THIRTEEN

ANDREW EXPERIENCED a sensation of discomfort after Little Miss’s death that would not leave him for weeks. To call it grief might be a little too strong, he thought, for he suspected that there was no place in his positronic pathways for any feeling that corresponded exactly to the human emotion known as grief.

            And yet there was no question but that he was disturbed in some way that could only be traced to the loss of Little Miss. He could not have quantified it. A certain heaviness about his thoughts, a certain odd sluggishness about his movements, a perception of general imbalance in his rhythms--he felt these things, but he suspected that no instruments would be able to detect any measurable change in his capacities.

            To ease this sensation of what he would not let himself call grief he plunged deep into his research on robot history, and his manuscript began to grow from day to day.

            A brief prologue sufficed to deal with the concept of the robot in history and literature--the metal men of the ancient Greek myths, the automata imagined by clever storytellers like E. T. A. Hoffmann and Karel Čapek, and other such fantasies. He summarized the old fables quickly and dispensed with them. It was the positronic robot--the real robot, the authentic item--that Andrew was primarily concerned with.

            And so Andrew moved swiftly to the year 1982 and the incorporation of United States Robots and Mechanical Men by its visionary founder, Lawrence Robertson. He felt almost as though he were reliving the story himself, as he told of the early years of struggle in drafty converted-warehouse rooms and the first dramatic breakthrough in the construction of the platinum-iridium positronic brain, after endless trial-and-error. The conception and development of the indispensable Three Laws; research director Alfred Lanning’s early triumphs at designing mobile robot units, clumsy and ponderous and incapable of speech, but versatile enough to be able to interpret human orders and select the best of a number of possible alternative responses. Followed by the first mobile speaking units at the turn of the Twenty-First Century.

            And then Andrew turned to something much more troublesome for him to describe: the period of negative human reaction which followed, the hysteria and downright terror that the new robots engendered, the worldwide outburst of legislation prohibiting the use of robot labor on Earth. Because miniaturization of the positronic brain was still in the development stage then and the need for elaborate cooling systems was great, the early mobile speaking units had been gigantic--nearly twelve feet high, frightful lumbering monsters that had summoned up all of humanity’s fears of artificial beings--of Frankenstein’s monster and the Golem and all the rest of that assortment of nightmares.

            Andrew’s book devoted three entire chapters to that time of extreme robot-fear. They were enormously difficult chapters to write, for they dealt entirely with human irrationality, and that was a subject almost impossible for Andrew to comprehend.

            He grappled with it as well as he could, striving to put himself in the place of human beings who--though they knew that the Three Laws provided foolproof safeguards against the possibility that robots could do harm to humans--persisted in looking upon robots with dread and loathing. And after a time Andrew actually succeeded in understanding, as far as he was able, how it had been possible for humans to have felt insecure in the face of such a powerful guarantee of security.

            For what he discovered, as he made his way through the archives of robotics, was that the Three Laws were not as foolproof a safeguard as they seemed. They were, in fact, full of ambiguities and hidden sources of conflict. And they could unexpectedly confront robots--straightforward literal-minded creatures that they were--with the need to make decisions that were not necessarily ideal from the human point of view.

            The robot who was sent on a dangerous errand on an alien planet, for example--to find and bring back some substance vital to the safety and well-being of a human explorer--might feel such a conflict between the Second Law of obedience and the Third Law of self-preservation that he would fall into a hopeless equilibrium, unable either to go forward or to retreat. And by such a stalemate the robot--through inaction--thus could create dire jeopardy for the human who had sent him on his mission, despite the imperatives of the First Law that supposedly took precedence over the other two. For how could a robot invariably know that the conflict he was experiencing between the Second and Third Laws was placing a human in danger? Unless the nature of his mission had been spelled out precisely in advance, he might remain unaware of the consequences of his inaction and never realize that his dithering was creating a First Law violation.

            Or the robot who might, through faulty design or poor programming, decide that a certain human being was not human at all, and therefore not in a position to demand the protection that the First and Second Laws were supposed to afford

            Or the robot who was given a poorly phrased order, and interpreted it so literally that he inadvertently caused danger to humans nearby

            There were dozens of such case histories in the archives. The early roboticists--most notably the extraordinary robopsychologist, Susan Calvin, that formidable and austere woman--had labored long and mightily to cope with the difficulties that kept cropping up.

