Please note, this is quite aside from a secondary instinct, that of reproduction or survival of the race, which is _not_ unheard of elsewhere. But in Prime's humans, this tremendous desire for survival of the individual grew into a virtual obsession. I tested Prime, himself, on this factor, and found him quite normal. He had no feeling at all on the subject of remaining self-aware. I had thought this unseemly human characteristic might have been a perversion from his unhealthy egotism, but patently it was not. Therefore, I had to conclude that the human's high drive to self-preservation was of a spontaneous nature, deriving as one of the random results of Prime's unique heat-life-forms. Anyway, Prime had been so intent in accomplishing his earlier purpose that he gave it little thought until it was too late. This purpose, incidentally, was the only shred of amusement I could salvage from this last trip. It developed that Prime and his fellow diamonds bred this whole life-strain principally to satisfy their insatiable egos. You see, they finally inculcated into their humans a great love and admiration for diamonds--so much so that they were declared the prince of gems and valued most highly for their ornamental value. Entirely ignorant that diamonds contained a self-awareness of their own, humans toiled and strained to dig them from deep mines just to fashion them into baubles for their own adoration. Here again, Prime asserted a crude genius. Not only did he create a whole life-form and induce its members to worship him, but also he insinuated the desire and skill into humans to cut and polish their diamonds in a manner to provide a maximum of light refraction. Prime and many others of his Terra kin, enjoyed high stimulation from being so cut, polished, transported and worshipped. 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.