Herjellsen’s device was deceptively simple.

Had he not been insane, had he not been an isolate, lonely, scorned, maddened, dissociated and crazed, the uniqueness, the simplicity of it, would doubtless not have occurred to him.

It was irrational.

It was as irrational as existence, that there should be such. The void was rational, space, emptiness. That there should be anything, gods or particles, that was the madness.

That there should be anything, that was the madness.

Dr. B. Hamilton, mathematician, Ph.D. California Institute of Technology, looked up, fingering the pencil.

It seemed startling, wondrous, that it should be.

As wondrous as suns and stars, the passage of light, and the slow turnings in the night of luminous galaxies.

Who could have predicted that there should be being? From what discursive statements of initial conditions and laws should such a prediction follow? And in the nothingness what entities might serve as values for those individual constants, and as values for those variables, for in the void there was nothing.

From nothing can come nothing.

Dr. Hamilton lit a cigarette, and drew on it, angrily, defensively.

But smoke cannot screen thoughts from themselves.

It did not appear to be a truth of logic, a matter of the meanings of words, or even of the possibilities of thought, that nothing could come from nothing.

Surely one could imagine nothing, and then something. It was imaginable, and whatever is imaginable is logically possible, conceptually possible.

Yet in some sense it did seem true, so true, that from nothing could come nothing.

It made no sense to call it a necessary truth, for its negation was semantically consistent, conceptually possible, and yet it seemed, somehow a strong truth, a likely truth.