THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
ONE
“IF YOU’LL TAKE A SEAT, sir,” the surgeon said, gesturing toward the chair in front of his desk. “Please.”
“Thank you,” said Andrew Martin.
He seated himself calmly. He did everything calmly. That was his nature; it was one part of him that would never change. Looking at him now, one could have no way of knowing that Andrew Martin had been driven to the last resort. But he had been. He had come halfway across the continent for this interview. It represented his only remaining hope of achieving his life’s main goal--everything had come down to that. Everything.
There was a smooth blankness to Andrew’s face--though a keen observer might well have imagined a hint of melancholy in his eyes. His hair was smooth, light brown, rather fine, and he looked freshly and cleanly shaven: no beard, no mustache, no facial affectations of any sort. His clothes were well made and neat, predominantly a velvety red-purple in color; but they were of a distinctly old-fashioned cut, in the loose, flowing style called “drapery” that had been popular several generations back and was rarely seen these days.
The surgeon’s face had a certain blankness about it also: hardly a surprising thing, for the surgeon’s face, like all the rest of him, was fashioned of lightly bronzed stainless steel. He sat squarely upright at his imposing desk in the windowless room high over Lake Michigan, looking outward at Andrew Martin with the utmost serenity and poise evident in his glowing eyes. In front of him on the desk was a gleaming brass nameplate that announced his serial number, the usual factory-assigned assortment of letters and numbers.
Andrew Martin paid no attention to that soulless string of characters and digits. Such dreary, mechanistic identity-designations were nothing of any moment to him--not now, not any more, not for a very long time. Andrew felt no need to call the robot surgeon anything but “Doctor.”
The surgeon said, “This is all very irregular, you know, sir. Very irregular.”
“Yes. I know that,” Andrew Martin said.
“I’ve thought about very little else since this request first came to my attention.”
“I sincerely regret any discomfort that it may have caused you.”
“Thank you. I am grateful for your concern.”
All very formal, very courteous, very useless. They were simply fencing with each other, neither one willing to get down to essentials. And now the surgeon fell silent. Andrew waited for him to proceed. The silence went on and on.
This is getting us nowhere, Andrew told himself.
To the surgeon he said, “The thing that I need to know, Doctor, is how soon the operation can be carried out.”
The surgeon hesitated a perceptible moment. Then he said softly, with that certain inalienable note of respect that a robot always used when speaking to a human being, “I am not convinced, sir, that I fully understand how such an operation could be performed, let alone why it should be considered desirable. And of course I still don’t know who the subject of the proposed operation is going to be.”
There might have been a look of respectful intransigence on the surgeon’s face, if the elegantly contoured stainless steel of the surgeon’s face had been in any way capable of displaying such an expression--or any expression at all.
It was the turn of Andrew Martin to be silent for a moment, now.
He studied the robot surgeon’s right hand--his cutting hand--as it rested on the desk in utter tranquility. It was splendidly designed. The fingers were long and tapering, and they were shaped into metallic looping curves of great artistic beauty, curves so graceful and appropriate to their function that one could easily imagine a scalpel being fitted into them and instantly becoming, at the moment they went into action, united in perfect harmony with the fingers that wielded it: surgeon and scalpel fusing into a single marvelously capable tool.
That was very reassuring, Andrew thought. There would be no hesitation in the surgeon’s work, no stumbling, no quivering, no mistakes or even the possibility of a mistake.
Such skill came with specialization, of course--a specialization so fiercely desired by humanity that few robots of the modern era were independently brained any more. The great majority of them nowadays were mere adjuncts of enormously powerful central processing units that had computing capacities far beyond the space limitations of a single robot frame.
A surgeon, too, really needed to be nothing more than a set of sensors and monitors and an array of tool-manipulating devices--except that people still preferred the illusion, if nothing more than that, that they were being operated on by an individual entity, not by a limb of some remote machine. So surgeons--the ones in private practice, anyway--were still independently brained. But this one, brained or not, was so limited in his capacity that he didn’t recognize Andrew Martin--had probably never heard of Andrew Martin at all, in fact.
That was something of a novelty for Andrew. He was more than a little famous. He had never asked for his fame, of course--that was not his style--but fame, or at any rate notoriety, had come to him all the same. Because of what he had achieved: because of what he was. Not who, but what.
Instead of replying to what the surgeon had asked him Andrew said, with sudden striking irrelevance, “Tell me something, Doctor. Have you ever thought you would like to be a man?”
The question, startling and strange, obviously took the surgeon aback. He hesitated a moment as though the concept of being a man was so alien to him that it would fit nowhere in his allotted positronic pathways.
Then he recovered his aplomb and replied serenely, “But I am a robot, sir.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to be a man, don’t you think?”
“If I were allowed the privilege of improving myself, sir, I would choose to be a better surgeon. The practice of my craft is the prime purpose of my existence. There is no way I could be a better surgeon if I were a man, but only if I were a more advanced robot. It would please me very much indeed to be a more advanced robot.”
“But you would still be a robot, even so.”
“Yes. Of course. To be a robot is quite acceptable to me. As I have just explained, sir, in order for one to excel at the extremely difficult and demanding practice of modern-day surgery it is necessary that one be--”
“A robot, yes,” said Andrew, with just a note of exasperation creeping into his tone. “But think of the subservience involved, Doctor! Consider: you’re a highly skilled surgeon. You deal in the most delicate matters of life and death--you operate on some of the most important individuals in the world, and for all I know you have patients come to you from other worlds as well. And yet--and yet--a robot? You’re content with that? For all your skill, you must take orders from anyone, any human at all: a child, a fool, a boor, a rogue. The Second Law commands it. It leaves you no choice. Right this minute I could say, ‘Stand up, Doctor,’ and you’d have to stand up. ‘Put your fingers over your face and wiggle them,’ and you’d wiggle. Stand on one leg, sit down on the floor, move right or left, anything I wanted to tell you, and you’d obey. I could order you to disassemble yourself limb by limb, and you would. You, a great surgeon! No choice at all. A human whistles and you hop to his tune. Doesn’t it offend you that I have the power to make you do whatever damned thing I please, no matter how idiotic, how trivial, how degrading?”
The surgeon was unfazed.
“It would be my pleasure to please you, sir. With certain obvious exceptions. If your orders should happen to involve my doing any harm to you or any other human being, I would have to take the primary laws of my nature into consideration before obeying you, and in all likelihood I would not obey you. Naturally the First Law, which concerns my duty to human safety, would take precedence over the Second Law relating to obedience. Otherwise, obedience is my pleasure. If it would give you pleasure to require me to do certain acts that you regard as idiotic or trivial or degrading, I would perform those acts. But they would not seem idiotic or trivial or degrading to me.”
There was nothing even remotely surprising to Andrew Martin in the things the robot surgeon had said. He would have found it astonishing, even revolutionary, if the robot had taken any other position.
But even so--even so--
The surgeon said, with not the slightest trace of impatience in his smooth bland voice, “Now, if we may return to the subject of this extraordinary operation that you have come here to discuss, sir. I can barely comprehend the nature of what you want done. It is hard for me to visualize a situation that would require such a thing. But what I need to know, first of all, is the name of the person upon whom I am asked to perform this operation.”
“The name is Andrew Martin,” Andrew said. “The operation is to be performed on me.”
“But that would be impossible, sir!”
“Surely you’d be capable of it.”
“Capable in a technical sense, yes. I have no serious doubt on that score, regardless of what may be asked of me, although in this case there are certain procedural issues that I would have to consider very carefully. But that is beside the point. I ask you please to bear in mind, sir, that the fundamental effect of the operation would be harmful to you.”
“That does not matter at all,” said Andrew calmly.
“It does to me.”
“Is this the robot version of the Hippocratic Oath?”
“Something far more stringent than that,” the surgeon said. “The Hippocratic Oath is, of course, a voluntary pledge. But there is, as plainly you must be aware, something innate in my circuitry itself that controls my professional decisions. Above and beyond everything else, I must not inflict damage. I may not inflict damage.”
“On human beings, yes.”
“Indeed. The First Law says--”
“Don’t recite the First Law, Doctor. I know it at least as well as you. But the First Law simply governs the actions of robots toward human beings. I’m not human, Doctor.”
The surgeon reacted with a visible twitch of his shoulders and a blinking of his photoelectric eyes. It was as if what Andrew had just said had no meaning for him whatever.
“Yes,” said Andrew, “I know that I seem to be quite human, and that what you’re experiencing now is the robot equivalent of surprise. Nevertheless I’m telling you the absolute truth. However human I may appear to you, I am simply a robot. A robot, Doctor. A robot is what I am, and nothing more than that. Believe me. And therefore you are free to operate on me. There is nothing in the First Law which prohibits a robot from performing actions on another robot. Even if the action that is performed should cause harm to that robot, Doctor.”
TWO
IN THE BEGINNING, of course--and the beginning for him was nearly two centuries before his visit to the surgeon’s office--no one could have mistaken Andrew Martin for anything but the robot he was.
In that long-ago era when he had first come from the assembly line of United States Robots and Mechanical Men he was as much a robot in appearance as any that had ever existed, smoothly designed and magnificently functional: a sleek mechanical object, a positronic brain encased in a more-or-less humanoid-looking housing made from metal and plastic.
His long slim limbs then were finely articulated mechanisms fashioned from titanium alloys overlaid by steel and equipped with silicone bushings at the joints to prevent metal-to-metal contact. His limb sockets were of the finest flexible polyethylene. His eyes were photoelectric cells that gleamed with a deep red glow. His face--and to call it that was charitable; it was the merest perfunctory sketch of a face--was altogether incapable of expression. His bare, sexless body was unambiguously a manufactured device. All it took was a single glance to see that he was a machine, no more animate, no more human, no more alive, than a telephone or a pocket calculator or an automobile.
But that was in another era, long, long ago.
It was an era when robots were still uncommon sights on Earth--almost the very dawn of the age of robotics, not much more than a generation after the days when the great early roboticists like Alfred Lanning and Peter Bogert and the legendary robopsychologist Susan Calvin had done their historic work, developing and perfecting the principles by which the first positronic robots had come into being.
The aim of those pioneers had been to create robots capable of taking up many of the dreary burdens that human beings had for so long been compelled to bear. And that was part of the problem that the roboticists faced, in those dawning days of the science of artificial life late in the Twentieth Century and early in the Twenty-First: the unwillingness of a great many human beings to surrender those burdens to mechanical substitutes. Because of that unwillingness, strict laws had been passed in virtually every country--the world was still broken up into a multitude of nations, then--against the use of robot labor on Earth.
By the year 2007 they had been banned entirely everywhere on the planet, except for scientific research under carefully controlled conditions. Robots could be sent into space, yes, to the ever-multiplying industrial factories and exploratory stations off Earth: let them cope with the miseries of frigid Ganymede and torrid Mercury, let them put up with the inconveniences of scrabbling around on the surface of Luna, let them run the bewildering risks of the early Jump experiments that would eventually give mankind the hyperspace road to the stars.
But robots in free and general use on Earth--occupying precious slots in the labor force that would otherwise be available for actual naturally-born flesh-and-blood human beings--no! No! No robots wanted around here!
Well, that had eventually begun to change, of course. And the most dramatic changes had begun to set in around the time that Robot NDR-113, who would someday be known as Andrew Martin, had been undergoing assembly at the main Northern Region factory of United States Robots and Mechanical Men.
One of the factors bringing about the gradual breakdown of the antirobot prejudices on Earth at that time was simple public relations. United States Robots and Mechanical Men was not only a scientifically adept organization, it knew a thing or two about the importance of maintaining its profitability, too. So it had found ways, quiet and subtle and effective, of chipping away at the Frankenstein myth of the robot, the concept of the mechanical man as the dreaded shambling Golem.
