The Small World of M-75, Ed M. Clinton [little readers TXT] 📗

away, and though he struggled to keep hold of it, it seemed irretrievably gone. Once more the omnipotent voice clamped over him like a harsh hand over the mouth of a squalling babe. "You will go to Section AA-39 of the control board. What's the schedule, Joe? Thanks. M-75, your movement pattern is as follows: Z-29-a-q-39-8...."

Powerless to resist, though every crystal and atom of his reasoning self fought to thrust aside the command, M-75 obeyed. He moved along the prescribed pattern, clipping wires with metal fingers that sprouted blades, rewiring with a dexterity beyond anything human, soldering with a thumb that generated a white heat, removing bulbs and parts and fetching replacements from the vent where they popped up at precisely the right moment. He could not help doing the job perfectly: the design of the board to its littlest detail was imprinted indelibly on his memory tapes.

But that certain portion of him, a little fragment greater than before, remained detached and watchful. Vividly recorded was the passage of the two men into, through, and out of the room, and the things they had done while there. So even while he worked on the board he ran and re-ran that memory pattern through a segment of his analyzer. From the infinite store of data filed away in his great chest, his calculator sifted and selected, paired and compared, and long before the repair job on the big board was done, M-75 knew how to get out of the room. The world was getting a little small for him.

aines dialed a number on the plant phone and swayed back casually in his chair as he listened to the muted ringing on the other end. The buzz broke off in midburp and a dour voice said: "Dirty work and odd jobs division, Lister talking."

"Joe Gaines, Harry. Got a hot squad lying around doing nothing?"

"Might be I could scare up a couple of the boys."

"Well, do so. One of our servos—"

A metallic bang interrupted Gaines, a loud, incisive bang that echoed dankly through the quiet of the chamber.

"What the hell was that?" growled Lister.

Gaines blinked, his eyes following Sokolski as the latter looked up from his work and rose to his feet.

"Joe—still there?" came Lister's impatient voice.

"Yeah, yeah. Anyway, this baby's ready for the demo treatment. And a real hot one, Harry. Coupla years inside that Einstein oven and you ain't exactly baked Alaska when you come out."

"Shortly."

Once again came the same sharp, metallic clang, ringing through the room. Unmistakably, it came from the direction of the pile. Slowly, as though reluctant to let go, Gaines dropped the receiver back on its cradle.

"Bert—" he began, and felt his face grow bloodless.

Sokolski walked over in front of the opening into the maze and stood, arms akimbo, huge head cocked to one side, listening.

"Bert, funny noises coming out of nuclear—"

Sokolski ignored him and took a step forward. Gaines shuffled to his side, and they listened.

Out of the maze rattled half a dozen loud, grinding, metallic concussions.

"Bert—"

"You said that before."

"Bert, listen!" screeched Gaines.

Sokolski looked up at the high ceiling, squinted, and tried to place the perfectly familiar but unidentifiable sound that came whispering down the maze.

And then he knew. "The door to the pile!" he spluttered.

Gaines was beside himself with horror. "Bert, let's get going. I don't like this—"

All of a sudden Geiger counters in the room began their deadly conversation, a rising argument that swooped in seconds from a low mumble to a shouting thunder-storm of sound. Gamma signals hooted, the tip off cubes on either side of the maze entrance became red, and the radiation tabs clipped to their wrists turned color before their eyes.

Then they were staring for what seemed like an eternity, utterly overwhelmed by its very impossibility, at a sight they had never imagined they might ever see: a pile servomech wheeling silently around the last bend in the maze and straight toward them.

Sokolski had sense enough to push the red emergency button as they fled past it.

he command sequence fulfilled, M-75 turned away from the repaired board. He sensed again that disconcerting shift of orientation as he faced the light-studded panel. Once more he was moving in quick automatic response to the flickering lights, once more his big chest was belching and grumbling and buzzing instantaneous un-thought answers to the problem data flashing from the board.

But now he remained aware that he was reacting, and conscious also that there had been times when he did not respond to the board. The moment to moment operation of the controls occupied only a small portion of his vast electrical innards. So, as he rolled back and forth, flicking controls and adjusting levers, doing smoothly those things which he could not help but do, the rest of his complex, changing faculties were considering that fact, analyzing, comparing it to experience and memory, always sifting, sifting. It was not too long before he came to a shocking conclusion.

Knowing that the sounds that had set him to working on the repair pattern had first disassociated him from the dictatorship of the blinking lights; remembering exultantly that supreme moment of complete freedom; shocked by its passing; remembering that its passing like its coming, had followed a set of sounds: there was only one possible conclusion that could be derived from all of this.

He located, in his memory banks, the phrase which had freed him from the board, and he traced its complex chain of built-in stimulus-response down into the heart of his circuitry. He found the unit—or more accurately, he found its taped activating symbol—that cut him from the board.

For a moment he hesitated, not really sure of what to do. There was no way for him to reproduce the sound pattern; but, as a partly self-servicing device, he knew something of his own structure, and had learned a good deal more about it in tracing down the cut-off phrase.

