But the war was over now. The Sirians had been destroyed, or reduced to mere museum pieces. Now the Scientists came to investigate the Sphere. There was much we wanted to learn from the creatures of the Sphere. But it was a strange story that the Sirian sphere had to tell. * * * * * Aeons ago there lived on a great planet of Sirius a race of intelligent men, shaped as we are, but smaller due to the greater gravity of their planet. And these men had developed a high civilization, a civilization different from ours, in that they learned early about mechanics, but chemistry and physics merely developed from the needs of the great mechanical engineers. Electricity was used as a powerful aid in their machines, and in their processes; it was a by-product, not an end. Gradually their machines eliminated more and more of their work; they became more and more complicated, but more and more trustworthy. Men began to experiment with physics and found that their calculating machines needed development. It was easy to add first one step, then the next. More and more the machines could do. The mathematics became more and more complicated, and the machines developed the equations, found they could not handle them and passed them out as unfinished results. Finally one man used the machines to calculate the design of a machine that would be able to do these new equations. He built it, but the calculations were wrong. The machine had correctly solved his problem, but he had stated it wrong. It resulted in a machine that would solve only simple problems, but it did something no other machine had ever done. Given irrelevant data it would choose the correct facts and solve the problem. It was a step, a short step toward a machine that really thought. Progress thereafter was rapid. The machines built machines, had been doing it for decades in fact, but now they did one thing more--they designed them. Now the problem could describe the type of machine needed, and the worker machine would design it, and turn out the completed machine! But these machines were rapidly perfecting the beginning that man had made. Within a decade after that first discovery of the principles of mechanical thought the machine was made that could not only solve problems, but could also originate them. They had developed a brain. It was a great machine, which occupied an entire building, with its massive framework bolted down to the ground.