Chapter V
When the music had done Gud picked up a curved line which was shaped like a scimetar and whacked at the whirling spheres. Each time Gud whacked, he whacked off a disk from a whirling sphere; and the disks continued to whirl and ceased not. Soon a corner of space was full of whirling wheels. And Gud wondered what made the wheels go round.
As he felt the wheels go round Gud remembered a far and distant world he had once visited before he had destroyed the universe. He remembered that this little world had been full of machines and that the machines had wheels going round, and could make things. And Gud remembered as far back as a god can remember, and yet he could not recall ever having made machines that made things. He saw that he had been unprogressive to have created with hand tools and never to have made machines nor the things that machines made.
So Gud resolved straightway to make a creating machine. He gathered the wheels together and filled them with substance from the heap of matter that he had made. And then he took squares and triangles and curves and cones and rhomboids and tetrahedrons and a great many other things that were in space; and he worked very fast and furiously, and presently he had made a machine which ground with a deafening roar, for it was a high-speed, self-acting, creating machine, the like of which had never been.
And the machine began to create and to grind out things. But there was nothing alive in the things which the creating machine ground out, for it had not in it the breath of life, but only the spirit of the machine. Those things which the machine made were other machines; and they came out of the creating machine endowed with the spirit of the machine, and straightway they began also to turn and grind with a great and discordant roar.
The machines of transportation began to distribute the other machines through space. They roared and shrieked and whistled as they hurtled thither and yon, and Gud fled before them.
Then came also great lighting machines and filled all the center of space with light, and drove the darkness into the outer edges of space, toward which Gud had fled.
There were many myriads of machines that Gud did not know, and he had no time in which to name them. But there were some machines that were very dreadful, and of these Gud knew the names and the uses, for he had seen the like of them in the little world of machines he had once visited, for these were killing machines.
But the killing machines could find nothing to kill for there was not any life, but only the machines that were fast filling all space. The spirit of the killing machines was not to create but to destroy and they boomed and shrieked mightily for their prey. Gud was sore afraid, and because of the great noise of the machines, he could not remember that he was immortal and need not fear even the killing machines.