CODE OF THE LIFEMAKER

      THE SEARCHER

        1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.;
        1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE
        SOLAR SYSTEM


AD ENGLISH-SPEAKING HUMANS EXISTED, THEY
would probably have translated the spacecraft's des-
ignation as "searcher." Unmanned, it was almost a mile
long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmo-
spheres, and it operated fully under the control of com-
puters. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and
the computers were very sophisticated.
    The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage
of many years was the fourth in the system of a star named
after the king of a mythical race of alien gods, and could 
appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn't much to look 
at——an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a
lot of boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts,
and vast areas of volcanic ash and dust——but the search-
er's orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich 
in titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, ura-
nium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by
thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planet's
history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support
large-scale production without extensive dependence on
bulk nuclear transmutation processes—— in other words,
very economically——and that was precisely the kind of
things that the searcher had been designed to search for.
After completing their analysis of the preliminary data,
the control computers selected a landing site, composed
and transmitted a message home to report their findings
and announce their intentions, and then activated the ves-
sel's descent routine.
    Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor ro-
bots, equipped with imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, 
chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation monitors, and
various manipulator appendages, emerged from the ship
and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investi-
gate surface features selected from orbit. Their findings
were transmitted back to the ship and processed, and
shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and 
wheeled mining, drilling, and transportation robots went
out to begin feeding ores and other materials back to
where more machines had begun to build a fusion-pow-
ered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was 
constructed next, followed by a parts-assembly facility,
and step by step the pilot plant grew itself into a fully
equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own
control computers. The master programs from the ship's 
computers were copied into the factory's computers, which
thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control of
surface operations. The factory then began making more
robots.
    Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as
intended, but the alien engineers had created their own
counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in their
plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and
routine wear and tear in the factory; troubleshooting pro-
grams tracked down causes of production rejects and ad-
justed the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown
teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and
specialized scavenging robots roamed the surface in search 
of wrecks, write-offs, discarded components, and any other
likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.
    Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot pop-
ulation grew in number and variety. When the population
had attained a critical size, a mixed workforce detached
itself from the main center of activity and migrated a few
miles away to build a second factory, a replica of the first,
using materials supplied initially from Factory One. When
Factory Two became self-sustaining, Factory One, its pri-
mary task accomplished, switched to mass-production
mode, producing goods and materials for eventual ship-
ment to the alien home planet.
    While Factory Two was repeating the process by
commencing work on Factory Three, the labor detail from
Factory One picked up its tools and moved on to begin 
Factory Four. By the time Factory Four was up and run-
ning, Factories Five through Eight were already taking
shape. Factory Two was in mass-production mode, and
Factory Three was building the first fleet of cargo
vessels to carry home the products being stockpiled. This
self-replicating pattern would spread rapidly to transform
the entire surface of Zeus IV into a totally automated
manufacturing complex dedicated to supplying the distant
alien civilization from local resources.
    From within the searcher's control computers, the Su-
pervisor program gazed out at the scene through its data
input channels and saw that its work was good. After a 
thorough overhaul and systems checkout, the searcher
ship reembarked its primary workforce and launched it-
self into space to seek more worlds on which to repeat
the cycle.

   FIFTY YEARS LATER

    Not far——as galactic distances go——from Zeus was an-
other star, a hot , bluish white star with a mass of over
fifteen times that of the Sun. It had formed rapidly, and 
its lifespan——the temporary halt of its collapse under self-
gravitation by thermonuclear radiation pressure——had de-
manded such a prodigious output of energy as to be a
brief one. In only ten million years the star, which had
converted all the hydrogen in its outer shell to helium, 
resumed its collapse until the core temperature was high 
enough to burn the helium into carbon, and then, when
the helium was exhausted, repeated the process to begin
burning carbon. The ignition of carbon raised the core
temperature higher still, which induced a higher rate of
carbon burning, which in turn heated the core even more, 
and a thermonuclear runaway set in which in terms of 
stellar timescales was instantaneous. In mere days the
star erupted into a supernova——radiating with a billion
times the brightness of the Sun, exploding outward until
its photosphere enclosed a radius greater than that of 
Uranus' orbit, devouring its tiny flock of planets in 
the process.
    Those planets had been next on the searcher's list to
investigate, and it happened that the ship was heading
into its final approach when the star exploded. The rad-
diaton blast hit it head-on at three billion miles out.
    The searchers hull survived more-or-less intact, but
secondary x-rays and high-energy subnuclear particles——
things distinctly unhealthy for computers——flooded its in-
terior. With most of its primary sensors burned out, its
navigation system disrupted, and many of its programs
obliterated or altered, the searcher veered away and dis-
appeard back into the depths of interstellar space.
    One of the faint specks lying in the direction now ahead
of the ship was a yellow-white dwarf star, a thousand
light-years away. It too possessed a family of planets, and
on the third of those planets the descendants of a species
of semi-intelligent ape had tamed fire and were beginning
to experiment with tools chipped laboriously from thin
flakes of stone.
    Supernovas are comparatively rare events, occurring
with a frequency of perhaps two or three per year in the
average galaxy, But as with most generalizations, this has
occasional exceptions. The supernova that almost enve-
loped the searcher turned out to be the first of a small
chain that rippled through a localized cluster of massive
stars formed at roughly the same time. Located in the
middle cluster was a normal, longer-lived star which
happened to be the home star of the aliens. The aliens
had never gotten round to extending their civilization much
beyond the limits of their own planetary system, which
was unfortunate because that was the end of them.
    Everybody has a bad day sometimes.