ave looked at 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. 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--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 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 in Harta's
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 further.

It was not necessary. Harta 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."

"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," 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 on a training trip