Warm today, Gulf Stream, wet as usual: Dagwood, idly munching, snagged by a hook of steel and drawn high and handsome over the ledge.

Imagine being pulled mouth first up through bubble and shimmer and your belly trying to pop out your mouth and your head screaming and the light light light. Racing toward you and someone said heaven doesn’t exist and there is nothing beyond the edge of the world. But is there nothing? Dagwood’s eyes aswoon and trying to keep a grip on consciousness and all the time this spinning vision of golden light like electric strands of Sargasso dancing just beyond the surface.

TWANGG!! Whatever had just flashed by him had probably tried to eat him: a blurred collage of silver scale and bug-eye and scrap-iron tooth. Didn’t though and bit clear through the line that pulled him. Dagwood, drifting in a funk slowly down from the brink of the void, was bait.

In a world full of sharks it is perhaps inadvisable to look like an injured fish. Dagwood, far too central to the plot to die right now, was fortunate enough to regain his senses in timely fashion. He was, however, very lost and very very far away from home.

The big blue world that until very recently was flashed at him through The Oracle was now somewhat closer. He was in it. It was all around him. Death was surely no more than a heartbeat away. Oh Glub, he thought. I’m really for it now. The evil world will eat me like a snack and all those zealots cut me up for sport. Lucky old Glub, down there beyond the ledge safe in front of The Oracle where the world was as it ought to be.