“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.”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. In your shoes I’d have done the same thing.”

“There are no atheists in foxholes, people say, and it’s so true, it’s so fucking true.” Cassie swallowed, savoring the aftertaste of the Cheerios. “No… no, I’m being too hard on myself. That maxim, it’s not an argument against atheism — it’s an argument against foxholes.”

“Exactly.”

A cold gray tide washed through Cassie’s mind. “Lianne, there’s something you should know.”

“Yeah?”

“I think I’m about to faint.”

The radio officer rose from her chair. Her mouth moved, but Cassie heard no words.

“Help… ,” said Cassie.

The tide crested, crashing against her skull. She slipped down slowly, through the floor of the radio’shack… through the superstructure… the weather deck… hull… island… sea.

Into the green fathoms.

Into the thick silence.

“This is for you.”

A deep voice — deeper, even, than Lianne’s.

“This is for you,” said Anthony again, handing her a stale slice of American cheese, its corners curled, its center inhabited by a patch of green mold.

She blinked. “Was I … unconscious?”

“Yeah.”

“Long?”

“An hour.” The Exxon tiger grinned down from Anthony’s T-shirt. “Sam and I agreed that the first person who passed out would get the emergency ration. It’s not much, Doc, but it’s yours.”

Cassie folded the slice into quarters and, pushing the ragged stack into her mouth, gratefully wolfed it down. “Th-thanks…”

She rose from the bunk. Anthony’s cabin was twice as large as hers, but so cluttered it seemed cramped. Books and magazines were scattered everywhere, a Complete Pelican Shakespeare on the bureau, a stack of Mariners’ Weather Logs on the washbasin, a Carpco Manual and a Girls of Penthouse on the floor. A spiral notebook lay on his desk, its cover displaying an airbrushed portrait of Popeye the Sailor.

“You’ll have some, won’t you?” asked Anthony, flashing her a half-empty bottle of Monte Alban. MEZCAL CON GUSANO, the label said. Mescal with worm. Without waiting for a reply, he sloshed several ounces into two ceramic Arco mugs.

“It’s hell being a biologist. I know too much.” As the pains started up again, Cassie pressed her palm against the Brief History of Time belted to her stomach. “Our fats were the first to go, and now it’s the proteins. I can practically feel my muscles coming apart, cracking, splitting. The nitrogen floats free, spilling into our blood, our kidneys…”

The captain took a protracted sip of mescal. “That why my urine smells like ammonia?”

She nodded.

“My breath stinks too,” he said, handing her an Arco mug.

“Ketosis. The odor of sanctity, they used to call it, back when people fasted for God.”

“How soon before we… ?”

“It’s an individual sort of thing. Big fellas like Follingsbee, they’re likely to last another month. Rafferty and Lianne — four or five days, maybe.”

The captain drained his mescal. “This voyage started out so well. Hell, I even thought we’d save His brain. It’s hash by now, don’t you think?”

“Quite likely.”

Settling behind his desk, Anthony refilled his mug and retrieved a brass sextant from among the nautical charts and Styrofoam coffee cups. “Know something, Doc? I’m just tipsy enough to say I think you’re an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady.”

The remark aroused in Cassie a strange conjunction of delight and apprehension. A door to chaos had just been opened, and now she’d do best to fling it closed. “I’m flattered,” she said, taking a hot gulp of Monte Alban. “Let’s not forget I’m practically engaged.”

“I was practically engaged once.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Janet Yost, a bos’n with Chevron Shipping.” The captain sighted Cassie through his sextant; a lascivious grin twisted his lips, as if the instrument somehow rendered her blouse transparent. “We bunked together for nearly two years, running the glop down from Alaska. Once or twice we talked about a wedding. Far as I’m concerned, she was my fiancй e. Then she got pregnant.”

“By you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And… ?”

“And I freaked out. A baby’s no way to start a marriage.”

“Did you ask her to get an abortion?”

“Not in so many words, but she could tell that’s where I stood. I’m not fit for fatherhood, Cassie. Look at who I’ve got for a model. It’s like a surgeon learning his business from Jack the Ripper.”

“Maybe you could’ve… hunted around, right? Gotten some guidance.”

“I tried, Doc. Talked to sailors with kids, walked uptown to F.A.O. Schwarz and bought a Baby Feels-So-Real, you know, one of those authentic-type dolls, so I could take it home and hold it a lot — I felt pretty embarrassed buying the thing, I’ll tell you, like it was some sort of sexual aid. And, hey, let’s not forget my trips to Saint Vincent’s for purposes of studying the newborns and seeing what sort of creatures they were. You realize how easy it is to sneak into a maternity ward? Act like an uncle, that’s all. None of this shit worked. To this day, babies scare me.”

“I’m sure you could get over it. Alexander did.”

“Who?”

“A Norway rat. When I forced him to live with his own offspring, he started taking care of them. Sea horses make good fathers too. Also lumpfish. Did Janet get the abortion?”

“Wasn’t necessary. Mother Nature stepped in. Before I knew it, we’d lost the relationship too. An awful time, terrible fights. Once she threw a sextant at me — that’s how my nose got busted. After that we made a point of staying on separate ships. Maybe we passed in the night. Didn’t hear from her for three whole years, but then, when the Val hit Bolivar Reef, she wrote to me and said she knew it wasn’t my fault.”