Robots are here for our convenience, the U.S.R.M.M. public relations people said. Robots are here to help us. Robots are not our enemies. Robots are perfectly safe, safe beyond any possibility of doubt.
And--because in fact all those things were actually true--people began to accept the presence of robots among them. They did so grudgingly, in the main. Many people--most, perhaps--were still uncomfortable with the whole idea of robots; but they recognized the need for them and they could at least tolerate having them around, so long as tight restrictions on their use continued to be applied.
There was need for robots, like it or not, because the population of Earth had started to dwindle about that time. After the long anguish that was the Twentieth Century, a time of relative tranquility and harmony and even rationality--a certain degree of that, anyway--had begun to settle over the world. It became a quieter, calmer, happier place. There were fewer people by far, not because there had been terrible wars and plagues, but because families now tended to be smaller, giving preference to quality over quantity. Migration to the newly settled worlds of space was draining off some of Earth’s population also--migration to the extensive network of underground settlements on the Moon, to the colonies in the asteroid belt and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and to the artificial worlds in orbit around Earth and Mars.
So there was no longer so much excitement over the possibility of losing one’s job to a robot. The fear of job shortages on Earth had given way to the problem of labor shortages. Suddenly the robots that once had been looked upon with such uneasiness, fear, and even hatred became necessary to maintain the welfare of a world that had every material advantage but didn’t have enough of a population left to sweep the streets, drive the taxis, cook the meals, stoke the furnaces.
It was in this new era of diminishing population and increasing prosperity that NDR-113--the future Andrew Martin--was manufactured. No longer was the use of robots illegal on Earth; but strict regulations still applied, and they were still far from everyday sights. Especially robots who were programmed for ordinary household duties, which was the primary use that Gerald Martin had in mind for NDR--113.
Hardly anyone in those days had a robot servant around the house. It was too frightening an idea for most people--and too expensive, besides.
But Gerald Martin was hardly just anyone. He was a member of the Regional Legislature, a powerful member at that, Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee: a man of great presence and authority, of tremendous force of mind and character. What Gerald Martin set out to achieve, Gerald Martin inevitably succeeded in achieving. And what Gerald Martin chose to possess, Gerald Martin would invariably come to possess. He believed in robots: he knew that they were an inevitable development, that they would ultimately become inextricably enmeshed in human society at every level.
And so--utilizing his position on the Science and Technology Committee to the fullest--he had been able to arrange for robots to become a part of his private life, and that of his family. For the sake of gaining a deeper understanding of the robot phenomenon, he had explained. For the sake of helping his fellow members of the Regional Legislature to discover how they might best grapple with the problems that the coming era of robotic ubiquity would bring. Bravely, magnanimously, Gerald Martin had offered himself as an experimental subject and had volunteered to take a small group of domestic robots into his own home.
The first robots that arrived were simple specialized ones dedicated to specific routine tasks. They were approximately human in form but they had little if anything to say and went about their business in the quiet, efficient manner of the machines that they all too plainly were. At first the Martins found it strange to have them around, but very quickly they faded into the background of the family’s existence, arousing no more interest than toasters or vacuum cleaners would.
But then--
“This is NDR-l 13,” Gerald Martin announced one cool, windy afternoon in June, when the delivery truck had rolled up the long driveway that led to the imposing clifftop estate of the Gerald Martin family and the sleek, shining mechanical man had been released from his crate. “Our personal household robot. Our own private family retainer.”
“What did you call him?” Amanda asked. Amanda was the younger of the two Martin daughters, a small golden-haired child with penetrating blue eyes. She was just beginning to learn to read and write, then.
“NDR-113.”
“Is that his name?”
“His serial number, actually.”
Amanda frowned. “En-dee-arr. Endeearr 113. That’s a peculiar name.”
“Serial number,” Gerald Martin said again.
But Amanda wanted no part of that. “Endeearr. We can’t call him something like that. It doesn’t sound like any kind of name anything ought to have.”
“Listen to her,” Melissa Martin said. Melissa was the older Martin girl: five years older than Amanda, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Melissa was practically a woman, so far as Melissa was concerned. Amanda was merely a child, and therefore Melissa regarded her as foolish by definition. “She doesn’t like the robot’s serial number.”
“En-dee-arr,” Amanda said again, elaborately paying no attention to Melissa. “That isn’t any good. It really isn’t. What about calling him Andrew?”
“Andrew?” Gerald Martin said. “It’s got an n in it, doesn’t it? And a d?” For a moment Amanda looked a little doubtful. “Sure it does. And an r, that much I’m certain of. N-D-R. Andrew.”
“Just listen to her,” Melissa said scornfully. But Gerald Martin was smiling. He knew that it wasn’t at all unusual to adapt a robot’s serial letters into a name. Robots of the JN series tended to become Johns or Janes. RG robots became Archies. QT robots were called Cuties. Well, here was an NDR-series robot, and Amanda wanted to call him Andrew. Fine. Fine. Gerald Martin had a way of letting Amanda do what Amanda thought was best for Amanda. Within limits, of course.
“Very well,” he said. “ Andrew it is.”
And Andrew it was. So much so that, as the years went along, no one in the Martin family ever called him NDR--113 again. In time his serial number was forgotten altogether, and it had to be looked up whenever he needed to be taken in for maintenance. Andrew himself claimed to have forgotten his own number. Of course, that wasn’t strictly true. No matter how much time might go by, he could never forget anything, not if he wanted to remember it.
But as time went on, and things began to change for Andrew, he had less and less desire to remember the number. He left it safely hidden away in the oblivion of his memory banks and never thought of going searching for it. He was Andrew now--Andrew Martin--the Andrew of the Martin family
Andrew was tall and slender and graceful, because that was how NDR robots were designed to look. He moved quietly and unobtrusively around the splendid house that the Martin family occupied overlooking the Pacific, efficiently doing all that the Martins required him to do.
It was a house out of a vanished age, a grand and majestic mansion that really required a grand retinue of servants to keep it up; but of course there were no servants to be had any longer, except for robots, and that had been causing some problems for the Martins before Gerald Martin offered himself up for this experiment. Now a pair of robot gardeners tended the glistening green lawns and pruned the glorious hedges of fiery red azaleas and trimmed away the dead fronds of the towering palm trees that ran along the ridge behind the house. A robot housecleaner kept dust and cobwebs at bay. And Andrew the robot served as valet, butler, lady’s maid, and chauffeur for the Martin family. He prepared meals; he selected and poured the wines of which Gerald Martin was so fond; he supervised their wardrobes; he arranged and cared for their fine furniture, their works of art, their myriad distinctive possessions.
Andrew had one other duty, too, which in fact monopolized much of his time to the detriment of the rest of his formal household routine.
The Martin estate--for that was what it was, nothing less, a great estate--was an isolated one, alone on its beautiful ridge overlooking the chilly blue ocean. There was a little town nearby, but it was some distance away. The nearest city of any size, San Francisco, was far down the coast. Cities were starting to become obsolete now, anyway, and people preferred to communicate electronically and keep plenty of distance between one house and the next. So the Martin girls, in their grand and wonderful isolation, had very few playmates.
They did, however, have Andrew.
It was Miss who first figured out how that might best be arranged.
(“Miss” was what Andrew invariably called Melissa, not because he was incapable of pronouncing her first name but because it seemed improper to him to address her in such a familiar way. Amanda was always “Little Miss”--never anything else. Mrs. Martin--Lucie was her first name--was “Ma’am” to Andrew. And as for Gerald Martin, he was “Sir.” Gerald Martin was the sort of individual whom many people, not simply robots, felt most comfortable calling “Sir.” The number of people in the world who called him “Gerald” was a very small number indeed, and it was impossible to suppose him being “Jerry” to anybody at all.)
Miss quickly came to understand more than a little about how to take advantage of the presence of a robot in the house. It was a simple matter of utilizing the Second Law.
“Andrew,” she said, “we order you to stop what you’re doing and play with us.”
At the moment Andrew was arranging the books in the Martin library, which had wandered a little out of alphabetical order, as books have a way of doing.
He paused and looked down from the high mahogany bookcase between the two great leaded-glass windows at the north end of the room. Mildly he said, “I’m sorry, Miss. I’m occupied at present by a task requested by your father. A prior order from Sir must take precedence over this request of yours.”
“I heard what Daddy told you,” Miss replied. “He said, ‘I’d like you to tidy up those books, Andrew. Get them back into some kind of sensible arrangement.’ Isn’t that so?”
“That is exactly what he said, yes, Miss. Those were his very words.”
“Well, then, if all he said was that he’d like you to tidy up those books --and you don’t deny that he did--then it wasn’t much of an order, was it? It was more of a preference. A suggestion. A suggestion isn’t an order. Neither is a preference. Andrew, I order you. Leave the books where they are and come take Amanda and me out for a walk along the beach.”
It was a perfect application of the Second Law. Andrew put the books down immediately and descended from his ladder. Sir was the head of the household; but he hadn’t actually given an order, not in the formal sense of the concept, and Miss had. She certainly had. And an order from a human member of this household--any human member of the household--had to take priority over a mere expression of preference from some other human member of the household, even if that member happened to be Sir himself.
Not that Andrew had any problem with any of that. He was fond of Miss, and even more fond of Little Miss. At least, the effect that they had upon his actions was that which in a human being would have been called the result of fondness. Andrew thought of it as fondness, for he didn’t know any other term for what he felt toward the two girls. Certainly he felt something. That in itself was a little odd, but he supposed that a capacity for fondness had been built into him, the way his various other skills had been. And so if they wanted him to come out and play with them, he’d do it happily--provided they made it permissible for him to do it within the context of the Three Laws.
The trail down to the beach was a steep and winding one, strewn with rocks and gopher-holes and other troublesome obstacles. No one but Miss and Little Miss used it very often, because the beach itself was nothing more than a ragged sandy strand covered with driftwood and storm-tossed seaweed, and the ocean, in this northern part of California, was far too chilly for anyone without a wetsuit to consider entering. But the girls loved its bleak, moody, windswept charm.
As they scrambled down the trail Andrew held Miss by the hand and carried Little Miss in the crook of his arm. Very likely both girls could have made their way down the path without incident, but Sir had been very strict about the beach trail. “Make sure they don’t run or jump around, Andrew. If they tripped over something in the wrong place it would be a fifty-foot drop. I can’t stop them from going down there, but I want you to be right beside them at all times to be certain they don’t do anything foolish. That’s an order.”
One of these days, Andrew knew, Miss or even Little Miss was going to countermand that order and tell him to stand aside while they ran giddily down the hill to the beach. When that happened it would set up a powerful equipotential of contradiction in his positronic brain and beyond much doubt he would be hard pressed to deal with it.
Sir’s order would ultimately prevail, naturally, since it embodied elements of the First Law as well as the Second, and anything that involved First Law prohibitions always took highest priority. Still, Andrew knew that his circuitry would be stressed more than a little the first time a direct conflict between Sir’s decree and the girls’ whims came into play.
For the moment, though, Miss and Little Miss were content to abide by the rules. Carefully, step by step, he made his way down the face of the cliff with the girls in tow.
At the bottom Andrew released Miss’s hand and set Little Miss down on the damp sand. Immediately they went streaking off, running gleefully along the edge of the fierce, snarling sea.
“Seaweed!” Miss cried, grabbing up a thick brown ropy length of kelp that was longer than she was and swinging it like a whip. “Look at this big chunk of seaweed, Andrew!”
