he believed in God; she had heard from someone on the base that he did not, and she had never observed Andrew and Margaret going even to the nondenominational chapel. At supper, Margaret asked him. He said, “Isaac Newton believed in God, my dear. He looked out into the stars, and he saw that they were fixed, and he made up his mind that God had set them there, just where they were, at the beginning of creation. He saw, too, that the stars were so far away from Earth that the average man could not imagine how far. And he could not help seeing that there were more stars in some parts of the sky than in others, and so, eventually, he had to admit that it was going to be fixity or gravity, and you could not have both. If the stars were not uniformly set into the sky, then they had to move toward one another or away, and eventually the universe would change, and, he thought, there might therefore be a universal collapse, as more and more stars gathered together in one spot. And so, because he did not think that God would allow this sort of thing, he decided that, from time to time, God puts the stars back where they should be, as an Almighty should be able to do. Of course, then they must ask the question why God set up the possibility of movement in the first place. Why not just make all the stars equidistant and equally large and dense, so that they don’t move?”
“Why not?” she said.
“Does God want to keep himself occupied?” Andrew took a bite of his ham steak and shrugged. It was a rainy day, and their windows were shrouded with gray, but they could hear the clanging and booming of ships being built a few hundred yards away. Andrew shook his head, then said, “Simply because, not. Because that is a question not to be asked.”
“I asked it.”
“You may ask it, of course, my dear. I don’t mean it is forbidden, as there are no forbidden questions. I simply mean it is not a question that I would ask. I am content to know that the stars do move, and to leave aside, for the moment, the purpose of their movement.”
“So you don’t believe in God?”
“I usually leave that question aside, too, but if you must have me respond to it, and, indeed, must fit your conception of me into the world of the naval base here, where Captain and Mrs. Lear and everyone else believe that God attends to their every thought and action, and judges them day by day, then I would say that, at this point in my life, I have come to understand God as a Being for whom it is my privilege to search, rather than as one for whom it is my obligation to perform.”
They ate quietly for a while. Then Andrew said, “Am I to assume that you yourself believe in God, my dear?”
“My mother always said that the ways of God were not to be understood by mortals, and I do believe that anyone from Missouri can understand her sentiment.”
He nodded. It seemed that, from their different perspectives, Andrew and she agreed on the subject, but when she spoke of this again to Mrs. Lear, Margaret said, “I think he would say that God is different from religion.” Mrs. Lear disagreed with this sentiment, but their friendship was not affected.
One day, he borrowed a shotgun from Hubert Lear, and the two of them went off on a walk to the western part of the island. They were gone all day. When they came back, Andrew was as excited as she had ever seen him—he and Hubert Lear had taken plenty of ammunition, but they had shot no squirrels or rabbits, they had shot only mud. They had shot mud from many angles, including several times when Hubert climbed as far up a tall tree as he could go, carrying the shotgun in a sling and the shells in a separate sling, and from that height (some thirty feet, Andrew thought), Hubert had shot straight down into the mud. After each shot into the mud, Andrew would inspect the holes the shot made, and, he said, “Every single one of them looked like a crater on the moon, and so, my dear, I see that the moon is being bombarded by shot of all sizes, and craters have been