"I have invented a complex compound which can accomplish this," he said. "I call it chlorophyll. But you have many more surprises in store for you," he warned. "Wait until your next visit."
I was entranced, but his work appeared still to be no more than an oddity, so I let it pass.
Prime was quite right. On my next visit he showed me his crowning achievement. He called it animal life, a division of his so-called organic creations.
Here he departed almost entirely from our known concept of life-forms. Prime's animals maintained life, or at least a convincing simulation thereof, by ingesting other organic life-forms, both vegetative and animal, and through an awkward procedure of digestion and devious, chemical transformations, generated an interior source of energy.
What almost made me report the whole affair at that time was this innovation: Prime's animal life-forms now existed entirely independent of direct radiant energy! Instead, they substituted, of all things, heat-energy, gained from simple oxidation of various so-called organic compounds.
At this point I asked a question to which Prime gave me a very revealing answer. I asked, "How do you define the term, 'organic compound'?"
He lay there in the sun, flash—his iridescence at me in brilliant sparkles from his random facets and announced in a haughty manner: "Organic pertains to any carbon-containing life-form, of which I am the originator, of course."
Now I understood a part of the immensity of Prime's egotism. In devising his own life-form he built it around his own element in which Terra abounds, largely in the gaseous dioxide compound.
I presumed that Prime had attempted to pass on the great Charter of Life to the non-crystalline forms of carbon about him, and, failing that, he enlisted the other elements in combination with carbon to produce his desired end.
Imagine such circuity, though! Substituting heat-energy for light as the basic life-fuel!