His search for knowledge took him not into the macro, but into the microcosms. Surely the larger universe was near the end result while the smaller was near the beginning. Somewhere in that complexity of sub-particles he would find a result without cause! His tools were crude. It was nothing to pluck a star from the heavens with a reaching tractor ray--to split it--explode it. But to shear a molecule from a parent mass, to hold it inviolate from its fellows, seemed impossible. He raged at the task for a million years, forgetting all the names linked to his life--forgetting the menace of Dark Fire. And he succeeded. His success lasted for one thrilling moment. In a vacuum of its own, untouched by outside force, that microcosm hung pendant. Devil Star saw it fuzzily, by the reflecting thread of electrons that he sent against it. And was to see it no more. For in that moment of triumph came the icy cold certainty that he was being watched. That captured micro-universe was gone from his delicate grasp as if it had never been. With a violence beyond imagining, he expanded to half again his diameter. From a dozen portions of his body, his visions leaped out. And he saw Dark Fire. He was gripped by the splendor of her, as she moved slowly down an aisle of stars toward him ... her visions already touching his, holding them with hard bright purpose. Against the dark background of space, her central green light was lustrous. "<i>Devil Star, there will be no choice!</i>" The sudden clangor of that voice from the past had no meaning to Devil Star, though he frantically tried to examine it. But meanings, reasons, coherent thinking were lost to him. As Dark Fire drifted nearer, he was enclosed in a vast peace. He knew at once that his searching, even his finding, was a patchwork substitute for this great longing that had been built into the very fabric of him. Now came the voice of Dark Fire, humming, insidious. "Devil Star, our moment has come--as we knew it would. Devil Star, follow me!" <tb> And now he hung in the vibrant band of life, drawn there half by her will, half by his. And he trembled with the half-memory of death, and yet bathed by the hypnotic vibrations flooding from the central light of her, so that he knew peace and understood the answers to all questions. She was dwindling. He knew what he must do. <i>As she would destroy me!</i> The thought raged, but he prepared. Then hiatus ... the gulf of timelessness between two instants of time. There was a click deep in the subterranean caverns of his thought swirls. It was as if he had been transported to another band of hyper-space. But was this another hyper-space? It could not be. In that depthless ladder of universes, and he had traversed them all, there was nothing similar. He viewed this strange space with childish wonder, knowing that he was here, yet without a body, without a purple central light.