After replacing and refusing of the sensor elements, the locus of the phenomenon is traced to a rail-yard on the edge of the zone, and further, apparently emanating from a young drug-user and hobo, Milton Bradford.

Five years later, Milton Bradford (or, "Brad" to his inner circle) has gone from drug-using poverty to the pinnacle of corporate power as the Chairman of Progress and Development Enterprises (P&D), a real-estate and industrial conglomerate who functioned as an important partner during the days of the Genesis Project.

P&D was formerly headed by Gerstal B. Hedgemore, who committed suicide in apparent shame when Bradford was confirmed as his illegitimate heir, consequently leaving him his worldly and corporate fortunes in his will.

Hedgemore did not commit suicide, but willingly abdicated his top position and lives in cloistered seclusion within the P&D buildings, never meeting Bradford.

Between the adoration of the cult, which its leader has increasing trouble restraining, and the staff of P&D, psychologically exhausted from years of maintaining the P&D fiction against the utter destruction of the Universe, the cracks in the cover story develop and widen, and the Creative Force arouses and begins to try to simplify the Universe in order to make it more manageable - though not uninhabitable for its chosen residents; from the original confirmatory nova of Proxima Centauri and destruction of Pluto, it deletes all quasars observable in the Universe; rationalizes pi at the 323rd decimal; halves the speed of light; and changes probability so that outcomes bracketing the mean become more likely than the mean itself.