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 babywith a new found freedom in a strange and bafflingworld....
ike 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.
ert Sokolski signed the morning report