Colluphid is assigned a research assistant—sullen, spectacularly uninterested in theology, and possessed of exactly the lateral thinking that makes him either the worst research assistant in the galaxy or the most necessary one.

Oolon Colluphid, newly tenured and aggressively certain, attends a Conditions Ceremony on Brontitall—and discovers that three hundred beings sincerely mourning a god they know is gone are considerably harder to argue with than he expected.