"The appendage to which you find my gold setting attached belonged to a living human at one time. Perfection of this animal was the goal toward which I was striving on your last visit." I began removing the charred coating from Prime questioning him further. "Did you succeed in developing self-awareness in your human life-form?" "Completely," he replied with a note of subdued triumph. "Much too successfully, in fact." And then he related the true purpose of his whole project. It seems that, through the ages, Prime and his fellow diamonds brought a most complicated life-form into being by a rather trial-and-error process of evolution. By psychokinesis they instilled a system of reproduction and heredity dependent upon bio-chemical devices he called _chromosomes_. These were composed of tinier units, or _genes_, which were easily manipulated to change any given strain. In such a manner Prime and his fellows evolved this human life-form, and if I may say so, the most was made of the animal potentialities I first witnessed on the beach. The human model was a bi-symmetrical biped with two upper appendages which terminated in clever, five-fingered vises. These latter accounted for the complex artifacts with which Terra was strewn. Prime proudly helped me dissect one of the dead creatures, and I believe what struck me most was the plumbing. Visualize, if you can, a closed system of nutrient fluid, called _blood_, circulating through 100,000 miles (see enclosed equivalent chart) of semi-flexible conduit arranged in an exceedingly complex network. This blood is held at precisely 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit (see chart) in spite of widely varying exterior temperatures. But most fantastic is the pump which makes a complete circulation of the total blood volume every one and a quarter minutes (see chart)! What an organ! Although its weight is measured in ounces (see chart) each 24-hours (see chart) it pulses about 100,000 times, moving 10 or more tons (see chart) of blood through it! * * * * * Well, this was only one of the physical-chemical oddities Prime installed in his heat-life-form contrivance. The other which I shall describe at this time was the so-called _brain_, or seat of intelligence. By a rather sluggish and clumsy system of electron-flow, the human's brain controlled physical activities, stored memories and managed a perverted form of thinking that was too intimately involved with sub-conscious, bodily interferences ever to amount to much. Nevertheless, this outrageously complicated thought-organ was the seat of Prime's catastrophe, and also, it has proved to be the source of the subject of this report. Early in Prime's animal-evolution, he explained, his animal's brain developed what he described as an _instinct for survival_. I interpret this as meaning simply an excessive desire to remain in a state of self-awareness.