The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Small World of M-75, by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Small World of M-75

Author: Ed M. Clinton, Jr.

Illustrator: Ed Emsh

Release Date: April 21, 2010 [EBook #32079]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SMALL WORLD OF M-75 ***

Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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 baby
with a new found freedom in a strange and baffling
world...._

* * * * *

Like 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, br