Minelli passed around cans of beer, warm but still welcome, and they ate slowly, saying little, listening to the birds and the hum of the wind through the trees behind them. When they had finished, Edward spread a sleeping bag on the grass and invited Betsy to lie back and doze with him. The climb had not been exhausting, but the sun was warm and the air was sweet, and large fat bees were buzzing in lazy curves around them. They were well fed, and the beer had made Edward supremely drowsy.

Betsy lay beside him, head resting in the crook of his arm. "Happy?" she asked him.

Edward opened his eyes and stared up at white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. "Yes," he said. "I really am."

"So am I."

A few dozen yards away, other campers were singing folk songs and sixties and seventies tunes. Their voices drifted in the restless, warm air, finally melding with the wind and the hum of the bees.

Chapter 68

68

Walter Samshow celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday aboard the Glomar Discoverer, cruising in circles a few kilometers beyond the zone where huge gouts of oxygen had once risen to the ocean surface. The bubbling had stopped three days before.

The ship's galley prepared a two-meter-long birthday cake in the shape of a sea serpent—or an oarfish, depending on whether you asked the cook or Chao, who had seen several oarfish in his time, but no sea serpents.

At five in the afternoon, the cake was cut with some ceremony under the canvas awning spread on the fantail. Bible-leaf slices of the serpent were served on the ship's best china, accompanied by champagne or nonalcoholic punch for those ostensibly on duty.

Sand silently toasted his partner with a raised glass of champagne at the stern. Samshow smiled and tasted the cake. He was trying to decide what flavor the peculiar mud-colored icing was—someone had suggested sweetened agar earlier—when the ocean all around suddenly glowed a brilliant blue-green, even beneath the intense sun.

Samshow was reminded of his youth, standing on the beach at Cape Cod on the night of the Fourth of July, waiting for fireworks and tossing his own firecrackers into the surf just as their fuses burned short. The firecrackers had exploded below the surface with a silent puff of electric-green light.

The crew on the rear deck fell silent. Some looked at their shipmates in puzzlement, having missed the phenomenon.

In rapid succession, from the northern horizon to the southern horizon, more flashes illuminated the ocean.

"I think," Samshow said in his best professorial tone, "we are about to have some mysteries answered." He knelt to put his plate and glass of champagne down on the deck, and then stood, with Sand's help, by the railing.

To the west, the entire sea and sky began to roar.