Page 26 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Invasion of the Silicates

the rest. Bombing its central command won’t work because it
doesn’t have one.”
“Sorry I’m being defensive,” said Rutger unapologetically, “but I
don’t think this idea is a greater stretch than rousing a sleeping giant
made of mud and gravel to do your bidding, and then trying to put
the genie back in the bottle. It has some nice scientific-sounding
mumbo-jumbo to keep the reader mollified. What I need is the
means to fight the thing. What do you think?”
Feghootsky was surprised.
“You mean you don’t have any solutions already concocted? I
find that hard to believe.”
“If I do, I don’t find them worthy of discussion here.” Schlager
spread his hands. “Maybe I already regret conjuring up this
insensate invader. Come on, you must have some idea, Fred.”
“Okay, but let me first say that you are not providing enough
information for an intelligent species like ours to take as a starting
point for finding a solution. You have given us an evolutionary
possibility we might find hard to swallow: a mindless inorganic
substance feeding on other inorganic substances: no co-
evolutionary relationship with its environment: not really a predator,
barely a parasite, in no way a symbiont. Nevertheless, it must have
an Achilles’ heel; otherwise humanity is mocked as well as
threatened—although I don’t see how petrification of the desert
could be an extinction event on the scale of a meteor collision. No,
the scientists will discover a solvent no more complicated to use
than crop-dusted herbicide and insecticide. But I don’t see any
dramatic opportunities there, unless you throw in some
international or corporate intrigue making that discovery more
contingent on espionage than laboratory work usually is, setting
traps and hazards for your protagonists.”
“Not much help,” said Rutger. “Or do you expect some home
remedy to save the day—baking soda and vinegar, with a dash of
mustard powder, perhaps? I want mankind up against the wall,
fighting a literally implacable enemy. Deserts are on every
continent—maybe this could unite the world!”

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