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.

Before the argument began, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had a few things to say about Oolon Colluphid, his four books, and a marginal annotation that doesn't appear in any other copy of the Guide.