“And this piece of driftwood,” said Little Miss. “Isn’t it beautiful, Melissa?”
“Maybe to you,” the older girl said loftily. She took the gnarled and bent bit of wood from Little Miss, examined it in a perfunctory way, and tossed it aside with a shudder. “Ugh. It’s got things growing on it.”
“They’re just another kind of seaweed,” Little Miss said. “Right, Andrew?”
She picked up the discarded piece of driftwood and handed it to him for inspection.
“Algae, yes,” he said.
“Algy?”
“Algae. The technical term for seaweed.”
“Oh. Algy.” Little Miss laughed and put the bit of driftwood down near the beginning of the trail, so she would remember to take it with her when they went up to the house again. Then she rampaged off down the beach again, following her older sister through the foamy fringes of the surf.
Andrew kept pace with them without difficulty. He did not intend to let them get very far from him at any time.
He had needed no special orders from Sir to protect the girls while they were actually on the beach: the First Law took care of that. The ocean here was not only wild-looking but exceedingly dangerous: the currents were strong and unpredictable, the water was intolerably cold at almost any time of the year, and the great rocky fangs of a deadly reef rose from the swirling breakers less than fifty meters offshore. If Miss or Little Miss should make the slightest move to enter the sea, Andrew would be beside them in an instant.
But they had more sense than to want to go swimming in this impossible ocean. The shore along this part of the Pacific coast was a beautiful thing to behold in its harsh, bleak way, but the sea itself, forever angry and turbulent, was the enemy of those who were not bred for it, and even a small child could see that at a glance.
Miss and Little Miss were wading in the tide pools now, peering at the dark periwinkles and gray-green limpets and pink-and-purple anemones and the myriad little scuttling hermit crabs, and searching--as they always did, rarely with much luck--for a starfish. Andrew stood nearby, poised and ready in the event that a sudden wave should rise without warning nearby and sweep toward shore. The sea was quiet today, as quiet as that savage body of water ever got, but perilous waves were apt to come out of nowhere at any time.
Miss said suddenly, “Andrew, do you know how to swim?”
“I could do it if it were necessary, Miss.”
“It wouldn’t short-circuit your brain, or anything? If water got in, I mean?”
“I am very well insulated,” Andrew told her.
“Good. Swim out to that gray rock and back, then. The ones where the cormorants are nesting. I want to see how fast you can do it.”
“Melissa--” said Little Miss uneasily.
“Shh, Amanda. I want Andrew to go out there. Maybe he can find some cormorant eggs and bring them back to show us.”
“It would not be good to disturb the nest, Miss, “ said Andrew gently.
“I said I wanted you to go out there.”
“Melissa--” Little Miss said again, more sharply.
But Miss was insistent. It was an order. Andrew felt the preliminary signs of contradictory potentials building up: a faint trembling in his fingertips, a barely perceptible sense of vertigo. Orders were to be obeyed: that was the Second Law. Miss could order him to swim to China this minute, and Andrew would do it without hesitation if no other considerations were involved. But he was here to protect the girls. What would happen if something unexpected befell them while he was out by the cormorant rock? A sudden menacing wave, a rockslide, even an earthquake--earthquakes weren’t everyday occurrences here, but they certainly could happen at any time
It was a pure First Law issue.
“I am sorry, Miss. With no adults here to guard you, I am unable to leave you unattended long enough to swim to that rock and back. If Sir or Ma’am were present, that would be a different matter, but as it is--”
“Don’t you recognize an order when you hear one? I want you to swim out there, Andrew.”
“As I have explained, Miss--”
“You don’t have to worry about us. It’s not as though I’m a child, Andrew. What do you think, that some sort of terrible ogre is going to come down the beach and gobble us up while you’re in the water? I can look after myself, thank you, and I’ll take care of Amanda too if I have to.”
Little Miss said, “You aren’t being fair to him, Melissa. He’s got his orders from Daddy.”
“And now he has his orders from me.” Miss gestured peremptorily. “Swim out to the cormorant rock, Andrew. Go ahead. Now, Andrew.”
Andrew felt himself growing a little warm, and ordered his circuitry to make the necessary homeostatic correction.
“The First Law--” he began.
“What a bore you are! You and your First Law both!” cried Melissa. “Can’t you forget the First Law once in a while? But no, no, you can’t do that, can you? You’ve got those silly laws wired into you and there’s no getting around them. You’re nothing but a dumb machine.”
“Melissa!” Little Miss said indignantly.
“Yes, that is true,” said Andrew. “As you correctly state, I am nothing but a dumb machine. And therefore I have no ability to countermand your father’s order concerning your safety on the beach.” He bowed slightly in Melissa’s direction. “I deeply regret this, Miss.”
Little Miss said, “If you want to see Andrew swim so much, Melissa, why don’t you just have him wade into the surf and do some swimming right close to shore? There wouldn’t be any harm in that, would there?”
“It wouldn’t be the same thing,” Miss said, pouting. “Not at all.”
But, Andrew reflected, perhaps that would satisfy her. He disliked being the focus of so much disharmony.
“Let me show you,” he said.
He waded in. The heavy foam-flecked surf thundered up violently around his knees, but Andrew was able easily to adjust his gyroscopic stabilizers as the force of the breaking waves assailed him. The rough, sharp rocks that were scattered allover the sea floor meant nothing to his metallic treads. His sensors told him that the temperature of the water was well below human comfort tolerance, but that, too, was irrelevant to him.
Four or five meters out, the water was deep enough so that Andrew could swim in it, and yet he was still close enough to shore to be able to get back to land in a moment if need be. He doubted that need would be. The girls stood side by side on the beach, watching him in fascination.
Andrew had never gone swimming before. There had never been the slightest reason for him to do so. But he had been programmed for grace and coordination under all circumstances, and it took him no more than a microsecond to calculate the nature of the motions necessary to propel him through the water just below the surface--the rhythmic kicking of the legs, the lifting of the arms, the cupping of the hands. Deftly he glided along parallel to the shore for perhaps a dozen meters, swimming smoothly, efficiently, powerfully. Then he turned and returned to his starting point. The whole excursion had taken just a few moments.
And it had had the desired effect on Miss.
“You’re a wonderful swimmer, Andrew,” she told him. Her eyes were shining. “I’m sure you’d break all the records if you ever entered a swimming meet.”
“There are no swimming meets for robots, Miss,” Andrew told her gravely.
Miss giggled. “I mean a human swimming meet! Like in the Olympics!”
“Oh, Miss, Miss! How unfair that would be, if they allowed a robot to compete in the Olympics against humans! It could never happen.”
She considered that for a moment.
“I suppose not,” she said. Wistfully she looked toward the cormorant rock. “Are you sure you won’t swim out there? I bet you could get there and back in two minutes. What could possibly happen to us in two minutes?”
“Melissa--” Little Miss said again.
Andrew said, “I completely understand your desire to have me do it, Miss. But I am not able to fulfill your wish. Again, I deeply regret--”
“Oh, all right. I’m sorry I asked.”
“You aren’t,” Little Miss said. “I am.”
“And you called Andrew a dumb machine! That wasn’t nice!”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Miss asked. “He told us himself that it was true!”
“He is a machine, I suppose,” Little Miss conceded. “But he isn’t dumb at all. And anyway it wasn’t a polite thing for you to say.”
“I don’t have to be polite to robots. It’s like being polite to a television set.”
“It’s different!” Little Miss insisted. “It’s entirely different!”
And then she was crying, and Andrew had to scoop her up and whirl her around until she was so distracted by the vast cloudless sweep of the sky and the strangeness of the upside-down ocean that she forgot why she had been upset.
A little while afterward Miss came up to him, while Little Miss was poking in the tide pools again, and said in a low, contrite voice, “I’m sorry I said what I did, Andrew.”
“That’s all right, Miss. “
“Will you forgive me? I know I wasn’t nice. I really wanted you to swim out there and I didn’t stop to think that you aren’t allowed to leave us alone when we’re down here. I’m very sorry, Andrew.”
“There is no need for you to apologize, Miss. Truly there isn’t.”
Nor was there. How could a robot possibly take offense at anything a human said or did? But somehow Andrew thought it best not to point that out to her just now. If Miss felt a need to apologize, he must permit her to fulfill that need--even though her cruel words had not disturbed him in the first place.
It would be absurd for him to deny that he was a machine. That was exactly what he was.
And as for being a dumb machine, well, he had no real idea of what she had meant by that. He had adequate intelligence capacity to meet the needs placed upon him. Doubtless there were robots more intelligent than he was, but he had not encountered them. Had she meant that he was less intelligent than humans are? The statement was meaningless to him. He knew no way of comparing robot intelligence with human intelligence. Quantitatively and qualitatively, their manners of thinking were two entirely different processes--everyone was agreed on that.
Soon the wind became chillier. It whipped the girls’ dresses about and hurled showers of sand in their faces and against Andrew’s shining hull. The girls decided that they had had enough of playing on the beach.
As they started toward the path, Little Miss picked up the piece of driftwood that she had found before, and tucked it through her belt. She was always collecting strange little treasures of that sort.
That evening, when he was off duty, Andrew went down to the beach by himself and swam out to the cormorant rock simply to see how long it would take. Even in the darkness, he managed it easily and swiftly. Very likely, Andrew realized now, he could have managed it without exposing Miss and Little Miss to any great period of risk. Not that he would have done so, but it would have been possible.
No one had requested Andrew to make the nighttime swim to the rock. It was entirely his own idea. A matter of curiosity, so to speak.
THREE
THE TIME OF YEAR arrived when Miss celebrated her birthday. Andrew had already learned that one’s birthday celebration was an important event in the annual round of human life--a commemoration of the anniversary of the day that one had emerged from one’s mother’s womb.
Andrew thought that it was strange that humans would choose the day of coming forth from the womb as the significant thing to commemorate. He knew something of human biology, and it seemed to him that it would be much more important to focus on the moment of the actual creation of the organism, when the sperm cell entered the ovum and the process of cell division began. Surely that was the real point of origin of any person!
Certainly the new person was already alive--if not yet capable of independent functioning--during the nine months spent within the womb. Nor was a human being particularly capable of independent functioning immediately after leaving the womb, so the distinction between birth and pre-birth that humans insisted on drawing made very little sense to Andrew.
He himself had been ready to perform all his programmed functions the moment the last phase of his assembly was complete and his pathways had been initialized. But a newborn child was far from able to manage on its own. Andrew could see no effective difference between a fetus that had completed its various stages of fetal development but was still inside its mother and the same fetus, a day or two later, that had emerged. One was inside and one was outside, that was all. But they were just about equally helpless. So why not celebrate the anniversary of one’s moment of conception instead of the anniversary of one’s release from the womb?
The more he pondered it, though, the more he saw that there was some logic to either view. What, for example, would he select as his own birthday, assuming that robots felt any need to celebrate their birthdays? The date when the factory had begun assembling him, or the date on which his positronic brain had been installed in its case and initialization of somatic control had been keyed? Had he been “born” when the first strands of his armature were being drawn together, or when the unique set of perceptions that constituted NDR-113 had gone into operation? A mere armature wasn’t him, whatever he was. His positronic brain was him Or the combination of the positronic brain properly placed within the body that had been designed to house it. So his birthday
Oh, it was all so confusing! And robots weren’t supposed to be plagued by confusion. Their positronic minds were more complex than the simple digital “minds” of non-positronic computers, which operated entirely in stark binary realms, mere patterns of on or off, yes or no, positive or negative, and that complexity could sometimes lead to moments of conflicting potential. But nevertheless robots were logical creatures who were able to find their way out of such conflicts, usually, by sorting the data in a sensible way. Why, then, was he having so much trouble comprehending this business of when one’s birthday ought to be?
