“I have no news from them.”
“And how about the cloud?”
“I sent out a patrol this morning. They just returned one hour ago. They couldn’t detect any trace of the cloud.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even the aircraft?”
“Nothing.”
LAUDA’S HYPOTHESIS
Lauda knocked at the door of the astrogator’s cabin and walked in. The astrogator was making some entries on a photogrammetrical map.
“What’s the matter?” asked Horpach without lifting his head.
“I wanted to talk to you ahout something.”
“Is it that urgent? We’re starting in fifteen minutes.”
“I don’t know. It seems we’re about to figure this place out,” said Lauda.
The astrogator laid aside his compasses. Their eyes met. The biologist was no younger than the commander; strange, that he was still permitted to go on space flights. Apparently he was particularly interested in it. He looked more like an old mechanic than a scientist.
“What have you figured out, then? Let’s hear it.”
“We’ve turned up living organisms in the ocean,” answered Lauda. “Life in the ocean, but none at all on land.”
“How is that? There
“That’s right. Traces more than five million years old. But later all life on land was exterminated. What I’m about to say sounds fantastic, Astrogator, and I have next to no proof for it, but here’s the way it might have come about: imagine, once upon a time, some millions of years ago, a rocket landed here. A rocket that originated from some other system, perhaps from the region of a nova.”
Lauda spoke faster now, his voice calm and firm.
“We know for a fact, that intelligent life existed on the sixth planet of the system before the explosion of the Zeta of the Lyre constellation. These creatures had a highly developed technology. Suppose a scouting craft of the Lyre people landed here on this planet. Maybe there was a crash landing or some other catastrophe that totally wiped out the ship’s crew — a nuclear explosion, say, or a chain reaction — anyhow, there wasn’t a single living being aboard that wreck that touched down on Regis. Only robots, automated and computerized machines remained. Not the kind we have, with a trunk, a head and limbs, resembling the human body. The inhabitants of the Lyre were probably not humanoid at all in appearance, and they constructed their robots to resemble them. The robots were unharmed and left the ship. They were highly specialized homeostatic mechanisms, capable of withstanding the most difficult environmental conditions. Now they no longer had anyone to direct their activities. Perhaps those robots whose mental processes were closest to those of their creators even tried to repair the wrecked craft, although this would serve no useful pupose under the circumstances. But you know the way robots operate. A repair robot will always repair, everything he’s been programed for, whether it makes sense in a given situation or not. Then a separate group of robots became independent of the others. Perhaps they were attacked by the local fauna. Lizardlike reptiles, predators lived on the planet at that time, and certain predators will attack anything that moves. The robots fought them off and won the battle. They had to be armed for a fight like that — in other words, they adapted to local conditions as best they could. We’d have to assume, of course, that these robots were capable of producing other machines according to their specific needs of the moment. Let’s say they needed flying machines to fight off these saurians. Needless to say, I don’t know any details. I am only imagining the way the situation might have evolved under natural conditions. Maybe there were no flying reptiles here at all, only burrowing reptiles, living underground. I simply have no way of knowing. But in any event the robots would have adapted perfectly to life on the continents of this planet. They succeeded so well that they were victorious in their battle against all life forms. Including plants.”
“Plants? How do you account for that?”
“I’m not quite sure. I could advance several hypotheses, but I’d rather not. Incidentally I haven’t even mentioned the most important part yet. Hundreds of generations later the ‘offspring’ of the first mechanisms were no longer anything like the original products created by the Lyre civilization. Do you follow me? It was the beginning of an evolution of nonliving things, an evolution of machines. After all, what’s the first principle of a homeostat? To outlast, to survive under changing conditions, however difficult and hostile these conditions may be. The forms that eventually resulted from this evolution faced a peril far greater than attack by the local fauna and flora. They were forced to search out sources of energy and raw materials in order to produce spare parts and new organisms. This search led to the development of a kind of mining industry. Their ancestors — the ones who arrived with our hypothetical spaceship — must have been originally powered by some radioactive source. But there are no radioactive elements present on this planet. In other words, they no longer had access to this particular supply of power, and so were forced to find another one. This would have led to a critical shortage of power and eventually to a battle over the source of energy supply. The machines waged war on each other in a literal struggle for survival. And of course this is the basis for all evolution: survival of the fittest, due to natural selection. In this battle, the ‘intellectually’ superior mechanisms, which needed considerable amounts of, energy (not least, perhaps, because of their size) were no match for the less developed but more economical and more productive machines — ”
“Hold it. Aside from the fact that this all sounds like pure fantasy, isn’t it true that it is precisely the organism with the highest developed nervous system who usually wins the evolutionary battle? Even if the nervous system had been replaced in this case by an electronic system, the principle would still remain the same.”
“Correct. But only in the case of homogenous organisms that naturally evolved on the same planet — not those that arrived from other planets.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s this simple: on Earth, the biochemical prerequisites for the proper functioning of organisms have always been and still are almost always the same. Algae, amoebae, plants, animals — they’re all made up of nearly identical cells; they all have a very similar protein-based metabolism. And in view of this common basic building block, this common point of origin, what you have just outlined about the development of the machines becomes a distinguishing characteristic rather than a common one. It is not the only one, but one of the most important. However, the situation was quite different in this case. There were two types of mechanisms that landed here on Regis. The more complicated obtained their energy from their own radioactive stores of supply, while the simpler mechanisms, small repair systems, derived their power from solar cells that were recharged by sunlight. This was a tremendous advantage and made them superior to the other radioactive-powered type.”
“But the higher developed mechanisms might have robbed them of these solar batteries. And anyway, what good is all this debate? Why should we even talk about it? It may not even be worth discussing. What do you say, Lauda?”
“Quite the contrary! This is an important point! As I see it, an inanimate evolution of a most peculiar character has taken place here, due to extraordinary conditions which came about by chance. This is the way it looks to me. Two types of systems were successful in this evolutionary pattern: first, those that had made the greatest advances in miniaturization, and then those that became settled in a definite place. The first type were the beginning of these Talack clouds. I believe them to be very tiny pseudo insects that, if necessary, and for their common good, can unite to form a superordinate system. This is the course taken by the evolution of the mobile mechanisms. The stationary mechanisms, on the other hand, were the starting point for this strange metallic vegetation, the ‘ruins’ of the areas we thought were cities — ”
“In other words, you don’t think they are cities?”
“No, of course not. They’re merely collections of mechanisms that became stationary. Inanimate structures that self-reproduced and were outfitted with special organs to store solar energy. That seems to be the function of the small triangular plates.”