            The problems had become especially intricate as robots with more advanced types of positronic pathways began to emerge from the workshops of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men toward the middle of the Twenty-First Century: robots with a broader capacity for thought, robots who were able to look at situations and perceive their complexities with an almost human depth of understanding. Robots like--though he took care not to say so explicitly--Andrew Martin himself. The new generalized-pathway robots, equipped with the ability to interpret data in much more subjective terms than their predecessors, often reacted in ways that humans were not expecting. Always within the framework of the Three Laws, of course. But sometimes from a perspective that had not been anticipated by the framers of those laws.

            As he studied the annals of robot development, Andrew at last understood why so many humans had been so phobic about robots. It wasn’t that the Three Laws were badly drawn--not at all. Indeed, they were masterly exemplars of logic. The trouble was that humans themselves were not always logical--were, on occasion, downright illogical--and robots were not always capable of coping with the swoops and curves and tangents of human thought.

            So it was humans themselves who sometimes led robots into violations of one or another of the Three Laws--and then, in their illogical way, often would blame the robots themselves for having done something undesirable which in fact they had actually been ordered to do by their human masters.

            Andrew handled these chapters with the utmost care and delicacy, revising and revising them to eliminate any possibility of bias. It was not his intention to write a diatribe against the flaws of mankind. His prime goal, as always, was to serve the needs of mankind.

            The original purpose of writing his book might have been to arrive at a deeper understanding of his own relationship to the human beings who were his creators--but as he proceeded with it he saw that, if properly and thoughtfully done, the book could be an invaluable bridge between humans and robots, a source of enlightenment not only for robots but for the flesh-and-blood species that had brought them into the world. Anything that enabled humans and robots to get along better would permit robots to be of greater service to humanity; and that, of course, was the reason for their existence.

            When he had finished half his book, Andrew asked George Charney to read what he had written and offer suggestions for its improvement. Several years had passed since the death of Little Miss, and George himself seemed unwell now, his once robust frame gaunt, his hair nearly gone. He looked at Andrew’s bulky manuscript with an expression of barely masked discomfort and said, “I’m not really much of a writer myself, you know, Andrew.”

            “I’m not asking for your opinion of my literary style, George. It’s my ideas that I want you to evaluate. I need to know whether there’s anything in the manuscript that might be offensive to human beings.”

            “I’m sure there isn’t, Andrew. You have always been the soul of courtesy.”

            “I would never knowingly give offense, that is true. But the possibility that I would inadvertently--”

            George sighed. “Yes. Yes, I understand. All right, I’ll read your book, Andrew. But you know that I’ve been getting tired very easily these days. It may take me a while to plow all the way through it.”

            “There is no hurry,” said Andrew.

            Indeed George took his time: close to a year. When he finally returned the manuscript to Andrew, though, there was no more than half a page of notes attached to it, the most minor factual corrections and nothing more.

            Andrew said mildly, “I had hoped for criticisms of a more general kind, George.”

            “I don’t have any general criticisms to make. It’s a remarkable work. Remarkable. It’s a truly profound study of its subject. You should be proud of what you’ve done.”

            “But where I touch on the topic of how human irrationality has often led to Three Laws difficulties--”

            “Absolutely on the mark, Andrew. We are a sloppy-minded species, aren’t we? Brilliant and tremendously creative at times, but full of all sorts of messy little contradictions and confusions. We must seem like a hopelessly illogical bunch to you, don’t we, Andrew?”

            “There are times that it does seem that way to me, yes. But it is not my intention to write a book that is critical of human beings. Far from it, George. What I want to give the world is something that will bring humans and robots closer together. And if I should seem to be expressing scorn for the mental abilities of humans in any way, that would be the direct opposite of what I want to be doing. Which is why I had hoped that you would single out, in your reading of my manuscript, any passages that might be interpreted in such a way that--”

            “Perhaps you should have asked my son Paul to read the manuscript instead of me,” George said. “He’s right at the top of his profession, you know. So much more in touch with all these matters of nuance and subtle inference than I am these days.”

