Albert Teichner

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 surveyed 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 feeder machine. ”