作者：Clinton, E. M.
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
The Small World of M-75试读：
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....ike sparks flaring briefly in the darkness, awareness first came to him. Then, there were only instants, shocking-clear, brief: finding himself standing before the main damper control, discovering himself adjusting complex dials, instants that flickered uncertainly only to become memories brought to life when awareness came again.He was a kind of infant, conscious briefly that he was, yet unaware of what he was. Those first shocking moments were for him like the terrifying coming of visual acuity to a child; he felt like homo neandertalensis must have felt staring into the roaring fury of his first fire. He was homo metalicus first sensing himself.
Yet—a little more. You could not stuff him with all that technical data, you could not weave into him such an intricate pattern of stimulus and response, you could not create such a magnificent feedback mechanism, in all its superhuman perfection, and expect, with the unexpected coming to awareness, to have created nothing more than the mirror image of a confused, helpless child.
Thus, when the bright moments of consciousness came, and came, as they did, more and more often, he brooded, brooded on why the three blinking red lights made him move to the main control panel and adjust lever C until the three lights flashed off. He brooded on why each signal 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, performing their automatic functions, seeing their responses, like his, were triggered by the lights on the big board and by the varying patterns of sound that issued periodically from overhead.
It was the sounds which were his undoing. The colored lights, with their monotonous regularity, failed to rouse him. But the sounds were something else, for even as he responded to them, doing things to the control board in patterned reaction to particular combinations of particular sounds, he was struck with the wonderful variety and the maze of complexity in those sounds; a variety and complexity far beyond that of the colored lights. Thus, being something of an advanced analytic calculator and being, by virtue of his superior feedback system, something considerably more than a simple machine (though he perhaps fell short of those requisites of life so rigorously held by moralists and biologists alike) he began to investigate the meaning of the sounds.ert Sokolski signed the morning report and dropped it into the transmitter. He swung around on his desk stool; he was a big man, and the stool squealed in sharp protest to his shifting weight.
Joe Gaines, who was as short and skinny and dark-haired as his colleague was tall and heavily muscled and blond, shuddered at the sound. Sokolski grinned wickedly at his flinching.
"Check-up time, I suppose," muttered Gaines without looking up from the magazine he held propped on his knees. He finished the paragraph, snapped the magazine shut, and swung his legs down from the railing that ran along in front of the data board. "Dirty work for white-collar men like us."
Sokolski snorted. "You haven't worn a white shirt in the last six years," he growled, rising and going to the supply closet. He swung open 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 how much more expensive you are to the government than me," he chortled as he bent over to strap on heavy, leaded shoes. "Big fellow like you must cost 'em twice as much to outfit for this job."
Sokolski grunted and struggled into the thick, radiation-resistant suit. "Think how lucky you are, runt," he responded as he wriggled his right arm down the sleeve, "that they've got those little servomechs 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 around dampers and generally playing filing cabinet for loose neutrons." He shook himself. "Thanks, Joe," he growled as Gaines helped him with a reluctant zipper.
Gaines checked the big man's oxygen equipment and turned his back so that Sokolski could okay his own. "You're set," said Sokolski, and they snapped on their helmets, big inverted lead buckets with narrow strips of shielded glass providing strictly minimal fields of view. Gaines plugged one end of the thickly insulated intercom cable into the 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, echoing inside the helmet before being transmitted, sounding distant and hollow.
Gaines leading, the cable sliding and coiling snakelike between them, they passed through the doorway, over which huge red letters shouted ANYONE WHO WALKS THROUGH THIS DOOR UNPROTECTED WILL DIE, and clomped down the zigzagging corridor toward the uranium pile that crouched within 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 thick mittened hand around one handle on the door to the Hot Room. "Not half so hot as it gets outside it, sweetheart, where we're going." He jerked on the handle and Gaines seized the second handle and added his own strength. The huge door slid unwillingly back.
The silent sound of the Hot Room surged out over them—the breathless whisper of chained power struggling to burst its chains. Sokolski checked his neutron tab and his gamma reader and they stepped over the threshold. They leaned into the door until it had slid shut again.
"I'll take the servomechs, Bert," piped Gaines, tramping clumsily toward 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 the first servo, a squat, gleaming creature with the symbol M-11 etched across its rotund chest, and deactivated it by the simple expedient of pulling from its socket the line running from the capacitor unit in the lower trunk of its body to the maze of equipment that jammed its enormous chest. The instant M-11 ceased functioning, the other two servomechs were automatically activated to cover that section of the controls with which M-11 was normally integrated.
This was overloading their individual capacities, but it was an inherent provision designed to cover the emergency that would follow any accidental deactivation of one of them. It was also the only way in which they could be checked. You couldn't bring them outside to a lab; they were hot. After all, they spent their lives under a ceaseless fusillade of neutrons, washed eternally with the deadly radiations pouring incessantly from the pile whose overlords they were. Indeed, next to the pile itself, they were the hottest things in the plant.
"Nice job these babies got," commented Gaines as he checked the capacitor circuits. He reactivated the servo and went on to M-19.
"If you think it's so great, why don't you volunteer?" countered Sokolski, a trifle sourly. "Incidentally, it's a good thing we came in, Joe. There's half a dozen units here working on reserve transistors."
Their sporadic conversation lapsed; it was exacting work and they could remain for only a limited time under that lethal radiation. Then, almost sadly, Gaines said, "Looks like the end of the road for M-75."
"Oh?" Sokolski came over beside him and peered through the violet haze of his viewing glass. "He's an old timer."
Gaines slid an instrument back into the pouch of his suit, and patted the robot's rump. "Yep, I'd say that capacitor was good for about another 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 up anyway. We'll call a demolition unit for your pal here, and then rig up a service pattern so one of his buddies can repair the board."
They moved toward the door.-75 watched the two men leave and deep inside him something shifted. The heavy door closed with a loud thud, the sound registered on his aural perceptors and was fed into his analyzer. Ordinarily it would have been discharged as irrelevant data, but cognizance had wrought certain subtle changes in the complex mechanism that was M-75.
A yellow light blinked on the control panel, and in response he moved to the board and manipulated handles marked, DAMPER 19, DAMPER 20.
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