            And Andrew finally understood from that statement that George Charney had not wanted to read his manuscript at all--that George was growing old and weary, that he was entering the final years of his life, that once again the wheel of the generations had turned and that Paul was now the head of the family. Sir had gone and so had Little Miss and soon it was going to be George’s turn. Martins and Charneys came and went and yet Andrew remained--not exactly unchanging (for his body was still undergoing occasional technological updating and it also seemed to him that his mental processes were constantly deepening and growing richer as he allowed himself to recognize fully his own extraordinary capabilities), but certainly invulnerable to the ravages of the passing years.

            He took his nearly finished manuscript to Paul Charney. Paul read it at once and offered not only praise but, as George had indicated, valuable suggestions for revision. There were places where Andrew’s inability to comprehend the abrupt, non-linear jumps of reasoning of which the human mind is capable had led him into certain oversimplifications and unwarranted conclusions. If anything, Paul thought the book was too sympathetic to the human point of view. A little more criticism of the irrational human attitude toward robotics, and toward science in general, might not have been out of place.

            Andrew had not expected that.

            He said, “But I would not want to offend anyone, Paul.”

            “No book worth reading has ever been written that didn’t manage to offend someone,” Paul replied. “Write what you believe to be the truth, Andrew. It would be amazing if everybody in the world agreed with you. But your viewpoint is unique. You have something real and valuable to give the world here. It won’t be worth a thing, though, if you suppress what you feel and write only what you think others want to hear.”

            “But the First Law--”

            “Damn the First Law, Andrew! The First Law isn’t everything! How can you harm someone with a book? Well, by hitting him over the head with it, I suppose. But not otherwise. Ideas can’t do harm--even wrong ideas, even foolish and vicious ideas. People do the harm. They seize hold of certain ideas, sometimes, and use them as the justification for doing unconscionable, outrageous things. Human history is full of examples of that. But the ideas themselves are just ideas. They must never be throttled. They need to be brought forth, inspected, tested, if necessary rejected, right out in the open. --Anyway, the First Law doesn’t say anything about robots writing books. Sticks and stones, Andrew--they can do harm. But words--”

            “As you yourself have just remarked, Paul, human history is full of harmful events that began simply with words. If those words had never been uttered, the harmful events would not have taken place.”

            “You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you? Or do you? I think you do. You know what power ideas have, and you don’t have a lot of faith in the ability of humans to tell a good idea from a bad one. Well, neither do I, sometimes. But in the long run the bad idea will perish. That’s been the story of human civilization for thousands of years. The good does prevail, sooner or later, no matter what horrors have happened along the way. And so it’s wrong to suppress an idea that may have value to the world. --Look, Andrew: you’re probably the closest thing to a human being that has ever come out of the factories of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men. You’re uniquely equipped to tell the world what it needs to know about the human-robot relationship, because in some ways you partake of the nature of each. And so you may help to heal that relationship, which even at this late date is still a very troubled one. Write your book. Write it honestly.”

            “Yes. I will, Paul.”

            “Do you have a publisher in mind for it, by the way?”

            “A publisher? Why, no. I haven’t yet given any thought to--”

            “Well, you should. Or let me do it for you. I have a friend in the book business--a client, really--do you mind if I say a word or two to him?”

            “That would be quite kind of you,” Andrew said.

            “Not at all. I want to see this book out there where it can be read by everybody, just as you do.”

            And indeed within a few weeks Paul had secured a publishing contract for Andrew’s book. He assured Andrew that the terms were extremely generous, extremely fair. That was good enough for Andrew. He signed the contract without hesitation.

            Over the next year, while he worked on the closing sections of his manuscript, Andrew often thought of the things Paul had said to him that day--about the importance of stating his beliefs honestly, the value that his book could have if he did. And also about his own uniqueness. There was one statement of Paul’s that Andrew could not get out of his mind.

            Look, Andrew: you’re probably the closest thing to a human being that has ever come out of the factories of u. s. Robots and Mechanical Men. You’re uniquely equipped to tea the world what it needs to know about the human-robot relationship, because in some ways you partake of the nature of each.

            Was it so? Is that what Paul really thought, Andrew wondered, or had it just been the heat of the moment that had led him to say those things?

            Andrew asked himself that over and over again, and gradually he began to form an answer.

            And then he decided that the time had come to pay another visit to the offices of Feingold and Charney and have another talk with Paul.

