"I don't grok it," Jubal answered gruffly, "I was quoting something, uh, an 'Old One' said." He decided to back off and try a new approach; apparently God the Creator was not the easiest aspect of Deity to try to explain to Mike as an opening... since Mike did not seem to grasp the idea of Creation itself.  Well, Jubal wasn't sure that he did, either - he had long ago made a pact with himself to postulate a Created Universe on even-numbered days, a tail-swallowing eternal-and-uncreated Universe on odd-numbered days - since each hypothesis, while equally paradoxical, neatly avoided the paradoxes of the other - with, of course, a day off each leap year for sheer solipsist debauchery.  Having thus tabled an unanswerable question he had given no thought to it for more than a generation.