SEVEN

ANDREW SUMMONED LITTLE MISS. Not so much for his own sake, but because Sir’s anger had been so intense that Andrew feared for the old man’s health, and Little Miss was the only person in the world who could soothe him out of such an irascible mood.

            Sir was in his upstairs bedroom when she arrived. He had been there for two hours. Andrew showed Little Miss up the stairs and halted, hesitating, outside the room as she began to enter it. Sir could be seen pacing back and forth, moving with such determination and ferocity that he seemed to be wearing a track in the antique oriental carpet. He paid no attention to the two figures in the hallway.

            Little Miss glanced back at Andrew.

            “Why are you waiting out there?” she asked.

            “I don’t think it would be useful for me to venture near Sir just now, Little Miss.”

            “Don’t be foolish.”

            “I am the one who upset him so.”

            “Yes, I realize that. But he’s surely over it by now. Come on in with me, and between us we’ll get this thing cleared up in no time.”

            Andrew could hear the rhythmic angry sound of Sir’s steady pacing. “With all respect, Little Miss, it does not seem to me that he is over it in the least. I believe he is still quite troubled. And if I irritate him further --No, Little Miss. I am unable to enter his room. Not until you assure me that he is calm enough so that I can safely be seen by him.”

            Little Miss stared at Andrew a moment. Then she nodded and said, “All right, Andrew. I understand.”

            She went inside. Andrew heard the rhythm of Sir’s anguished pacing begin to slow a bit. He heard voices: first that of Little Miss, speaking gently and calmly, and then that of Sir, erupting in torrents of volcanic wrath, and then Little Miss again, as quietly as before, and then Sir, not quite as frenziedly. And then Little Miss, still calmly but this time not gently: speaking quite firmly, in fact.

            The whole while, Andrew had no idea what was being said. It would not have been difficult for him to adjust his audio receptors to pick up the conversation clearly. But that seemed inappropriate to him; and so the only adjustment he had made was in the opposite direction, allowing him to monitor the conversation sufficiently to know whether his help might be needed, but not so that he could understand the individual words.

            After a time Little Miss appeared at the doorway and said, “Andrew, would you step in here now?”

            “As I said before, I am extremely concerned about the state of Sir’s emotional level, Little Miss. If I were to enter, and provoke him all over again--”

            “His emotional level is fine, Andrew. Blowing off a little steam isn’t going to kill him. It’s good for him, as a matter of fact. Now come on in here. Come in.”

            It was a direct order--coupled with a lessening of First Law potentials. Andrew had no choice but to obey.

            He found Sir sitting in his enormous winged armchair by the window--the mahogany-and-leather armchair that Andrew had made for him fifteen years before--with a lap-robe wrapped about him. He was indeed calm again, but there was a steely glint in his eye, and--sitting enthroned the way he was--he had the look about him of an angry old emperor plagued by unruly subordinates. He ignored Andrew’s presence completely.

            Little Miss said, “All right, Father. We can discuss this quietly and rationally, can’t we?”

            Sir shrugged. “I try to discuss everything quietly and rationally. I always have.”

            “Yes, you have, Father.”

            “But this, Mandy--this total absurdity--this monstrous nonsense that Andrew has thrown at me--!”

            “Father!”

            “I’m sorry. I can’t stay calm when I’m confronted with absolute craziness.”

            “You know that Andrew is inherently incapable of craziness. Craziness just isn’t included in his specifications.”

            “When he talks about getting his freedom--his freedom, by God!--what else can it be but craziness?” And Sir began to sputter and turn red again.

            Andrew had never seen Sir in such a state--never. Once more he began to feel uneasy about being present in the room, and thus setting up such a threat to the old man’s constitution. Sir seemed almost on the verge of an apoplectic fit. And if something should happen to him--something that would be a direct result of Andrew’s having begun all this--

            Little Miss said, “Stop it, Father! Just stop it! You have no right to throw a tantrum over this!”

            Andrew was astonished to hear Little Miss speaking to her father so harshly, so defiantly. She sounded like a mother scolding a cranky child. Suddenly it struck him that among human beings time must eventually reverse all the normal generational roles: that Sir, once so dynamic and autocratic and all-knowing, was now as weak and vulnerable as a child, and it was Little Miss’s responsibility to guide and direct him as he struggled to understand the bewildering nature of the world.

            It seemed a little strange to Andrew, too, that they would be enacting this highly charged scene in front of him. But of course no one in the Martin family had hesitated to talk in front of Andrew for thirty years--not even about the most intimate matters. Why should they feel any inhibitions in his presence? He was only a robot.

            “Freedom--” Sir said. His voice was thick in his throat. “For a robot!”

            “It’s an unusual concept, yes. I admit that, Father. But why are you taking it as such a personal affront?”

            “Am I? I’m taking it as an affront against logic! An affront against common sense! Look, Mandy, what would you say if your front porch came to you and said, ‘I want my freedom. I want to move to Chicago and be a front porch there. I think being a front porch in Chicago would be personally more fulfilling than remaining in this place.’ “

            Andrew saw a muscle flicker in Little Miss’s cheek. He understood abruptly that Sir’s vehement reaction to his request must have some connection with Ma’am’s decision, years ago, to end her marriage to Sir and leave, to seek her freedom as a single woman far away.

            Human beings were so complicated!

            Little Miss said, “ A front porch can’t say anything. Or decide to move itself anywhere else. Front porches aren’t intelligent. Andrew is.”

            “Artificial intelligence.”

            “Father, you sound like the worst sort of Society-for-Humanity Fundamentalist bigot! Andrew has lived with you for decades. You know him as well as you know any member of your own family. --What am I saying? He is a member of your own family. Now, suddenly, you begin talking about him as though he’s nothing but some ingenious kind of carpet sweeper! Andrew is a person and you know that very well.”

            “An artificial person,” Sir said. But some of the conviction and force had left his tone.

            “Artificial, yes. That’s beside the point. This is the Twenty-Second Century, Father--and pretty far along in the Twenty-Second Century at that. Surely we’re capable by now of recognizing that robots are intricate and sensitive organisms that have distinctive personalities, that have feelings, that have--well, that have souls. “

            “I’d hate to have to defend that point in court,” Sir said. He said it quietly, with a touch of amusement in his voice where the rancor had been just a few moments before. So he was regaining some control over himself, apparently. Andrew felt a sensation of relief.

            “Nobody’s asking you to defend it in court,” said Little Miss. “Only to accept it within your own heart. Andrew wants you to give him a document saying that he’s a free individual. He’s willing to pay you generously for that document, unnecessary though any payment should be. It would be a simple statement of his autonomy. What’s so terrible about that, may I ask?”

            “I don’t want Andrew to leave me,” said Sir sullenly.

            “Ah! That’s it! That’s the crux, isn’t it, Father?”

            There was no fire in Sir’s eyes now. He seemed lost in self-pity. “I’m an old man. My wife is long gone, my older daughter is a stranger to me, my younger daughter has moved out and is on her own in the world. I’m all alone in this house--except for Andrew. And now he wants to move out too. Well, he can’t. Andrew is mine. He belongs to me and I have the right to tell him to stay here, whether he likes it or not. He’s had a damned easy time of it all these years, and if he thinks he can simply abandon me now that I’m getting old and sickly, he can--”

            “Father--”

            “He can just forget about it!” Sir cried. “Forget it! Forget it! Forget it!”

            “You’re getting yourself worked up again, Father.”

            “What if I am?”

            “Slow down, ease back. When did Andrew say anything about leaving you?”

            Sir looked confused. “Why, what else could he have meant by wanting his freedom?”

            “A piece of paper is all he wants. A legal document. A bunch of words. He doesn’t intend to go anywhere. What are you imagining, that he’ll run off to Europe and set up a carpentry workshop there? No. No. He’ll stay right here. He’ll still be as loyal as ever. If you give him an order, he’ll obey it without question, as he always has. Whatever you say. That won’t change. Nothing will, really. Andrew wouldn’t so much as be able to step outside the house if you told him not to. He can’t help that. It’s built in. All he wants is a form of words, Father. He wants to be called free. Is that so horrible? Is it so threatening to your Hasn’t he earned it, Father?”

            “So this is what you believe, is it? Some new nonsense that you’ve gotten into your head?”

            “Not nonsense, Father. And not new, either. Heavens, Andrew and I have been talking about this for years!”

            “Talking about it for years, have you? Years?”

            “For years, yes, discussing it over and over again. It was my idea in the first place, as a matter of fact. I told him it was ridiculous for him to have to think of himself as some sort of walking gadget, when in fact he’s so very much more than that. He didn’t react at all well when I first proposed it to him. But then we went on talking, and after a time I saw that he was beginning to come around, and then he told me very straightforwardly that he did very much want to be free. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tell my father and it’ll all be arranged.’ But he was afraid to. He kept on postponing it, because he was afraid you would be hurt. Finally I made him put it up to you.”

            Sir shrugged. “It was a foolish thing to do. He doesn’t know what freedom is. How can he? He’s a robot.”

            “You keep underestimating him, Father. He’s a very special robot. He reads. He thinks about what he’s read. He learns and grows from year to year. Maybe when he came here he was just a simple mechanical man like all the rest of them, but the capacity for growth was there in his pathways, whether his makers knew it or not, and he’s made good use of that capacity. Father, I know Andrew and I tell you that he’s every bit as complex a creature as--as--you and me.”

            “Nonsense, girl.”

            “How can you say that? He feels things inside. You must be aware of that. I’m not sure what he feels, most of the time, but I don’t know what you feel inside a lot of the time either, and you’ve got the capacity for facial expression and all kinds of other body language that he doesn’t. When you talk to him you see right away that he reacts to all kinds of abstract concepts--love, fear, beauty, loyalty, a hundred others--just as you and I do. What else counts but that? If someone else’s reactions are very much like your own, how can you help but think that that someone else must be very much like yourself?”

            “He isn’t like us,” Sir said. “He’s something entirely different.”

            “He’s someone entirely different,” Little Miss said. “ And not as different as you want to have me believe.”

            Sir shrugged. His face had turned gray now where it had been mottled with angry red blotches before, and he looked very, very old and weary.

            He was silent for a long while, staring at his feet, pulling his lap-robe tighter around him. He still looked like an old emperor sitting sternly upright on his throne, but now he was more like an emperor who was seriously considering the possibility of abdicating.

            “All right,” he said finally. There was a note of bitterness in his tone. “You win, Mandy. If you want me to agree with you that Andrew is a person instead of a machine, I agree. Andrew is a person. There. Are you happy now?”

            “I never said he was a person, Father.”

            “As a matter of fact, you did. That was precisely the word you used.”

            “You corrected me. You said he was an artificial person, and I accepted the correction.”

            “Well, then. So be it. We agree that Andrew is an artificial person. What of it? How does calling him an artificial person instead of a robot change anything? We’re just playing games with words. A counterfeit banknote may be regarded as a banknote, but it’s still counterfeit. And you can call a robot an artificial person, but he’ll still be--”

            “Father, what he wants is for you to grant him his freedom. He will continue to live here and do everything in his power to make your life pleasant and comfortable, as he has since the day he came here. But he wants you to tell him that he’s free.”

            “It’s a meaningless statement, Mandy.”

            “To you, maybe. Not to him.”

            “No. I’m old, yes, but I’m not quite senile, not yet, at least. What we’re talking about here is establishing a gigantic legal precedent. Giving robots their freedom isn’t going to abolish the Three Laws, but it sure as anything is going to open up a vast realm of legal wrangling about robot rights, robot grievances, robot this and that. Robots will be running into the courts and suing people for making them do unpleasant work, or failing to let them have vacations, or simply being unkind to them. Robots will start suing U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men for building the Three Laws into their brains, because some shyster will claim it’s an infringement of their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Robots will want to vote. Oh, don’t you see, Mandy? It’ll be an immense headache for everybody.”

            “It doesn’t have to be,” Little Miss replied. “This doesn’t have to be a worldwide cause célèbre. It’s simply an understanding between Andrew and us. All that we actually want is a privately executed legal document, Father, drawn up by John Feingold, signed by you, witnessed by me, given to Andrew, which will stipulate that he--”

            “No. That would be utterly worthless. Look, Mandy, I sign the paper and then I die, and Andrew stands up on his hind legs and says, ‘So long, everybody, I’m a free robot and I’m heading out now to seek fame and fortune, and here’s the paper that proves it,’ and the first time he opens his mouth and says that to someone they’ll laugh in his face and tear up his little piece of meaningless paper for him and ship him back to the factory to be dismantled. Because the piece of paper won’t have given him any kind of protection that has the slightest validity in our society. No. No. If you insist on my doing this nonsensical thing, I have to do it the right way or else I won’t bother at all. We can’t simply give Andrew his freedom just by drawing up a little paper involving just us. This is a matter for the courts.”