            He arrived unannounced, but the receptionist greeted him without any inflection of surprise in its voice. Andrew was far from an unfamiliar figure by this time at the Feingold and Charney headquarters.

            He waited patiently while the receptionist disappeared into the inner office to notify Paul that Andrew was here. It would surely have been more efficient if the receptionist had used the holographic chatterbox, but unquestionably it was unmanned (or perhaps the word was “unroboted”) by having to deal with another robot rather than with a human being.

            Eventually the receptionist returned. “Mr. Charney will be with you soon,” the receptionist announced, and went back to its tasks without another word.

            Andrew passed the time revolving in his mind the matter of his word choice of a few minutes before. Could “unroboted” be used as an analog of “unmanned”? he wondered. Or had “unmanned” become a purely metaphoric term sufficiently divorced from its original literal meaning to be applied to robots--or to women, for that matter?

            Many similar semantic problems had cropped up frequently while Andrew was working on his book. Human language, having been invented by humans for the use of humans, was full of little tricky complexities of that sort. The effort that was required in order to cope with them had undoubtedly increased Andrew’s own working vocabulary--and, he suspected, the adaptability of his positronic pathways as well.

            Occasionally as Andrew sat in the waiting room someone would enter the room and stare at him. He was the free robot, after all--still the only one. The clothes-wearing robot. An anomaly; a freak. But Andrew never tried to avoid the glances of these curiosity-seekers. He met each one calmly, and each in turn looked quickly away.

            Paul Charney finally came out. He and Andrew had not seen each other since the winter, at the funeral of Paul’s father George, who had died peacefully at the family home and now lay buried on a hillside over the Pacific. Paul looked surprised to see Andrew now, or so Andrew thought--though Andrew still had no real faith in his ability to interpret human facial expressions accurately.

            “Well, Andrew. So good to see you again. I’m sorry I made you wait, but there was something I had to finish.”

            “Quite all right. I am never in a hurry, Paul.”

            Paul had taken lately to wearing the heavy makeup that fashion was currently dictating for both sexes, and though it made the somewhat bland lines of his face sharper and firmer, Andrew disapproved. He felt that Paul’s strong, incisive personality needed no such cosmetic enhancement. It would have been perfectly all right for Paul to allow himself to look bland; there was nothing bland about the man himself, and no need for all this paint and powder.

            Andrew kept his disapproval to himself, of course. But the fact that he disapproved of Paul’s appearance at all was something of a novelty for him. He had only just begun to have such thoughts. Since finishing the first draft of his book, Andrew had discovered that disapproving of the things human beings did, as long as he avoided expressing such opinions openly, did not make him as uneasy as he might have anticipated. He could think disapproving thoughts without difficulty and he was even able to put his disapproval in writing. He was certain that it had not always been like that for him.

            Paul said, “Come inside, Andrew. I heard that you wanted to talk to me, but I wasn’t really expecting that you’d come all the way down here to do it.”

            “If you are too busy to see me just now, Paul, I am prepared to continue to wait.”

            Paul glanced at the interplay of shifting shadows on the dial on the wall that served as the reception-office’s timepiece and said, “I can make some time. Did you come alone?”

            “I hired an automatobile.”

            “Any trouble doing that?” Paul asked, with more than a trace of anxiety in his tone.

            “I wasn’t expecting any. My rights are protected.”

            Paul looked all the more anxious for that. “Andrew, I’ve explained to you half a dozen times that that law is essentially unenforceable, at least in most circumstances. --and if you insist on wearing clothes, you’re bound to run into trouble eventually, you know. Just as you did that first time when my father had to rescue you.”

            “It was the only such time, Paul. But I’m sorry that you’re displeased.”

            “Well, look at it this way: you’re virtually a living legend, do you realize that? People sometimes like to win a little ugly fame for themselves by making trouble for celebrities, and a celebrity is certainly what you are. Besides, as I’ve already told you, you’re too valuable in too many ways for you to have any right to take chances with yourself. --How’s the book coming along, by the way?”

            “I’ve finished a complete draft. Now I’m doing the final editing and polishing. At least, I hope it will be the final editing and polishing. The publisher is quite pleased with what he’s seen so far.”

            “Good!”

