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if it wants, it can have that organic weapon repro-duce itself on and on. It
is a genetic engineer, using its own mass to make its children. And it is
intelligent, not just a machine-like being. Not like you or I, of course, but
clever enough to out-think us.  It doesn't sound good, Leo said. It
isn't.  You aren't giving up, are you?  No. Leo grabbed Hulann's heavy biceps
and squeezed, grinned at the scaly naoli. Hulann grinned back, though he did
not much feel in the mood for such a pleasantry.The spy-bee ceased to hover
and snapped against the windscreen, shattering into dozens of little bits and
leav-ing a chip on the plastiglass. It broke!  Leo said. The Isolator ordered
it to destruction, Hulann cor-rected hint But why?  Don't get your hopes up,
the alien said, pulling his lips back from his teeth, baring the gleaming
points, his four nostrils flared and his eyes wide and cautious.  If the
Isolator has destroyed the bee, that can only mean that it is already sending
a weapon for us and does not need the little mechanical monitor any
longer.  Oh, Leo said. He crouched a little deeper into his chair, watching
the sky which had begun to cloud over with low, gray blankets of mist like a
burnished steel bowl laid over the world. He searched the flat stretches of
sand in all directions, peering intently through wa-vering fingers of hot air
that sought to delude him.  I don't see anything, he said at last. You
won't, Hulann said.  It will come too quickly for that.  What can we
do?  Wait  There must be something more!  We can drive, Hulann said.  We can
make this shut-tlecraft move as swiftly as it can. The Isolator only cov-ers
an area of a hundred or two hundred miles square, de-pending on the model. If
we drive fast and long enough, we should escape its territory though I have
never heard of anyone escaping an Isolator.  That's pessimism, Leo
said. That's right, the alien agreed.There was dark sky.And sand.And
something else on its way, something they could not define or imagine until it
was upon them . . .Within the vat, the independent cells of the Isolator
worked together according to the dictates of their group consciousness. It was
true, as Hulann had told the boy, that each individual cell was perfectly
capable of sustain-ing life on its own. But the intelligence of the beast was
a conglomerate one. And all the cells had been pro-grammed, by the naoli
engineers, to respect the need for group action above the natural urge and
ability of each particle to separate itself and exist in isolation.The mother
mass burbled contentedly, like a fat baby chuckling deeply in its throat,
lying there in the bottom of the vat, contemplating its catalogue of
destructive de-vices and employing its limited but genuine imagination to
modify the catalogue items to make them even more deadly than they had been
intended. It was an amber jelly now, shot through with streaks of green as
bright as newly mown grass and blotted with patches of gray as the cells
combined to function in various specialized fash-ions at least through this
moment of crisis when every re-source had to be called upon and used.If anyone
had been within the vat, he would have been repelled by the odor: the smell of
death and decay, even though things were being born not dying. It eman-ated
from the flesh of the Isolator and clung to the warm, metal walls like a film
of grease. It was generated by the heat which was, in turn, generated by the
intricate and exhausting processes of creation which the mother mass was
employing to develop its weaponry.Deep in the mechanical works of the complex,
around the vat itself, the food constructors and dispensers in-creased the
supply of liquid protein that was fed into the bottom of the vat where the
mother mass absorbed and digested it almost instantly, each cell taking what
it re-quired and passing the rest on in a form of high-speed os-mosis
unmatched by any earthly plant. The machines, to obtain the higher demand for
food on the part of the creature they were created to serve, opened the
surface receptors of the ingestion plant and collected more sand, rock, weed,
and cactus for conversion into liquid protein, at the same time obtaining
water from underground pools which other systems siphoned upwards into the
humming works of the station.The smooth surface of the amoeboid mass churned
like pudding stirred from beneath by a beater. The thin ten-sion cracked as an
arm of the jell soared upwards toward the roof of the vat, waving lazily in
the darkness and the steamy mists that now rose from the main body of the
Isolator. The hand-like ball at the end of the  arm broke free and continued
to soar upward, as if it were lighter than air. As it rose, rolling slowly,
slowly, it began to lengthen from a sphereoid into a streamlined form in the
fashion of a knife, though a great deal larger. From either side, thin
membranes spread outward to help it ride on the mists. These wings were more
in the nature of the appendages of a bat than of the feathered limbs of a
bird. They flapped wetly, cracking in the confines of the great tank.Birth had
been given.Slowly, the creature took on features as the mother body smoothed
its work. The face was thin, wicked, and marked with two deep eyes with
cataracted blue-white surfaces that see in all ranges of light. Through these, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]