"Strange item," muttered General Lloyd.
"I assume it to be some means of control and communication," said Harry Vinson. "Lord, what a program for any machine or any human, for that matter."
Admiral Sarne shrugged. "Seems to me that a logic machine capable of thought might be better able to perform to its own plan than a human."
"Not in the beginning," said Vinson. "Consider the evolutional problem—"
"You treat the thing as though it were alive," objected Hegeman.
"To all intents and purposes, it is," said Vinson flatly. "Even to evolution. Consider the life of machinery. It must have started with the little automatic repair machines. There are some twenty-two thousand electron tubes in each one, you know, and so we devised a gadget that went down the aisles and replaced them one after another automatically. Now, the machine must have started from that crude affair and by using its cable-clamps, worked on another machine capable of more complex action. Sort of like a lobster fashioning a hammer out of a rock with its claws. Then the more complex machine must have rebuilt the repair-gadgets, making them even more facile—and so on until we have the completely capable machine.
"So," he said with a grim smile, "if that isn't evolution, what is?"
"But evolution is a natural process."
"Is it necessarily so? Remember, we humans breed bigger and better cattle, dogs, birds, and plants. We are making evolution less a natural process in every form of domesticated and semi-domesticated life—but our own. By its own rules, the human race is sheer mongrel!"