And so Prime's incredible motives were finally divulged.
A few years (see chart) before my final return, however, Prime's humans, in their sluggish way, stumbled upon some rudimentary universal facts about the construction of the atom.
Until this time, as I stated, the humans' extreme obsession with survival had been of no concern to Prime, although the instinct had brought his prize animal into a savage, vicious, condition of belligerence that resulted in highly destructive warfare among various groups.
Atomic power changed all this rather quickly. Where humans had previously only managed to slaughter other organic life-forms and each other, now they began detonating nuclear devices. And in the process even the durable diamond family suffered many casualties.
At this point, I gather, Prime's egotism became somewhat sublimated into outrage and anger, that his adoring subjects could be so thoughtless as to destroy their precious diamonds along with their own populace.
After the initial incident in an area called Japan, Prime passed the word to all his fellows, and they deliberately spurred the humans on to produce great piles of nuclear ammunition. Later, by clever manipulation of the humans' sub-conscious emotions and instincts of self-preservation, Prime's culture ironically turned this unique attribute back on the humans. They were goaded into a self-destroying atomic war that accomplished Prime's vengeance in a very brief time.
True, a great number of diamonds were destroyed in the holocaust, but as I mentioned, Prime was not at all contaminated with this survival-of-the-individual instinct of his created life-forms.
Rather, he gloated and took immense egotistical pleasure in the destruction of his creations.
When I came upon him that last day in his oxidized condition he had only one regret. He confessed that a single human individual had escaped the radio-active destruction. Blinded and weakened, he was at the point of despair when I scraped the black oxidation from his exterior. It was this last human's death which he named when I asked him the nature of his mission.