3 pounds Cheerios

2 pounds Sun Maid raisins

3 12-oz. tubes Colgate toothpaste

2 loaves Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread

1 36-oz. can Libby’s string beans

1 48-oz. jar Hellman’s mayonnaise

1 12-oz. jar glory grease

4 12-oz. bottles Vick’s cough syrup

1 pound popcorn (gleaned from the floor of our movie theater)

2 1-gallon cans Campbell’s tomato juice

6 carrots

1 bunch broccoli

6 Oscar Mayer hot dogs (we’d better save most of these for bait)

607 communion wafers

311 acorn barnacles scraped from our rudder and hull (lucky thing we harvested these before the mutineers arrived)

76 goose barnacles (ditto)

1 banana

1 slice Kraft American cheese (we’ll set this aside for an emergency)

Sam’s worked out our rations for the coming week. Curious to know the menu aboard the luxury liner Valparaíso? Breakfast: 10 Cheerios, 4 ounces tomato juice. Lunch: 7 string beans, 2 communion wafers. Dinner: 2 acorn barnacles, 1 ounce bread, 1 carrot cube, 8 raisins. The captain, on occasion, will get a belt of mescal.

A force-12 gale swept across Van Horne Island this morning, driving squalls of rain before it. Did I imagine the accumulation might be enough to lift us free? Of course I did. Did I picture the winds blowing the fog away? I’m only human, Popeye.

The mutineers have decided to protect themselves from future storms. Their homes are grotesque, twisted shanties cobbled together from Toyota doors and Volvo hoods, bulging out of the sand like steel igloos.

“Please feed us,” gasps their emissary of the moment, a demac named Barnes, dressed only in hot pink bathing trunks. Evidently he’d been a real porker before the famine. His vacated skin hangs from his torso like blobs of wax dripping down the shaft of a candle.

“We have nothing to spare,” I call to him.

“I had a life,” moans the demac. “Done things. Slung hash, been to Borneo, fathered four boys, organized church picnics. I had a life, Captain Van Horne.”

Tomorrow, as it happens, is the OMNIVAC’s deadline for hauling God across the Arctic Circle. I can see His brain disintegrating, Popeye, each neuron entering oblivion with a sudden, brilliant burst, like five billion flashbulbs firing at some apocalyptic press conference.

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.