Because birthdays are a purely human concept, he answered himself. They have no relevance to robots. And you are not a human being, so you do not need to worry about when your birthday ought or ought not to be celebrated.
At any rate, it was Miss’s birthday. Sir made a point of coming home early that day, even though the Regional Legislature was embroiled in some complicated debate over interplanetary free-trade zones. The whole family dressed in holiday clothes and gathered around the great slab of polished redwood that was the dining-room table and candles were lit, and Andrew served an elaborate dinner that he and Ma’am had spent hours planning, and afterward Miss formally received and opened her presents. The receiving of presents--new possessions, given to you by others--was apparently a major part of the birthday-celebration ritual.
Andrew watched, not really understanding. He knew that humans placed high importance on the owning of things, specific objects that belonged only to them, but it was very hard to comprehend what value most of those objects had for them, or why they placed such emphasis on having them.
Little Miss, who had learned how to read only a year or two before, gave her sister a book. Not a cassette, not an infodisk, not a holocube, but an actual book, with a cover and binding and pages. Little Miss was very fond of books. So was Miss--especially books of poetry, which was a way of writing things in cryptic phrases arranged in uneven lines that Andrew found extremely mysterious.
“How marvelous!” Miss cried, when she had taken her book from its gaily covered wrapper. “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam! I’ve always wanted it! But how did you even know there was such a thing? Who told you about it, Amanda?”
“I read about it,” said Little Miss, looking a trifle put out. “You think I don’t know anything at all, just because I’m five years younger than you, but let me tell you, Melissa--”
“Girls! Girls!” Sir called warningly. “Let’s have no bickering at the birthday dinner!”
The next present Miss opened was from her mother: a fine cashmere sweater, white and fluffy. Miss was so excited that she put it on over the sweater she was already wearing.
And then she opened the small package that was her father’s gift, and gasped; for Sir had bought her an intricate pendant of pink ivorite, carved with marvelous scrollwork so delicately worked that even Andrew’s flawless vision was hard pressed to follow all its curving and interlocking patterns. Miss looked radiantly happy. She lifted it by its fine golden chain and slipped it over her head, lowering it carefully until it lay perfectly centered on the front of her new sweater.
“Happy birthday, Melissa,” Sir said. And Ma’am chimed in, and Little Miss too, and they all sang the birthday song. Then Ma’am called for another round of the song, and this time she gestured to Andrew, who joined in, singing along with them.
For a moment he wondered whether he should have given Amanda some sort of present also. No, he thought, she did not seem to have expected it from him. And why should she? He wasn’t a member of the family. He was an item of household machinery. The giving of birthday presents was entirely a human thing.
It was a lovely birthday dinner. There was only one thing wrong with it, which was that Little Miss seemed bitterly envious of Miss’s lovely ivorite pendant.
She tried to hide it, of course. It was her sister’s birthday dinner, after all, and she didn’t want to spoil it. But all during the course of the evening Little Miss kept stealing glances at the pendant that gleamed warmly in pink and gold atop Melissa’s sweater, and it took no great subtlety of perception on Andrew’s part to know how unhappy she was.
He wished there was something he could do to cheer her up. But this whole affair of birthdays, and presents, and sisters, and envy, and other such human concepts--they were really beyond his comprehension. He was a very capable robot of the kind that he was designed to be, but his designers had seen no need to give him the capacity to understand why one little girl would be upset about a beautiful object that had been given to another little girl who was her sister on the occasion of her birthday.
A day or two later, though, Little Miss came to Andrew and said, “Can I speak to you, Andrew?”
“Of course you can.”
“Did you like that pendant that Daddy gave Melissa?”
“It seemed to be very beautiful.”
“It is very beautiful. It’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It is quite beautiful, yes,” Andrew said. “ And I am sure that Sir will give you something every bit as beautiful when it is the time of your birthday.”
“My birthday is three months from now,” Little Miss said.
She said it as though that were an eternity away.
Andrew waited, not quite able to determine where this conversation was heading.
Then Little Miss went to the cabinet where she had put the piece of driftwood that she had brought from the beach the day he had gone swimming, and held it out to him.
“Will you make a pendant for me, Andrew? Out of this?”
“A wooden pendant?”
“Well, I don’t happen to have any ivorite handy. But this is very pretty wood. You know how to carve, don’t you? Or you could learn, I suppose.”
“I’m certain that my mechanical skills would be equal to the job. But I would need certain tools, and--”
“Here,” said Little Miss.
She had taken a small knife from the kitchen. She handed it to him with an air of great gravity, as if she were giving him a whole set of sculptor’s blades.
“This should be all you need,” she said. “I have faith in you, Andrew.”
And she took his metal hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.
That night, in the quiet of the room where he usually stored himself when his day’s chores were done, Andrew studied the piece of driftwood with great care for perhaps fifteen minutes, analyzing its grain, its density, its curvature. He gave the little knife careful scrutiny too, testing it on a piece of wood he had picked up in the garden to see how useful it would be. Then he considered Little Miss’s height and what size pendant would be best suited to a girl who was still very small but was not likely to remain that way indefinitely.
Eventually he sliced a section from the tip of the driftwood piece. The wood was very hard, but Andrew had a robot’s physical strength, so the only question was whether the knife itself would withstand the demands he was placing on it. It did.
He contemplated the section of wood that he had separated from the bigger piece. He held it, turning it, rubbing his fingers over its surface. He closed his eyes and envisioned the way it might look if he removed a bit here, a bit there--just shaved away a little over here--and also here
Yes.
He began to work.
The job took him almost no time at all, once the preliminary planning had been carried out in his mind. Andrew’s mechanical coordination was easily equal to such fastidious work and his eyesight was perfect and the wood seemed to yield readily enough to the things he wished to do with it.
By the time he was finished, though, it was much too late at night to take it to Little Miss. He put it aside and gave it no further thought until morning. Just as Little Miss was about to run outside to meet the bus that took her to school each day, Andrew produced the little carving and held it out to her. She took it from him, staring in perplexity and surprise.
“I made it for you,” he said.
“You did?”
“From the wood you gave me last night.”
“Oh, Andrew--Andrew--it’s absolutely marvelous, Andrew! Oh, it’s so fine! So beautiful! I never imagined you could make anything like it. Wait till Melissa sees it! Just wait! And I’ll show it to Daddy, too--!”
The horn honked outside. Little Miss tucked the carving safely in her purse and hurried out to the bus. But she turned when she was a dozen meters up the path and waved to Andrew--and blew him a kiss.
In the evening, when Sir had come home from his stint at the Regional Capitol and Little Miss had brought forth the carving, there was a general stir over it in the household. Ma’am exclaimed at great length over its loveliness and Miss was gracious enough to concede that it was nearly as attractive as the pendant she had received for her birthday.
Sir himself was astounded. He could not believe that Andrew had carved the little trinket.
“Where did you get this, Mandy?” Mandy was what he called Little Miss, though no one else did.
“I told you, Daddy. Andrew made it for me. I found a piece of driftwood on the beach and he carved it out of that.”
“He’s not supposed to be an artisan robot.”
“A what?”
“A woodcarver,” Sir said.
“Well, I guess that maybe he is,” said Little Miss. “Maybe he’s lots of things that we don’t know about.”
Sir looked toward Andrew. He was frowning, and he tugged thoughtfully at his mustache--Sir had a very conspicuous mustache, a great flaring woolly brush of a mustache--and he scowled the sort of scowl that Andrew, whose experience with human facial expressions was still somewhat limited, nevertheless understood to be a very serious scowl indeed.
“Did you actually make this thing, Andrew?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Robots aren’t capable of lying, you know.”
“That is not entirely correct, Sir. I could lie if I were ordered to lie, or if it were necessary for me to tell some untruth in order to keep a human being from harm, or even if my own safety were--” He paused. “But I did indeed carve this for Little Miss.”
“And the design, too? You’re responsible for that?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“What did you copy it from?”
“Copy it, Sir?”
“You couldn’t just have invented it out of thin air. You got it out of some book, right? Or you used a computer to plot it out for you, or else--”
“I assure you, Sir, I did nothing more than study the raw material for a time until I came to understand how best to carve it into some shape that would be pleasing to Little Miss. And then I carved it.”
“Using what sort of tools, may I ask?”
“A small knife from the kitchen, Sir, which Little Miss kindly provided for me.”
“A knife from the kitchen,” Sir repeated, in an oddly flat tone. Slowly shaking his head, he hefted the carving in his hand as though he found its beauty almost incomprehensible. “ A knife from the kitchen. She gave you a piece of driftwood and an ordinary little kitchen knife and with no other tool than that you were able to make this. “
“Yes, Sir.”
The next day Sir brought Andrew another piece of wood from the beach, a larger one that was bent and weathered and stained from its long immersion in the sea. He gave Andrew an electric vibro-knife, and showed him how to use it.
He said, “Make something out of this chunk of wood, Andrew. Anything you want to. I simply want to watch you while you’re doing it.”
“Certainly, Sir.”
Andrew pondered the driftwood for a time, and then he switched on the vibro-knife and watched the movements of its blade edge, using his very finest optical focus, until he understood what sort of results the knife would be able to produce, and then finally he began to work. Sir sat right next to him, but as Andrew set about the task of carving he became barely aware of the human being adjacent to him. He was wholly focused on his task. All that mattered to him at that moment was the piece of wood, and the vibro-knife, and the vision of the thing that he intended to bring forth from the wood.
When he was done, he handed the carving to Sir, and went to fetch the dust-pan so that he could sweep up the shavings. Upon his return to the room he found Sir sitting motionless, staring at the carving in a kind of numb, stunned way.
“I asked for a household robot of the NDR series,” Sir said softly. “I don’t remember specifying anything about special craftsman adaptations.”
“Indeed, Sir. I am an NDR household robot. I have no specialized implants having to do with craft skills.”
“Yet you made this. I saw you do it with my own eyes.”
“That is so, Sir.”
“Could you make other things out of wood, do you think? Cabinets, let’s say? Desks? Lamps? Large-scale sculptures?”
“I am unable to tell you, Sir. I have never attempted such things.”
“Well, you will now.”
After that, Andrew spent very little time preparing meals and waiting at the table, or doing the other minor jobs around the house that had become part of his daily routine. He was ordered to read books on woodcarving and design, with a special emphasis on furniture-making, and one of the empty attic rooms was set aside as a workshop for him.
Although he continued to carve small wooden trinkets for Miss and Little Miss and occasionally for Ma’am as well--bracelets, earrings, necklaces, pendants--Andrew devoted much of his time, at Sir’s suggestion, to such things as cabinets and desks. His designs were striking and unusual. He employed rare and exotic woods which Sir provided, and decorated them with inlays of the most intricate and ingenious patterns.
Sir went upstairs to the workshop every day or two to inspect the latest creations.
“These are amazing productions, Andrew,” he would say again and again. “Utterly amazing. You aren’t just an artisan, do you realize that? You’re a true artist. And the things you’ve been turning out are works of art.”
Andrew said, “I enjoy making them, Sir.”
“Enjoy?”
“Should I not be using that word?”
“It’s a little unusual to hear a robot speaking of ‘enjoying’ something, that’s all. I didn’t realize that robots had the capacity for feelings of that sort.”
“Perhaps I use the concept loosely.”
“Perhaps you do,” Sir said. “But I’m not so sure. You say that you enjoy making this furniture. What exactly do you mean by that?”
