August 15, 2025 • 13 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Sweet, their blood and sticky by Albert R. Teitner. They
weren't human, weren't even related to humanity through ties of blood,
but they were our airs. The machine had stood there
(00:21):
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.
(00:41):
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 nat of
a very needful human race, but there had been no
(01:03):
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.
(01:24):
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
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
(01:44):
day when the packager collapsed at the edge of the
total evaporation zone. Kreno 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,
(02:10):
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
(02:31):
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, hard to
focus to it, She strained, and then relaxed, speaking, The
circuits are closed into themselves. It learns nothing from outside
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
your feelings, but the thing is not alive. It is
a machine. I 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. Harda
throbbed with excitement. How could Greno be wrong? He knew
(03:38):
everything as soon as the facts were in his mind.
Yet here now we're living things, crawling toward the machine,
just like the excrescens 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,
(04:00):
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 ninety one, said Harda. She concentrated
(04:21):
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 one 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,
(04:43):
offspring who were nudged along by their elders. But these
small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all.
After they had fed joyously, they danced back toward the mountain.
A few of medium height went back in pairs firm
taffy fingers intertwined in each other. They mate, said Kreno.
(05:04):
It is their custom. How tiring they are, said Harta,
I have lost interest. We have seen thirty one worlds
with such customs, and these creatures are too simple to
be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system.
Not yet, Creno insisted. We passed through the ocean and
(05:24):
survived the lands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has
there been the tiniest unit of life. Why at this
one spot should something exist? But we have several parallel situations,
Harta protested, they were colonies landed in one spot by
the civilization of another planet. They landed here with their
(05:47):
feeder machine, and that is the explanation. Your mind does
not function well in a four dimension continuum, Harta, You
will need more training. But these cases are rare, and Kreno,
I know they are rare, my child, but still they exist.
You will have to learn eventually a little at a time. Now, then,
(06:09):
it is a rule of such limited dimensional realms that
the movement of matter and events from place to place
is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures must be observed. To
transport a machine this size across their space would have
required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have.
More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller
(06:31):
device would have supplied them with food. I am forced
to conclude that somehow we are approaching this problem backwards backwards.
You mean they made the machine here after they came.
He did not reply to that. We must concentrate together
on thinking ourselves into their functioning in the manifold. Harta
(06:53):
followed his suggestion, and soon their thoughts were moving among
and within the striped creatures. The sides of their bodies
consisted of fundamentally the same taffy substance, but it had
been modified by various organic structures. All though, were built
of the same fundamental units, elongated thin cells, which readily
(07:14):
aligned themselves in semi crystalline patterns. Enough, Greno said, back
to the hill. Their rows of thin limbs rested on
the ridge crest. Once more. We have seen such cell
crystals before. She sighed the inefficiencies in such a poverty
of dimensions. Do you still think we have looked at
(07:36):
it backwards? Of course we have. They did not bring
the machine or make it. The machine made them. That
is not possible, Creno, great as you are in these matters,
we have never seen life created by a machine before.
No one ever has. From the millions of reports I
have seen at home, maybe we have and not known it.
(07:59):
The life we have seen always evolved through enormous eons,
and we could not see its origins clearly. In most cases,
here we are dealing with something that has taken comparatively
little time. He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had
said so much. No disregard such theories. You are still
too young to bother with them. Here is the important thing.
(08:23):
This machine was left by an earlier race that disappeared.
Everything else was destroyed, but it went right on producing
its substance. The substance is not life. It is only
four dimensional matter. Right. But over a long enough time,
you know this as well as I do, random factors
will eventually produce a life form. By some trick of radiation,
(08:47):
this process has been speeded up here. The substance the
machine produces has in turn produced life. Creno sensed with
a tremor, some dangerous shifting and hardest consciousness. As an elder,
it was his duty to prevent a premature insight in
the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up.
He must go no farther. It was not necessary. Harta
(09:10):
took it up for him. Then. Any substance producing life
and modified by it, could, if you go far enough back,
be the product of a machine. But it would have
taken so long to produce life that the original matter
that bore the direct imprint of the machine would have
disappeared an error, said Creno desperately. There is just this case.
(09:34):
By the time these creatures have arrived at self knowledge,
the machine will be gone. They will not know it
ever existed. And that is all it means. There is
just this one case. Now we must leave this unimportant
example of minor dimensions. He strained consciousness to a forward movement,
but Harta remained behind. He had to pull back start,
(09:59):
he ordered. Her. Mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too.
He applied all his force to bring her back into control,
but she still held fast. Something more is hidden from me.
