Sweet Their Blood and Sticky
Teichner Albert
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Sweet Their Blood and Sticky
Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from "Worlds of If"
November 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
They weren't human--weren't even related to humanity through ties of
blood--but they were our heirs!
SWEET
Their blood and sticky
By ALBERT R. TEICHNER
The machine had stood there a long time. It was several hundred feet
long and could run on a thimbleful of earth or water. Complete in
itself, the machine drew material from the surrounding landscape,
transmuting matter to its special purposes. It needed sugar, salt, water
and many other things but never failed to have them. It was still
working. And at the delivery end, where the packaging devices had been
broken down, it turned out a steady turgid stream on the ground of
pink-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 there
had been no machine to produce peace. The crossing shock waves of fused
hydrogen had destroyed the machines by the tens of thousands, along with
all the automatic shipping lines, leaving only, in the quirk of a
pressure cross-pattern, an undisturbed taffy-making machine, oozing its
special 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 had
started all this would come by it at any moment to tip an eager pinky in
the still-warm taffy to taste its tangy sweetness. But there were no
human beings. There had been none since the day when the packager
collapsed, at the edge of the total-evaporation zone.
* * * * *
Creno set a few of his legs on the edge of the glassy, weathered ridge
and gazed over the plateau. Harta, next to him, trembled as she
adjusted to the strange hardness of these four dimensions. "Being is a
thin thing here," she said.
"Thin, yes," Creno smiled. "An almost dead world. But there is a mystery
in that almost to make the journey worth the coming."
"What mystery?" But Creno was of the wisest on the home planet and her
sense feelers scanned once more to find what he must mean. "I _do_ feel
it! Everything dead but that one great mental thing moving, and a
four-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 into
themselves. It learns nothing from outside itself except to move and
extend 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 as
one mystery disappeared. "I feel your feelings, but the thing is not
alive. 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 knew
everything as soon as the facts were in his mind. Yet here now were
living things crawling toward the machine, just like the excrescence at
one end but in no way a part of it! The feeling of _willed_ effort as
they crawled slowly toward it, white and pink striped, reaching grasping
feelers into the turgid product, taking it in, then rising on easing
legs as the food spread within them.
"There _are_ living creatures here!" Creno pondered. "I feel your
messages. Twenty, thirty--a horde is crawling from that mountain toward
it."
"Four thousand three hundred and ninety-one," said Harta. She
concentrated. "There are three thousand and five more in the mountain
caves, waiting to come out as the others return."
Back