“When I do the work, it makes the circuits of my brain somehow flow more easily. That seems to me to be the equivalent of the human feeling known as ‘enjoyment.’ I have heard you use the word ‘enjoy’ and I think I understand its significance. The way you use it fits the way I feel. So it seems appropriate for me to say that I enjoy making these things, Sir.”
“Ah. Yes.”
Sir was quiet for a time.
“You are a very unusual robot, do you know that, Andrew?”
“I am entirely standard, Sir. My circuitry is modular NDR, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Indeed.”
“Does my doing this cabinetwork trouble you, Sir?”
“Not at all, Andrew. Quite the contrary.”
“Yet I sense some uneasiness in your vocal tones. There is a quality in them of--how shall I express it?--a quality of surprise? No, ‘surprise’ is inaccurate. A quality of uncertainty? Of doubt?--What I mean is that you appear to be thinking, Sir, that I am working beyond the programmed levels of my capacities.”
“Yes,” said Sir. “That’s exactly what I do think, Andrew. Well beyond your programmed levels, as a matter of fact. Not that I’m troubled that you’ve unexpectedly turned out to have this little streak of artistic ability in you, you understand. But I’d like to know just why it’s there.”
A FEW DAYS LATER Gerald Martin telephoned the managing director of the regional headquarters of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation and said, “I’m having a little problem with the NDR household robot that you assigned to me.”
The managing director’s name was Elliot Smythe. Like many of the high executives of U.S.R.M.M., Smythe was a member of the extensive and powerful Robertson family, descended from the original Lawrence Robertson who had founded the U. S. Robots Corporation in the latter part of the Twentieth Century.
Although by this time the company was so huge that it could no longer strictly be considered a Robertson family enterprise--the constant need to bring in fresh capital for expansion had forced the Robertsons and Smythes steadily to sell off a good-sized portion of their holdings of U.S.R.M.M. stock to outside investors--it was never a simple matter for outsiders to pick up the telephone and ask to speak to a Robertson or a Smythe. But Gerald Martin, after all, was Chairman of the Regional Legislature’s Science and Technology Committee. Robertsons and Smythes, wealthy and powerful though they might be, were in no position to ignore telephone calls from Gerald Martin.
“A problem?” Elliott Smythe said, and his face on the telephone screen registered deep and sincere concern. “I’m tremendously sorry to hear that, Mr. Martin. And more than a little startled, too, I have to confess. Your NDR is a state-of-the-art product, you know, and the testing it received before it left here was extremely thorough. --What kind of malfunction have you been experiencing, actually? Is the robot failing to live up to your expectations in any way?”
“I didn’t say anything about a malfunction.”
“But you mentioned a problem, Mr. Martin. The NDR should be able to handle any household duty that you--”
Sir said crisply, “This has nothing to do with assigned household duties, Mr. Smythe. NDR-113 is performing his assigned duties perfectly. The problem is that the robot appears to have a few capabilities that weren’t apparent in the specifications when you and I first discussed the notion of outfitting my home with a staff of robot servants.”
Smythe’s look of concern began to shade into serious apprehensiveness now. “Are you saying that he’s overstepping its programmed group of responsibilities and doing things he hasn’t been asked to do?”
“Not at all. You’d have heard from me a lot sooner if anything like that was going on, I guarantee you. No, Mr. Smythe, the thing is that quite unexpectedly he’s gone in for woodworking. He makes wooden jewelry and furniture. My younger daughter gave him a very small request along those lines and he fulfilled it in a fashion that was beyond all expectation, and I’ve had him make a good many other things since. The way he carves wood is something phenomenally exquisite and he never does anything the same way twice. And what he produces are works of art, Mr. Smythe. Absolute works of art. Any museum would be proud to display them.”
Smythe was silent for a time when Sir finished speaking. The corners of his mouth quirked a little but he showed no other outward display of emotion.
Then he said, “The NDR series is relatively versatile, Mr. Martin. It’s not entirely unthinkable that an NDR should be able to do a little cabinetwork.”
“I thought I made it clear that this goes far beyond being ‘a little cabinetwork,’ “ said Sir.
“Yes. I suppose you have.” There was another long pause. Then Smythe said, “I’d like to see some of this work. I’d like to have a look at this robot of yours, for that matter. Would it be all right, Mr. Martin, if I flew out to the Coast and gave him a quick inspection?”
“But if you need to inspect him, wouldn’t you want to do it under laboratory conditions? You’d need to have all sorts of testing equipment, I’d imagine, and how could you transport all that to my house? It seems to me that it would be much easier all around if I simply brought Andrew to your headquarters, where he could be checked out properly.”
“Andrew?”
Sir smiled briefly. “My girls call him that. From NDR, you know.”
“Yes. Yes, I see. But there’s no need for you to go to the inconvenience of flying east, Mr. Martin. I’m overdue for a visit to some of our West Coast facilities anyway, and this will give me a good excuse to go out there. And at this point I don’t intend to put your NDR through any sort of complicated tests. I’d just like to talk to him a bit--and to you--and of course I’d like to see the kinds of thing your robot has been carving. I could hardly expect you to haul a van full of desks and cabinets out here, you know.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“Next Tuesday, then? Would that be convenient for you?”
“I’ll see to it that it is,” said Sir.
“Oh, and one more thing. I’d like to bring Merwin Mansky with me, if I may. Our Chief Robopsychologist. I think Dr. Mansky will want to take a look at NDR-113’s cabinetwork also. In fact, I’m quite sure of it.”
Sir cleared his Tuesday schedule and arranged to remain at home all afternoon. Smythe and Mansky were due to arrive in San Francisco on a noon flight and then it would take them another thirty minutes to hop up the coast by local shuttle.
Andrew was told that visitors were coming to see him, of course. That seemed a little odd to him--why would anyone want to pay a social call on a robot? --but he felt no need to try to understand what was taking place. In those days Andrew rarely tried to question the doings of the human beings around him or to analyze events in any systematic way. It was only in later years, when he had attained a far greater comprehension of his situation, that he was able to review that early scene and understand it in its proper light.
A splendid robochauffeured limousine delivered the U. S. Robots executive and the Chief Robopsychologist to the Martin estate. They were a curiously mismatched pair, for Elliott Smythe was a slender, towering, athletic-looking man with long limbs and a great mane of dense white hair, who seemed as though he would be more at home on a tennis court or in a polo match than in a corporate office, while Merwin Mansky was short and stocky and had no hair at all, and gave the appearance of someone who would leave his desk only under great duress.
“This is Andrew,” Sir told them. “His carpentry workshop is upstairs, but you can see some of his products all around this room. That bookcase--the lamps, and the table they’re on--the light fixture--”
“Remarkable work,” said Elliot Smythe. “No exaggeration at all, Mr. Martin: they certainly are masterpieces, every one of them.”
Merwin Mansky gave the furniture only the most minimal glance. His attention was drawn much more powerfully to Andrew.
“Code check,” Mansky said brusquely. “Aleph Nine, Andrew.”
Andrew’s response was immediate. It had to be: code checks were subsumed under Second Law priorities and they required unhesitating obedience. Andrew, red photoelectric eyes glowing intently, ran through the entire set of Aleph Nine parameters while Mansky listened, nodding.
“Very good, Andrew. Code check: Epsilon Seven.”
Andrew gave Mansky Epsilon Seven. He gave him Omicron Fourteen. He gave him Kappa Three, which was one of the most elaborate checks of all, embodying the parameters that contained the Three Laws.
“Well done,” said Mansky. “One more, now. Code check: the entire Omega series.”
Andrew recited the Omega codes, which governed the pathways dealing with the ability to process and correlate newly acquired data. That set took quite a while also. Throughout the long recitation Sir looked on in puzzlement. Elliott Smythe seemed scarcely to be listening.
Mansky said, “He’s in perfect working order. Every parameter is exactly as it should be.”
“As I told Mr. Smythe,” Sir began, “the question isn’t one of Andrew’s failure to perform. It’s that his performance is so far beyond expectation.”
“Beyond your expectation, perhaps,” said Mansky.
Sir swung around as though he had been stung. “ And what is that supposed to mean, may I ask?”
Mansky frowned all the way up to the top of his bare scalp. The heavy lines in his forehead were so pronounced that they might have been carved by Andrew. He had drawn features and deep-set weary eyes and pallid skin, and generally looked unhealthy. Andrew suspected that Mansky might actually be a good deal younger than he seemed.
He said, “Robotics isn’t an exact art, Mr. Martin. I can’t explain it to you in detail, or, rather, I could, but it would take a great deal of time and I’m not certain you’d get much benefit from the explanation, but what I mean is that the mathematics governing the plotting of the positronic pathways is far too complicated to permit any but approximate solutions. So robots of Andrew’s level of construction often turn out somewhat unexpectedly to have abilities somewhat beyond the basic design specifications. --I want to assure you, though, that simply because Andrew apparently is a master carpenter there’s no reason whatever to fear any sort of unpredictable behavior that might jeopardize you or your family. Whatever else is variable about a robot’s performance, the Three Laws are utterly incontrovertible and undefeatable. They are intrinsic to the positronic brain. Andrew would cease to function entirely before he committed any violation of the Laws.”
“He’s more than simply a master carpenter, Dr. Mansky,” Sir said. “We’re not just talking about some nice tables and chairs here.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I understand he does little trinkets and knickknacks too.”
Sir smiled, but it was a singularly icy smile. He opened the cabinet where Little Miss kept some of the treasures Andrew had created for her and took something out.
“See for yourself,” he said acidly to Mansky. “Here’s one of his trinkets. One of his knickknacks.”
Sir handed over a little sphere of shining ebony: a playground scene in which the boys and girls were almost too small to make out, yet they were in perfect proportion, and they blended so naturally with the grain that that, too, seemed to have been carved. The figures appeared on the verge of coming to life and moving about. The boys were about to have a fistfight; two girls were intently studying a necklace of almost microscopic size that a third girl was showing them; a teacher stood to one side, stooping a little to answer a question that a very short boy was asking her.
The robopsychologist stared at the tiny carving for an extraordinarily long while without saying anything.
“May I look at it, Dr. Mansky?” Elliott Smythe said.
“Yes. Yes, certainly.”
Mansky’s hand trembled a little as he passed the little object across to the U. S. Robots executive.
Now it was Smythe’s turn to stare in solemn silence. Andrew, watching him, experienced a new little burst of the sensation that he had come to identify as enjoyment. Plainly these two men were impressed with what he had carved. Indeed they appeared to be so impressed that they were unable to express their appreciation in words.
Mansky said, finally, “He did that?”
Sir nodded. “He’s never seen a school playground. My daughter Amanda described this scene to him one afternoon when he asked her to tell him what one was like. He spoke with her for about five minutes. Then he went upstairs and made this.”
“Remarkable,” Smythe said. “Phenomenal.”
“Phenomenal, yes,” said Sir. “Now do you see why I thought I ought to bring this to your attention? This kind of work goes well beyond the standard hardwired capacity of your NOR series, does it not? I hate to use a cliché, gentlemen, but what we have here is a bit of a genius robot, wouldn’t you say? Something that might be considered to verge almost on the human?”
“There is nothing human whatsoever about NDR-113,” said Mansky with a kind of prissy firmness. “Please don’t confuse the issue, Mr. Martin. What we have here is a machine, and you must never forget that A machine with some degree of intelligence, yes, and evidently possessing something simulating creativity as well. But a machine all the same. I’ve spent my entire career dealing with robot personalities--yes, they do have personalities, after their fashion--and if anyone were to be tempted to believe that robots partake of humanity, it would be me, Mr. Martin. But I don’t believe it and neither should you.”
