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 * * * * * End of Project Gutenberg's The Small World of M-75, by Ed M. Clinton, Jr.