Said Devil Star, magnanimously, "We shall go together! Now, or later?"
Devil Star frowned. "We'd better not," he said cautiously. "Not right away. Better make sure none of the others are around to see us. Come, World Rim!" And he shot into instant motion, gaining two light years on her before she knew what was happening. She surged into frantic motion after him, bewildered, panicky with incomprehension of his actions or thoughts.
Coldly, cruelly, he let himself be occluded from her in the heaving patchwork of a dark nebular cloud. World Rim was left behind, reproachful. He would see her again.
He had no room for emotion now, only purpose. He thundered through the empty spaces, veered away from galaxies that vibrated with the noxious beat of the life force, and found a galaxy where peace was.
He hung there, thinking. He had cheated death! Truly, that had been the prime search of his life. And, having cheated it, he would discover the way to knowledge unending. He would discover the hidden band.
Something had happened in that band which enabled him to triumph over life's first law. What?
Had it given him choice? He was convinced that it had.
In the millions of years that now elapsed, Devil Star came to think of that band as the band of decision. He had been in that band. He had interrupted its faultless rightness. He had interrupted destiny! And it was somewhere!
The bands of space, in all their complexity, knew him. He went up them one by one, studying them with a coldly disciplined leisure. With the cold analytical tool of his mind, he probed for the reasons behind those strange layers of hyper-space. He gazed on the obscene ugliness of the third band, wondering what lay behind the dark skin of nothingness that clove it. But the answer did not lie there. For he could not enter.
The fourth band, where he was mirrored endlessly to the vanishing point.
The fifth band, where all of space was geared to such a time-scale that the blazing components of the universe were serpentines of solid matter.
The sixth, seventh, eighth. The ninth, inhabited by the brittle cinders of suns, gaunt reminders of the universe's ultimate decadence. Those suns, however, were not burned-out matter, they were matter held in some timeless moment of atomic convulsion, as if the fury of heat and light had been sheared away. What reason? Was there here a result without cause?