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."

* * * * *

They came in groups of about a hundred, pulling themselves slowly toward
the edges of the great sticky lake that lay within the vaster area where
the pink matter dried and crumbled into the strong breeze. Some were
smaller than others, offspring who were nudged along by their elders.
But t