Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science Fiction July 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE SMALL WORLD OF M-75
By Ed M. Clinton, Jr.
Illustrated by Ed Emsh
_For all his perfection and magnificence he was but a baby with a new found freedom in a strange and baffling world...._
* * * * *
Like sparks flaring briefly in the darkness, awareness first came tohim. Then, there were only instants, shocking-clear, brief: findinghimself standing before the main damper control, discovering himselfadjusting complex dials, instants that flickered uncertainly only tobecome memories brought to life when awareness came again.
He was a kind of infant, conscious briefly that he was, yet unaware ofwhat he was. Those first shocking moments were for him like theterrifying coming of visual acuity to a child; he felt like homoneandertalensis must have felt staring into the roaring fury of hisfirst fire. He was homo metalicus first sensing himself.
Yet--a little more. You could not stuff him with all that technicaldata, you could not weave into him such an intricate pattern ofstimulus and response, you could not create such a magnificentfeedback mechanism, in all its superhuman perfection, and expect, withthe unexpected coming to awareness, to have created nothing more thanthe mirror image of a confused, helpless child.
Thus, when the bright moments of consciousness came, and came, as theydid, more and more often, he brooded, brooded on why the threeblinking red lights made him move to the main control panel and adjustlever C until the three lights flashed off. He brooded on why eachsignal from the board brought forth from him these specific responses,actions completely beyond the touch of his new and uncertain faculty.When he did not brood, he watched the other two robots, performingtheir automatic functions, seeing their responses, like his, weretriggered by the lights on the big board and by the varying patternsof sound that issued periodically from overhead.
It was the sounds which were his undoing. The colored lights, withtheir monotonous regularity, failed to rouse him. But the sounds weresomething else, for even as he responded to them, doing things to thecontrol board in patterned reaction to particular combinations ofparticular sounds, he was struck with the wonderful variety and themaze of complexity in those sounds; a variety and complexity farbeyond that of the colored lights. Thus, being something of anadvanced analytic calculator and being, by virtue of his superiorfeedback system, something considerably more than a simple machine(though he perhaps fell short of those requisites of life sorigorously held by moralists and biologists alike) he began toinvestigate the meaning of the sounds.
* * * * *
Bert Sokolski signed the morning report and dropped it into thetransmitter. He swung around on his desk stool; he was a big man, andthe stool squealed in sharp protest to his shifting weight.
Joe Gaines, who was as short and skinny and dark-haired as hiscolleague was tall and heavily muscled and blond, shuddered at thesound. Sokolski grinned wickedly at his flinching.
"Check-up time, I suppose," muttered Gaines without looking up fromthe magazine he held propped on his knees. He finished the paragraph,snapped the magazine shut, and swung his legs down from the railingthat ran along in front of the data board. "Dirty work forwhite-collar men like us."
Sokolski snorted. "You haven't worn a white shirt in the last sixyears," he growled, rising and going to the supply closet. He swungopen the door and began pulling out equipment. "C'mon, you lazy runt,hoist your own leadbox."
Gaines grinned and slouched over to the big man's side. "Think of howmuch more expensive you are to the government than me," he chortled ashe bent over to strap on heavy, leaded shoes. "Big fellow like youmust cost 'em twice as much to outfit for this job."
Sokolski grunted and struggled into the thick, radiation-resistantsuit. "Think how lucky _you_ are, runt," he responded as he wriggledhis right arm down the sleeve, "that they've got those littleservomechs in there to do the real dirty work. If it weren't for them,they'd have all the shrimps like you crawling down pipes and arounddampers and generally playing filing cabinet for loose neutrons." Heshook himself. "Thanks, Joe," he growled as Gaines helped him with areluctant zipper.
Gaines checked the big man's oxygen equipment and turned his back sothat Sokolski could okay his own. "You're set," said Sokolski, andthey snapped on their helmets, big inverted lead buckets with narrowstrips of shielded glass providing strictly minimal fields of view.Gaines plugged one end of the thickly insulated intercom cable intothe socket beneath his armpit, then handed the other end to Sokolski,who followed suit.
Sokolski checked out the master controls on the data board and nodded.He clicked on the talkie. "Let's go," he said, his voice, echoinginside the helmet before being transmitted, sounding distant andhollow.
Gaines leading, the cable sliding and coiling snakelike between them,they passed through the doorway, over which huge red letters shoutedANYONE WHO WALKS THROUGH THIS DOOR UNPROTECTED WILL DIE, and clompeddown the zigzagging corridor toward the uranium pile that crouchedwithin the heart of the plant.
Gaines moaned, "It gets damned hot inside these suits."
They had reached the end of the trap, and Sokolski folded a thickmittened hand around one handle on the door to the Hot Room. "Not halfso hot as it gets outside it, sweetheart, where we're going." Hejerked on the handle and Gaines seized the second handle and added hisown strength. The huge door slid unwillingly back.
The silent sound of the Hot Room surged out over them--the breathlesswhisper of chained power struggling to burst its chains. Sokolskichecked his neutron tab and his gamma reader and they stepped over thethreshold. They leaned into the door until it had slid shut again.
"I'll take the servomechs, Bert," piped Gaines, tramping clumsilytoward the nearest of the gyro-balanced single-wheeled robots.
"You always do, it being the easiest job. Okay, I'll work the board."
Gaines nodded, a gesture invisible to his partner. He reached thefirst servo, a squat, gleaming creature with the symbol M-11 etchedacross its rotund chest, and deactivated it by the simple expedient ofpulling from its socket the line running from the capacitor unit inthe lower trunk of its body to the maze of equipment that jammed itsenormous chest. The instant M-11 ceased functioning, the other twoservomechs were automatically activated to cover that section of thecontrols with which M-11 was normally integrated.
This was overloading their individual capacities, but it was aninherent provision designed to cover the emergency that would followany accidental deactivation of one of them. It was also the only wayin which they could be checked. You couldn't bring them outside to alab; they were _hot_. After all, they spent their lives under aceaseless fusillade of neutrons, washed eternally with the deadlyradiations pouring incessantly from the pile whose overlords theywere. Indeed, next to the pile itself, they were the hottest things inthe plant.
"Nice job these babies got," commented Gaines as he checked thecapacitor circuits. He reactivated the servo and went on to M-19.
"If you think it's so great, why don't you volunteer?" counteredSokolski, a trifle sourly. "Incidentally, it's a good thing we camein, Joe. There's half a dozen units here working on reservetransistors."
Their sporadic conversation lapsed; it was exacting work and theycould remain for only a limited time under that lethal radiation.Then, almost
sadly, Gaines said, "Looks like the end of the road forM-75."
"Oh?" Sokolski came over beside him and peered through the violet hazeof his viewing glass. "He's an old timer."
Gaines slid an instrument back into the pouch of his suit, and pattedthe robot's rump. "Yep, I'd say that capacitor was good for aboutanother thirty-six hours. It's really overloading." He straightened."You done with the board?"
"Yeah. Let's get outta here." He looked at his tab. "Time's about upanyway. We'll call a demolition unit for your pal here, and then rigup a service pattern so one of his buddies can repair the board."
They moved toward the door.
* * * * *
M-75 watched the two men leave and deep inside him something shifted.The heavy door closed