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briefcase on the AT&T spool, popped the clasps, and removed his Jerusalem Bible. "Your second choice said yes."
    "Rafferty? Never sailed with him, but they say he knows more about salvage than anybody this side of . .
    ."
    The captain's voice trailed off. A faraway look settled into his eyes. Taking a large gulp of humid air, he ran the nail of his index finger along the belly of his tattooed mermaid, as if performing a caesarean section.
    "The oil won't go," he said tonelessly.
    "What?"
    "Matagorda Bay. When I'm asleep, a heron flies into my bedroom, black oil dripping from its wings. It circles above me like a vulture over a carcass, screeching curses. Sometimes it's an egret, sometimes an ibis or a roseate spoonbill. Did you know that when the sludge hit their faces, the manatees rubbed their eyes with their flippers until they went blind?"
    "I'm . . . sorry," said Thomas.
    "Stone blind." Van Horne made his right hand into tongs, squeezing his forehead between thumb and ring finger. With his left hand he lifted his Old Milwaukee and chugged down half the bottle. "What about a second mate?"
    "You mustn't hate yourself, Anthony."
    "An engineer?"
    "Hate what you did, but don't hate yourself."
    "A bos'n?"
    Opening his Bible, Thomas slipped out the set of 8 X 10 glossies that L'Osservatore romano's photography editor had printed from Gabriel's 35mm slides. "It all happens tomorrow—an officer's call down at the mates' union, a seaman's call over in Jersey City . . .” The captain disappeared into his bedroom, returning two minutes later in red Bermuda shorts and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Exxon tiger. "Big sucker, eh?" he said, staring at the photos. "Two miles long, Raphael told me. About the size of downtown Wilkes-Barre." He dragged the edge of his hand along the blurry corpse. "Small for a city, large for a person. You figured His displacement?" Thomas treated himself to a hearty swallow of Old Milwaukee. "Hard to say. Close to seven million tons, I'd guess." The enjoyment of cold beer was probably the closest he ever came to sinning—beer, and the pride he took in seeing himself footnoted in The Journal of Experimental Physics
    —beer, footnotes, and the viscous oblations that followed his occasional purchase of a Playboy.
    "Captain, how do you see this voyage of ours?"
    "Huh?"
    "What's our purpose?"
    Van Horne flopped into his ruptured couch. "We're giving Him a decent burial."
    "Your angel say anything about resuscitation?"
    "Nope."
    Thomas closed his eyes, as if he were about to offer his undergraduates some particularly difficult and disconcerting idea, like strange attractors or the many-worlds hypothesis. "The Catholic Church is not an institution that readily abandons hope. Her position is this: while the divine heart has evidently stopped beating, the divine nervous system may still boast a few healthy cells. In short, the Holy Father proposes we apply the science of cryonics to this crisis. Do you know what I'm talking about?"
    "We should get God on ice before His brain dies?"
    "Precisely. Personally, I believe the Pope's being far too optimistic." An uncanny but entirely reasonable gleam overcame Van Horne, the inevitable luminescence of a man who's been given the opportunity to save the universe. "But if he's not being too optimistic," said the captain, a mild tremor in his voice, "how much time ... ?"
    "The Vatican computer wants us to cross the Arctic Circle no later than the eighteenth of August." Van Horne chugged down the rest of his beer. "Damn, I wish we had the Val now. I'd leave with the morning tide, crew or no.
    "Your ship arrived in New York Harbor last night."
    The captain slammed the empty bottle onto the AT&T spool. "She's here? Why didn't you tell me?"
    "Don't know why. Sorry." Thomas collected the photos and slipped them back into his Bible. He knew perfectly well why. It was a matter of power and control, a matter of convincing this strange, oil-haunted man that Holy