awayand staring at him, above all the searing light. Abruptly he rejectedit all. He swung back into the foyer of the plant and faced a darkcorner, bringing instant, essential relief to his pulsatingphotocells.
Staring into the semi-darkness, he re-ran the memory tape of hisescape from the pile. The farther he had moved from the pile, itseemed, the less adjusted he had become, the less able he was to judgeand correlate.
Silently, lost in his computations, he rolled around and around thefoyer for a long, long time. He became aware, finally, that thebrilliance outside had paled. He went again to the door and watchedthe fading sunlight, caught the rainbow splendor that streaked theevening sky.
He waited there, fighting the reluctance inside himself. The drivingcuriosity that had brought him this far overcame that curious,perplexing reticence, and he looked down at the steps and measuredtheir width and depth so that he might set up a feedback pattern. Thisdone, he bounced, almost jauntily, down them.
He had rolled perhaps fifty feet down the smooth pathway curvingacross the grounds when he made out, clearly discernible in thegathering dusk, the three men and the machine that were moving towardhim. It was the last bit of datum he ever filed.
The demolition squad had finished with the hot remains of M-75, andtheir big truck was coughing away into the night. One by one, thefloodlights that had lighted their work flickered out.
"Pretty delicate machines, after all," commented Sokolski. "One joltfrom that flame thrower...."
Gaines was silent as they walked back toward the plant. "Bert," hesaid 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 hadreally been thinking all along, "It's a small world, Bert, a smallworld."
THE END
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The Small World of M-75 Page 4