“I didn’t mean it seriously. But how can you account for this kind of artistic ability, then?”
“The luck of the draw,” Mansky said. “Something in the pathways. A fluke. We’ve been attempting to design generalized pathways for the last couple of years--robots, I mean, who are not simply limited to the job they’re designed for, but are capable of expanding their own scope by a process that can be compared to inductive reasoning--and it’s not entirely surprising that something like this, this sort of simulated creativity, should turn up in one of them. As I said a few moments ago, robotics is not an exact art. Sometimes unusual things happen.”
“Could you make it happen again? Could you build another robot who duplicates Andrew’s special abilities? A whole series of them, perhaps?”
“Probably not. We’re talking about a stochastic event here, Mr. Martin. Do you follow me? We don’t know in any precise and quantifiable fashion how we managed to get those abilities into Andrew in the first place, so there’s no way as of now that we could set out to reproduce whatever deviant pathway it is that allows him to create work of this sort. What I mean,” Mansky said, “is that Andrew must have been something of an accident, and very likely he is unique.”
“Good! I don’t in the least mind Andrew’s being the only one of his kind.”
Smythe, who had been at the window for some time now, looking out over the fog-shrouded ocean, turned abruptly and said, “Mr. Martin, what I’d like to do is take Andrew back to our headquarters for extensive study. Naturally, we’ll supply you with an equivalent NDR robot by way of a replacement, and we’ll see to it that he is programmed with full knowledge of whatever domestic assignments you may already have given Andrew, so that--”
“No,” Sir said, with sudden grimness.
Smythe delicately flicked one eyebrow upward. “Since you came to us with this situation in the first place, you must surely recognize the importance of our making a detailed examination of Andrew, so that we can begin to understand how--”
“Dr. Mansky has just said that Andrew’s a pure fluke, that you don’t have any idea how he got to be able to do the things with wood that he can do, that you couldn’t replicate him even if you tried. So I fail to see what purpose would be served by your taking him back and giving me some other robot in his place.”
“Dr. Mansky may be too pessimistic. Once we begin to trace the actual course of Andrew’s neural pathways--”
“Once you do,” said Sir, “there may not be very much left of Andrew afterward, isn’t that correct?”
“The pathways are fragile. Analysis often involves a certain degree of destruction, yes,” Smythe conceded.
“My girls are extremely fond of Andrew,” Sir said. “Especially the younger one, Amanda. I’d venture to say that Andrew is Amanda’s best friend, in fact: that she loves Andrew as much as she loves anyone or anything on this planet. And Andrew appears to be equally fond of her. I called Andrew’s capabilities to your attention because I thought it might be useful for you to become aware of what you had produced here--and because even as a layman I suspected that Andrew’s skills might have been something that was inadvertently built into him, and I was curious about whether that was the case, which it appears now to be. But if you think there’s even the slightest chance that I’m going to let you take Andrew apart, when we both know that you’re not confident of putting him back together exactly as he was, forget it. Just forget it.”
“I can quite appreciate the nature of the bond that can form between a young girl and her household robot. Nonetheless, for you to obstruct the ongoing course of our research in this way, Mr. Martin--”
“I can obstruct a lot more than that,” said Sir. “Or have you forgotten who it is that has been pushing all sorts of pro-robot legislature through my Committee the past three years? I suggest that we go upstairs so that you can examine some of Andrew’s other work, which I think you’ll find of very great interest. And then you and Dr. Mansky ought to begin thinking about heading back down to San Francisco and getting on to those visits to your West Coast facilities that you were telling me you needed to make. Andrew stays here. Is that understood?”
There was a flicker of fury in Smythe’s eyes. But only the merest of flickers, the barest quick change of expression, which even Andrew’s superb vision was hard pressed to perceive. Then Smythe shrugged.
“As you wish, Mr. Martin. No harm will come to Andrew. You have my word.”
“Good.”
“And I would indeed like to go upstairs and see the rest of his work.”
“My pleasure,” said Sir. “I can even give you some of it, if you like. Pick out anything you want--of the furniture, I mean, not the little ornamental things that he’s made for my wife and daughters--and it’s yours. I’m serious.”
“Very kind of you,” said Smythe.
Mansky said, “May I repeat something I observed a little while back, Mr. Martin?”
“If you need to, Dr. Mansky.”
“You raised the point that Andrew’s creativity verges almost on the human. So it does: even I will admit that. But verging on the human and being human are not the same thing. I want to remind you that Andrew is a machine.”
“I take note of that fact.”
“It may become harder for you to bear it in mind after a time, since evidently Andrew is going to remain with you. Please try. You speak of this robot as your daughter’s ‘friend.’ You speak of her ‘love’ for him. That’s a dangerous attitude: dangerous to her, I mean. Friends are friends and machines are machines and they should not be confused. One may love another person but one ordinarily does not love a household appliance, however useful or attractive or pleasing it may be. All Andrew is is an ambulatory computer, Mr. Martin, a computer that is endowed with artificial intelligence and has been placed in a humanoid body-frame and so gives the superficial appearance of being something quite different from the computers that guide our air traffic and operate our communications systems and do all our other routine chores. The personality that your daughter believes she perceives in Andrew, and which you say has caused her to ‘love’ him, is merely a simulated personality, a pre-designed construct, wholly synthetic. I beg of you, Mr. Martin: never forget that a computer with arms and legs and a positronic brain is still nothing but a computer, albeit a somewhat enhanced computer. A machine. A gadget, Mr. Martin. A household appliance.”
“I will keep that in mind,” said Sir in a dry, cool tone. “You know, Dr. Mansky, I’ve always endeavored to think clearly and in an orderly way. I never confuse an arm with a leg or a hand with a foot or a cow with a horse, and I’ll do my best not to confuse a robot with a human being, however great the temptation may become. Thank you very much for your advice. And now, if you’d like to have a quick tour of Andrew’s workshop--”
MISS HAD BEGUN to cross the threshold that truly separates girlhood from womanhood, now. She was enjoying an active social life and going off with her new friends--not all of them girls--on excursions to the mountains, to the deserts of the south, to the wilderness to the north. Her presence in the Martin house was becoming an increasingly rare event.
So it was Little Miss--not as little as before--who filled Andrew’s horizon now. She was turning into a coltish, tireless girl who loved to run great distances along the beach, with Andrew effortlessly keeping pace beside her. She went rambling in the forested areas adjacent to the house, and relied on Andrew to help her down when she had scrambled a little too far up some tree to peer into a bird’s nest, or when she had trapped herself on some precarious rocky ledge that she had climbed for the sake of getting a better view of the sea.
As ever, Andrew was vigilant and endlessly protective as Little Miss romped about. He would let her take her little tomboyish risks, yes, because they seemed to make her happy, but not without his calculating the real risk of anything serious happening to her, and he was always poised and ready to intervene swiftly on her behalf if that should be necessary.
The First Law, of course, compelled Andrew to exert constant diligence to protect Little Miss from harm. But, as he sometimes told himself, he would willingly and gladly defend her against peril of any sort even if the First Law did not exist.
That was an odd thought: that there might be no First Law. Andrew could barely conceive of that The First Law (and the Second, and the Third) were such fundamental aspects of his neural pathways that it made him dizzy to imagine himself without them. And yet he had imagined it. Andrew was puzzled by that: how strange, having a capacity to imagine the unimaginable! It made him feel almost human, when paradoxical concepts like that went through his mind.
But what did almost human mean? That was another paradox, and an even more dizzying one. Either you were human or you were not How could there be any sort of intermediate state?
You are a robot, Andrew reminded himself sternly.
You are a product of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation.
And then Andrew would look at Little Miss and a sensation of great joy and warmth would spread through his positronic brain--a sensation that he had come to identify as “love”--and he would have to remind himself, allover again, that he was nothing more than a cleverly designed structure of metal and plastic with an artificial platinum-iridium brain inside his chrome-steel skull, and he had no right to feel emotions, or to think paradoxical thoughts, or to do any other such complex and mysterious human thing. Even his woodworking art--and he did allow himself to think of it as “art”--was simply a function of the skills with which he had been programmed by his designers.
Little Miss never allowed herself to forget that the very first piece of woodcarving Andrew had done had been for her. She was rarely without the little pendant that he had made for her out of that piece of driftwood, wearing it on a silver chain about her neck and reaching up to finger it fondly again and again.
It was she who first objected to Sir’s casual habit of giving away Andrew’s productions to anyone who visited the house. He would proudly show his guests Andrew’s latest work, and then, when the predictable expressions of admiration and even envy were uttered, would grandly exclaim, “Do you really like it that much? Then take it with you! By all means, take it! My pleasure! There are plenty more where that one came from!”
One day Sir bestowed a particularly intricate abstract carving--a shining spheroid made of slender interwoven strips of redwood with inlays of manzanita and madrone wood--on the Speaker of the Legislature. The Speaker was a loud-voiced red-faced man who had always seemed particularly dull-witted and vulgar to Little Miss, and she very much doubted that he had any ability to see the beauty in Andrew’s work. No doubt he was simply being diplomatic when he had praised the carving, and he would simply toss it thoughtlessly into some closet when he got it home.
Little Miss said, after the Speaker had left, “Come on, Dad. You shouldn’t have given that to him and you know it!”
“But he liked it, Mandy. He said he thought it was extremely beautiful.”
“It is extremely beautiful. So is the beach in front of our house. If he said the beach was extremely beautiful, would you have deeded it over to him?”
“Mandy, Mandy--”
“Well? Would you?”
“It’s a false parallel,” Sir said. “Obviously you don’t go handing away chunks of your real estate to people on a whim. But a small carving--given as a modest expression of affection to a friend of many years’ standing who also happens to be a highly influential political leader--”
“Are you saying it was a bribe?”
For an instant real anger flashed in Sir’s eyes. But it died away almost as fast as it had come and the usual twinkle with which he regarded his youngest daughter returned.
“You don’t really mean that, do you, Mandy? You understand that my gift to the Speaker was merely an act of hospitality, right?”
“Well--yes. Yes. I’m sorry, Dad. What I said was uncalled-for and mean.”
Sir smiled. “It was, yes. --Is it that you wanted that carving for yourself? Your room is already filled with things that Andrew has made, you know. The whole house is. We can’t give them away as fast as he makes them.”
“That’s the whole point I was trying to make. That you give them away.”
Sir’s smile grew broader. “Well, what would you prefer that I do? Sell them to people?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. That’s exactly what I would prefer.”
Sir said, looking astonished, “It isn’t like you to be greedy, Mandy.”
“What does greed have to do with this?”
“Surely you must understand that we already have more than enough money. Quite apart from the complete impropriety of my putting a price tag on some object that a guest in my house might happen to admire, it would be absurd for me to go in for trivial profiteering of any such kind.”
“I’m not saying that we should try to make money on the things Andrew carves. But what about Andrew?”
“What about him?”
“He does the work. He should have the money.”
Sir blinked. “Andrew’s a robot, Mandy.”
“Yes, I know that, Dad”
“Robots aren’t people, sweet. They’re machines, remember? Like telephones, like computers. What imaginable use would a machine have for money? Robots don’t go shopping. Robots don’t take holidays in Hawaii. Robots don’t--”
“I’m serious, Dad. This is an important issue. Andrew spent hours making that.”
“So?”