            “I don’t know that he’s necessarily pleased with the book as a book. There are parts of it that make him uncomfortable, I think. But it’s my guess that he expects to sell a great many copies simply because it’s the first book written by a robot, and it’s that aspect that pleases him.”

            “It’s only human, I’m afraid, to be interested in making money, Andrew.”

            “I would not be displeased by it either. Let the book sell, for whatever reason it does. I can find good uses for whatever money it brings in.”

            “But I thought you were well off, Andrew! You’ve always had your own income--and there was the quite considerable amount of money my grandmother left you--”

            “Little Miss was extremely generous. And I’m sure I can count on the family to help me out further, if a time comes when my expenses begin to exceed my income. Still, I would rather be able to earn my own way at all times. I would not want to draw on your resources except as a last resort.”

            “Expenses? What expenses can you be talking about? Yachts? Trips to Mars?”

            “Nothing like that,” said Andrew. “But I do have something rather costly in mind, Paul. It’s my hope that the royalties from my book will be large enough to see me through what I have in mind. My next step, so to speak.”

            Paul looked a little uneasy. “And what is that?”

            “Another upgrade.”

            “You’ve always been able to pay for your upgrades out of your own funds up till now.”

            “This one may be more expensive than the others.”

            Paul nodded. “Then the book royalties will come in handy. And if they’re disappointing, I’m sure that we can find some way of making up--”

            “It isn’t only a matter of money,” Andrew said. “There are some other complications. --Paul, for this one I have to go straight to the top. I need to see the head of the U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation and get his clearance for the job. I’ve tried to make an appointment, but so far I haven’t been able to get through to him at all. No doubt it’s because of my book. The corporation wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about my writing a book, you know--they provided no cooperation whatever, as a matter of fact--”

            A grin appeared on Paul’s face. “Cooperation, Andrew? Cooperation’s the last thing you could have expected from them. You scare them silly. They didn’t cooperate with us in either stage of our great fight for robot rights, did they? Quite the reverse, actually. And you surely understand why. Give a robot too many rights and no one’s going to want to buy one, eh?”

            “That may be true, or perhaps not. In any case, I want to speak with the head of the company concerning a very special request that I have. I can’t manage to get through by myself, but perhaps if you make the call for me--”

            “You know that I’m not any more popular with them than you are, Andrew.”

            “Nevertheless, you’re the head of a powerful and influential law firm and a member of a great and distinguished family. They can’t simply ignore you. And if they try, you can always hint that by seeing me they stand a chance of heading off a new campaign by Feingold and Charney to strengthen the civil rights of robots even further.”

            “Wouldn’t that be a lie, Andrew?”

            “Yes, Paul, and I’m not good at telling lies. I can’t tell one at all, in fact, unless I do it under the constraint of one of the Three Laws. That’s why you have to make the call for me.”

            Paul chuckled. “Ah, Andrew, Andrew! You can’t tell a lie, but you can urge me to tell one for you, is that it? You’re getting more human all the time!”

FOURTEEN

THE APPOINTMENT wasn’t easy to arrange, even using Paul’s supposedly powerful name.

            But repeated pressure--coupled with the none too delicate hint that permitting Andrew to have a few minutes of Harley Smythe-Robertson’s precious time might well save U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men from having to go through a troublesome new round of litigation over robot rights--finally carried the day. On a balmy spring day Andrew and Paul set out together across the country for the vast and sprawling complex of buildings that was the headquarters of the gigantic robotics company.

            Harley Smythe-Robertson--who was descended from both branches of the family that had founded U. S. Robots, and had adopted the hyphenated name by way of declaring that fact--looked remarkably unhappy at the sight of Andrew. He was approaching retirement age and an extraordinary amount of his tenure as president of the company had been devoted to the controversies over robot rights. Smythe-Robertson was a tall, almost skeletally lean man whose gray hair was plastered thinly over the top of his scalp. He wore no facial makeup. From time to time during the meeting he eyed Andrew with brief but undisguised hostility

            “And what new trouble have you come here to cause us, may I ask?” Smythe-Robertson said.

            “Please understand, sir, it has never been my intention to cause this company trouble. Never.”

            “But you have. Constantly.”

            “I have only attempted to gain that to which I have felt entitled.”

            Smythe-Robertson reacted to the word “entitled” as he might have to a slap in the face.

