At first she seemed not to hear him. Then she touched him briefly with a vision ray. "Devil Star," she murmured. "No. It's no use. There is something wrong. Go away." The utter calamitousness of that order held him rigid. "There is nothing wrong," he whispered. "I am here. I shall go with you." Her visions wavered away. "No, there is something wrong," she repeated stubbornly. "Why should I take you anywhere?" Then, craftily, "Where is there to take you?" <tb> He burst into the full flood of her visions. He was trembling, trying to reject what he heard, and not succeeding. Welling up from the depths of him came knowledge of the ultimate horror he was facing. Here--now--he must defeat the horror, or he was lost to it and would live with it forever. "I shall go with you," he said in bitter frenzy. "You shall take me with you--to the forty-eighth band!" And as soon as the words were out, he knew he should not have spoken them. Her faint thoughts came: "It is," she said wonderingly, "the place you had been when I last saw you so many years ago. But no. It is impossible, Devil Star! Perhaps you are deceiving me again." He surged closer, reckless, uncaring. "Deceived you! It is you who deceived me, deceived me and all purple lights. But I was not fooled green light!" And it flooded out of him, half in pride, half in scorn, the whole story of his anarchistic fight against destiny. "I fought you, World Rim," he lashed out, "and I fought all other green lights--and the universe itself!" Stay it though he would, a yawning cavern was engulfing him. He trembled, striving to bring himself up out of that utter chaos of dark. But he spoke on, raging, alternately frightened and astounded at what he was speaking. And from World Rim came silence. "Speak!" he said wildly. "There is a need in me, a longing. I do not know what it is!" She seemed to shrink, until she was small, her central light wavering. "Then I know," she whispered. "Devil Star, you wish to die." "No!" "And you wish to create. To create and die." He stared, his thought swirls shaken with those words. "To create," he whispered. Now her voice lifted, firm with conviction. "I see it all now, Devil Star. You wish to die, and in dying to create. All energy creatures, even green lights after their fourth giving-of-birth, must do that, or they will be very unhappy. It is very clear. But also you want to find that impossible band of decision you talk about." His thoughts were tortured. Yet he knew that from her deeply buried instincts, the true answer to his longing had come. "Then I must create," he said hollowly. "And you must take me there--to the forty-eighth band!" "No." The word shattered against him. "For when we got there, it might be the same as with--Dark Fire." There was a humming within him, a growing madness. "We must go!" he said violently. Sparkles of flame shot from the core of her.