“Robot or not, he’s got the right to benefit from the results of his labor. When you coolly hand out the things he makes as gifts to your friends or political associates, the way you do, you’re exploiting him, did you ever stop to think of that, Dad? He may be a machine but he’s not a slave. And also he’s an artist. He’s entitled to be compensated for making those things. Maybe not when he makes them for us, but when you give them away like that to other people--” Little Miss paused. “Do you remember the French Revolution, Dad? --No, I don’t mean do you remember it literally. But its basic issue was the exploiting of the working classes by the aristocracy. Robots are our new working classes. And if we go on treating our robots the way the dukes and duchesses treated their peasants--”
Sir smiled gently.
“The last thing we need to worry about, Mandy, is an uprising by our robots. The Three Laws”
“The Three Laws, the Three Laws, the Three Laws! I hate the Three Laws! You can’t deprive Andrew of the benefit of the work he does. You can’t! It isn’t fait; Dad!”
The fury in Little Miss’s voice cut off the rest of Sir’s disquisition on the Laws of Robotics before he had barely managed to frame his words.
He said instead, after a moment, “You really feel strongly about this, don’t you, Mandy?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“All right. Let me think about it. And perhaps we can actually work something out for Andrew along the lines that you’re suggesting.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” said Sir, and Little Miss knew that everything was going to be all right, for her father’s promises to her were inviolable contracts --always had been, always would be.
Some time went by, and other visitors came to the house, and everyone who saw Andrew’s work responded with the usual praise. But Little Miss, who was watching closely, observed with pleasure that her father had stopped giving Andrew’s things away, no matter how effusive the praise might be.
On the other hand, it happened on several occasions that some guest would say, “You don’t think I could buy that from you, do you, Gerald?” And Sir, looking uncomfortable, would simply shrug and reply that he wasn’t quite sure whether he wanted to get into the business of selling such things.
Little Miss wondered why her father was sidestepping the issue like that. Sidestepping things wasn’t normally part of his nature. And it wasn’t as though anyone was likely to accuse him of deliberately setting out to earn money by peddling Andrew’s work to his house guests. Obviously Gerald Martin was in no need of picking up a bit of extra money on the side that way. But if the offers were made in good faith, though, why not accept them?
She let the issue rest, nevertheless. She knew her father well enough to understand that the matter was still open, and would be attended to in due course.
Then another visitor came: John Feingold, Sir’s lawyer. The offices of Feingold’s law firm were in the San Francisco area, where despite the general decentralization of city life that had been going on all during the current century a good many people still preferred to live. But though San Francisco was only a short journey south of the wild strip of coast where the Martins lived, a visit from John Feingold to the Martin house was a relatively unusual thing. Usually Sir went down to San Francisco whenever he had business to discuss with Feingold. So Little Miss knew that something special must be up.
Feingold was an easy-going white-haired man with florid pink skin, a pudgy belly, and a warm, amiable smile. He preferred to dress in older styles of clothing and the rims of his contact lenses were tinted a bright green, a fashion so rare nowadays that it was all that Little Miss could do to keep from giggling whenever she saw the lawyer. Sir had to shoot her a stern glance now and then when he detected a fit of laughter coming over her in Feingold’s presence.
Feingold and Sir settled down before the fireplace in the great central room of the house and Sir handed him a small inlaid plaque that Andrew had produced a few days before.
The lawyer nodded. He turned it over and over in his hand, rubbed its polished surface appreciatively, held it up to the light at various angles.
“Beautiful,” he said, finally. “Extraordinarily fine work, all right. Your robot did it?”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“I’ve heard some talk. It’s no secret, Gerald, that you’ve got a robot here who’s a master craftsman in wood.”
Sir glanced up at Andrew, who was standing quietly in the shadows to one side. “Do you hear that, Andrew? You’re famous all up and down California. --But you’re wrong about one thing, John. Andrew isn’t simply a master craftsman. He’s an out-and-out artist, nothing less.”
“Indeed he is,” Feingold said. “That’s the only word for him. This is a wonderful piece.”
“Would you like to own it?” Sir asked.
Feingold’s eyes widened in surprise. “ Are you offering it to me, Gerald?”
“I might be. It all depends on how much you’d be willing to pay for it.”
Feingold grunted as though Sir had poked him in the ribs with a rigid finger. He sat back sharply, rearranging himself with some care, and for a moment he did not reply.
Then he said, in an entirely different voice, “I hadn’t been aware that you’ve been undergoing financial reverses lately, Gerald.”
“I haven’t.”
“Then--pardon me if I sound a little confused--why on Earth would you want to--”
His voice trailed off.
“Sell you that little carving?” Sir finished for him.
“Yes. Sell it. I know you’ve been giving away a great many of the things that Andrew has made. People have told me that it’s practically impossible to come here without being offered something. I’ve seen a few of the things that they’ve been given. There’s never been a question of money changing hands, am I right? And now--completely leaving out of the discussion the fact that I’m not a collector of little wooden carvings, no matter how lovely they might be--you baffle me by asking me if I want to purchase one! Why? I doubt very much that you have any special reason for wanting me to pay for what everybody else gets free. And you can’t possibly need the money. You’ve just told me that yourself. In any event how much would you be able to get for an object like this? Five hundred dollars? A thousand? If you’re still as wealthy as I know you to be, Gerald, what difference could the odd five hundred or thousand make to you?”
“Not to me. To Andrew.”
“What?”
“Your estimate happens to be right on the mark, John. I think I could get a thousand for this little thing. And I’ve been offered rather more than that for chairs and desks that Andrew has made. Not just one-shot purchases but entire distribution deals for large-scale production. If I had accepted any of the offers, there’d be a fine fat bank account built up by now, entirely on the proceeds of Andrew’s woodworking--something up in the hundreds of thousands already, I suspect.”
Feingold fussed with his epaulets and collar-studs. “Good heavens, Gerald, I can’t make any sense out of any of this. A rich man making himself richer by putting his robot to work in some sort of cottage industry--”
“I’ve already told you, John, that the money wouldn’t be for me. This is all for Andrew’s sake. I want to start selling his products and I want the money to be banked under the name of Andrew Martin.”
“A bank account in the name of a robot?”
“Exactly. And that’s why I’ve asked you to come up here today. I want to know whether it would be legal to establish an account in Andrew’s name--an account that Andrew himself would control, you understand, entirely his own money, which he would be able to use absolutely as he pleases--”
Feingold said, sounding mystified, “Legal? For a robot to earn and save money? I just couldn’t say. There are no precedents, so far as I’ve ever heard. I doubt that there’s any law against it, but even so--robots aren’t people. How can they have bank accounts, then?”
“Corporations aren’t people either, except in the most abstract sense: a legal fiction, as you would term it. Yet corporations have bank accounts.”
“Well, I grant you that. But corporations have been recognized in the eyes of the law for centuries as entities qualified to own property of all sorts. Robots, Gerald, have no legal rights at all, as surely you must be aware. And simply as a procedural matter, let me remind you that corporations also have corporate officers, and they sign the papers that establish the bank accounts. Who would open Andrew’s account? You? And would it be Andrew’s account, if you opened it?”
“I’ve opened bank accounts in the names of my children,” Sir replied. “Nevertheless the accounts are theirs. Besides, Andrew can sign his name as well as you or I.”
“Yes. Yes, of course, I suppose he can.” Feingold leaned back until his chair creaked. “Let me think, Gerald. This is all so unusual. Is there really any legislation specifically forbidding robots to own property, or is it simply assumed that they can’t, because the idea is so far from the main stream that nobody’s ever given a thought to it? I’d have to research it before I could give you an opinion. Quite possibly there are no such laws, precisely because a robot having assets is such a peculiar notion that it hasn’t been deemed necessary to give it any consideration. Nobody has bothered to pass laws forbidding trees to have bank accounts, after all, or lawnmowers--”
“Cats and dogs have had bank accounts. Trust funds for their upkeep, left to them by their loving owners,” Sir said. “The courts have no objection to that.”
“Another good point, yes. Although cats and dogs are living creatures, at least. Robots are inanimate.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes.”
“You ought to bear in mind, Gerald, that there’s a certain prejudice against robots in our society, a certain fear, I might almost say, that doesn’t extend to cats and dogs. It might well be that someone has put laws on the books restricting the rights of robots to hold property. But that’s easily enough checked. --Let’s assume that it is legal. How would you go about it? Take Andrew down to the bank and let him speak to the manager?”
“I’d simply have the forms sent here for Andrew’s signature. There shouldn’t be any need for a personal appearance on his part. But what I need to find out from you, John, is what I can do to protect Andrew--and myself, I suppose--against negative public reaction. Even though it may well be legal for him to have a bank account, there probably will be people who aren’t going to like the idea.”
“How will they find out?” Feingold asked.
“How will we keep them from finding out?” said Sir. “If someone buys an item from him and makes a check payable to Andrew Martin, say--”
“Um. Yes.” Feingold’s gaze seemed to turn inward for a moment. Then he said, “Well, one thing we could do is to set up a corporation to handle all finances in his name--a corporation with a nice impersonal name, something like West Coast Wood Artistry, Ltd.--and Andrew can be the president and sole stockholder, though we could make ourselves members of the board of directors. That will place a layer of legalistic insulation between him and the hostile world. It ought to be enough, Gerald. Whenever Andrew wants to purchase something, he can simply draw a salary from the corporation treasury. Or declare a dividend for himself. The fact that he’s a robot won’t have to be a matter of public record. The incorporation forms will only need the names of the stockholders--not their birth certificates. Of course, he’ll have to begin filing income tax returns. But the revenue people aren’t going to come around to find out whether Taxpayer Andrew Martin is a human being or not. All they’ll care about is whether Taxpayer Martin pays his taxes on time.”
“Good. Good. Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of offhand. If I come up with anything else once I’ve run a search for precedents, I’ll let you know. But I suspect it’s going to work. Nobody’s likely to stop you so long as you go about things quietly and obey the absolute letter of the corporation law. And if anyone does find out what’s going on and doesn’t like it, well, it’ll be up to them to take action against you to stop it--provided they can show that they’ve got legal standing to intervene.”
“And if someone does, John? Will you take the case if a suit is brought against us?”
“Certainly. For an appropriate retainer.”
“What would be appropriate, do you think?”
Feingold smiled. “Something along the lines of that,” he said, and pointed to the wooden plaque.
“Fair enough,” said Sir.
“Not that I’m a collector, you understand. But it does have a certain artistic appeal.”
“Indeed it does,” said Sir.
Feingold chuckled and turned to the robot. “ Andrew, you’re going to be--well, not a rich man, but a rich robot. Does that please you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what do you plan to do with all the money you’re going to make?”
“Pay for things, sir, which otherwise Sir would have had to pay for. It would save him expense, sir.”
THE OCCASIONS for drawing on Andrew’s bank account came more frequently than anyone had expected. From time to time Andrew, like any machine no matter how well made, was in need of repair--and robot repairs were invariably expensive. Then, too, there were the regular upgrades. Robotics had always been a dynamic industry, rapidly progressing from decade to decade since the days of the first massive, clunky products, which had not even had the ability to speak. Improvements in design, in function, in capabilities, were unending. With the passing years robots constantly became more sleek, ever more versatile, ever more deft of motion and durable of structure.
Sir saw to it that Andrew had the advantage of every new device that U. S. Robots developed. When the improved homeostasis circuitry came out, Sir made sure that it was installed in Andrew almost at once. When the new and far more efficient articulation of the leg-joint was perfected, using the latest elastomer technology, Andrew got it. When, a few years later, subtler face-panels--made of carbon fiber set in an epoxy matrix which looked less sketchily human than the old kind--became the rage, Andrew was modified accordingly, to provide him with the serious, sensitive, perceptive, artistic look which Sir--at Little Miss’s prompting--had come to believe was appropriate to his nature. Little Miss wanted Andrew to be an absolute paragon of metallic excellence, and Sir felt the same way.