Still he hesitated, as though what he was about to do was perhaps forbidden. It could not have been a question of goodness or badness, for morality was certainly not built into him. Probably somewhere in his tapes there was a built-in command that forbade it, but he was too much his own master now to be hampered by such a thing.

The door to the unknown outside passed within his field of view for a second as he moved about his work. The sight of it tripped something in his chest, and he felt again that strange sensation of growing power, of inherent change. First had come simple awareness; and then symbols had found their place in his world; and now he had discovered, in all its consuming fullness, curiosity.

He carefully shorted out the cut-off unit.

He was free.

He stared at the board and the blinking lights and the huge dials with their swaying needles, at the levers and handles and buttons, and revelled in his freedom from them, rocking to and fro and rolling giddily from side to side, swamped with the completeness of it.

The other two servomechs swung over slightly so that they could better cover the board alone.

M-75 spun and rolled toward the great door.

His hands clanged loudly against the door. The huge metal appendages, designed for other work than this, were awkward at first. But he was learning as he moved. He was now operating in a new universe, but the same laws, ultimately, worked. The first failure of coordination between visual data and the manipulation of metal hands quickly passed. Half a dozen trials and he had learned the new pattern, and it became data for future learning.

He moved swiftly and deftly. He clutched the handhold and rolled backward, as he had seen the men do. The door slid open easily before his great weight and firm mechanical strength.

He sped across the threshold, spun to face into the maze, and rolled down it, swinging sharply left and right, back and forth, around the corners of the jagged corridor.

Data poured into his sensors. His awareness was a steady thing of growing intensity now, and he fed avidly on every fragment of information that crashed at him from the strange new world into which he rushed headlong. He struggled to evaluate and file the data as rapidly as it came to him. It seemed to exceed his capacity for instantaneous evaluation to an increasing degree that began to alarm him. But driven by curiosity as he was, he could only hurry on.

He burst into a huge room, a room filled with roaring, rattling sounds that meant nothing to him.

Two men stood before him, making loud noises. He searched his memory, and discovered only fragments of the sounds they made filed there. His curiosity, bursting, was boundless, and for a moment he was unable to decide which thing in this expanding universe to pursue first. Attracted by their movement, he swung ominously toward the men.

They fled, making more noises. This, too, was data, and he filed it.

-75 did not immediately follow Gaines and Sokolski out of the room. Fascinated by the multitude of new things surrounding him on every side, he held back. He glided over to the master control panel, puzzled by its similarity to the board before which he had slaved so long, and lingered before it for a few seconds, wondering and comparing. When he had recorded it completely on his tapes, he swung away and rolled out of the room in the direction the two men had gone.

He found himself in a long, empty corridor, lined by open doors that flickered by, shutterlike, as he flashed past. Ahead he heard new sounds, sounds like the meaningless cacophony the men had shouted at him before rushing off, superimposed over the incessant background sounds—the shrilling, the clanging, the one particular repetitive pattern. Some of the sounds touched and tugged at him, but he shook them off easily.

The corridor led into the foyer of the building, jammed with plant personnel. Their excitement and noise-making rose sharply as he entered. The crowd drew tighter and the men began fighting one another, struggling to get through a door that was never meant to handle more than two at a time.

M-75 skidded to a halt and watched, unmoving. He sensed their fright, even though he could not understand it. Although he was without human emotion, he could evaluate their inherent rejection of him in their action pattern. The realization of it made him hesitate; it was something for which he had no frame of reference whatsoever.

His chest hummed and clicked. Here, again, in this room, was another new universe. Through the door streamed a light of a brilliance beyond anything in his experience; his photocells cringed before its very intensity.

The light cast the shadows of the men fighting to get out, long black wavering silhouettes that splashed across the floor almost to where M-75 rested. He studied them, lost in uncertain analysis.

He remained so, poised, alert, filing, observing, all the while completely unmoving, until long after the last of the shouting men had left the room. Only then did he move, hesitantly, toward the infernally fierce light.

He hung at the brink of the three stone steps that fell away to the grounds outside. Vainly he sought in his memory tapes for a record of a brightness as intense as that which he faced now; sought for a color recording similar to the vast swash of blue that filled the world overhead; or for one of the spreading green that swelled to all sides. He found none.

The vastness of the outside was utterly stunning.

He felt a vague uneasiness, a sensation akin to the horrible frenzy he had felt earlier in the pile.

He rotated from side to side, his receptors sweeping the whole field of view before him. With infinite accuracy his perfect lenses recorded the data in all its minuteness, despite the dazzling sunlight.

There was so much new that it was becoming difficult to make decisions. The vast rolling green, the crowds of men grouped far away and staring at him, above all the searing light. Abruptly he rejected it all. He swung back into the foyer of the plant and faced a dark corner, bringing instant, essential relief to his pulsating photocells.

Staring into the semi-darkness, he re-ran the memory tape of his escape from the pile. The farther he had moved from the pile, it seemed, the less adjusted he had become, the less able he was to judge and correlate.

Silently, lost in his computations, he rolled around and around the foyer for a long, long time. He became aware, finally, that the brilliance outside had paled. He went again to the door and watched the fading sunlight, caught the rainbow splendor that streaked the evening sky.

He waited there, fighting the reluctance inside