I will be back, she said, and she disappeared from
the ridge. He had never faced such a quandary before,
(10:19):
on a training trip with a younger one. If he
went in pursuit, he would find her ultimately, that was
in the nature of being older and wiser. But if
she revolted against his pursuit, she could extend the time
considerably on this forsaken planet, and he wanted to get
her away as soon as possible. The more time here,
the more chance that the awful truth would come to
(10:42):
her before her time. He watched the growing waves of
creatures floundering toward the vast oozing puddle, which refilled itself
as quickly as it was diminished by them, and the
receding waves of those that had already fed. This, he
could see was an endless process. The whole life of
the species moved in continuous, sistily diastally around the machine.
(11:06):
Soon he would have to go in search of her,
but then she was back at his side, her being
for this world once more solidified. She concentrated for a
moment on the pink striped waves of rippling inward and
outward around the great sustaining pool, then communicated with him,
we can leave now, there's nothing more to see. Something
(11:29):
in her mind remained close to his, as the mind
of younger never should be too older. But at least
he could see with relief that the worst had not happened.
The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her too early,
when it could only hurt all he found turned to
him as they receded from this thin manifold universe, then
moved up the dimension ladder to their home level was
(11:52):
a surface of happiness. Suddenly, though, as they prepared for
flight in that hyperspace, all her joy was gone. I
saw it, she said, in my free and unrestricted spirit.
I moved deep into the substance of that world below
all the total ruin far below, And there was a
(12:12):
monstrous machine near the molten core, almost infinitely older than
the feeding one far above it. And it too had
been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed.
I could see it had once produced the ooze from
which came the life, from which in turn come the
beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe
they too thought they were free and unrestricted, he sighed.
(12:37):
For the bitter cost of the knowledge, this one would
no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration,
and he would no longer live vicariously in the happiness
of another being's innocence. Now Hearta too would be seeking
the answer to the question of original creation, the answer
that he had not found in his journeys across a
(12:59):
myriad ad worlds and dimensions, that no one had ever found.
And of sweep their Blood and sticky by Albert R.
Teitner
Sweet, their blood and sticky by Albert R. Teitner. They
weren't human, weren't even related to humanity through ties of blood,
but they were our airs. The machine had stood there
(00:21):
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.
(00:41):
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 nat of
a very needful human race, but there had been no
(01:03):
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.
(01:24):
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
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
(01:44):
day when the packager collapsed at the edge of the
total evaporation zone. Kreno 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,
(02:10):
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
(02:31):
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, hard to
focus to it, She strained, and then relaxed, speaking, The
circuits are closed into themselves. It learns nothing from outside
(02:54):
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
(03:17):
your feelings, but the thing is not alive. It is
a machine. I 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. Harda
throbbed with excitement. How could Greno be wrong? He knew
(03:38):
everything as soon as the facts were in his mind.
Yet here now we're living things, crawling toward the machine,
just like the excrescens 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,
(04:00):
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 ninety one, said Harda. She concentrated
(04:21):
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 one 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,
(04:43):
offspring who were nudged along by their elders. But these
small creatures were the ones who scampered most of all.
After they had fed joyously, they danced back toward the mountain.
A few of medium height went back in pairs firm
taffy fingers intertwined in each other. They mate, said Kreno.
(05:04):
It is their custom. How tiring they are, said Harta,
I have lost interest. We have seen thirty one worlds
with such customs, and these creatures are too simple to
be interesting. Let us go home or try some other system.
Not yet, Creno insisted. We passed through the ocean and
(05:24):
survived the lands of this tiny planet. Nowhere else has
there been the tiniest unit of life. Why at this
one spot should something exist? But we have several parallel situations,
Harta protested, they were colonies landed in one spot by
the civilization of another planet. They landed here with their
(05:47):
feeder machine, and that is the explanation. Your mind does
not function well in a four dimension continuum, Harta, You
will need more training. But these cases are rare, and Kreno,
I know they are rare, my child, but still they exist.
You will have to learn eventually a little at a time. Now, then,
(06:09):
it is a rule of such limited dimensional realms that
the movement of matter and events from place to place
is highly difficult. Certain compacting procedures must be observed. To
transport a machine this size across their space would have
required enormous effort and an intelligence they do not yet have.
More than that, it would have been unnecessary. A smaller
(06:31):
device would have supplied them with food. I am forced
to conclude that somehow we are approaching this problem backwards backwards.
You mean they made the machine here after they came.
