Travis said wonderingly, "You look so young. If it weren't that Martin Kent told me about you, I'd--" She let him look at her, standing with her eyes lowered. Travis had seen the _landuli_, the dancing girls raised by the princes of Orion-3; had seen the white-tressed houris of Venus; had seen the golden women bred for men's pleasure by the Kafars of Proxima Centauri. He had never seen anyone as lovely as this first woman. Her legs were long and white, her hips gently rounded. The high arch of her breasts were poetry. And then she raised her lashes. Her blue eyes were ancient as space itself, as filled with nameless knowledge, with wisdom beyond Travis's understanding. They had beheld all things, from the slug that came out of a borning world's ocean bottom to the scribblings of the universe's mightiest scientist. Her ears had heard the songs of Sull and the symphonies of Bach and Lyrn. Travis was aware of all that staring into her eyes. He whispered, "But--how?" She gestured at the calyx and the wires. "Those machines feed me energy that I need to stay alive. They also feed me the intellectual stimulation I need to stay sane. "Man's thoughts can be recorded. You know that. Therefore they give off some electrical flow. I will not go into the whys of it. You would not understand. But those electrical flows never die. They fade and fade, almost to nothingness--but not quite. The dynamos here pick them up, amplify them. "Here in the crystal calyx I have been fed all thought since the Werwile smashed Flormaseron. I spent years with a being called the Discoverer--before he disappeared into some strange twisting of the space-time continuum. It was he who warned me of Rudra, the Werwile. He said he was stirring--about to come again." Travis muttered, "The Werwile?" The girl laughed softly at his puzzled face. "The Werwile, yes. The eternal one. He who never sleeps. He who knows all things. Your race calls him Devil ... a race-memory of the first beginnings of the humanoid cell, of the one who smashed the first race just when it was rising to its glory. All your legends, all the legends of all men contain mention of him. The Rebel. Loki. Venus's Badal. Cygni's Daldal." "You mean, there is someone like that? An actual person?" "Why not? Your race has dreamed of immortality. So has every race. The Werwile found it." Travis hooked his thumbs in the metal loops of his space-harness and waited. Nuala walked about the big chamber, touching a glittering cone, staring up at a whirling golden globe. She went on, "He found it, smashed his own people in a holocaust of destruction, and went into another cosmos. Now he is coming back. The irony of it is that he hollowed out this crystal crypt himself--and it was here he built his own evil knowledge. My people put me here, thinking he would never return...." Travis chuckled, "What can one man do to worry you?"