But everyone’s reacting differently. Doug Shaftoe’s always conspicuously cool and sort of pensive in the presence of a very large amount of gold, like he’s always known that it was there, but touching it makes him think about where it came from and what was done to get it there. The sight of a single brick almost made Goto Dengo vomit up his Kobe beef. For Eberhard Föhr, who is out in the cove doing a lazy backstroke, it is the physical incarnation of monetary value, which for him, and the rest of Epiphyte, has mostly been a mathematical abstraction—a practical application of one particular sub-sub-sub-branch of number theory. So it has the same kind of purely intellectual attraction to him as a moon rock or a dinosaur tooth. Tom Howard sees it in the embodiment of some political principles that are almost as pure, and as divorced from human reality, as number theory. Mixed in with that is some sense of personal vindication. For Leon the Sea Gypsy, it’s just a cargo to be hauled from point A to point B, for which he’ll be compensated with something more useful. For Avi it’s an inextricable mixture of the sacred and the satanic. For Randy—and if anyone knew about this, he would be dreadfully embarrassed, and would freely admit to its cloyingness—it is the closest thing he’s got right now to a physical link with his beloved, in that she was pulling these bars out of the wreck of the submarine just a few days ago. And that is really the only sense in which he gives a damn about it, anymore. In fact, in the few days since he decided to hire Leon to smuggle him up the Sulu Sea and into southern Luzon, he has had to remind himself over and over again that the nominal purpose of the trip is to open up Golgotha.