Project Gutenberg's Sweet Their Blood and Sticky, by Albert Teichner

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Title: Sweet Their Blood and Sticky

Author: Albert Teichner

Release Date: May 22, 2007 [EBook #21568]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SWEET THEIR BLOOD AND STICKY ***

Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Tamise Totterdell and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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.

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