Temporary respite is achieved through the knowledge of two scientists and a time-travelling bird.

In the midst of all this, right in the middle of all the foofaraw, after the phone call, but before the whole thing erupted, Maurice read in the New York Times about a pair of scientists named Nielsen and Ninomiya who had hypothesised that a bird may have travelled back through time from the future to disable the Large Hadron Collider, and they had proposed a thought experiment in which a card is drawn from a deck of one hundred million cards, and if that one card is a spade when all the other ninety-nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine are hearts; if that one card is drawn then the Hadron Collider will be switched off forever, and they submitted this in all seriousness, and the news brought Maurice a real feeling of relief, and of lightness and buoyancy, and a quickness of step which lasted for the remainder of the morning.