"No. I did that which I <i>would</i> do. I had no choice." She rotated along an axis, probing him, mocking him. "We shall explore this thought of yours. I have choice, so you would say, of destroying this life I have created, or of allowing it to exist. But I have no choice." "You have choice!" "No." Again that mockery. And suddenly she drew back, lashing out with a destroying heat-ray that in a cosmic instant turned her planet into a molten, endless sea. Devil Star looked at it in horror, and a clamoring thought rose in him: <i>As she would destroy me!</i> That shocked moment held. Then, mockingly, "I made no choice, Devil Star. I could not have acted but as I did. For am I not the product of my Mother? Of all who went before her? Of all the events that have impinged on me to make me as I am? Am I not moved and swayed by cosmic tides that began long before I began? And you, Devil Star, are but a wave-curl in the tide ... an event in space-time, forcing me to make my so-called 'choice.' Choice? There was none. There was an inevitable act." He stared at her askance. Then a thought shook him to the innermost part of his being. "Dark Fire," he whispered, "until now we have been friends. We can no longer be friends. For soon a time will come when I must--when I <i>shall</i>--make a choice between two events. Do you understand?" Puzzlement was in her gaze. "I do not understand," she said slowly. "We must always be friends." A fuzzy-headed comet slashed its path across the dark heavens between them. Devil Star said, in mirthless mockery, "Friends! Can green and purple lights ever be friends?" For long and long she held that thought. Then, as if in involuntary reaction against the horror that rose from the instinctive matrix of her, she surged back across the heavens. From that distance, her amplifying fear and shock drove against him. "You speak, and do not know whereof you speak!" He followed in triumph, but Dark Fire dwindled more swiftly, as if knowing that to flee from him would dull her turmoil. But drifting back came her voice, cold and faint. "Devil Star, there will be no choice!" <tb> The friendship of Dark Fire and Devil Star was truly done. For even when they were members of the same playing group, there was this cold thought: I am destined to die, and to die in a certain manner. I shall therefore turn destiny aside. I shall not die! When Dark Fire came for him, he would be ready for her. When the time came, ironically, he was not ready.... He was in his forty-millionth year, still a youth in his vast time-scale, when he began drifting away from his other friends as well. For already he felt the hunger in him, the first deep pangs, and mistook it for his need to acquire knowledge.