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...."