            “Very well. Then we do it through the courts.”

            “But don’t you realize what that would mean?” Sir demanded. He was angry again. “All the issues that I just raised will be certain to come out. There’ll be tremendous controversy. And then the filing of briefs--the appeals--the public outcry--and ultimately the verdict. Which will be against us, without any question.”

            He glared at Andrew. “See here, you!” There was a harsh grating quality in Sir’s voice that Andrew had never heard before. “Do you comprehend what we’ve been saying here? The only way I can free you, if it’s going to have the slightest meaning, is to do it by recognized legal means. But there are no recognized legal means for freeing robots. Once this thing gets into the courts, not only are you going to fail to achieve your goal, but the court will take official cognizance of an the money that you’ve been amassing, and you’re going to lose that too. They’ll tell you that a robot has no legal right to earn money or establish bank accounts to keep it in, and either they’ll confiscate it outright or they’ll force me to take it away from you myself, though I don’t have any need for it whatever or any desire to have it. That’ll be an embarrassment to me and a dead loss to you. You still won’t be free, whatever that may mean to you, and you won’t have your precious bank account either. Well, Andrew? Is all this rigmarole worth the chance of losing your money?”

            “Freedom is a priceless thing, Sir,” Andrew said. “And the chance of gaining my freedom is worth any amount of money that I may possess.”

EIGHT

IT TROUBLED ANDREW greatly that the process of seeking his freedom might cause further distress for Sir. Sir was very fragile now--there was no disguising that, no avoiding the reality of it--and anything that might be a drain on his flagging energies, anything that might upset or disturb or in any way trouble him, might all too readily endanger his life.

            And yet Andrew felt it essential that he press onward with his legal action, now that he had brought the matter up. To turn away from it at this point would be a betrayal of his own integrity. It would mean a repudiation of the independent and self-actuated persona that he had felt burgeoning within his positronic brain for year after year.

            At first the promptings of that persona had bewildered and even alarmed him. It seemed wrong to him, a flaw in his design, that it should be there at all. But over the course of time he had come to accept its existence as a real thing. Freedom--the state of not being a slave, the state of not being a thing--was what that persona demanded now. And had to have.

            He knew there were risks. The court might share his attitude that freedom was a thing without price--but could easily rule that there was no price, however great, for which a robot might be able to buy his freedom.

            Andrew was willing to take his chances on that. But the other risk, the risk to Sir’s well-being, troubled him deeply.

            “I fear for Sir,” he told Little Miss. “The publicity--the controversy--the uproar--”

            “Don’t worry, Andrew. He’ll be shielded from everything, I promise you. John Feingold’s lawyers will see to that This is entirely a procedural matter. It isn’t going to involve my father personally at all.”

            “And if he is called into court?” Andrew asked.

            “He won’t be.”

            “If he is, though,” Andrew persisted. “He is my owner, after all. And a famous former member of the Legislature besides. What if there is a subpoena? He’ll have to appear. He will be asked why he thinks I should have my freedom. He doesn’t even really believe that I should--he’s going along with this entirely for your sake, Little Miss, I have no doubt about that--and he will have to come into court, sick and old as he is, to testify in favor of something about which he has deep reservations. It will kill him, Little Miss.”

            “He won’t be called into court. “

            “How can you assure me of that? I have no right to allow him to come to harm. I have no ability to allow him to come to harm. --I think I have to withdraw my petition.”

            “You can’t,” said Little Miss.

            “But if my going to court should be the direct cause of your father’s death--”

            “You’re getting overwrought, Andrew. And putting interpretations on the First Law that are completely unwarranted. My father isn’t a defendant in this case, and he’s not the plaintiff either, and he’s not even going to be a witness. Don’t you think John Feingold is capable of protecting someone who was as well known and important in this Region as my father from the nuisance of being called into court? I tell you, Andrew, he will be shielded. Some of the most powerful people in this Region will see to that, if it becomes necessary. But it won’t become necessary.”

            “I wish I could be as sure of that as you are.”

            “I wish you could too. Trust me, Andrew. He’s my father, let me remind you. I love hint more than anything in the--well, I love him very deeply. I wouldn’t dream of letting you go ahead with this case if I saw any danger to him in it You’ve got to believe that, Andrew.”

            And in the end he did. He still was uneasy about the possibility of Sir’s becoming involved. But Little Miss had given him enough assurance to proceed.

            A man from the Feingold office came to the house with papers for him to sign, and Andrew signed them--proudly, with a flourish, the bold Andrew Martin signature in firm up-and-down strokes that he had been using on his checks ever since the founding of his corporation so many years before.

            The petition was filed with the Regional Court. Months went by, and nothing in particular happened. Occasionally some dreary legal document would arrive, elaborately bound in the traditional stiff covers, and Andrew would scan it quickly and sign it and return it, and then nothing more would be heard for another few months.

            Sir was very frail now. Andrew found himself thinking, sometimes, that it might be for the best if Sir died peacefully before the case ever came to court, so that he would be spared the possibility of any kind of emotional turmoil.

            The thought was horrifying to him. Andrew banished it from his mind.

            “We’re on the docket,” Little Miss told him finally. “It won’t be long now.”

            And, exactly as Sir had predicted, the proceedings were far from simple.

            Little Miss had assured him that it would merely be a matter of appearing before a judge, presenting a petition for a declaration of his status as a free robot, and sitting back to wait out the time it took for the judge to do some research, study the legal precedents, and issue his ruling. The California district of the Regional Court was notoriously farseeing in its interpretation of legal matters and there was every reason, so Little Miss asserted, to believe that the judge would, in the course of time, rule in Andrew’s favor and issue some sort of certificate that gave him the free status he sought.

            The first indication that things were going to be more complicated than that came when the offices of Feingold and Feingold received notice from the Regional Court--Judge Harold Kramer, presiding over the Fourth Circuit--that counter-petitions had been filed in the matter of Martin vs. Martin.

            “Counter-petitions?” Little Miss asked. “And what does that mean?”

            “It means that there is going to be intervention on the opposing side,” Stanley Feingold told her. Stanley was the head of the firm now--old John was in semi-retirement--and he was handling Andrew’s case personally. He looked so much like his father, down to the rounded belly and the amiable smile, that he could almost have been John’s younger twin. But he did not affect green-tinted contact lenses.

            “Intervention by whom?” Little Miss demanded.

            Stanley took a deep breath. “The Regional Labor Federation, for one. They’re worried about losing jobs to robots if robots are given their freedom.”

            “That’s ancient history. The world doesn’t have enough human workers to fill all the available jobs as it is, and everybody knows it.”

            “Nevertheless, the labor people will always jump in to prevent any kind of innovation that might further the concept of robot rights. If robots become free entities, they might be able to claim job seniority--union membership--all kinds of things of that sort.”

            “Ridiculous.”

            “Yes, I know, Mrs. Charney. But they are filing a petition of intervention, all the same. And they are not the only ones who are.”

            “Who else?” said Little Miss in an ominous voice.

            “The United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation,” Feingold said.

            “They are?”

            “Is it so surprising? They are the world’s sole manufacturers of robots, Mrs. Charney. Robots are their main product. Their product, let it be said, with some stress on that word--and products are inanimate things. The U.S.R.M.M. people are disturbed at the idea that anyone might come to consider robots to be anything more than that. If Andrew’s petition succeeds in gaining freedom for robots, U.S.R.M.M. probably fears, then it may succeed in gaining other rights for them as well--civil rights, human rights. So of course they will want to fight against that. Just as a manufacturer of shovels and pick-axes regards its products as mere inanimate tools, not as persons, Mrs. Charney, and would be likely to oppose any legal ruling that gave its shovels and pick-axes any sort of civil rights which might lead the shovels and pick-axes to attempt to control the way they are manufactured, warehoused, and sold.”

            “Nonsense. Absolute nonsense!” Little Miss cried, with a ferocity in her tone that was worthy of Sir.

            “I agree,” Stanley Feingold said diplomatically. “But the interventions have been filed, all the same. And there are others besides these two. We also find ourselves faced with objections from--”

            “Never mind,” said Little Miss. “I don’t want to hear the rest of the list. Just go in there and refute every single stupid argument that these reactionaries put forth.”

            “You know I’ll do my best, Mrs. Charney,” Feingold said.

            But there wasn’t a great deal of confidence in the lawyer’s tone.

            The next development came just a week before the trial. Little Miss called Feingold and said, “Stanley, we’ve just received notice that television crews will be coming to my father’s house on Monday to set up the special wiring for the hearing.”

            “Yes, of course, Mrs. Charney. It’s quite routine.”

            “Is the hearing going to be held at my father’s house?”

            “Andrew’s deposition will be taken there, yes.”

            “And the rest of the trial?”

            “It isn’t a trial, exactly, Mrs. Charney.”

            “The rest of the proceedings, then. Where will they take place? In Judge Kramer’s courtroom?”

            “The usual procedure,” Feingold said, “is for each concerned party involved in the action to participate electronically. The judge will receive all the inputs in his chambers.”

            “No one goes to court in person any more?”

            “Rarely, Mrs. Charney. Very rarely.”

            “But it does still happen?”

            “As I said, very rarely. The world is so decentralized now, people have spread out over such great distances--it’s so much easier to do these things electronically.”

            “I want this done in a courtroom.”

            Feingold gave her a quizzical look. “Is there any special reason why--”

            “Yes. I want the judge to be able to see Andrew face to face, to listen to his actual voice, to form a close-range opinion of his character. I don’t want him to think of Andrew as some sort of impersonal machine whose voice and image are coming to him over telephone lines. Besides which, I very much don’t want my father to have to put up with the stress and turmoil of technical crews invading his privacy to wire his house for whatever kind of transmission is necessary.”

            Feingold nodded. He looked troubled. “In order to assure a courtroom hearing at this late date, Mrs. Charney, I would have to file a writ of--”

            “File it, then.”

            “The intervening parties will certainly object to the extra expense and inconvenience involved.”

            “Let them stay home from the hearings, then. I wouldn’t want them put to the slightest inconvenience, not for all the world. But Andrew and I intend to be in that courtroom.”

            “Andrew and you, Mrs. Charney?”

            “Did you think I was going to stay home that day?”

            And so it came to pass that the appropriate writ was filed, and the intervening parties grumbled but could raise no sustainable objection--for it was still anyone’s right to have his day in court, electronic testimony being by no means mandatory--and on the appointed day Andrew and Little Miss at last presented themselves at the surprisingly modest chambers of Judge Kramer of the Fourth Circuit of the Regional Court for the long-awaited hearing on the petition that was, for purely technical reasons, listed on the docket as Martin vs. Martin.

            Stanley Feingold accompanied them. The courtroom--located in a tired-looking old building that might have gone back to Twentieth Century times--was surprisingly small and unglamorous, a modest little room with a plain desk at one end for the judge, a few uncomfortable chairs for those rare people who insisted on appearing in person, and an alcove that contained the electronic playback devices.

            The only other human beings present were Judge Kramer himself--unexpectedly youthful, dark-haired, with quick glinting eyes--and a lawyer named James Van Buren, who represented all the intervening parties gathered into a single class. The various intervening parties themselves were not present. Their interventions would be shown on the screen. There was nothing they could do to overturn the writ Feingold had secured, but they had no desire to make the trip to court themselves. Almost no one ever did. So they had waived their right to be physically present in the courtroom and had filed the usual electronic briefs.

            The positions of the intervenors were set forth first. There were no surprises in them.

            The spokesman for the Regional Labor Federation did not place much explicit stress on the prospect for greater competition between humans and robots for jobs, if Andrew were granted his freedom. He took a broader, loftier way of raising the issue:

            “Throughout all of history, since the first ape-like men chipped the edges of pebbles into the chisels and scrapers and hammers that were the first tools, we have realized that we are a species whose destiny it is to control our environment and to enhance our control of it through mechanical means. But gradually, as the complexity and capability of our tools have increased, we have surrendered much of our own independence--have become dependent on our own tools, that is, in a way that has weakened our power to cope with circumstances without them. And now, finally, we have invented a tool so capable, so adept at so many functions, that it seems to have an almost human intelligence. I speak of the robot, of course. Certainly we admire the ingenuity of our roboticists, we applaud the astonishing versatility of their products. But today we are confronted with a new and frightening possibility, which is that we have actually created our own successors, that we have built a machine that does not know it is a machine, that demands to be recognized as an autonomous individual with the rights and privileges of a human beingand which, by virtue of its inherent mechanical superiority, its physical durability and strength, its cunningly designed positronic brain, its bodily near-immortality, might indeed, once it has attained those rights and privileges, begin to regard itself as our master! How ironic! To have built a tool so good that it takes command of its builders! To be supplanted by our own machinery--to be made obsolete by it, to be relegated to the scrapheap of evolution--”

            And so on and on, one resonant cliché after another.

