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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein
 |
| Dingbat | ||
| An alien mechanical parasite. |
On a strange alien planet, a mechanical parasite developed.
| The man looked dully at Dan. “Charlie’s the name,” he said. “Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.”
“Doesn’t sound practical,” said Dan. “I’ve built a few gadgets myself, but I wouldn’t try to stick a radio in a pen and then try to use it for a watch to boot.” “There’s space for a pack of cigarettes,” said the salesman. “Buy one for the lady? Plenty of compact room.” Dan Courtland picked up one. They were shapeless little blobs about four inches long and weighing about a half pound... "...I’m an inventor — but I wish I was as good as the guy who invented this combination washing machine, street car, and fire truck, providing it works. Wonder if it actually gives the time.” He took one of the Dingbats out of his pocket. A large, delicately figured watch face showed him the time. “That’s funny,” he muttered. “I'd swear that didn’t have a watch face on it before. It must have a snap cover that slid back as I took it out... As soon as class was over, Dan took the Little Dingbat into the lab behind the classroom and put it on a bench. He sat down and looked at it. From one angle it seemed to be cubical and gray. From another it seemed round and slightly green. Dan turned it around. It looked more like a flat disk from this side... He laughed to himself. Combination pen and watch and portable radio! ...He picked up the Dingbat as if it were an electropen, and then he saw that the corner that had been turned away from him actually did contain a point. But why hadn’t he seen it when that side had been facing him? He turned the Dingbat over and it fitted comfortably into his hand. It wrote smoothly and more rapidly than any other he had ever used. |
| Technovelgy from Deadly Host,
by Raymond F. Jones. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1945 Additional resources -
|
They come from the planet of Sian, described as a "mechanical world".
“The Sianese themselves are completely mechanical. Brains, appendages, and all. No one has ever seen anything of the insides of one. We know only that they exist. They wear out or die. And they reproduce by a method of group construction. I am the only man who has ever observed the process. I was able to see once how eight of them gathered around a workbench and took enough parts out of themselves to assemble a ninth creature that joined them apparently as intelligent and able as themselves. I believe that certain specialized mechanisms within the Sianese are constantly producing these parts used in assembling others.”
“And so?” said Dan.
“On Sian there are life forms of metal that are as different from each other as are the life forms of Earth. There are animals there, and insects, and even a peculiar sort of thing that is almost plantlike.”
Bud stopped and Dan kept looking at him. “Keep going.” "
“The Dingbats.” said Bud, “are insects of Sian.”
“Insects!”
“Right. Mechanical insects, a particularly deadly breed. The Sianese try to exterminate them with little radiation guns just like we spray flies.”
“Historians have tried to prove that the Sianese are the results of a civilization conquered by the robots it built to serve it. No one knows any facts that are really certain except that Sianese history goes back about sixty thousand years and stops abruptly. No petering out. Just stops.
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'Power could be compressed thus into an inch-square cube of what looked like blue-white ice'
'It's so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself...'
'Heavy penalties... were to be applied to any one found driving manually-controlled machines.'
'Buy a Little Dingbat... electropen, wrist watch, pocketphone, pocket radio, billfold ... all in one.'
'... an elastic, tinted material that had all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.'
'It is remarkable that the long leverages of their machines are in most cases actuated by a sort of sham musculature...'
