Edith, who had just returned from her stateroom with something bundled in her arms, nudged Jonathan’s elbow and tried to lead him toward the promenade deck. He resisted, and the bundle dropped from her arms with a snap.

“Come," Edith said. “We must find you a lifeboat at once. They’re taking men off on the starboard side.”

“There’s still time,” Jonathan protested. He bent down and picked up a blanket wrapped around a toy pig. He knew, without Edith’s telling him, that it was the same pig her father had given her after a car crash from which she emerged as the sole survivor. He had explained that the pig was a symbol of good luck in China, and made her promise to keep it with her always. But Edith, a fashion reporter destined to become the world’s first woman war correspondent, was adamant that her space in a lifeboat should be taken by others. Later this night, Jonathan knew, a young officer, mistaking her bundle in a blanket for a baby, would snatch it from her arms and toss it into number 11, one of the last boats down on the davits. Only a pig and a promise were going to save her.

Jonathan dusted the pig off very carefully as he handed it back to her, noticing that one of its little forelegs was broken.

“Edith,” he said, smiling, “I’d hold on to this if I were you.”

Just then, Hollis’s voice pierced Jonathan’s bonephone: “Earth to Wayville! Earth to Wayville! Reality check. We’ve just surfaced and I need you topside!”

Inside the hurricane’s eye, the air was sticky and close and three times as dense as it had been before the relativistic bombing. The surface layers of the oceans had actually boiled off. There was no escaping the oppressive atmosphere. Hollis had equalized the air pressure in the crew compartment with that of Earth’s surface, so that even when they submerged again, the dense air would still be with them. The humidity was unbearable. Jonathan imagined that Venus must look and feel a lot like this, as he and this priest, the only other living person on Earth, stood atop Alvin’s coning tower, looking about them. All around was dead calm and a thick, yellow-white haze.

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Hollis called out, cranking the transmitter to its highest level yet: “Position forty-one twenty-six north, seventy-one four west. Require immediate assistance. Come at once. This is the research vessel Alvin. We are running out of supplies. Starving.”

Hollis put the transmitter down. Jonathan merely shook his head, activated a dove, and sent it flapping into the fog. “Who do you think is going to hear you?” he said. “They’re all dead.”

“There’s always hope.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes heavenward, thinking that a priest would believe anything to avoid the sin of despair, and began preparing another dove.

“We’ll make landfall tomorrow,” said Hollis with an unconvincing tone of optimism.

“Can you keep us within the storm’s eye?”

“Sure. This one’s only a baby. She’s making toward shore at twenty knots. We can keep up with her. She’ll bring us right to Long Island, somewhere near Jones Beach.”