For the first time Prime communicated directly with a human being. He telepathed, "I am, indeed, a fine jewel. Six carats of flawless, blue-white!"
The female's face contorted, and her mind revealed fear again, fear for her sanity and a great confusion. Gradually, she calmed, however, and I could see that in spite of his diminished anger, Prime was enjoying her agitation as well as her admiration.
"You are not mad," he said at length. "I am a diamond, all right, but feast your eyes well, for I have come to destroy you as I have the rest of your ungrateful race."
"Why? Why?" she cried, her appendages trembling and waves of fear beating out. Her eyes seemed to bulge in fascinated terror as she stared at Prime. She couldn't, of course, sense my presence, since she was minus that one critical perceptic.
Prime snapped back at her, "Because you are a race of hypocrites. You professed to love your diamonds, yet you have destroyed them by the thousands in your vandalistic warfare."
The thought was more than she could encompass, so Prime embraced her mind with a telepathic field and patiently revealed the whole, lengthy history of his creation of the human race and its delinquent failure to pay proper respect to its creator.
When she recovered from the overwhelming revelation she threw back her head and exclaimed, "The secret of human life! The eternal goal of the philosophers! And I have learned it!"
She broke into an emotional laugh that defies my powers of description. In it were vestiges of irony, amusement, self-pity and terror, but none of the adoring remorse that Prime had been seeking.
Then suddenly a little corner of her brain blocked itself off from both Prime and me. She said, "But if you destroy me, who will be left to love you and admire you?"