He did not reply to that. We must concentrate together
on thinking ourselves into their functioning in the manifold. Harta
(06:53):
followed his suggestion, and soon their thoughts were moving among
and within the striped creatures. The sides of their bodies
consisted of fundamentally the same taffy substance, but it had
been modified by various organic structures. All though, were built
of the same fundamental units, elongated thin cells, which readily
(07:14):
aligned themselves in semi crystalline patterns. Enough, Greno said, back
to the hill. Their rows of thin limbs rested on
the ridge crest. Once more. We have seen such cell
crystals before. She sighed the inefficiencies in such a poverty
of dimensions. Do you still think we have looked at
(07:36):
it backwards? Of course we have. They did not bring
the machine or make it. The machine made them. That
is not possible, Creno, great as you are in these matters,
we have never seen life created by a machine before.
No one ever has. From the millions of reports I
have seen at home, maybe we have and not known it.
(07:59):
The life we have seen always evolved through enormous eons,
and we could not see its origins clearly. In most cases,
here we are dealing with something that has taken comparatively
little time. He stopped, shocked that he, an elder, had
said so much. No disregard such theories. You are still
too young to bother with them. Here is the important thing.
(08:23):
This machine was left by an earlier race that disappeared.
Everything else was destroyed, but it went right on producing
its substance. The substance is not life. It is only
four dimensional matter. Right. But over a long enough time,
you know this as well as I do, random factors
will eventually produce a life form. By some trick of radiation,
(08:47):
this process has been speeded up here. The substance the
machine produces has in turn produced life. Creno sensed with
a tremor, some dangerous shifting and hardest consciousness. As an elder,
it was his duty to prevent a premature insight in
the young. It had been a mistake to bring this up.
He must go no farther. It was not necessary. Harta
(09:10):
took it up for him. Then. Any substance producing life
and modified by it, could, if you go far enough back,
be the product of a machine. But it would have
taken so long to produce life that the original matter
that bore the direct imprint of the machine would have
disappeared an error, said Creno desperately. There is just this case.
(09:34):
By the time these creatures have arrived at self knowledge,
the machine will be gone. They will not know it
ever existed. And that is all it means. There is
just this one case. Now we must leave this unimportant
example of minor dimensions. He strained consciousness to a forward movement,
but Harta remained behind. He had to pull back start,
(09:59):
he ordered. Her. Mind's obstinately frozen stance made him freeze too.
He applied all his force to bring her back into control,
but she still held fast. Something more is hidden from me.
I will be back, she said, and she disappeared from
the ridge. He had never faced such a quandary before,
(10:19):
on a training trip with a younger one. If he
went in pursuit, he would find her ultimately, that was
in the nature of being older and wiser. But if
she revolted against his pursuit, she could extend the time
considerably on this forsaken planet, and he wanted to get
her away as soon as possible. The more time here,
the more chance that the awful truth would come to
(10:42):
her before her time. He watched the growing waves of
creatures floundering toward the vast oozing puddle, which refilled itself
as quickly as it was diminished by them, and the
receding waves of those that had already fed. This, he
could see was an endless process. The whole life of
the species moved in continuous, sistily diastally around the machine.
(11:06):
Soon he would have to go in search of her,
but then she was back at his side, her being
for this world once more solidified. She concentrated for a
moment on the pink striped waves of rippling inward and
outward around the great sustaining pool, then communicated with him,
we can leave now, there's nothing more to see. Something
(11:29):
in her mind remained close to his, as the mind
of younger never should be too older. But at least
he could see with relief that the worst had not happened.
The deeper knowledge had not arrived to her too early,
when it could only hurt all he found turned to
him as they receded from this thin manifold universe, then
moved up the dimension ladder to their home level was
(11:52):
a surface of happiness. Suddenly, though, as they prepared for
flight in that hyperspace, all her joy was gone. I
saw it, she said, in my free and unrestricted spirit.
I moved deep into the substance of that world below
all the total ruin far below, And there was a
(12:12):
monstrous machine near the molten core, almost infinitely older than
the feeding one far above it. And it too had
been left in a stratum where all else was destroyed.
I could see it had once produced the ooze from
which came the life, from which in turn come the
beings by whom the machine above it was made. Maybe
they too thought they were free and unrestricted, he sighed.
(12:37):
For the bitter cost of the knowledge, this one would
no longer go forth in the joy of mere exploration,
and he would no longer live vicariously in the happiness
of another being's innocence. Now Hearta too would be seeking
the answer to the question of original creation, the answer
that he had not found in his journeys across a
(12:59):
myriad ad worlds and dimensions, that no one had ever found.
And of sweep their Blood and sticky by Albert R.
Teitner
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