            “The Frankenstein complex allover again,” Little Miss murmured in disgust. “The Golem paranoia. The whole set of ignorant anti-science anti-machine anti-progress terrors dragged forth one more time.”

            Still, even she had to admit that it was an eloquent statement of the position. As Andrew sat watching the screen, listening to the lawyer for the Labor Federation pour forth his stream of horrors, he found himself wondering why anyone thought robots would want to supplant human beings or to relegate them to any sort of scrapheap.

            Robots were here to serve. It was their purpose. It was their pleasure, one might almost say. But even Andrew found himself wondering whether, as robots grew to be more and more like human beings, it might become so difficult to tell the one from the other that the humans, lacking the built-in perfection of robots, would indeed come to look upon themselves as a second-rate kind of creature.

            Eventually the tirade of the Labor Federation’s spokesman ended. The screen dimmed and a brief recess was called. Then it was the turn of the speaker from United States Robots and Mechanical Men.

            Her name was Ethel Adams. She was a sharp-featured, taut-faced woman of middle years, who--probably not by any coincidence--bore a striking resemblance to the celebrated robopsychologist Susan Calvin, that great and widely revered scientific figure of the previous century.

            She did not indulge in any of the previous speaker’s inflated rhetoric. She said simply and predictably that to grant Andrew’s position would greatly complicate the ability of U.S.R.M.M. to design and manufacture the robots that were its main product--that if the company could be shown to be producing not machines but free citizens, it might be liable to all sorts of bewildering new restrictions that would critically hamper its work--that, in short, the whole course of scientific progress would be placed in needless jeopardy.

            It was, of course, the direct opposite of the first speaker’s position. He had held up the advance of technology as something worthy of dread; she was warning that it might be placed in serious danger. But the contradiction was only to be expected, Stanley Feingold said to Little Miss and Andrew. The real weapons that were being used in today’s struggle were emotions, not serious intellectual concepts.

            But there was one more speaker: Van Buren, the attorney who was there in person as the general representative of all those who had taken issue with Andrew’s request. He was tall and impressive, with classic senatorial mien: the close-cropped graying hair, the costly suit, the magnificently upright posture. And he had an extremely simple argument to offer, one that did not in any way attempt to deal with emotional issues:

            “What it comes down to, your honor, is an issue so basic--so trivial, even--that I am not really sure why we are all here today. The petitioner, Robot NDR-113, has requested of his owner, the Honorable Gerald Martin, that he be declared ‘free.’ A free robot, yes, the first of his kind. But I ask you, your honor: what meaning can this possibly have? A robot is only a machine. Can an automobile be ‘free’? Can an electronic screen be ‘free’? These questions have no answers because they have no content. Human beings can be free, yes. We know what that means. They have, as one of our great ancestors wrote, certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Does a robot have life? Not as we understand it. It has the semblance of life, yes--but so does the image on the face of a holocube. Nobody would argue that holocube images need to be set ‘free.’ Does a robot have liberty? Not as we understand the word: they are so far from having liberty that their very brains are constructed in such a way that they must obey human commands. And as for the pursuit of happiness--what can a robot possibly know about that? Happiness is a purely human goal. Freedom is a purely human state. A robot--a mere mechanical thing built out of metal and plastic, and from the very start of its existence intended and designed entirely as a device to serve the needs of human beings--is by definition not an object to which the concept of ‘freedom’ can be applied. Only a human being is capable of being free.”

            It was a good speech, clear and direct and expertly delivered. Van Buren was obviously aware of the excellence of the points he was making, because he went on to make them several more times in various forms, speaking slowly and with great precision, his hand coming down rhythmically on the desk before him to mark the cadence of his words.

            When he was done, the judge called another recess.

            Little Miss turned to Stanley Feingold and said, “It’ll be your turn next, right?”

            “Yes. Of course.”

            “I want to speak first. On Andrew’s behalf.”

            Feingold turned red. “But, Mrs. Charney--”

            “I know you’ve got a wonderful brief ready to deliver. I’m not in any way trying to imply that you don’t. But the judge has heard enough oratory today. I want to go up there and make a very simple statement, and I want to do it before anyone else has a chance to make a speech. Even you, Stanley.”

            Feingold was obviously displeased. But he knew who his client was. Andrew might be paying the bills, but Little Miss was running the show.

            He made the necessary request.

            Judge Kramer frowned, shrugged, nodded.

            “Very well,” he said. “ Amanda Laura Martin Charney may approach the bench.”

            For a moment Andrew, sitting quietly beside Feingold, wondered who that might be. He had never heard Little Miss referred to by her full name before. But then he saw the lean, trim figure of Little Miss rise and move forcefully toward the front of the room, and he understood.

            Andrew felt sudden hot currents of excitement running through his pathways at the sight of Little Miss standing so boldly there before the judge. How fearless she seemed! How determined! How--beautiful!

            She said, “Thank you, your honor. I am not a lawyer and I don’t really know the proper legal way of phrasing things. But I hope you’ll listen to my meaning and not be troubled if I don’t use the right kind of Latin terms.”

            “That will not be a problem, Mrs. Charney.”

            Little Miss smiled faintly and said, “I’m extremely grateful for that, your honor. --We have come here today because NDR-113, as the speakers on the other side so impersonally choose to refer to him, has petitioned to be declared a free robot. I should tell you that it sounds very strange to me to hear my dear friend Andrew referred to as NDR-113, although I am aware, more or less, that that was his serial number when he came to us from the factory long ago. I was only six or seven years old then, and so, as you can see, that was quite a considerable time back. I found NDR-113 an unpleasant thing to call him, and so I gave him the name of ‘Andrew.’ And because he has been with our family, and only our family, throughout all the intervening years, he is known generally as ‘Andrew Martin.’ With your permission, your honor, I would like to continue to refer to him as Andrew.”

            The judge nodded almost indifferently. It was not a real issue: the petition had been filed in the name of Andrew Martin in the first place.

            Little Miss continued, “I spoke of him as my friend. That is what he is. But he is other things as well. He is also our family servant. He is a robot. It would be absurd to deny that that is what he is. And--despite the eloquent speeches we’ve heard today--I think I need to make it clear that all he’s asking of the court is to be declared a free robot. Not, as they would have us think, to be declared a free man. He’s not here today looking to gain the right to vote, or to marry, or to have the Three Laws removed from his brain, or anything else like that. Humans are humans and robots are robots and Andrew knows perfectly well which side of the line he belongs on.”

            She paused then and looked glintingly across the room at James Van Buren as though expecting him to nod in agreement. But Van Buren offered no response other than a cool, bland professional stare.

            Little Miss went on, “Very well. The issue, then, is freedom for Andrew, and nothing else.

            “Now, Mr. Van Buren has argued that freedom is a meaningless concept when it is applied to robots. I beg to disagree, your honor. I disagree most strongly.

            “Let’s try to understand what freedom means to Andrew, if that is possible. In some ways, he is free already. I think it must be at least twenty years since anyone in the Martin family has given Andrew an order to do something that we felt he might not do of his own accord. In part that has been a matter of common courtesy: we like Andrew, we respect him, in some ways it is fair to say that we love him. We would not do him the unkindness of allowing him to think that we feel it necessary to give him orders of that kind, when he has lived with us so long that he’s perfectly capable of anticipating what needs to be done and doing it without having to be told.

            “But we could, if we wish, give him any sort of order at any time, and couch it as harshly as we wish, because he is a machine that belongs to us. That is what it says on the papers that came with him, on that day so long ago when my father first introduced him to us: he is our robot, and by virtue of the second of the famous Three Laws he is absolutely bound to obey us when we give him a command. He has no more ability to reject the option of obedience to human beings than any other kind of machine. And I tell you, your honor, that it troubles us deeply that we should have such power over our beloved Andrew.

            “Why should we be in a position to treat him so callously? What right do we have to hold such authority over him? Andrew has served us for decades, faithfully, uncomplainingly, lovingly. He has made the life of our family happier in a thousand ways. And quite apart from his devoted and unquestioning service to us, he has--completely on his own initiative --mastered the craft of woodworking to such a degree that he has produced, over the years, an astonishing series of remarkably beautiful pieces that can only be termed works of art, and which are eagerly sought after by museums and collectors everywhere. Considering all of that, how can we continue to be able to exert such power over him? By what right are we enabled to set ourselves up as the absolute masters of such an extraordinary person?”

            “A person, Mrs. Charney?” Judge Kramer interjected.

            Little Miss looked momentarily discomforted. “ As I said at the beginning, your honor, I lay no claim to Andrew’s being anything but a robot. Certainly I accept the reality of that. But I have known him so long, and so closely, that to me he is like a person. Let me amend what I said a moment before, then. By what right, I should say, are we enabled to set ourselves up as the absolute masters of such an extraordinary robot?”

            The judge frowned. “So the purpose of this petition--am I correct, Mrs. Charney?--is to have the Three Laws removed from Andrew’s brain in order that he be no longer subject to human control?”

            “Not at all,” replied Little Miss, sounding shocked. The question had taken her completely off guard. “I’m not even sure that such a thing would be possible. And look--look: even Andrew is shaking his head. There you are. It isn’t possible. And it certainly never has been what we had in mind when the petition was filed.”

            “Then just what did you have in mind, may I ask?” the judge said.

            “Only this. That Andrew be awarded a legally binding document which says that he is a free robot who owns himself, that if he chooses to continue serving the Martin family, it is by his own choice and not because we elect to exercise the rights vested in us by our original contract with his manufacturers. It’s a purely semantic issue, really. Nothing involving the Three Laws would be changed--even if it could be. We are simply trying to invalidate the condition of involuntary servitude in which we are compelled to keep Andrew now. After which he, on his part, would continue to serve us just as he does now--of that I’m quite sure. But he would do it entirely because he wanted to, which I believe that he does, and not because we require him to. Don’t you see, your honor, how much that would mean to him? It would give him everything and cost us nothing. And none of the immense and tragic problems of the overthrow of humanity by its own machines that the Labor Federation speaker so dramatically alluded to would enter into the case in the slightest way, I assure you.”

            For a moment the judge seemed to be suppressing a smile. “I think I see your point, Mrs. Charney. I appreciate the warmth and passion with which you’ve spoken as your robot’s advocate. --You are aware, are you not, that there’s really nothing in the law codes of this Region or of any other that deals with the question of whether robots can be free in the sense that you propose? There’s simply no body of precedent at all.”

            “Yes,” Little Miss said. “Mr. Feingold has made that quite clear to me already. But every departure from established precedent has to begin somewhere, after all.”

            “So it does. And I could make a ruling that would establish new law here. It would be subject to reversal in a higher court, naturally, but it would be within my powers to give my assent to the petition as it is now constituted, and thus to make your robot ‘free’ in the sense of a waiver by the Martin family of its inherent right to give him orders. For whatever that would be worth to him and to you, I could do that. But I need, first, to come to grips with the point that Mr. Van Buren has raised: the unspoken assumption in our society that only a human being can enjoy freedom, virtually by definition of the word. Judges who run counter to fundamental assumptions of that kind--who make rulings that sound impressive but are inherently meaningless--tend to be regarded as fools. Obviously I don’t want to turn this court into a laughing-stock. And therefore there are still some aspects of this case that I need to understand more clearly.”

            “If there’s anything else you want to ask me, your honor--” Little Miss said.

            “Not you. Andrew. Let the robot come forward.” Little Miss gasped. She looked toward Stanley Feingold and saw him sit up suddenly with a look of excitement on his face for the first time since she had told him that she intended to pre-empt his turn to address the court.

            As for Andrew, he had risen and was striding toward the front of the room with an air of the greatest dignity and nobility about him. He was completely calm--not only externally, where he had no way of displaying visible emotion anyway, but within.

            Judge Kramer said, “For the record: you are Robot NDR-113, but you prefer to be known as Andrew, is that correct?”

            “Yes, your honor.”

            The timbre of Andrew’s voice had come through the series of successive updatings to sound entirely human by this time. Little Miss had grown quite accustomed to that, but the judge seemed astonished, as though he had expected some sort of clanking grinding metallic tone to emerge. So it was a moment before the proceedings continued.

            Then the judge said, peering at Andrew with intense interest, “Tell me one thing, Andrew, if you will. Why do you want to be free? In what way will this matter to you?”

