I was no longer amused. Inflated by his success, his over-bearing self-esteem began to rankle a bit. "What," I asked, "of self-awareness? Your life-forms are quite pointless if you fail to stimulate self-awareness in them."
"I agree," he said promptly. "It would be futile to create life without self-determination. You have returned a little too early to see the end of my experiment," he said. "On your next visit I will reveal the purpose of my whole project."
Rather than file a premature estimate of the affair, I held my notes and accepted Prime's challenge to wait and see. Had I insisted at that time on knowing his intentions, I might have had the wisdom to restrain him, but then again who could have anticipated what happened? Not even Prime, himself, realized that his life-form would get out of hand the way it did.
On my final trip to Terra I had an extremely difficult time locating Prime. His emanations were so weak as to be almost indistinguishable in the screaming ruck of sensations that met my startled perceptions.
Part of my difficulty was the fact that the whole planet reeked with noxious nuclear-type radiation that made long-range communication with Prime virtually impossible. When I finally found him he was imprisoned in the grip of a gold setting on a ring-like artifact worn by a decomposing life-form.
"I am quite happy to see you," Prime greeted me with the first note of welcome I had ever received from him.
"Is this grotesque cadaver your wonderful life-form that you promised?" I jeered at him. Then I noticed that Prime's surface had been chipped into geometrically precise facets of ingenious angles which would enable him to make maximum use of light absorption—were it not for the fact that his entire surface was charred with a coating of oxidation such as would occur after exposure to excessive heat.
It was this near-opacity of his outer surface that had reduced Prime to his weakened condition.
"If you will be so good as to assist me to remove the char from my skin, I will proceed with a very important mission," he said.