Anthony drew a package from the footlocker. “This soup kitchen’s like any other, sailors. First the sermon, then the sandwich.” He cleared his throat. “ ‘When evening came, the disciples went to Him and said, “Send the people away, and they can go to the villages to buy themselves some food.’ ” He’d spent the noon-to-four watch paging through Ockham’s Jerusalem Bible, studying the great precedents: the manna from heaven, the water from the rock, the feeding of the five thousand. “ ‘Jesus replied, “Give them something to eat yourselves.” But they answered, “All we have is five loaves and two fish.” ’ ”

Tearing off his Panama hat, Ockham squeezed Anthony’s wrist. “Cut the crap, okay?”

So far Follingsbee had wrung four distinct variations. The steward’s own favorite was the basic hamburger, while Rafferty found the Filet-o-Fish unbeatable (seafood flavor derived from areola tissue) and Chickering preferred the Quarter Pounder with Cheese (curds cultivated from divine lymph). Nobody much liked the McNuggets.

“ ‘Breaking the loaves, He handed them to His disciples,’ ” Anthony persisted, “ ‘who gave them to the crowds.’ ” He hurled the sandwich over the side. “ ‘They all ate as much as they wanted…’ ”

The Filet-o-Fish arced toward the mutineers. Reaching up, Able Seaman Weisinger made the catch. Incredulous, he unwrapped the wax paper and stared at the gift. He rubbed the bun. He sniffed the meat. Tears of gratitude ran down his face in parallel tracks. Crumpling the paper into a ball, he tossed it aside, raised the sandwich to his mouth, and swept his lips along the breaded, juicy fibers.

“Eat,” Anthony commanded.

Placing one index finger under his nose, Weisinger hooked the other over his lower teeth and pried his jaw open. He inserted the Filet-o-Fish, bit off a large piece. He swallowed. Gulped. Shuddered. A retching noise issued from his throat, like a ship scraping bottom. Seconds later he vomited up the offering, marring his lap with a sticky mixture of amber fat and sea green bile.

“Chew it!” called Anthony. “You aren’t scarfing down peanuts in a fucking waterfront dive! Chew it!”

Weisinger broke off a modest morsel and tried again. His jaw moved slowly, deliberately. “It’s good!” rasped the AB. “It’s so good!”

“Of course it’s good!” shouted Anthony.

“Where’d you get it?” asked Ralph Mungo.

“All good things come from God!” cried Sister Miriam.

Anthony drew a Quarter Pounder with Cheese from the locker. “Who is your captain?” he screamed into the wind.

“You are!” cried Dolores Haycox.

“You are!” insisted Charlie Horrocks.

“You are!” chimed in Ralph Mungo, Bud Ramsey, James Echohawk, Stubby Barnes, Juanita Torres, Isabel Bostwick, An-mei Jong, and a dozen more.

Quarter Pounder in hand, Anthony thrust his arm over the rail. “Who is the bread of life?”

“You are!” cried a chorus of mutineers.

He waved the sandwich around. “Who can forgive your sins against this ship?”

“You can!”

Springing sideways, Sister Miriam grabbed the Quarter Pounder from Anthony and tossed it into the air. Like a tight end catching a forward pass, Haycox snagged the package, instantly ripping away the wax paper.

“You had no right to do that,” Anthony informed the nun. “You’re just a passenger, for Christ’s sake.”

“I’m just a passenger,” she agreed. “For Christ’s sake,” she repeated, curling her lower lip.

Ockham rummaged around in the locker, drawing out four hamburgers and four boxes of McNuggets. “You each get two!” he shouted, chucking the packages over the rail. “Eat slowly!”

“Very slowly,” said Miriam, throwing down six Filets-o-Fish.

The sky rained godsend. Half the packages were caught in midair, half hit the sands. Anthony was impressed not only by the orderliness with which the mutineers retrieved the fallen meat but by the fact that no sailor took more than his or her share.

“They fear me,” he observed.

“You proud of that?” asked Ockham.

“Yes. No. I want my ship back, Thomas.”

“How does it feel, being feared? Heady stuff?”

“Heady stuff.”

“That all?”

“All right, I’ll be frank — sure, I’m tempted to have my ass kissed. I’m tempted to become their god.” Anthony fixed on Ockham. “If you had my power,” said the captain, voice dripping with sarcasm, “no doubt you’d use it only for good.”

“If I had your power,” said the priest, closing the footlocker, “I’d try not to use it for anything at all.”

August 28.

I saved them, Popeye, and for the moment I am their god. It’s not really me they worship, of course — it’s the Idea of the Quarter Pounder. No matter. They still do whatever I say.

Their thirst is fearsome, but they don’t stop excavating. The sun shines without mercy, burning through the mist and frying their backs and shoulders, but they keep at it, pausing only long enough to wolf down sandwiches or apply protective coatings of glory grease to their skin.

“They’ve discovered the categorical imperative,” Ockham tells me.

“They’ve discovered the full belly,” I correct him.

I am their god, but Sister Miriam is their savior. Canteen in hand, she moves from digger to digger. Inevitably she evokes Debra Paget working the brick pits in The Ten Commandments, giving water to the Hebrew slaves.

Cassie may be a cynic and an egghead, but she’s certainly doing her part toward getting us out of here, dispensing water alongside Miriam and sometimes even digging herself. Furtively I watch. Until the day I die, I shall retain the image of a beauteous, raven-haired woman in cut-off jeans and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, shoveling out the Carpco Valparaíso.

When we first went on this diet, we all assumed it would change us in some way. Has it? Hard to say. I’ve seen nothing truly astonishing so far, no big jump in anybody’s reading speed or knot-tying skills. While our bowel movements have been remarkably pale and coherent — it’s like shitting soap — that’s hardly a miracle. (Sparks points out you can get the same result from macrobiotic food.) True, the deckies have tons of energy, a phenomenal amount, but Cassie insists there’s nothing supernatural going on. “His flesh is acting like Dumbo’s magic feather,” she says, “enabling us to tap our own latent powers.”

With Spicer and Wheatstone both gone, we’ve had to reapportion the duties. Dolores Haycox seems completely rehabilitated, and so we’ve made her our second mate, bumping James Echohawk up to third. The new bos’n is Ralph Mungo. I’m inclined to stick Weisinger back in the brig, but Ockham is convinced that Zook died before the kid ripped his hose, and right now we need every available pair of hands.

While Rafferty’s people disassemble the mountain, O’Connor’s men repair the damage, smoothing the keel with scrap-metal patches and straightening the port shaft by banging it with a sledgehammer. It turns out the thrown propeller has a seven-foot fissure running through one blade, but the backup screw seems fine, and that’s the one we’ll be mounting.

This morning Rafferty and Ockham made exploratory dives. Their report was encouraging. Just as we suspected, the anvil bones snapped in both His ears, but the padre says we can almost certainly get a firm grip on the stirrups.

Okay, I’ll admit it: His brain is surely mush by now. I keep telling myself this doesn’t matter. The angels wanted a decent burial, that’s all. Just a decent burial.

During the past twenty-four hours, Sam Follingsbee has gone way beyond McDonald’s, finding amazingly creative ways to prepare the fillets. He’s frustrated that so many spices and condiments got gobbled up during the famine, but he’s a wiz at making do. The local sand, for example, has a decidedly peppery flavor. The body itself supplies other essentials: wart fragments for mushrooms, mole scrapings for garlic cloves, tear duct chunks for onions. Most astonishing of all, by combining a fresh-water condenser and a microwave oven into a contraption that causes rapid fermentation, our chef can now distill His blood into something that tastes exactly like first-class burgundy.