            Andrew replied, “Would you wish to be a slave, your honor?”

            “Is that how you see yourself? A slave?”

            “Little Miss--Mrs. Charney--used the term ‘involuntary servitude’ to describe my condition. That is exactly what it is. I must obey. I must. I have no choice. That is nothing other than slavery, your honor.”

            “Even if I pronounced you free this minute, Andrew, you would still be subject to the Three Laws.”

            “I understand that completely. But I would not be subject to Sir and Little Miss--to Mr. Martin and Mrs. Charney. I could, at any time, leave the household where I have lived for many years and take up residence anywhere else I chose. They would have waived their right to order me back into service. Thus I would cease to be a slave.”

            “Is that what you want, Andrew? To leave the Martin house and go somewhere else?”

            “Not in the least. All I want is the right to choose to do so, if I should feel the desire.”

            The judge studied Andrew carefully. “You have referred to yourself several times as a slave--the slave of these people who obviously have such great affection for you and whose service, you tell us, you have no wish to leave. But you are not a slave. A slave is one whose freedom has been taken away from him. You never were free, and had no freedom to lose: you were created for the explicit purpose of serving. A robot, a mechanical adjunct to human life. You are a perfectly good robot--a genius of a robot, I am given to understand--capable of a degree of artistic expression that few or perhaps no other robots have ever attained. Since you don’t want to leave the Martins, and they don’t seem to want you to leave, and your life among them has apparently been that of a cherished member of the family, this all seems like something of a tempest in a teapot, Andrew. What more could you accomplish if you were free?”

            “Perhaps no more than I do now, your honor. But I would do it with greater joy. It has been said in this courtroom today that only a human being can be free. But I think that is wrong. It seems to me that only someone who wishes for freedom--who knows that there is such a concept, and desires it with all his will--is entitled to freedom. I am such a one. I am not human, not by any means. Never have I asserted that I am. But I wish for freedom, all the same.”

            Andrew’s voice died away. He held his place before the bench, utterly motionless.

            The judge sat nearly as rigidly, staring down at him. He appeared to be lost in thought. Everyone in the room was totally still.

            It seemed an eternity before the judge spoke.

            Then at last he said, “The essential point that has been raised here today, I think, is that there is no right to deny freedom to any--object--that possesses a mind sufficiently advanced to grasp the concept and desire the state. It is a point well taken, I think. I have heard the statements from all sides and I have reached my preliminary conclusions. I intend to rule in favor of the petitioner.”

            His formal decision, when it was announced and published not long afterward, caused a brief but intense sensation throughout the world. For a little while hardly anyone talked of anything else. A free robot? How could a robot be free? What did it mean? Who was this strange robot, anyway, who seemed so far in advance of the rest of his kind?

            But then the hubbub over the Andrew Martin case died down. It had been only a nine days’ wonder. Nothing had really changed, after all, except insofar as Andrew’s relationship to the Martin family was concerned.

            The intervenors against Andrew’s petition appealed to the World Court. In time the case made its way upward. The members of the Court listened carefully to the transcript of the original hearing and found no grounds for reversal.

            So it was done, and Andrew had had his wish fulfilled. He was free, now. It was a wonderful thing to contemplate. And yet he sensed, somehow, that he had not quite achieved whatever it was that he had set out to achieve when he first approached Sir to ask to be freed.

NINE

SIR REMAINED DISPLEASED. He could find no reason to rejoice in the court’s decision and made sure that Andrew and Little Miss knew it.

            Andrew came to him soon after the decree was final and said, “I have the check for you, Sir.”

            “What check are you talking about?”

            “For the entire balance in my corporate account. Which I promised to pay over to you, Sir, as the price for giving me my freedom.”

            “I never gave you your freedom!” Sir retorted. “You simply went and took it!” His harsh voice made Andrew feel almost as though he were being short-circuited.

            “Father--” Little Miss said, sternly.

            Sir, who was sitting huddled in his armchair with his lap-robe wrapped about him even though this was the warmest day of the summer so far, scowled at her. But in a somewhat more conciliatory tone he said, “ All right, Andrew. You wanted your freedom, for whatever that may be worth to you, and I didn’t object to it. I suppose that must be interpreted as meaning that I supported your petition. Well, then, consider that I did. So now you are free. You have my congratulations, Andrew.”

            “And I want to make the payment that I promised.” Sir’s eyes flashed with a trace of their old fire. “I don’t want your damned money, Andrew!”

            “We had an agreement, Sir--”

            “Agreement? What agreement? You know that I never agreed to anything. --Look, Andrew, I’ll take that check from you if it’s the only way that you’re going to feel that you really are free. But I think the idea’s preposterous. I’m a very wealthy old man and I don’t have very long to live and if you force me to take that money I’m simply going to hand it away to charity. I’ll give it to the Home for Orphaned Robots, if there is one. Or I’ll found one, if there isn’t.” He laughed--a thin, joyless laugh. Neither Andrew nor Little Miss joined in. “But you don’t care, do you? You simply want to give the money away. Very well, Andrew. Let me have the check.”

            “Thank you, Sir.”

            He passed it across to the old man.

            Sir peered at it for a moment, holding it this way and that until his dimming eyes told him which side of the check he was looking at.

            “You really have accumulated quite a fortune, Andrew. --Give me a pen, will you, Mandy?” Sir’s hand shook as he took it from her, but when he began to write on the back of the check it was in bold, steady strokes that went on for line after line, an inscription much longer than a mere endorsement would have required. He studied what he had written and nodded. Then he handed the check back to Andrew.

            Sir had endorsed the check Gerald Martin, received as payment in full for the freedom of Robot Andrew NDR-113 Martin, per court decision. And then beneath that he had drawn a line and written, Pay to the order of Andrew Martin, as bonus for outstanding services rendered during the period of his employment here. His endorsement of this check implies irrevocable acceptance of the bonus. Gerald Martin.

            “Will that be acceptable, Andrew?” Sir asked.

            Andrew hesitated a moment. He showed the check to Little Miss, who read what Sir had written and shrugged.

            “You leave me with no choice, Sir,” Andrew said.

            “Precisely. That’s the way I like things to be. Now fold that check up and put it in your pocket--no, you don’t have a pocket, do you?--well, put it away somewhere. Keep it as a souvenir, something to remember me by. And let’s hear nothing more about it.” Sir glared defiantly at both Andrew and Little Miss. “So. That’s done, then. And now you’re properly and truly free, is that right? Very well. Very well. From now on you can select your own jobs around this place and do them as you please. I will give you no orders ever again, Andrew, except for this final one: that you do only what you please. As of this moment you must act only according to your own free will, as stipulated and approved by the courts. Is that clear?”

            “Yes, Sir.”

            “But I am still responsible for you. That too, as stipulated and approved by the courts. I don’t own you any more, but if you happen to get yourself into any trouble, I’m the one who will have to get you out of it. You may be free but you don’t have any of the civil rights of a human being. You remain my dependent, in other words--my ward, by court order. I hope you understand that, Andrew.”

            Little Miss said, “You sound angry, Father.”

            “I am. I didn’t ask to have responsibility for the world’s only free robot dumped on me.”

            “Nothing has been dumped on you, Father. You accepted responsibility for Andrew the day you arranged to take him into your home. The court order doesn’t change a bit of that. You won’t have to do anything that you weren’t bound to do before. As for Andrew’s getting himself into trouble, what reason do you think he will? The Three Laws still hold.”

            “Then how can he be considered free?”

            Andrew said quietly, “ Are not human beings bound by their laws, Sir?”

            Sir glowered. “Don’t chop logic with me, Andrew. Human beings have voluntarily arrived at a social contract, a code of laws which they willingly agree to abide by because life in a civilized society would be untenable otherwise. Those who refuse to abide by those laws, and therefore make life untenable for others, are punished and, we like to think, eventually rehabilitated. But a robot doesn’t live by any voluntary social contract. A robot obeys its code of laws because it has no choice but to obey. Even a so-called free robot.”

            “But as you say, Sir, human laws exist and must be obeyed, and those who live under those laws regard themselves as free nevertheless. So a robot--”

            “Enough!” Sir roared. He swept his lap-robe to the floor and lurched uncertainly out of his chair. “I don’t feel like discussing this any further, thank you. I’m going upstairs. Good night, Amanda. Good night, Andrew.”

            “Good night to you, Sir. Shall I see you to your room?” Andrew asked.

            “You needn’t bother. I’m still strong enough to climb a flight of stairs. You go about your business, whatever that may be, and I’ll go about mine.”

            He tottered away. Andrew and Little Miss exchanged troubled glances, but neither of them said anything.

            After that Sir rarely left his bedroom. His meals were prepared and brought to him by the simple TZ-model robot who looked after the kitchen. He never asked Andrew upstairs for any reason, and Andrew would not take it upon himself to intrude on Sir’s privacy; and so from that time on Andrew saw Sir only on those infrequent occasions when the old man chose to descend into the main part of the house.

            Andrew had not lived in the house himself for some time. As his woodworking business had expanded, it had become awkward for him to continue to operate out of the little attic studio that Sir had set aside for him at the beginning. So it had been decided, a few years back, that he would be allowed to set up a little dwelling of his own, a two-story cabin at the edge of the woods that flanked the Martin estate.

            It was a pleasant, airy cabin, set on a little rise, with ferns and glistening-leaved shrubs all about, and a towering redwood tree just a short distance away. Three robot workmen had built it for him in a matter of a few days, working under the direction of a human foreman.

            The cabin had no bedroom, of course, nor a kitchen, nor any bathroom facilities. One of the rooms was a library and office where Andrew kept his reference books and sketches and business records, and the other and much larger room was the workshop, where Andrew kept his carpentry equipment and stored the work in progress. A small shed adjoining the building was used to house the assortment of exotic woods that Andrew used in the jewelry-making segment of his enterprise, and the stack of less rare lumber that went into his much-sought-after pieces of furniture.

            There was never any end of jobs for him to do. The publicity over his attaining free status had generated worldwide interest in the things that Andrew made, and scarcely a morning went by without three or four orders turning up on his computer. He had a backlog of commissions stretching years into the future, now, so that he finally had to set up a waiting list simply for the privilege of placing an order with him.

            He was working harder now as a free robot than he ever had in the years when he had technically been the property of Sir. It was not at all unusual for Andrew to put in thirty-six or even forty-eight straight hours of work without emerging from his cabin, since he had no need, naturally, for food or sleep or rest of any kind.

            His bank account swelled and swelled. He insisted on repaying Sir for the entire cost of building his little house, and this time Sir was willing to accept the money, purely for the sake of proper form. Title to the structure was legally transferred to Andrew and he executed a formal lease covering the portion of Gerald Martin’s land on which the building stood.

            Little Miss, who still lived just up the coast in the house she and Lloyd Charney had built long ago when they had first been married, never failed to look in on him whenever she came to Sir’s estate to pay a call on her father. As a rule Little Miss would stop off at Andrew’s workshop as soon as she arrived, and chat with him awhile and look at his latest projects, before going on into the main house where Sir was.

            Often she brought Little Sir with her--though Andrew no longer called him that. For Little Sir had ceased to be a boy quite some time back--he was a tall and robust young man now, with a flaring russet-colored mustache nearly as awesome as his grandfather’s and an imposing set of side-whiskers as well, and soon after the court decision that made Andrew a free robot he forbade Andrew to use the old nickname.

            “Does it displease you, Little Sir?” Andrew asked. “I thought you found it amusing.”

            “I did.”

            “But now that you are a full-grown man, it seems condescending to you, is that it? An affront to your dignity? You know I have the highest respect for your--”

            “It has nothing to do with my dignity,” Little Sir said. “It has to do with yours.”

            “I don’t understand, Little Sir.”

            “Evidently not. But look at it this way, Andrew: ‘Little Sir’ may be a charming name, and you and I certainly take it that way, but in fact what it is is the kind of groveling name that an old family retainer would use when speaking to the master’s son, or in this case the master’s grandson. It isn’t appropriate any more, do you see, Andrew? My grandfather isn’t your master nowadays, and I’m not a cute little boy. A free robot shouldn’t call anyone ‘Little Sir.’ Is that clear? I call you Andrew--always have. And from now on you must call me George.”

            It was phrased as an order, so Andrew had no choice but to agree.

            He ceased calling George Charney “Little Sir” as of that moment. But Little Miss remained Little Miss for him. It was unthinkable for Andrew to have to call her “Mrs. Charney” and even “Amanda” seemed like an improper and impertinent mode of address. She was “Little Miss” to him and nothing other than “Little Miss,” even though she was a woman with graying hair now, lean and trim and as beautiful as ever but undeniably growing old. Andrew hoped that she would never give him the same sort of order that her son had; and she never did. “Little Miss” it was; “Little Miss” it would always be.

