Chapter 2
Emergency bells sounded and colored lights danced, martial laws automatically enacted by their sound and flicker. The wheels of crisis turned and spewed forth from their teeth rudely awakened policemen half out of uniform, military reservists called up to find themselves patrolling darkened streets, emergency disaster crews assembling in fire houses and on appointed street corners, doctors gathering in nervous clutches at fully aroused hospitals and waiting beside ambulances tensed for wild dashes into full-scale disasters. Where it was night when the warning sounded, darkness descended as desperate power conservation efforts were initiated; where it was daylight, the terrified populace waited in horror for the blackness of the unlit night. All of this, of course, took only minutes to get fully under way.
Meanwhile, at the plant, Procedure One continued in full wild tumultuous swing.
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M-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 himself. The driving curiosity that had brought him this far overcame that curious, perplexing reticence, and he looked down at the steps and measured their width and depth so that he might set up a feedback pattern. This done, he bounced, almost jauntily, down them.
He had rolled perhaps fifty feet down the smooth pathway curving across the grounds when he made out, clearly discernible in the gathering dusk, the three men and the machine that were moving toward him. It was the last bit of datum he ever filed.
The demolition squad had finished with the hot remains of M-75, and their big truck was coughing away into the night. One by one, the floodlights that had lighted their work flickered out.
"Pretty delicate machines, after all," commented Sokolski. "One jolt from that flame thrower...."
Gaines was silent as they walked back toward the plant. "Bert," he said slowly, "what the hell do you suppose got into him?"
Sokolski shrugged. "You were the one who spotted the trouble with him, Joe. Just think, if you could have checked him out completely--"
Gaines could not help looking up at the stars and saying what he had really been thinking all along, "It's a small world, Bert, a small world."
THE END
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Small World of M-75, by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.