r
than you. Light, the first great discovery of life! It must have
hastened growth--warmth, sunrays, heat, cold at night and dark again.
The glory of it breaking at dawn over the squirming, groping blind
existence of things!

"God said let there be light, and there was light.

"Existence demanding the thing it craved. Was that it, or existence
finding light and learning to crave it? No matter--light, a thousand
miracles of warmth and wonder! Growth was inevitable, Claire.

"Then the craving learned by experience broke into new form. I don't
know what it was; a two-celled bug, perhaps--only that it was craving
that did it. Hunger and thirst after light.

"Pain came at the very start of things. Wants unsatisfied drove with the
scourge of hell, forcing eyes, ears, stomach, sex into being, and out of
the squalor of it all, still goaded by incessant want, there heaved the
gigantic scaly carcass of the dinosaur. Still unaware of things, but
driven to move, to grow, to expand. Existence demanding more expression
of its awareness of self.

"The beast didn't know what it was. He only grew and grew and grew, till
he spread his ugly, yearning life over hundreds of feet of ground. Eye
and ear and touch and a peace of filled belly lay basking in the light,
glorying in what they found. Life was good, riotously good, finding
things, finding itself out. They fought, fed, killed, bred, all in the
effort of existence to know.

"What a blood-drenched chaotic struggle for self it was, Claire!

"And so, on and on and on. Touch didn't satisfy the incessant taste for
more knowledge, more life. Bodies rising like hills out of the marshes
couldn't give the keen joy that existence craved for itself.

"New things again: changed, altered products of the old, bearing in
their frames the history, the memory of the old--it all came, and out of
it at last, hunger-driven for more keen life, sprang a biped, hairy,
tusked, savage, bloody, lustful, eager to live, live, live!

"He was a glorious beast. In his flattened head that held the little
bloodshot eyes were memory, products of the past, things that harked
back for confirmation of present things. He had instincts--that's what
they are, instincts, memories of past sufferings--that whipped the
organism to go on into keener living. He was sexed, he was hungry, he
was vicious, he slept and ate, he bred consciously, carrying on the
eager shout within his being for more, more of life. More of exi