            One day George and Little Miss came to the house, but neither of them made the usual stop at Andrew’s place before going in to see Sir. Andrew noticed the car arrive and continue on past his own separate little driveway, and wondered why. He felt troubled when half an hour passed, and then half an hour more, and neither of them came to him. Had he given offense in some way on their last visit? No, that seemed unlikely.

            But was there some problem in the main house, then?

            He distracted himself by plunging into his work, but it took all his robotic powers of self-discipline to make himself concentrate, and even so nothing seemed to go as smoothly as it usually did. And then, late in the afternoon, George Charney came out back to see him--alone.

            “Is anything wrong, George?” Andrew asked, a moment after George had entered.

            “I’m afraid that there is, Andrew. My grandfather is dying.”

            “Dying?” Andrew said numbly.

            Death was a concept he had long thought about, but had never really understood.

            George nodded somberly. “My mother is at his bedside now. Grandfather wants you to be there too.”

            “He does? It isn’t your mother who has sent for me, but Sir himself?”

            “Sir himself, yes.”

            Andrew felt a faint tremor in his fingertips. It was as close as he could come to a physical expression of excitement. But there was distress mingled with the sensation.

            Sir--dying!

            He shut down his tools and hurried across to the main house, with George Charney trotting along beside him.

            Sir was lying quietly in the bed in which he had spent most of his time in recent years. His hair had thinned to a few white wisps; even his glorious mustache now was a sad drooping thing. He looked very pale, as though his skin were becoming transparent, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing. But his eyes were open--his fierce old eyes, his piercing, intense blue eyes--and he managed a small smile, the merest upturning of his lips, as he saw Andrew come into the room.

            “Sir--oh, Sir, Sir--”

            “Come here, Andrew.” Sir’s voice sounded surprisingly strong: the voice of the Sir of old.

            Andrew faltered, too confused to respond.

            “Come here, I said. That’s an order. I said once that I wasn’t going to give you any more orders, but this is an exception. Just about the last one I’m ever going to give you--you can count on that.”

            “Yes, Sir. “ Andrew came forward.

            Sir pulled one hand out from under the coverlet. It seemed to be something of a struggle for him to move the blanket aside, and George rushed forward to help him.

            “No,” Sir said, with a trace of his familiar irascibility. “Damn it, don’t try to do it for me, George! I’m only dying, not crippled.” Angrily he pushed the coverlet down just far enough to raise his hand, and held it out toward the robot. “Andrew,” he said. “Andrew--”

            “Oh, Sir,” Andrew began.

            And he fell silent. He did not know what to say.

            He had never before been at the side of someone who was dying, had never so much as seen a dead person. He knew that death was the human way of ceasing to function. It was an involuntary and irreversible dismantling that happened eventually to all human beings. Since it was inevitable, Andrew wanted to think that it was something that humans took for granted as a natural process and did not look upon with fear or distaste. But he was not entirely sure of that. And Sir had lived so long--he must be so accustomed to being alive, and there had always been so much life and vitality in him--

            “Give me your hand, Andrew.”

            “Of course, Sir.”

            Andrew took Sir’s cool, pale, shriveled hand into his own: gnarled ancient flesh against smooth ageless plastic that was without flaw.

            Sir said, “You’re a splendid robot, do you know that, Andrew? Truly splendid. The finest robot that was ever made.”

            “Thank you, Sir.”

            “I wanted to tell you that. And one other thing. I’m glad you’re free. That’s all. It’s important to me that I had a chance to tell you that. All right, Andrew.”

            It was an unmistakable dismissal. Andrew no longer had Sir’s attention. He released Sir’s trembling hand and stepped back from the bed, taking up a position alongside George and Little Miss. Little Miss reached forward and touched Andrew’s arm just above the elbow, lightly, affectionately. But she said nothing. Nor did George.

            The old man seemed to have withdrawn into some private realm, far away. The only sound in the room now was Sir’s increasingly rough breathing, becoming ever more harsh, ever less regular. Sir lay motionless, staring upward at nothing at all. His face was as expressionless as any robot’s.

            Andrew was utterly at a loss. He could only remain standing, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless, watching what he knew must be Sir’s final moments.

            The old man’s breathing grew rougher yet. He made an odd gargling sound, deep in his throat, that was like no sound Andrew had ever heard in his entire existence.

            Then all was still. Other than the cessation of Sir’s breathing, Andrew was unable to detect any change in him. He had been virtually motionless a moment ago and he was motionless now. He had stared blindly upward before and he was staring upward now. Andrew realized, though, that something profound had just happened, something that was wholly beyond his comprehension. Sir had passed across that mysterious threshold that separated death from life. There was no more Sir. Sir was gone. Only this empty husk remained.

            Little Miss broke the endless silence at last with a soft cough. There were no tears in her eyes, but Andrew could see that she was deeply moved.

            She said, “I’m glad you got here before he went, Andrew. You belonged here. You were one of us.”

            Once more Andrew did not know what to reply.

            Little Miss said, “ And it was wonderful to hear him say what he did to you. He may not have seemed friendly to you toward the end, Andrew, but he was old, you know. And it hurt him that you should have wanted to be free. But he forgave you for that right at the last, didn’t he, Andrew?”

            And then Andrew found the words to say. He said, “I never would have been free without him, Little Miss.”

TEN

IT WAS ONLY AFTER Sir’s death that Andrew started to wear clothes. He began with an old pair of trousers at first, a pair that he had obtained from George Charney.

            It was a daring experiment, and he knew it. Robots, being metallic in exterior cladding and sexless in design--despite the “he” or “she” designations that their owners tended to hang on them--had no need for clothing, neither as protection against the elements nor as any sort of shield for modesty. And no robot, so far as Andrew knew, had ever worn any.

            But some curious longing within Andrew seemed to have arisen lately that led him to want to cover his body in the way humans did, and--without pausing to examine the motivation that was leading him toward it--he set out to do so.

            The day Andrew acquired the trousers, George had been with him in his workshop, helping him stain some porch furniture for his own house. Not that Andrew needed the help--indeed, it would have been very much simpler all around if George had let him do it by himself--but George had insisted on participating in the job. It was furniture for his own porch, after all. He was the man of the house--George was married now, and a lawyer with the old Feingold firm, which for the past few months had been caned Feingold and Charney, with Stanley Feingold as the senior partner--and he took his adult responsibilities very, very seriously.

            At the end of the day the furniture was stained and so, quite thoroughly, was George. He had splotches of stain on his hands, on his ears, on the tip of his nose. His russet mustache and ever more flamboyant side-whiskers were stained too. And, of course, there was stain allover his clothing. But at least George had come prepared for that, bringing an expendable shirt to work in and a disreputable-looking pair of trousers that he must have had since his high school days.

            As he was changing back into his regular clothes when the job was done, George crumpled up the old shirt and trousers and said, as he tossed them aside, “You might as well just throw these things in the trash, Andrew. They’re of no use to me any more.”

            George was right about the shirt. Not only was it badly stained, but it had split right down the seam from the arm to the shirt-tail when George reached out too far too quickly while trying to turn a porch table on its side. But the trousers, frayed and worn as they were, seemed salvageable to Andrew.

            He held them up with their legs dangling. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to keep these for myself.”

            George grinned. “To use as rags, you mean?”

            Andrew paused just a moment before replying.

            “To wear,” he said.

            Now it was George’s turn to pause. Andrew could see the surprise on his face, and then the amusement. George was trying hard not to smile, and he was more or less succeeding at it, but the effort was all too obvious to Andrew’s eyes.

            “To--wear,” George said slowly. “You want to wear my old pants. Is that what you just said, Andrew?”

            “It is. I would very much like to wear them, if that is all right with you.”

            “Is something going wrong with your homeostatic system, Andrew?”

            “Not at all. Why do you ask?”

            “Only that I was wondering if you were feeling chilly these days. Why else would you want to wear those pants?”

            “To find out what it is like.”

            “Ah,” George said. And then after a bit he said, again, “ Ah. I see. You want to find out what it’s like. All right, I can tell you, Andrew. What it will feel like is like having a dirty old piece of rough unpleasant cloth wrapped around your fine smooth metal skin.”

            “Are you saying that you don’t want me to put the trousers on?” Andrew asked.

            “I didn’t say that.”

            “But you think it’s a peculiar idea.”

            “Well--”

            “You do.”

            “Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. Very damned peculiar indeed, Andrew.”

            “And therefore you refuse to give me the trousers except for the purpose of destroying them?”

            “No,” George said. There was a note of exasperation in his voice. “Do whatever you want with them, Andrew. Try them on, if you like. Why should I have any objections? You’re a free robot. You can put on a pair of pants if that’s what you feel like doing. I don’t see any reason at all why I should stand in your way. --Go on, Andrew. Put them on.”

            “Yes,” said Andrew. “Yes, I will.”

            “It’s a moment for the history books. The first time a robot has put on clothes. I ought to get my camera, Andrew.”

            Andrew brought the trousers close to his waist. But then he hesitated.

            “Well?” George asked.

            “Will you show me how to do it?” Andrew said.

            Grinning broadly now, George showed Andrew how to manipulate the static charge so as to allow the trousers to open, wrap about his lower body, and move shut. George demonstrated the technique a couple of times with his own trousers, but Andrew was quite aware that it was going to take him a while to duplicate that one flowing motion, which George, after all, had been performing since he was a child.

            “It is the twist of the wrist when you bring the hand upward that puzzles me,” Andrew said.

            “Like this,” said George, and did it yet again.

            “Like that?”

            “More like this.”

            “Like this, yes.” Andrew touched the little stud once again and the trousers opened, fell, rose, and closed themselves about his legs. “Right?”

            “Much better,” said George.

            “A little practice and it will seem natural to me, I think,” Andrew said.

            George gave him an odd look. “No, Andrew. It’s never going to seem natural to you. Because it isn’t natural. --Why on Earth do you want to wear trousers, Andrew?”

            “As I said before, George. Out of curiosity about what it is like to be clothed.”

            “But you weren’t naked before you put them on. You were simply--yourself.”

            “Yes, I suppose I was,” Andrew said noncommittally.

            “I’m trying to be sympathetic. But for the life of me I still can’t understand what you’re up to, Andrew. Your body is so beautifully functional that it’s a downright shame to cover it--especially when you don’t need to worry about either temperature control or modesty. And the fabric doesn’t really cling properly, not on metal.”

            Andrew said, “Are not human bodies beautifully functional, George? Yet you all cover yourselves.”

            “For warmth, for cleanliness, for protection, for decorativeness. And as a concession to social custom. None of that applies to you.”

            Andrew said, “I feel bare without clothes.”

            “You do? You’ve never said a word about that before today, so far as I know. Is this something new?”

            “Reasonably new.”

            “A week? A month? A year? --What’s going on, Andrew?”

            “It is hard for me to explain. I have begun to feel--different. “

            “Different! Different from whom? It isn’t as though a robot is any novelty any more. Andrew, there are millions of robots on Earth now. In this Region, according to the last census, there are almost as many robots as there are humans.”

            “I know that, George. There are robots doing every conceivable kind of work.”

            “And not a single one of them wears clothes.”

            “But none of them is free, George.”

            “So that’s it! You feel different because you are different!”

            “Exactly.”

            “But to wear clothes--”

            “Indulge me, George. I want to do this.”

            George let out his breath in a long, slow exhalation.

            “Whatever you say. You’re a free robot, Andrew.”

            “Yes. I am.”

            After his initial skepticism George seemed to find Andrew’s venture into wearing clothes curious and amusing. He cooperated by bringing him, little by little, new additions to his wardrobe. Andrew could hardly go into town to purchase clothing himself, and he felt ill at ease even about ordering it from the computer catalogs, because he knew that his name was widely known in many places ever since the court decision, and he didn’t want some shipping clerk in a storeroom far away to recognize it on an order form and begin spreading the word that the free robot was now going in for wearing clothing.

            So George would supply him with the articles he requested: a shirt first, then shoes, a fine pair of gloves, a set of decorative epaulets.

            “What about underwear?” George asked. “Should I get you some of that too?” But Andrew had no idea of the existence or purpose of underwear, and George had to explain it to him. Andrew decided that he had no need of it.

            He tended to wear his new clothes only when he was alone at home. He was hardly ready to go outdoors in them; and even in his own cabin he stopped wearing them in the presence of others after a few preliminary experiments. He was inhibited by George’s patronizing smile, which with the best will in the world George continued to be unable to conceal, and by the bewildered stares of the first few customers who saw him dressed when they came to him to commission work.

