Transcriber’s Note: This e-text was produced from “Worlds of If”November 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidencethat the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
They weren’t human—weren’t even related to humanity through ties ofblood—but they were our heirs!
SWEET
Their blood and
sticky
The machine had stood there a long time. It was several hundred feetlong and could run on a thimbleful of earth or water. Complete initself, the machine drew material from the surrounding landscape,transmuting matter to its special purposes. It needed sugar, salt, waterand many other things but never failed to have them. It was stillworking. And at the delivery end, where the packaging devices had beenbroken down, it turned out a steady turgid stream on the ground ofpink-striped, twisting taffy.
Once the whole vast desert area had been filled with such devices,producing all the varied needs of a very needful human race. But therehad been no machine to produce peace. The crossing shock waves of fusedhydrogen had destroyed the machines by the tens of thousands, along withall the automatic shipping lines, leaving only, in the quirk of apressure cross-pattern, an undisturbed taffy-making machine, oozing itsspecial lava on the plateau floor.
It had been working seven and a half million years.
It continued to repair itself, as if a child of the race that hadstarted all this would come by it at any moment to tip an eager pinky inthe still-warm taffy to taste its tangy sweetness. But there were nohuman beings. There had been none since the day when the packagercollapsed, at the edge of the total-evaporation zone.
Creno set a few of his legs on the edge of the glassy, weathered ridgeand gazed over the plateau. Harta, next to him, trembled as sheadjusted to the strange hardness of these four dimensions. “Being is athin thing here,” she said.
“Thin, yes,” Creno smiled. “An almost dead world. But there is a mysteryin that almost to make the journey worth the coming.”
“What mystery?” But Creno was of the wisest on the home planet and hersense feelers scanned once more to find what he must mean. “I do feelit! Everything dead but that one great mental thing moving, and afour-dimensional stream coming out in the vibrations of this world!”
“I have been watching it,” said Creno. “What kind of life can that be?You are a sharp sensor, Harta. Focus to it.”
She strained and then relaxed, speaking: “The circuits are closed intothemselves. It learns nothing from outside itself except to move andextend its metal feelers for food. Soil is its food. Soil is its energy.Soil is its being.”
“Can it be alive?”
“It is alive.”
All his legs rested now in a row along the ridge. He too was relaxed asone mystery disappeared. “I feel your feelings, but the thing is notalive. It is a machine.”
“I do not understand. A machine in the middle of a dead world?”
“Whether we understand why or not, that is what it is—a machine.”
Harta throbbed with excitement. How could Creno be wrong? He kneweverything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now wereliving things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence atone end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of willed effort asthey crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching graspingfeelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easinglegs as the food spread within them.
“There are living creatures here!” Creno pondered. “I feel yourmessages. Twenty, thirty—a horde is crawling from that mountain toward