and their torpedo planes, we’re pretty sure they can deliver enough TNT to scuttle Van Horne’s cargo.”
A quick, delicious thrill shot through Oliver as, rising from his meridienne daybed, he marched across the Aubusson carpet to the bust of Darwin. He liked this Midway business. He liked it very much. “What’ll they charge us?”
“They quoted a few rough figures at lunch,” said Winston, scanning a ragged 3X5 card. “Salaries, food, gasoline, bombs, lawyers, insurance riders…”
“And the bottom line?”
“Gimme a minute.” Winston’s index finger danced along the keyboard of his pocket calculator. “Sixteen million, two hundred and twenty thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars.”
“Think we can get ’em down to fifteen?” asked Oliver, sliding his thumb across the marble furrows of Darwin’s frown. Not that it mattered. If his sister could squander her trust fund collecting Abraham Lincoln memorabilia and his brother could piss away his making cornball biographical movies about major-league baseball stars, Oliver was not about to balk at financing so worthy a project as this.
“Damn good chance of it,” Winston replied. “I mean, these clowns really need us. They practically lost their shirts on Pearl Harbor.”
July 28.
Midnight. Latitude: 30°6'N. Longitude: 22°12'W. Course: 015. Speed: 6 knots. Wind: 4 on the Beaufort. Heading north across the Cape Verde Abyssal Plain, the Canaries to starboard, the Azores dead ahead, Ursa Minor directly above.
This afternoon, in preparation for the blood transfer, we tried piercing His right carotid artery with a series of interconnected chicksans — “the world’s biggest hypodermic needle,” as Crock O’Connor put it. A disaster. Ten feet below the epidermis, He becomes hard as iron. Easier to rupture a football with a banana.
Assuming there’s no mutiny in the meantime, we’ll try again tomorrow.
You think I’m kidding about a mutiny, Popeye? I’m not.
Something strange is happening aboard the Carpco Valparaíso. Every time Bud Ramsey organizes a poker game, one of the players cheats and the whole affair turns into a bloody brawl. Graffiti’s been appearing on the bulkheads faster than I can order it sandblasted away: JESUS IS COMING IN HIS PANTS, and worse.
(I’m not a religious man, but I won’t have that kind of crap on my ship.) The deckies are constantly smoking near the cargo bays, thus breaking the first rule of oil-tanker safety.
Marbles Rafferty informs me that not an hour goes by without somebody pounding on his door to report a theft. Wallets, cameras, radios, knives.
I told our bos’n, Eddie Wheatstone, he’d either learn to hold his liquor or I’d clap him in irons. So this morning, what does the idiot do? Gets roaring drunk and smashes up the rec-room pinball machine, thereby obliging me to jam his ass in the brig.
Able Seaman Karl Jaworski insisted he gave Isabel Bostwick “nothing but a friendly good-night kiss.” Then I talked to the woman, a wiper, and she showed me her cuts and bruises, and after that two others came forward, An-mei Jong and Juanita Torres, with similar marks and similar complaints about Jaworski. I stuck him in the cell next to Wheatstone.
Until 48 hours ago, nobody had ever died on a vessel under my command.
Leo Zook. An AB. Poor bastard caught a lethal dose of hydrocarbon gas while cleaning out number 2 center tank. Now here’s the really troubling part. The hose of his Dragen rig was cut to pieces, and when Rafferty arrived on the scene, Zook’s mucking partner — Neil Weisinger, that nervy kid who manned the helm during Beatrice — was crouching beside the body holding a Swiss Army knife.
Whenever I stand outside Weisinger’s cell and ask him to tell what happened, he just laughs.
“The corpse is taking hold,” is how Ockham explains our situation. “Not the corpse per se, the idea of the corpse — that’s our great enemy, that’s the source of this disorder. In the old days,” says the padre, “whether you were a believer, a nonbeliever, or a confused agnostic, at some level, conscious or unconscious, you felt God was watching you, and the intuition kept you in check. Now a whole new era is upon us.”
“New era?” I say.
“Anno Postdomini One,” he says.
The Idea of the Corpse. Anno Postdomini One. Sometimes I think Ockham’s losing it, sometimes I think he’s dead right. I hate locking up my own crew, especially with His carotid artery still unbreached and the sharks running so thick, but what other choice do I have? I fear that we’re a plague ship, Popeye. Our cargo’s gotten inside us, sporing and spawning, and I’m no longer certain who’s towing whom.
A profound sense of regret fell upon Thomas Ockham as, dressed in his Fermilab sweatshirt and Levi Strauss jeans, he descended the narrow ladder to the Valparaíso’s makeshift brig. This, he decided, is how he should have spent his life — collar off, moving among the rejected and the jailed, siding with the world’s outcasts. Jesus hadn’t wasted His time worrying about superstrings or some eternally elusive TOE. The Master had gone where needed.
Lower than the pump room, lower even than the engine flat, the cells were strung along an obscure starboard passageway crowded with shielded cables and perspiring pipes. Thomas advanced at a crouch. The three prisoners were invisible, locked behind riveted steel doors improvised from boiler plates. Slowly, haltingly, the priest moved down the row, past the vandal Wheatstone and the lecher Jaworski, pausing before the case he found most disturbing, Able Seaman Neil Weisinger.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Thomas had contacted Rome. “In your opinion, does our current ethical disarray trace to some palpable force generated by the process of divine decay,” ran his fax’s final sentence, “or to some subjective psychological effect spawned by theothanatopsis, that is, to the Idea of the Corpse?”