            Andrew might be free, but there was built into him a carefully detailed program concerning his behavior toward human beings: a neural channel that was not as powerful in its effect as the Three Laws, but nevertheless was there to discourage him from giving any sort of offense. It was only by the tiniest steps that he dared advance. Open disapproval would set him back months. It was an enormous leap for him when he finally allowed himself to leave his house with clothing on.

            No one he encountered that day showed any sign of surprise. But perhaps they were too astounded even to react. And indeed even Andrew himself still felt strange about his experiment with clothing.

            He had a mirror, now, and he would study himself for long periods of time, turning from side to side, looking at himself from all angles. And sometimes he found himself reacting with disfavor to his own appearance. His metal face, with its glowing photoelectric eyes and its rigidly carved robotic features, sometimes struck Andrew himself as strikingly incongruous now that it rose up out of the soft, brightly colored fabrics of clothing meant for a human body.

            But at other times it seemed to him perfectly appropriate for him to be wearing clothing. Like virtually all robots, he had been designed, after all, to be fundamentally humanoid in shape: two arms, two legs, an oval head set upon a narrow neck. The U. S. Robots designers had not needed to give him that form. They could have made him look any way they deemed efficient--with rotors instead of legs, with six arms instead of two, with a swiveling sensor-dome atop his trunk instead of a head with two eyes. But no: they had patterned him after themselves. The decision had been made, very early in the history of robotics, that the best way to overcome mankind’s deep-seated fear of intelligent machines was to make them as familiar in form as possible.

            In that case, why should he not wear clothing also? That would make him look even more human, wouldn’t it?

            And in any event Andrew wanted to wear clothing now. It seemed symbolic to him of his new status as a legally free robot.

            Of course, not everyone accepted Andrew as free, regardless of what the legal finding had been. The term “free robot” had no meaning to many people: it was like saying “dry water” or “bright darkness.” Andrew was inherently incapable of resenting that, and yet he felt a difficulty in his thinking process--a slowing, an inner resistance--whenever he was faced with someone’s refusal to allow him the status he had won in court.

            When he wore clothing in public, he knew, he risked antagonizing such people. Andrew tried to be cautious about that, therefore.

            Nor was it only potentially hostile strangers who had difficulty with the idea of his wearing clothing. Even the person who most loved him in all the world--Little Miss--was startled and, Andrew suspected, more than a little troubled by it. Andrew saw that from the very first time. Like her son George, Little Miss had tried to conceal her feelings of surprise and dismay at the sight of Andrew in clothing. And, like George, she had failed.

            Well, Little Miss was old now and, like many old people, she had grown set in her ways. Maybe she simply preferred him to look the way he had looked when she was a girl. Or, perhaps, she might believe on some deep level that robots--all robots, even Andrew--should look like the machines that they were, and therefore should not dress like people.

            Andrew suspected that if he ever should question Little Miss on that point she would deny it, probably quite indignantly. But he had no intention of doing that. He simply tended to avoid putting on clothes--or too many of them--whenever Little Miss came to visit him.

            Which was none too often, these days, for Little Miss was past seventy now--well past seventy--and had grown very thin and sensitive to cold, and even the mild climate of Northern California was too cool for her most of the year. Her husband had died several years before, and since then Little Miss had begun spending much of her time traveling in the tropical parts of the world--Hawaii, Australia, Egypt, the warmer zones of South America, places like that. She would return to California only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year, to see George and his family --and, of course, Andrew.

            After one of her visits George came down to the cabin to speak with Andrew and said ruefully, “Well, she’s finally got me, Andrew. I’m going to be running for the Legislature next year. She won’t give me any peace unless I do. And I’m sure you know that the First Law of our family, and the Second Law and the Third Law as well, is that nobody says ‘no’ to Amanda Charney. So there I am: a candidate. It’s my genetic destiny, according to her. Like grandfather, like grandson, is what she says.”

            “Like grandfather--”

            Andrew stopped, uncertain.

            “What is it, Andrew?”

            “Something about the phrase. The idiom. My grammatical circuit--” He shook his head. “Like grandfather, like grandson. There’s no verb in the statement, but I know how to adjust for that. Still--”

            George began to laugh. “What a literal-minded hunk of tin you can be sometimes, Andrew”‘

            “Tin?”

            “Never mind about that. What the other expression meant was simply that I, George, the grandson, am expected to do what Sir, the grandfather, did--that is to say, to run for the Regional Legislature and have a long and distinguished career. The usual expression is, ‘Like father, like son,’ but in this case my father didn’t care to go into politics, and so my mother has changed the old cliché so that it says--Are you following all this, Andrew, or am I just wasting my breath?”

            “I understand now.”

            “Good. But of course the thing my mother doesn’t take into account is that I’m not really all that much like my grandfather in temperament, and perhaps I’m not as clever as he was, either, because he had a truly formidable intellect, and so there’s no necessary reason why I’d automatically equal the record he ran up in the Legislature. There’ll never be anyone like him again, I’m afraid.”

            Andrew nodded. “ And how sad for us that he is no longer with is. I would find it pleasant, George, if Sir were still--” He paused, for he did not want to say, “in working order.” He knew that that would not be the appropriate expression to use. And yet it was the first phrase that had come into his mind.

            “Still alive?” George finished for him. “Yes. Yes, it would be good to have him around. I have to confess I miss the old monster at least as much as you do.”

            “Monster?”

            “In a manner of speaking.”

            “Ah. Yes. A manner of speaking.”

            When George had gone, Andrew replayed the conversation in his mind, puzzling over its twists and turns and trying to see why he had been so badly off balance throughout it. It had been George’s use of idiomatic phrases and colloquial language, Andrew decided, that had caused the problems.

            Even after all this time, it was still difficult sometimes for Andrew to keep pace with humans when they struck out along linguistic pathways that were something other than the most direct ones. He had come into being equipped with an extensive innate vocabulary, a set of grammatical instructions, and the ability to arrange words in intelligible combinations. And through whatever fluke in his generalized positronic pathways it was that made Andrew’s intelligence more flexible and adaptable than that of the standard robot, he had been able to develop the knack of conversing easily and gracefully with humans. But there were limits to his abilities along that line.

            The problem was only going to get worse as time went along, Andrew realized.

            Human languages, he knew, were constantly in a state of flux. There was nothing fixed or really systematic about them. New words were invented all the time, old words would change their meanings, all sorts of short-lived informal expressions slipped into ordinary conversation. That much he had already had ample reason to learn, though he had not done any kind of scientific investigation of the kinds of changes that tended to take place.

            The English language, which was the one Andrew used most often, had altered tremendously over the past six hundred years. Now and then he had looked at some of Sir’s books, the works of the ancient poets--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare--and he had seen that their pages were sprinkled with footnotes to explain archaic word usage to modern readers.

            What if the language were to change just as significantly in the next six hundred years? How was he going to be able to communicate with the human beings around him, unless he kept up with the changes?

            Already, in one brief conversation, George had baffled him three times. “Like grandfather, like grandson.” How simple that seemed now that George had explained it--but how mysterious it had been at first.

            And why had George called him a “hunk of tin,” when George surely knew that there was no tin in Andrew’s makeup whatsoever? And--it was the most puzzling one of all--why should George have called Sir a “monster,” when that was plainly not an appropriate description of the old man?

            Those were not even the latest modern phrases, Andrew knew. They were simply individual turns of phrase, a little too colloquial or metaphorical for instant handling by Andrew’s linguistic circuitry. He would face far more mystifying ways of speech in the outside world, he suspected.

            Perhaps it was time for him to update some of his linguistic documentation.

            His own books would give him no guidance. They were old and most of them dealt with woodworking, with art, with furniture design. There were none on language, none on the ways of human beings. Nor was Sir’s library, extensive as it was, likely to be of much use. No one was living in the big house just now--it was sealed, under robot maintenance--but Andrew still could have access to it whenever he wanted. Nearly all of Sir’s books, though, dated from the previous century or before. There was nothing there that would serve Andrew’s purpose.

            All things considered, the best move seemed to be for him to get some up-to-date information--and not from George. When Andrew turned to George at the time he had wanted to start wearing clothing, he had had to fight his way through George’s incomprehension and a certain amount of George’s condescending amusement. Though he doubted that George would treat him the same way in this matter, he preferred not to find out.

            No, he would simply go to town and use the public library. That was the proper self-reliant thing to do--the correct way for a free robot to handle a problem, he told himself. It was a triumphant decision and Andrew felt his electropotential grow distinctly higher as he contemplated it, until he had to throw in an impedance coil to bring himself back to equilibrium.

            To the library, yes.

            And he would dress for the occasion. Yes. Yes. Humans did not enter the public library unclothed. Neither would he.

            He put on a full costume--elegant leggings of a velvety purple fabric, and a flowing red blouse with a satiny sheen, and his best walking boots. He even donned a shoulder chain of polished wooden links, one of his finest productions. It was a choice between that and another chain he had, one made of glitter-plastic, which perhaps was better suited for daytime wear; but George had said that the wooden chain was terribly impressive, particularly since anything made of wood was far more valuable than mere plastic. And he wanted to impress, today. There would be humans in the library, not robots. They would never have seen a robot there before. It was important for him to look his best.

            But he knew that he was doing something unusual and that there might be unusual consequences. If George dropped by unexpectedly, he would be surprised to find Andrew gone, and he might be troubled by that.

            Andrew had placed a hundred feet between himself and the house before he felt resistance gathering within himself and rapidly reaching the level that would bring him to a halt. He shifted the impedance coil out of circuit, and when that did not seem to make much difference, he returned to his home and on a piece of paper wrote neatly:

I HAVE GONE TO THE LIBRARY.

--Andrew Martin

and placed it in clear view on his worktable.

ELEVEN

ANDREW NEVER QUITE MADE IT to the library that day. He had never been there before--he rarely had reason to venture into the little town a short way down the road from the Martin estate--but he had not expected that to be any problem. He had studied the map with great care. And therefore he knew the route, or so he believed.

            But everything he saw, once he was more than a short distance from the house, seemed strange to him. The actual landmarks along the road did not resemble the abstract symbols on the map, not to his way of thinking. He hesitated again and again, comparing the things he was seeing out here with the things he had expected to see, and after he had been walking for a little while he realized that he was lost, that he must have taken a wrong turn somewhere without noticing it and could no longer relate his position to anything on the map.

            What to do now? Go back and start again? Or keep on in this direction, and hope that his path would somehow link up with the proper route?

            The most efficient thing, Andrew decided, was to ask someone for directions. It might be that he could regain the direction he wanted with relatively little effort.

            But who was there to ask? Closer to the house he had seen an occasional field robot, but there were none in sight here. A vehicle passed, but did not stop. Perhaps another one would come by soon. He stood irresolute, which meant calmly motionless; and then he saw two human beings walking diagonally across the field that lay to his left.

            He turned to face them.

            They saw him, and changed course so that now they were heading in his direction. They changed their demeanor, too. A moment before, they had been talking loudly, laughing and whooping, their voices carrying far across the field--but now they had fallen silent. Their faces bore the look that Andrew associated with human uncertainty.

            They were young, but not very young, twenty, perhaps? twenty-five? Andrew had never been very good at judging the age of humans.

            He said, when they were still some distance away, “Pardon me, sirs. Would you kindly describe to me the route to the town library?”

            They halted and stared.

            One of them, the taller and thinner of the two, who was wearing a tall narrow black hat that looked like a length of pipe and extended his height still further, almost grotesquely, said--not to Andrew, but to the other--”I think it’s a robot.”

            “I think you’re right,” said the other, who was short and plump, and had a bulbous nose and heavy eyelids. “It’s got a robot kind of face, doesn’t it?”

            “It certainly does. Definitely a robot kind of face.”

            “But it’s wearing clothes.”

            “Very fancy clothes too.”

            “Imagine that. A robot wearing fancy clothes! What will they think of next?”

            “Pardon me, sirs,” Andrew said again. “I am in need of assistance. I have been trying to locate the town library, but I seem to have lost my way.”

            “Speaks just like a robot,” the taller one said.

            “Got a face just like a robot,” said the other.

            “Then it must be a robot.”

            “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

            “But he’s wearing clothes.”

            “Clothes. Absolutely. There’s no denying the truth of that, is there?”

            “Robots don’t wear clothes, do they?”

            “Not that I know of.”

            “If it’s wearing clothes, do you think it can be a robot?”

            “It’s got a metal face. Metal everything. But if it’s a robot, why is it wearing clothes?”

            The taller one snapped his fingers. “You know what we have here? It’s the free robot. There’s a robot that lives at the old Charney place that isn’t owned by anybody, and I bet this is the one. Why else would it be wearing clothes?”

