“Was it your fault?”

“I left the bridge.”

Gritting her teeth, Cassie placed both her hands against A Brief History of Time and pushed. “We ever gonna find food out there?”

“Sure we are, Doc. I guarantee it. You okay?”

“Woozy. Abdominal pains. I don’t suppose you have any more cheese?”

“Sorry.”

She stretched out on the rug. Her brain had become a sponge, a Polymastia mamillaris dripping with Monte Alban. A mescal haze lay between her psyche and the world, hanging in space like a theatrical scrim, backlit, imprinted with twinkling stars. A scarlet macaw flew across the constellations — the very bird she’d promised to buy Anthony once they were home — and suddenly it was molting, feather by feather, until only the bare, breathing flesh remained, knobby, soft, and edible.

The minutes locked by. Cassie nodded off, roused herself, nodded off…

“Am I dying?” she asked.

Anthony now sat beside her, his back against the desk, cradling her in his bare, sweaty arms. His tattooed mermaid looked anorectic. Slowly he extended his palm, its lifeline bisected by three objects resembling thick, stubby pretzel sticks.

“You won’t die,” he said. “I won’t let anybody die.”

“Pretzels?”

“Pickled mescal worms. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar.”

“W-worms?”

“All meat,” he insisted, languorously lifting Caspar — or maybe it was Melchior, or possibly Balthazar — to her mouth. The creature was flaxen and segmented: not a true worm, she realized, but the larva of some Mexican moth or other. “Fresh from Oaxaca,” he said.

“Yes. Yes. Good.”

Gently, Anthony inserted Caspar. She sucked, the oldest of all survival reflexes, wetting the captain’s fingers, saturating his larva. Satisfaction beamed from his face, a fulfillment akin to what a mother experiences while nursing — not bad, she decided, for a man who’d panicked at his girlfriend’s pregnancy. She worked her jaw. Caspar disintegrated. He had a crude, spiky, medicinal flavor, a blend of raw mescal and Lepidoptera innards.

“Tell me what you told me before,” said Cassie. “About my being — how did you put it? — ‘a wonderfully attractive…’ ”

He fed her Melchior. “An incredibly attractive…”

“Yeah.” She devoured the larva. “That.”

Now came Balthazar. “I think you’re an incredibly attractive and altogether wonderful lady,” Anthony informed her for the second time that day.

As Cassie chewed, a mild sense of well-being took hold of her, transient but real. The wheat of General Mills, the cheese of Kraft, the worms of Oaxaca. She licked her lips and drifted toward sleep. Faith did not exist aboard the Carpco Valparaíso, nor hope either, but for the moment, at least, there was charity.

Whatever the cause of the Valparaíso’s failure to appear in Arctic waters, Oliver couldn’t help noticing that the World War Two Reenactment Society was profiting heavily from the delay. According to the contract the Enlightenment League had signed with Pembroke and Flume, each sailor, pilot, and gunner had to receive “full combat pay” for every day he served aboard the carrier. Not that the men didn’t earn it. Their commanders worked them around the clock, as if there were a war on. But Oliver still felt resentful. His money, he decided, was like Cassie’s large chest. All during high school, she’d never known for certain why she was constantly being asked out — or, rather, she had known, and she didn’t like it. A person should be valued for what he gave, Oliver believed, not for what he possessed.

The short, homely man portraying Lieutenant Commander Wade McClusky, the officer in charge of Air Group Six, required both his squadrons to fly two practice missions a day, dropping wooden bombs and Styrofoam torpedoes on the icebergs of Tromso Fjord. Meanwhile, the fellow playing the carrier’s skipper, a burly Irishman with a handlebar mustache, made his men keep the flight deck completely clear of ice and snow, even during those hours when the warplanes weren’t flying their milk runs. For Captain George Murray’s beleaguered sailors, combat duty aboard the Enterprise was like living in some suburbanite hell, a world where your driveway was six hundred feet long and needed shoveling even in the middle of summer.

An hour after the ninetieth straight PBY mission failed to find the Valparaíso, Pembroke and Flume summoned Oliver to their cabin. During World War Two, these spacious quarters had functioned as the wardroom, but the impresarios had converted it into a two-bedroom suite featuring a parlor furnished with an eye to late-Victorian ostentation.

“The crew’s getting itchy,” Albert Flume began, guiding Oliver toward a plush divan reminiscent of the couch in Delacroix’s Odalisque.

“Our pilots and gunners’re going nuts.” Sidney Pembroke unwrapped a facsimile of a Baby Ruth candy bar circa 1944. “If something doesn’t happen soon to improve morale, they’ll be asking to go home.”

“To wit, we’d like to start granting the boys shore leave.”

“At full combat pay.”

Oliver glowered and clenched his fists. “Shore leave? Shore leave to where? Oslo?”

Flume shook his head. “No way to get ’em there. The PBYs are tied up with reconnaissance, and we can’t hire bush pilots without attracting attention.”

“We hopped over to Ibsen City last night,” said Pembroke. “Dull place on the whole, but that Sundog Saloon has possibilities.”

Oliver scowled. “It’s nothing but an old airplane hangar.”

“We’ll give it to you straight,” said Pembroke, merrily devouring his candy bar. “Assuming you’re willing to bankroll us, Alby and I intend to turn the Sundog into a classic-type USO Club. You know, a home away from home, a place for the boys to get a free sandwich, dance with a pretty hostess, and hear Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’.”

“If it’s entertainment your people want,” said Oliver, “Barclay does a damn good magic act. Last year he was on the Tonight show, debunking faith healers.”

“Debunking faith?” Flume opened the refrigerator, removed a Rheingold, and popped the cap. “What is he, an atheist?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“We don’t mean to disparage your friend’s abilities,” said Pembroke, “but we’re envisioning something more along the lines of Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, the Andrews Sisters, Bing Crosby…”

“Aren’t those people dead?”

“Yeah, but it’s not that hard to come up with impersonators.”

“We’ll also be importing a string of attractive young women to work the room,” said Flume. “You know, nice girl-next-door types handing out cigarettes, offering to dance, and maybe allowing a stolen kiss or two.”

“No bimbos, of course,” said Pembroke. “Wholesome, aspiring actresses who know there’s more to life than topless bars and wet T-shirt contests.”

“Right now it’s three A.M. in Manhattan,” said Flume, “but if we get on the phone ’round suppertime we’ll be able to reach the relevant talent agencies.”

“You actually think the average New York actor will drop whatever he’s doing and catch the first plane to Oslo?” said Oliver.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because for the average New York actor,” said Flume, swallowing Rheingold, “getting paid a scale wage to impersonate Bing Crosby on an obscure island in the Arctic Ocean is the closest he’s come to a job in years.”

August 27.

In my entry of July 14, I told you what I heard, saw, and felt when I first laid eyes on our cargo. For sheer exhilaration, Popeye, it was nothing compared to my second epiphany.

At 0900 I was standing outside the wheelhouse, binoculars raised, watching the mutineers lying about in the streets of their shantytown. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized what a difference our feeble rations make. We, at least, can move.