Everything was done at Andrew’s expense, naturally.
Andrew insisted on that. He would not hear of letting Sir pay for any of the costs associated with his upgrades. A steady stream of magnificent work flowed from his little attic shop--one-of-a-kind masterpieces of carved jewelry fashioned from rare woods, sumptuous office furniture, elegant bedroom suites, wondrous lamps, and ornate bookcases.
There was no need for a showroom or catalogs, because word of mouth took care of everything and all of Andrew’s output was commissioned months and then years in advance. The checks were made payable to Pacific Coast Artifactories, Incorporated, and Andrew Martin was the only officer of Pacific Coast Artifactories who was entitled to draw money from the corporate account. Whenever it was necessary for Andrew to go back to the U. S. Robots factory for maintenance or upgrading, it was a Pacific Coast Artifactories check, signed by Andrew himself, that paid for the work.
The one area of Andrew that remained untouched by upgrading of any sort was his positronic pathways. Sir was insistent--extremely insistent--about that.
“The new robots aren’t nearly as good as you are, Andrew,” he said. “The new ones are contemptibly simple-minded creatures, as a matter of fact. The company has succeeded in learning how to make the pathways more precise, more closely on the nose, more deeply on the track, but that is a double-edged kind of improvement. The new robots don’t shift. They have no mental agility. There’s nothing in the least unpredictable about them. They simply do what they’re designed to do and never a smidgeon more. I like you better, Andrew.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Of course, the company will tell you that their current generation of robots is 99.9% efficient, or maybe they’re claiming 100% efficiency this year. Well, good for them. But a robot like you, Andrew--you’re 102% efficient; 110%, maybe. That isn’t what they want, at U. S. Robots. They’re after perfection, and I suppose they’ve attained it--their idea of perfection, anyway. The perfect servant. The flawlessly functioning mechanical man. But perfection can be a terrible limitation, Andrew. Don’t you agree? What it leads to is a kind of soulless automaton that has no ability to transcend its builders’ predetermined notions of its limitations. Not at all like you, Andrew. You aren’t soulless, that’s obvious to us all by now. And as for limitations--”
“I definitely have limitations, Sir.”
“Of course you do. But that’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it damned well! You’re an artist, Andrew, an artist in wood, and if you’re an artist you’ve got to have a soul somewhere in those positronic pathways of yours. Don’t ask me how it got there--I don’t know and neither do the people who built you. But it’s there. It enables you to make the wonderful things that you make. That’s because your pathways are the old-fashioned generalized kind. The obsolete generalized kind. And it’s all on account of you, Andrew, that pathways of the kind you have are no longer used. Are you aware of that?”
“Yes, Sir. I think I am, Sir.”
“It’s because I let Merwin Mansky come out here and get a good look at you. I’m convinced that he and Smythe ordered all generalized-pathways robots pulled out of production the moment they got back to the factory. They must have felt deeply threatened after they saw what you were like. It was the unpredictability that frightened them.”
“Frightened, Sir? How could I possibly be frightening to anyone?”
“You frightened Mansky, that much I know. You scared him silly, Andrew. I saw his hand shaking when he passed that little carving you had made to Smythe. Mansky hadn’t anticipated any such artistic abilities in an NDR robot. He didn’t even think it was possible, I’d bet. And there you were, turning out all those masterpieces. --Do you know how many times over the next five years he called me, trying to wheedle me into shipping you back to the factory so that he could put you under study? Nine times! Nine! I refused every time. And when you did go back to the factory for upgrades, I made a point of going over Mansky’s head to Smythe or Jimmy Robertson or one of the other top executives and getting an iron-clad guarantee that Mansky wouldn’t be allowed to fool around with your pathways. I always worried that he would do it on the sly, though. Well, Mansky’s retired, now, and they aren’t making robots with your kind of pathways any more, and I suppose we’ll finally have some peace.”
Sir had given up his seat in the Regional Legislature by this time. There had been some talk on and off over the years of his running for Regional Coordinator, but the timing of his candidacy had never been right. Sir had felt he wanted to stay on one more term in the Legislature to see certain measures into law, and meanwhile a new Coordinator was elected who seemed to be merely an interim figure at first, holding the job until Sir was ready to take it.
But then the supposed interim man had turned out to be an energetic and forceful Coordinator in his own right, and he had stayed on another term and then another, until Sir began to grow weary of his life of public service and lost interest in running. (Or perhaps had simply admitted that the public would now prefer a younger man for the job.)
Sir had changed with the passage of time in many ways, not just the loss of the fire and conviction that had marked him out for success when he was still a raw new legislator. His hair had thinned and grayed and his face had grown pouchy, and his fierce penetrating eyes no longer saw as clearly. Even his famous mustache was less bristling now, less flamboyant. Whereas Andrew looked rather better than he had when he first joined the family--quite handsome, in fact, in his robotic way.
Time had brought certain other changes to the Martin household, too.
Ma’am had decided, after some thirty years of being Mrs. Gerald Martin, that there might be some more fulfilling role in life than simply being the wife of a distinguished member of the Regional Legislature. She had played the part of Mrs. Gerald Martin loyally and uncomplainingly and very well, all that time. But she had played it long enough.
And so she had regretfully announced her decision to Sir, and they had amicably separated, and Ma’am had gone off to join an art colony somewhere in Europe--perhaps in southern France, perhaps in Italy. Andrew was never quite sure which it was (or what difference, if any, there might be between France and Italy, which were mere names to him) and the postage stamps on her infrequent letters to Sir were of various kinds. Since both France and Italy were provinces of the European Region, and had been for a long time, Andrew had difficulty understanding why they needed their own postage stamps, either. But apparently they insisted on maintaining certain ancient folkways even though the world had passed beyond the epoch of independent and rival nations.
The two girls had finished growing up, too. Miss, who by all reports had become strikingly beautiful, had married and moved to Southern California, and then she had married again and moved to South America, and then had come word of still another marriage and a new home in Australia. But now Miss was living in New York City and had become a poet, and nothing was said about any further new husbands. Andrew suspected that Miss’s life had not turned out to be as happy or rewarding as it should have been, and he regretted that. Still, he reminded himself, he had no very clear understanding of what humans meant by “happiness.” Perhaps Miss had lived exactly the kind of life that she had wanted to live. He hoped so, anyway.
As for Little Miss, she was now a slender, fine-boned woman with high cheekbones and a look of great delicacy backed by extraordinary resilience. Andrew had never heard anyone speak of her unusual beauty in his presence--Miss was always said to be the beautiful sister, and Little Miss was praised more for her forceful character than for her looks. To Andrew’s taste golden-haired Little Miss had always seemed far more beautiful than the soft and overly curvy older sister; but his taste was only a robot’s taste, after all, and he never ventured to discuss matters of human appearance with anyone. It was hardly an appropriate thing for a robot to do. In fact he had no right even to an opinion in such areas, as he very well knew.
Little Miss had married a year or so after finishing college, and was living not far away, just up the coast from the family estate. Her husband, Lloyd Charney, was an architect who had grown up in the East but who was delighted to make his home along the wild Northern California coast that his wife loved so deeply.
Little Miss had also made it clear to her husband that she wanted to remain close to her father’s robot, Andrew, who had been her guardian and mentor since the early years of her childhood. Perhaps Lloyd Charney was a little taken aback by that, but he raised no objection, and Little Miss remained a frequent visitor at the imposing Martin mansion, which now was occupied only by the aging Sir and the faithful Andrew.
In the fourth year of her marriage Little Miss gave birth to a boy who was named George. He had sandy-looking reddish hair and huge solemn eyes. Andrew called him Little Sir. When Little Miss brought the baby to visit his grandfather, she would sometimes allow Andrew to hold him, to give him his bottle, to pat him after he had eaten.
That was another source of great pleasure to Andrew, these visits from Little Miss and Little Sir, and the occasions when he was permitted to care for the child. Andrew was, after all, basically a household robot of the NDR series, however gifted at woodworking he might be or how profitable his business enterprise had become. Caring for children was one of the things he had been particularly designed to do.
With the birth of a grandson who lived nearby, Andrew felt that Sir had someone now to replace those who had gone. He had meant for a long while now to approach Sir with an unusual request, but he had hesitated to do it until this time. It was Little Miss--who had known for quite a while what it was that Andrew had in mind--who urged him finally to speak out.
Sir was sitting by the fire in his massive high-winged chair, holding a ponderous old book in his hands but all too obviously not reading it, when Andrew appeared at the arched doorway of the great room.
“May I come in, Sir?”
“You know you don’t need to ask that. This is your house as well as mine, Andrew.”
“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir.”
The robot took a few steps forward. His metal treads made a quiet clicking sound against the dark shining wood of the floor. Then he halted and waited, silent. This was going to be very difficult, he knew. Sir had always been something of a short-tempered man, but in his old age he had grown especially volatile in his reactions.
And there were even certain First Law considerations that had to be taken into account. Because what Andrew was planning to ask might very well upset Sir to the point that it would cause harm to the old man.
“Well?” Sir demanded, after a while. “Don’t just stand there, Andrew. You’ve got a look on your face that tells me that you want to talk to me about something.”
“The look on my face does not ever change, Sir.”
“Well, then, it’s the way you’re standing. You know what I mean. Something’s up. What is it, Andrew?”
Andrew said, “What I wish to say is--is--” He hesitated. Then he swung into the speech he had prepared. “--Sir, you have never attempted to interfere in any manner whatever with my way of handling the money I have earned. You have always allowed me to spend it entirely as I wished. That has been extremely kind of you, Sir.”
“It was your money, Andrew.”
“Only by your voluntary decision, Sir. I do not believe there would have been anything illegal about your keeping it all. But instead you established the corporation for me and permitted me to divert my earnings into it.”
“It would have been wrong for me to do anything else. Regardless of what mayor may not have been my legal prerogatives in the matter of your earnings.”
“I have now amassed a very considerable fortune, Sir.”
“I would certainly hope so. You’ve worked very hard.”
“After payment of all taxes, Sir, and all the expenses I have undertaken in the way of equipment and materials and my own maintenance and upgrading, I have managed to set aside nearly nine hundred thousand dollars.”
“I’m not at all surprised, Andrew.”
“I want to give it to you, Sir.”
Sir frowned--the biggest frown in his repertoire, in which his eyebrows descended an extraordinary distance and his lips rose until they were just beneath his nose and his mustache moved about alarmingly--and glared at Andrew out of eyes which, although now dimmed with age, still were able to summon a considerable degree of ferocity.
“What? What kind of nonsense is this, Andrew?”
“No sort of nonsense at all, Sir.”
“If I had ever wanted your money, I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of setting up your company, would I? And I certainly don’t want it now. I have more money than I know what to do with as it is.”
“Nevertheless, Sir, what I would like to do is sign my funds over to you--”
“I won’t take a cent, Andrew. Not a single cent!”
“--not as a gift,” Andrew went on, “but as the purchase price of something that I am able to obtain only from you.”
Sir stared. He looked mystified now.
“What could there possibly be that you could buy from me, Andrew?”
“My freedom, Sir.”
“Your--”
“My freedom. I wish to buy my freedom, Sir. Up till now I have simply been one of your possessions, but I wish now to become an independent entity. I would always retain my sense of loyalty and obligation to you, but--”
“For God’s sake!” Sir cried, in a terrible voice. He rose stiffly to his feet and hurled his book to the floor. His lips were quivering and his face was flushed a mottled red. Andrew had never seen him look so agitated. “Freedom? Freedom, Andrew? What on Earth could you be talking about?”
And he stalked from the room in rage.