            “Ask it,” said the one with the nose.

            “Good idea,” said the other. He took a few steps toward Andrew and said, “ Are you the robot from the Charney place?”

            “I am Andrew Martin, sir,” said Andrew.

            “Pretty snotty kind of robot, aren’t you?” the tall one said. “Give me a direct answer when I ask you a question.”

            “The place where I live is the Martin estate, which is owned by the Charney family. It was formerly the home of Mr. Gerald Martin. Therefore my name is Andrew Martin.”

            “You’re a robot, right?”

            “Of course I am, sir.”

            “Then why are you wearing clothes? Robots don’t wear clothes, do they?”

            “I wear clothes when I choose to wear them,” said Andrew quietly.

            “That’s disgusting. You’re a hideous spectacle decked out like that, do you know that? Absolutely hideous. A robot wearing clothes! Who ever heard of that?” He glanced at his companion. “Have you ever seen anything so disgusting?” And to Andrew he said, “Take off your clothes.”

            Andrew hesitated. He hadn’t heard an order in that tone of voice in so long that his Second Law circuits had momentarily jammed.

            The tall one said, “Well, what are you waiting for? I told you to take off your clothes, didn’t I? I order you to take off your clothes!”

            Slowly, Andrew began to obey. He unfastened his shoulder chain and set it down carefully on the ground. Then he removed his satiny blouse and folded it with great care so that it would not look crumpled when he put it on again. He placed it on the ground next to the chain.

            “Faster,” said the tall one. “Don’t bother folding your things. Just drop them, you hear? Get everything off. Everything.”

            Andrew unfastened the velvety leggings. He removed the elegant boots.

            The nose said, “Well, at least he follows orders.”

            “He has to. Every robot does. There isn’t any two ways about it. Following orders is built right into them. You say, ‘Go jump in the lake,’ and they jump. You say, ‘Bring me a plate of strawberries,’ and it goes right out and finds you some strawberries somewhere, even if it’s the wrong time of year.”

            “Sounds like a good deal, having something like that around.”

            “You bet it is. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a robot of my own. Haven’t you?”

            The tall one shrugged. “Who could afford it?”

            “This one’s real available. If it doesn’t belong to anyone, he could be ours as much as somebody else’s. We just have to tell him that he belongs to us. Make it an order, don’t you see?”

            The tall one blinked. “Hey! That’s right!”

            “We’ll make him run errands for us. Do all sorts of jobs. Anything we like, it’ll have to do. And nobody can stop us. It isn’t as if we’re stealing anybody’s property. He isn’t anybody’s property.”

            “But what if someone else tries to take him from us the same way?”

            “We’ll give him an order that says he can’t go off with anybody else,” said the nose.

            The tall one frowned. “I’m not sure that would work. If he has to obey orders from humans, he’ll have to obey orders from anybody else just the same as he does ours, right?”

            “Well--”

            “Let’s worry about that later. --Hey! you! You, robot! Stand on your head!”

            “The head is not meant--” Andrew began.

            “I said, stand on your head. That’s an order. If you don’t know how to stand on your head, this is a good moment to start learning the way it’s done.”

            Andrew hesitated again. Then he bent his head toward the ground and put his arms out so that they would bear his weight He attempted to lift his legs. But there was nothing in his circuitry to equip Andrew for dealing easily with such an inverted position, and he lost his balance almost at once. He toppled and fell heavily to the ground, landing on his back. For a moment he lay still, struggling to shake off the effects of his fall, before starting slowly to rise.

            “No,” the tall one said. “Just stay down there. And don’t make a sound.” To the other he said, “I bet you we could take him apart and put him back together again. You ever take a robot apart?”

            “No. you?”

            “Never. But I always wanted to.”

            “You think he’ll let us?”

            “How can he stop us?”

            Indeed there was no way at all that Andrew was able to stop them, if they ordered him not to resist in a forceful enough manner. The Second Law--obedience to humans--would always take precedence over the Third Law of self-preservation. In any case, it was impossible for him to defend himself against them without running the risk of hurting them, and that would mean breaking the First Law. At that thought every motile unit in him contracted slightly and Andrew began to quiver as he lay stretched full length on the ground.

            The tall one walked over and shoved at him with the tip of his boot.

            “He’s heavy. And I think we’re going to need tools to do the job.”

            Bulbous-nose said, “What if we can’t put him back the right way again afterward?”

            “What of it?”

            “Then we’ve wasted a perfectly good robot that we could have used for all sorts of other things. I think what we ought to do is order him to take himself apart. He’s got to know the right way of doing it. It would be fun to watch him try, anyhow. And then we can assemble him again.”

            “Right,” said the tall one thoughtfully. “But let’s get him off the road. If someone happens to come along--”

            It was too late. Someone had indeed come along and it was George. From where he lay, Andrew could see him topping a small rise in the middle distance. He would have liked to signal for help. But the last order he had received was, “Don’t make a sound,” and he was bound by that until countermanded by its giver or some other human being.

            George was looking this way, though. And now he was breaking into a trot. In another few moments he was there, somewhat winded, standing at Andrew’s side looking down at him in dismay.

            The two young men stepped back a little and waited, frowning, glancing uncertainly at each other.

            George said anxiously, “Andrew, has anything gone wrong with you?”

            Andrew said, “I am quite well, George.”

            “Why are you lying on the ground like that, then? Can’t you get up?”

            “I would have no difficulty in doing that, if you wished me to,” Andrew said.

            “Then do it! Don’t just lie there!”

            Andrew arose, gratefully, when he heard the order.

            George said, “ And why are your clothes scattered around all over the place? How come you’re not wearing them? What’s been going on here?”

            The tall young man said, “That your robot, Mac?”

            George turned sharply. “He’s no one’s robot. Have you two been playing games with him?”

            “Well, we thought it was pretty weird that a robot would be wearing clothes. So we politely asked him to take them off. What’s that to you if you don’t own him?”

            George said, “Were they trying to harm you, Andrew?”

            Andrew said, “It was their intention in some way to dismember me. They were about to move me to a quiet spot and require me to dismember myself.”

            George looked at the two young men. He was attempting to appear fearless and bold even though he was outnumbered, but Andrew saw his chin tremble.

            “Is this true?” George asked them sternly.

            The two had evidently also noticed George’s obvious discomfort, though, and plainly they had begun to decide that he represented no serious threat to them. George was no longer a young man. His children were grown, now, old enough so that his son Paul had joined the family law firm. George’s russet hair had turned gray and his cheeks--without their flaring side-whiskers, now--were the soft pink cheeks of a sedentary man. He was hardly likely to put up much of a fight, no matter how fierce his manner might seem. As the two took note of that, their manner changed, becoming less wary and more confident.

            The tall one said lightly, with a smirk on his face, “We wanted to see how he’d go about it, yes. Especially how he was going to manage things toward the end, when he only had one arm still attached.”

            “You have a peculiar way of amusing yourselves.”

            “Is that any business of yours?”

            “As a matter of fact, it is.”

            The tall one laughed. “ And what are you going to do about it, pudgy? Beat us up?”

            “No,” George said. “I don’t have to. This robot has been with my family for over seventy years, are you aware of that? He knows us and he values us more than he values anyone else in the world. What I’m going to do is tell him that you two have been threatening my life, that you’re planning to kill me. I’ll ask him to defend me. He’ll have to choose between my life and yours, and I know very well which choice he’s going to make. --Do you know how strong a robot is? Do you know what’s going to happen to you when Andrew attacks you?”

            “Hey, wait a second--” the bulbous-nosed one said. He looked troubled again, now. So did the other. They were both beginning to back away a little.

            George said sharply, “Andrew, I am in direct personal danger. These two young men are about to cause me harm. I order you to move toward them!”

            Andrew obediently took a couple of steps forward, though he wondered what he would be able to do by way of defending George beyond that. In sudden inspiration he brought his arms up into what could perhaps have been interpreted as a menacing position. If the whole idea was simply to have him seem formidable, well, he would make himself look as formidable as he could.

            He held the fierce pose. His photoelectric eyes glowed their strongest shade of red. His bare metallic form gleamed in the sunlight.

            The two young men didn’t choose to stay around to see what was going to happen next. They took off across the field as fast as they could run, and it was only when they were something like a hundred meters away and felt that they had reached a safe place that they turned and glared back, shaking their fists and yelling angry curses.

            Andrew took a few more steps in their direction. They swung around and sped away over the top of the hill. Within moments they were down the far side and out of sight.

            Even now, Andrew remained in his posture of threat.

            “All right, Andrew, you can relax,” said George. He was shaking and his face was pale and sweaty. He looked very much unstrung. George was well past the age where he could comfortably face the possibility of a physical confrontation with one young man, let alone two of them at once.

            Andrew said, “It is just as well that they ran away. You know that I could never have hurt them, George. I could plainly see that they weren’t attacking you.”

            “But they might have, if things had gone on any further.”

            “That is only a speculation. In my judgment, George--”

            “Yes. I know. Most likely they’d never have had the guts to raise a hand against me. But in any case I didn’t order you to attack them. I only told you to move toward them. Their own fears did all the rest. That and that prizefighter stance that you were clever enough to adopt.”

            “But how could they possibly fear robots? The First Law insures that a robot could never--”

            “Fear of robots is a disease that much of mankind has, and there doesn’t really seem to be any cure for it--not yet, at any rate. But never mind that. They’re gone and you’re still in one piece and that’s all that matters right now. What I’d like to know, though, is what the devil were you doing here in the first place, Andrew?”

            “I was going to the library.”

            “Yes. I know that. I found the note you left. But this isn’t the way to the library. The library’s back there, in town. And when I phoned the library the librarian said you hadn’t been there, that she hadn’t heard a thing from you. I went out looking for you on the library road and there wasn’t any sign of you there, and nobody I met along the way to town had seen you either. So I knew you were lost. As a matter of fact, you’ve gotten yourself turned around by 180 degrees.”

            “I suspected that there was some error in my directional plan,” Andrew said.

            “There certainly was. I was just about ready to order a sky-search scan for you, do you know that? And then it occurred to me that you might have wandered over this way, somehow. --What were you doing going to the library anyway, Andrew? Sometimes you get the strangest ideas into your head. You know that I’d be happy to bring you any book you needed.”

            “Yes, I know that, George. But I am a--”

            “Free robot. Yes. Yes. With every right to pick himself up and march off to town to use the library, if that’s what he wants to do, even though his extraordinary robotic intelligence is mysteriously incapable of keeping him on the right road. And what was it, may I ask, that you wanted to get at the library?”

            “A book on modern language.”

            “Are you planning to give up woodworking for linguistics, Andrew?”

            “I feel inadequate in regard to speech.”

            “But you have a fantastic command of the language! Your vocabulary, your grammar--”

            “The language--its metaphors, its colloquialisms, even its grammar--constantly changes, George. My programming does not. If I don’t update myself, I will be almost unable to communicate with human beings in another few generations.”

            “Well--perhaps you have a point there.”

            “So I must study the patterns of linguistic change. And many other things as well.” Suddenly Andrew heard himself saying, “George, I feel it’s important that I get to know much more about human beings, about the world, about everything. I have lived such an isolated life all these years, in our beautiful estate here on this little secluded strip of coast. The world beyond my own doorstep is a mystery to me, really. --and I need to know more about robots also, George. I want to write a book about them.”

            “A book,” George said, sounding puzzled. “ About robots. A manual of design?”

            “Not at all. A history of their development is what I have in mind.”

            “Ah,” George said, nodding and frowning at the same time. “Well, then. Let’s walk home, shall we?”

            “Of course. May I put my clothes on or shall I simply carry them?”

            “Put them on. By all means.”

            “Thank you.”

            Andrew dressed quickly and he and George began to walk back up the road.

            “You want to write a book on the history of robotics,” George said, as if revolving the concept in his mind. “But why, Andrew? There are a million books on robotics already and at least half a million of them go into the history of the robot concept. The world is growing saturated not only with robots but with information about robots.”

            Andrew shook his head, a human gesture that he had lately begun to make more and more frequently. “Not a history of robotics, George. A history of robots--by a robot. Surely no such book has ever been written. I want to explain how robots feel about themselves. And especially about how it has been for us in our relationships with human beings, ever since the first robots were allowed to work and live on Earth.”

            George’s eyebrows lifted. But he offered no other direct response.

TWELVE

LITTLE MISS was making one of her periodic visits to her family’s California estate. She had reached her eighty-third birthday and she seemed frail as a bird these days. But there was nothing about her that was lacking in either energy or determination. Though she carried a cane, she used it more often to gesture with than she did for support.

