At first he hoped that eventually he would succeed in diminishing the contradiction, and perhaps even in resolving it. However, it kept increasing. Because all the data indicated that the Universe arose from a single atom, but also that no such atom could have existed. Here an obvious explanation suggested itself, the God hypothesis, but Razglaz set it aside as a last resort. I remember his smile when he said, “We shouldn’t pass the buck to God. Certainly an astrophysicist shouldn’t…” Pondering the dilemma for many months, Razglaz reviewed his previous research. Ask any physicist you know, if you do not believe me, and he will tell you that certain phenomena on the smallest scale occur, as it were, on credit. Mesons, those elementary particles, sometimes violate the laws of conservation, but they do this so incredibly fast that they hardly violate them at all. What is forbidden by the laws of physics they do with lightning speed, as though nothing could be more natural, and then they immediately submit to those laws again. And so, on one of his morning strolls across the university campus, Razglaz asked himself: What if the Universe were doing the same thing on a large scale? If mesons can behave impossibly for a fraction of a second, a fraction so minuscule that a whole second would seem an eternity in comparison, then the Universe, given its dimensions, might behave in that forbidden way for a correspondingly longer period of time. For, say, fifteen billion years…

It arose, then, although it might well have not arisen, there being nothing from which to arise. The Universe is a forbidden fluctuation. It represents a momentary aberration, but an aberration of monumental proportions. It is no less a deviation from the laws of physics than, on the smallest scale, a meson! Suspecting he was on the right track, the professor immediately went to his laboratory and made some calculations, which, step by step, verified his idea. But even before he had finished, the realization came: the solution to the riddle of the origin of the Universe revealed a threat as great as could be imagined.