In which Colluphid catalogs the universe's design failures with scholarly precision, Hurkel plays devil's advocate in the worst possible way, and someone—or something—writes two words in the margin of his research notes.

Colluphid travels to the Cathedral of the Conditions to meet his academic liaison—and discovers that "liaison" is the ecclesiastical word for someone assigned to make sure you understand exactly what you don't know.

A digression on the long, distinguished, and largely inconclusive history of theological criticism across the galaxy—because before Oolon Colluphid set out to reinvent the wheel, it helps to understand how many wheels have already been reinvented, and in how many cases they were on fire at the time.

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.