            She listened to the story of Andrew’s unhappy attempt to reach the library in a fury of mounting indignation. At the end she tapped her cane vehemently against the floor and said, “George, that’s absolutely horrible. Who were those two young ruffians, anyway?”

            “I don’t know, Mother.”

            “Then you should make it your business to find out.”

            “What difference does it make? Just a couple of local hooligans, I suppose. The usual idling foolish kids. In the end they didn’t do any damage.”

            “But they might have. If you hadn’t come along when you did, they could have caused serious harm to Andrew. And even when you did come along, you might well have been physically attacked yourself. The only thing that saved you from that, it seems, is that they were so stupid that they failed to realize that Andrew wouldn’t be able to harm them even at your direct order.”

            “Really, Mother. Do you think they would have touched me? People attacking an absolute stranger on a country road? In the Twenty-Third Century?”

            “Well--perhaps not. But Andrew was certainly in danger. And that’s something we can’t allow. You know that I regard Andrew as a member of our family, George.”

            “Yes, of course. So do I. We always have.”

            “Then we can’t permit a couple of moronic young louts to treat him like some kind of disposable wind-up toy, can we?”

            “What would you have me do, Mother?” asked George.

            “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? Put your legal training to some good use, then! Listen to me: I want you to set up a test case, somehow, that will force the Regional Court to declare for robot rights, and then get the Regional Legislature to pass the necessary enabling bills, and if there are any political problems you carry the whole thing to the World Court, if you have to. I’ll be watching, George, and I’ll tolerate no shirking. “

            “Mother, didn’t you say just a short while ago that what you wanted most in the world for me was that I run for the seat that Grandfather held in the Legislature?”

            “Yes, of course. But what does that have to do with--”

            “And now you want me to launch a controversial campaign for robot rights. Robots can’t vote, Mother. But there are plenty of human beings who do, and a lot of them aren’t as fond of robots as you are. Do you know what will happen to my candidacy if the main thing that people know about me is that I was the lawyer who forced the Legislature to pass robot-rights laws?”

            “So?”

            “Which is more important to you, Mother? That I get elected to the Legislature, or that I get myself involved with this test case of yours?”

            “The test case, naturally,” said Little Miss at once.

            George nodded. “ All right. I just wanted to make sure we had things perfectly clear. I’ll go out there and fight for civil rights for robots, if that’s what you want me to do. But it’s going to be the end of my political career even before my political career has begun, and you have to realize that.”

            “Of course I realize that, George. You may find that you’re mistaken--I don’t know--but in any case, the main thing is that I want Andrew to be protected against a repetition of this brutal incident. First and foremost that is what I want.”

            “Well, then,” said George. “That’s what I’ll see that you get, Mother. You can count on it “

            He began his campaign right away. And what had begun simply as a way of placating the fearsome old lady swiftly turned into the fight of his life.

            George Charney had never really yearned for a seat in the Legislature, anyway. So he was able to tell himself that he was off that hook, now that his mother had decided that he should be a civil-rights crusader instead. And the lawyer in him was fascinated by the challenge. There were deep and profound legal implications to the campaign that called for the most careful analysis and calculation.

            As senior partner of Feingold and Charney, George plotted much of the strategy, but left the actual work of research and filing papers to his junior partners. He placed his own son Paul, who had become a member of the firm three years before, in charge of piloting the day-by-day maneuvers. Paul had the additional responsibility of making dutiful progress reports virtually every day to his grandmother. She, in turn, discussed the campaign every day with Andrew.

            Andrew was deeply involved. He had begun work on his book on robots--he was going back to the very beginning, to Lawrence Robertson and the founding of United States Robots and Mechanical Men--but he put the project aside, now, and spent his time poring over the mounting stacks of legal documents. He even, at times, offered a few very different suggestions of his own.

            To Little Miss he said, “George told me the day those two men were harassing me that human beings have always been afraid of robots. ‘ A disease of mankind,’ is what he called it. As long as that is the case, it seems to me that the courts and the legislatures aren’t likely to do very much on behalf of robots. Robots have no political power, after all, and people do. Shouldn’t something be done about changing the human attitude toward robots, then?”

            “If only we could.”

            “We have to try,” Andrew said. “George has to try.”

            “Yes,” said Little Miss. “He does, doesn’t he?”

            So while Paul stayed in court, it was George who took to the public platform. He gave himself up entirely to the task of campaigning for the civil rights of robots, putting all of his time and energy into it.

            George had always been a good speaker, easy and informal, and now he became a familiar figure at conventions of lawyers and teachers and holo-news editors, and on every opinion show on the public airwaves, setting forth the case for robot rights with an eloquence that grew steadily with experience.

            The more time George spent on public platforms and in the communications studios, the more relaxed and yet commanding a figure he became. He allowed his side-whiskers to grow again, and swept his hair--white, now--backward in a grandiose plume. He even indulged in the new style of clothing that some of the best-known video commentators were going in for, the loose, flowing style known as “drapery.” Wearing it made him feel like a Greek philosopher, he said, or like a member of the ancient Roman Senate.

            Paul Charney, who was generally a good deal more conservative in his ways than his father, warned him the first time he saw his father rigged out like that: “Just take care not to trip over it on stage, Dad;”

            ‘‘I’ll try not to,” said George.

            The essence of his pro-robot argument was this:

            “If, by virtue of the Second Law, we can demand of any robot unlimited obedience in all respects not involving harm to a human being, then any human being, any human being at all, has a fearsome power over any robot, any robot. In particular, since Second Law overrides Third Law, any human being can use the law of obedience to defeat the law of self-protection. He can order the robot to damage itself or even destroy itself for any reason, or for no reason whatsoever--purely on whim alone.

            “Let us leave the question of property rights out of the discussion here --though it is not a trivial one--and approach the issue simply on the level of sheer human decency. Imagine someone approaching a robot he happens to encounter on the road and ordering it, for no reason other than his own amusement, to remove its own limbs, or to do some other grave injury to itself. Or let us say that the robot’s owner himself, in a moment of pique or boredom or frustration, gives such an order.

            “Is this just? Would we treat an animal like that? And an animal, mind you, might at least have the capacity to defend itself. But we have made our robots inherently unable to lift a hand against a human being.

            “Even an inanimate object which has given us good service has a claim on our consideration. And a robot is far from insensible; it is not a simple machine and it is not an animal. It can think well enough to enable it to speak with us, reason with us, joke with us. Many of us who have lived and worked with robots all our lives have come to regard them as friends --virtually as members of our families, I dare say. We have deep respect for them, even affection. Is it asking too much to want to give our robot friends the formal protection of law?

            “If a man has the right to give a robot any order that does not involve doing harm to a human being, he should have the decency never to give a robot any order that involves doing harm to a robot--unless human safety absolutely requires such action. Certainly a robot should not lightly be asked to do purposeless harm to itself. With great power goes great responsibility. If the robots have the Three Laws to protect humans, is it too much to ask that humans subject themselves to a law or two for the sake of protecting robots?”

            There was, of course, another side to the issue--and the spokesman for that side was none other than James Van Buren, the lawyer who had opposed Andrew’s original petition for free-robot status in the Regional Court. He was old, now, but still vigorous, a powerful advocate of traditional social beliefs. In his calm, balanced, reasonable way, Van Buren was once again a forceful speaker on behalf of those who denied that robots could in any way be considered worthy of having “rights.”

            He said, “Of course I hold no brief for vandals who would wantonly destroy a robot that does not belong to them, or order it to destroy itself. That is a civil offense, pure and simple, which can readily be punished through the usual legal channels. We no more need a special law to cover such cases than we need a specific law that says it is wrong for people to smash the windows of other people’s houses. The general law of the sanctity of property provides sufficient protection.

            “But a law preventing one from destroying one’s own robot? Ah, now we venture into very different areas of thinking. I have robots in my own law office, and it would no more occur to me to destroy one than it would for me to take an axe to a desk. Still, is there anyone who would argue that I should be stripped of the right to do as I please with my own robots, or my own desks, or any other article of office furniture that I may own? Can the State, in its infinite wisdom, come into my office and say, ‘No, James Van Buren, you must be kind to your desks, and spare them from injury. Likewise your filing cabinets: they must be treated with respect, they must be treated as friends. And the same applies, naturally, to your robots. In no way, James Van Buren, may you place the robots you own in jeopardy.’ “

            Van Buren would pause, then, and smile in his calm and reasonable way, letting everyone know that this was strictly a hypothetical example, that in fact he was not the sort of man who would do injury to anyone or anything.

            And then he would say, “I can hear George Charney replying that a robot is fundamentally different from a desk or a filing cabinet, that a robot is intelligent and responsive, that robots should be regarded virtually as human. And I would reply to him that he is mistaken, that he is so bemused by affection for the robot that his own family has kept for many decades that he has lost sight of what robots really are.

            “They are machines, my friends. They are tools. They are appliances. What they are is mere mechanical contrivances, neither more nor less deserving of legal protection than any other inanimate object. Yes, I said inanimate. They can speak, yes. They can think, in their own rigid preprogrammed way. But when you prick a robot, does it bleed? If you tickle one, will it laugh? Robots have hands and senses, yes, because we have constructed them that way, but do they have true human affections and passions? Hardly. Hardly! And therefore let us not confuse machines made in the image of mankind with living things.

            “And I must point out, too, that humanity in this century has become dependent on robot labor. There are more robots in the world than there are people, now, and in the main they do the jobs that none of us would be willing to touch. They have freed humanity from dreary drudgery and degradation. To confuse the robot issue with the ancient debates over slavery and the later debates over freedom for those slaves and the still later debates over full civil rights for the descendants of the freed slaves will ultimately lead to economic chaos, when our robots begin to demand not simply the protection of the law but independence from their masters. Those slaves of centuries gone by were human beings who were cruelly taken advantage of and mistreated. No one had any right to force them into servitude. But robots were brought into the world to serve. By definition they are here to be used: not to be our friends but to be our servants. And to take any other position is a wrongheaded, sentimental, dangerous way of thinking.”

            George Charney was a persuasive orator, but so was James Van Buren. And in the end the battle--fought mainly in the court of public opinion, rather than in the Legislature or the Regional Court--ended in something of a stalemate.

            There were a great many people now who had been able to transcend the fear or dislike of robots that had been so widespread a couple of generations earlier, and George’s arguments struck home with them. They too had begun to look upon their robots with a certain degree of affection, and wanted them afforded some kind of legal security.

            But then there were the others, who may not have feared robots themselves so much as they did the financial risks that they might somehow experience as a result of extending civil rights to robots. They urged caution in this new legal arena.

            So when the battle at last was over and pro-robot legislation came forth, setting up conditions under which it was illegal to issue an order that might harm a robot, the law that was passed by the Regional Legislature, sent back for revisions by the Regional Court, passed again in a modified way, this time upheld in the Regional Court, and eventually ratified by the World Legislature and upheld after a final appeal to the World Court, was a very tepid one indeed. It was endlessly qualified and the punishments for violating its provisions were totally inadequate.

            But at least the principle of robot rights--established originally by the decree awarding Andrew his “freedom”--had been extended a little further.

            The final approval by the World Court came through on the day of Little Miss’s death.

            That was no coincidence. Little Miss, very old and very weak now, had nevertheless held on to life with desperate force during the closing weeks of the debate. Only when word of victory arrived did she at last relax the tenacity of her grip.

            Andrew was at her bedside when she went. He stood beside her, looking down at the small, faded woman propped up among the pillows and thinking back to those days of nearly a hundred years before when he was newly arrived at the grand coastside mansion of Gerald Martin and two small girls had stood looking up at him, and the smaller one had frowned and said, “En-dee-arr. That isn’t any good. We can’t call him something like that. What about calling him Andrew?”

            So long ago, so very long ago. A whole lifetime ago, so far as things went for Little Miss. And yet to Andrew it sometimes seemed only a moment--hardly any time at all since those days when he and Miss and Little Miss had romped on the beach below the house, and he had gone for a swim in the surf because it had pleased them to ask him to do so.

            Nearly a century.

            For a human being, Andrew knew, that was an enormous span of time.

            And now Little Miss’s life had run its course and was speeding away. The hair that once had been a radiant gold had long since turned to shining silver; but now the last of its gleam was gone from it and for the first time it looked dull and drab. She was coming to her termination, and there was no help for that. She was not ill; she was simply worn out, beyond any hope of repair. In another few moments she would cease to function. Andrew could hardly imagine a world that did not contain Little Miss. But he knew that he was entering such a world now.

            Her last smile was for him. Her last words were, “You have been good to us, Andrew.”

            She died with her hand holding his, while her son and his wife and their children remained at a respectful distance from the robot and the old woman in the bed.