He decided, albeit reluctantly, not to publish his theory. Instead, he began searching the whole arsenal of physics for ways to assist the Universe somehow, to strengthen and maintain its debtor’s life. But his efforts came to naught. It was impossible to cancel the cosmic debt by anything done in the present: the debt lay not within the Universe but at its origin — at that point in time when the Universe became the mightiest and yet most defenseless Debtor to Nothingness.

It was at this juncture that I met the professor and spent many weeks in conversations with him. First he outlined for me the essential points of his discovery; then we worked together to find some means of deliverance.

Ah — I thought, returning to my hotel with fevered head and despairing heart — if only I could have been there, twenty billion years ago, for just a split second! That would be enough to place a single solitary atom in the void, and the Universe could grow from it as from a planted seed, now in a totally legitimate way, in accordance with the laws of physics and the principle of conservation of matter and energy. But how was I to get there?

The professor, when I told him this idea, smiled sadly and explained to me that the Universe could not have arisen from any ordinary atom; the cosmic nucleus would have had to contain the energy of all the transformations and events that expanded to fill the metagalactic void. I saw my error, but continued to mull over the problem. Then, one afternoon, as I rubbed oil on my legs, which were swollen with mosquito bites, my mind wandered back to the old days, when, while flying through the spherical cluster of Canes Venatici, I had read theoretical physics for lack of anything better to do. I had been particularly engrossed in a volume devoted to elementary particles, and I recalled Feynman’s hypothesis that there are particles that move “upstream” against the flow of time. When an electron moves in this manner, we perceive it then as an electron with a positive charge (a positron).