Free Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

tortured, browbeaten, and bought off by God, the hero returns to the dung heap for a rematch.
    Her tongue was a stone. She was too dry to weep. I shall not succumb to faith, she swore, staring across the vast, faceless sea. There are no atheists in foxholes. "Help," Cassie rasped, cranking the transceiver.
    "Please. Help. The Beagle is a stupid name for a ship," she groaned. "Beagles are dogs, not ships. Help. Please, God, it's me," muttered the lapsed Darwinist. "It's Cassie Fowler. Saint Paul's Rocks. Beagles are dogs. Please, God, help me.”
    July 4.
    Our fair republic's birthday. Latitude: 20°9'N. Longitude: 37°15'W. Course: 170. Speed: 18
    knots. Distance made good since New York: 1106 nautical miles.
    If I didn't know better, I'd say Jehovah himself had sent that hurricane. Not only did we survive, we got carried 184 miles at 40 knots, and now we're almost a day ahead of schedule. A loaded tanker probably could've smashed those rollers apart, but we actually had to ride them—full speed ahead in the troughs, dead slow along the crests. There was so much foam, the waves turned pure white, as if the sea herself had died.
    We had a good man at the helm, a moon-faced Jersey kid named Neil Weisinger, and somehow we bullied our way through, but only after a Marisat dome cracked in two and a starboard kingpost got torn out by the roots. Not to mention 4 lifeboats blown overboard, 15 shattered windows in the deckhouse, 2
    broken arms, 1 sprained ankle.
    On a normal voyage, whenever the crew gets drunk and rowdy, I can usually scare them into sobriety by waving a flare pistol around. But on this trip, if things go as I expect, we'll eventually be arming the deckies with those damn antipredator weapons. I'm nervous, Popeye. A potted sailor and a T-62
    bazooka are a bad combination.
    It doesn't matter that alcoholic beverages are forbidden in the U.S. Merchant Marine. We're not a dry ship—this I know. Judging from past experience, I'd guess we left port with about 30 cases of contraband beer and 65 bottles of hidden liquor. Rum is especially popular, I've noticed over the years. Pirate fantasies, I think. I myself keep 4 bottles of mescal in the chart room, secluded under Madagascar. To date we've had only one minor setback. The Vatican was supposed to send us the cream of its film collection, but either the reels never arrived or those Carmelites forgot to load them, and the only picture that actually made it on board is a 16mm pan-and-scan print of The Ten Commandments. So we've got this fancy theater and just one movie to run in it. It's a pretty awful flick, and I suspect we'll be chucking tomatoes at the screen long about the tenth showing.
    There are 4 or 5 VCRs kicking around, and dozens of cassettes with titles like Babs Boffs Boston. We've even got the notorious Caligula. But such fare tends to leave about a third of the men and nearly all the women cold.
    Whenever I slip Raphael's feather from my sea chest and stare at it, the same questions run through my mind. Did my angel speak the truth? Is Dad really the one who can wash away the oil? Or was Raphael just making absolutely sure I'd accept the mission?
    In any event, I'm figuring to return from the Arctic by way of Spain. I'll dock in Cadiz, give the crew shore leave, and hop on the first bus to Valladolid.
    "I did it," I'll tell him. "I got the job done."
    Although zero by zero degrees still lay half an ocean away, Thomas Ockham nevertheless found himself grappling night and day with the eschatological implications of a Corpus Dei. Beyond the information Rome explicitly requested—course, speed, position, estimated date of rendezvous—his daily faxes contained as much speculative theology as he thought the cardinals could stand.
    "At first blush, Eminence," he wrote to Di Luca on the Fourth of July, "the death of God is a scandalous and enervating notion. But do you remember the riches certain thinkers mined from this vein in the late