Hurkel has spent nine days checking the four-page memo. It is no longer four pages. The Babel fish fossil record, it turns out, has a problem—and someone sealed the archive forty-one years ago to make sure no one could find it.

Colluphid turns from design flaws to moral failures—the things God chose rather than merely neglected to fix. The list is darker than he expected, and it keeps leading somewhere he didn't intend to go.

Six months after publication, Oolon Colluphid is the galaxy's most famous atheist—and the most privately dissatisfied. His publisher wants more. His desk drawer contains a question he hasn't answered. His spare room contains a research assistant he hadn't noticed.