He returned the petty officer's salute and wordlessly, almost inaudibly, answered the needless comment that this would be the final trip of the evening. He sat down in the boat and waited with his elbow on the gunwale and his chin propped up in his hand. All sound was muffled, as though it crossed a vast distance. His eyelids insisted on drooping. He shook his head to clear it, looked first at the moon, then across the black water of the bay, bisected by a shimmering silvery path that pointed to the horizon. The boat rocked slightly, the path beckoned, and after considering the matter for a moment he made up his mind and stepped out of the boat, onto the moonlit path. It was yielding yet firm. When the moon momentarily disappeared into clouds again, the path dulled but still supported him. Uncertain of the way to go, he waited for the moon to reemerge, and while waiting looked down through water now suffused with pale light from no obvious source. Beneath his feet, crimson fish and amber-backed sea scorpions with ebony claws went mindlessly about their business. When the moon reappeared, he had the sensation, unexpected but not unpleasant, of being drawn forward by some external agency--by the moon itself, he decided after reflection. It was some hitherto undiscovered tidal effect. Or something. He accelerated along the path toward the invisible seam of the horizon that held sea and sky together, and then the moon swept him right off the earth, bound him somehow to itself, so that the planet fell away sharply, lost definite shape, became indistinguishable from a starless darkness and he could no longer tell where anything below him left off and anything else began. He turned his gaze upward and saw only the moon. Satellite and satellite, the greater and the lesser, rushed through the darkness, closing the distance between themselves. It occurred to him after a brief interval that he really was approaching the moon at tremendous speed, that it might be a good idea to slow down, but before he could begin to wrestle meaningfully with the problem of braking, he had abruptly plunged through the surface of a mare and come to a full stop, without suffering any harm whatever from the sudden deceleration. He found himself teetering on the brink of a precipice. The edge curved to left and right and met at a point opposite him, but distant, so distant. He had, he somehow understood, flown not to the moon but beyond spacetime itself. He stood on the rim of a vast hole, perfectly circular, in the floor of Heaven, and ranged with him around the rim were presences or beings or in any event gigantic and strange awfulesses, the first inhabitants of Heaven. There was none among them even as familiar-looking as a hawk- or cat-headed god, nor even the naked writhing ropy horrors of less formal pantheons. These beings paid him no attention; they had important matters before them. Within the hole lay a roiling infinite darkness like a heavy sea of petroleum, the primordial chaos, lightless, noiseless, formless, substanceless, and yet there. The things ranged around the rim were trying to reach some agreement concerning the disordered state of affairs below. There were irreconcilable factions of introspectionists, extro-, proto-, and even daring abstract retrospectionists. One faction desired a universe in which everything would happen exactly as it should and only as it could, from beginning to end, on grounds that they might then trust it to operate by itself while they pursued other interests. Another faction wanted a universe in which nothing was predetermined, on grounds that it would remain eternally interesting, thereby obviating the need to seek outside interests. Some who aspired to immanence, who wished to suffuse and pervade the universe with their essence, maintained that order could be brought out of chaos, summoned forth from it. Others, whose ambition it was to transcend, to exist apart from, the material universe, held that order must be, could only be, imposed upon chaos, from on high or in any case from without. Still others liked things just the way they were and saw no reason to tamper with a system that obviously worked. As those of a legalistic twist of essence discussed the sameness or differentness of otherness and outsideness, the debate raged and flamed into argument, and accusations began to fly, accusations of timid orthodoxy, counter-accusations of reckless unorthodoxy, of incorrectness, heresy, and apostasy, of uncommunicativeness, uncooperativeness, and obstructionism, of imbecility and rationality, of speakable horridness, of inunhumanity and uninhumanity, of general indivinity and all which it implied, from divisibility to visibility to viscosity. The factions began to jostle one another. He felt himself in danger of being trampled and hopefully invoked the protection of his own god. The paleodeities paused and regarded the presumptuous creature perplexedly or with more or less indifference, more or less antipathy, each according to its nature, and then collectively and unceremoniously dismissed him, through the simple expedient of crowding him over the edge of the rim. Tumbling toward chaos, he choked down his terror and closed his eyes and prayed. And after a timeless interval the prayer was answered, and he felt something yielding but firm underfoot. He stood on the moonlit path again. He saw that the stars had been carefully reset in the black sky. He offered up thanks to the only god who knew him, and followed the moon's elongate reflection home to his dreaming self and the rest of dreaming humanity.