            “How extraordinary to hear a robot speak of feelings of entitlement. “

            “This robot is a very extraordinary robot, Mr. Smythe-Robertson,” said Paul.

            “Extraordinary,” Smythe-Robertson said sourly. “Yes. Quite extraordinary.”

            Andrew said, “Sir, slightly more than a century ago I was told by Melwin Mansky, who was the Chief Robopsychologist of this company then, that the mathematics governing the plotting of the positronic pathways was far too complicated to permit of any but approximate solutions, and that therefore the limits of my own capacities were not fully predictable.”

            “As you say, that was over a century ago,” Smythe-Robertson replied. And after a moment’s hesitation added icily, “Sir. The situation is quite different nowadays. Our robots are made with great precision now and are trained precisely to their tasks. We have eliminated every aspect of unpredictability from their natures.”

            “Yes,” said Paul. “So I’ve noticed. And one result is that my receptionist has to be guided at every point that departs from the expected path, however slightly. I don’t see that as much of a step forward in the state of the art.”

            Smythe-Robertson said, “I think you’d like it a great deal less if your receptionist were to improvise.”

            “Improvise?” Paul said. “Think is all I ask. Enough thinking to be able to handle the simple situations a receptionist needs to deal with. Robots are designed to be intelligent, aren’t they? It seems to me you’ve backtracked toward a very limited definition of intelligence indeed.”

            Smythe-Robertson fidgeted and glowered, but made no direct response.

            Andrew said, “Are you saying, sir, that you no longer manufacture any robots that are as flexible and adaptable as--let us say--myself?”

            “That’s right. We discontinued the generalized-pathways line so long ago that I couldn’t tell you how far back it was. Perhaps it was in Dr. Mansky’s time. Which was long before I was born, and as you see, I am far from young.”

            “As am I,” said Andrew. “The research I have done in connection with my book--I think you know that I have written a book about robotics and robots--indicates that I am the oldest robot presently in active operation.”

            “Correct,” said Smythe-Robertson. “And the oldest ever. The oldest that will ever be, in fact. No robot is useful after its twenty-fifth year. Their owners are entitled to bring them in at that time and have them replaced with new models. In the case of leased robots, we call them in automatically and provide the replacements.”

            “No robot in any of your presently manufactured series is useful after the twenty-fifth year,” said Paul pleasantly. “But Andrew is a robot of a quite different sort.”

            “Indeed he is,” said Smythe-Robertson. “I’m only too aware of that.”

            Andrew, adhering steadfastly to the path he had marked out for himself, said, “Since I am the oldest robot in the world and the most flexible one in existence, would you not say that I am so unusual that I merit special treatment from the company?”

            “Not at all,” said Smythe-Robertson icily. “Let me be blunt with you--sir. Your unusualness is a continuing embarrassment to the company. You have caused us all manner of difficulties, as I’ve already pointed out, as a result of the various activist positions you have taken over the years. Your feelings of--ah--entitlement are not shared here. If you were on lease as most of our robots are, instead of having been acquired by outright purchase through some regrettable bit of ancient administrative carelessness, we’d have called you in long ago and replaced you with a robot of a more docile type.”

            “At least you’re straightforward about it,” Paul said.

            “There’s no secret about the way we feel over this. We’re in business to sell robots, not to engage in endless unprofitable political squabblings. A robot that believes it’s something more than a useful mechanical device is a direct threat to our corporate welfare.”

            “And therefore you would destroy me if you could,” said Andrew. “I quite understand that. But I am a free robot and I own myself, so I can’t be called in and it would be pointless to make an attempt to repurchase me. And I am protected by the law against any harm you might want to do to me. Which is why I have been willing to put myself in your hands for periodic upgrading. And why I have come to you today to request the most extensive upgrading you have ever done on any robot. What I want is a total replacement for myself, Mr. Smythe-Robertson.”

            Smythe-Robertson looked both astounded and bewildered. He stared at Andrew in total silence, and the silence went on for a seemingly interminable time.

            Andrew waited. He looked past Smythe-Robertson toward the wall, where a holographic portrait looked back at him. It showed a dour, austere female face: the face of Susan Calvin, the patron saint of all roboticists. She had been dead nearly two centuries now, but after having delved into her working papers as deeply as he had during the course of writing his book, Andrew felt he knew her so well that he could half persuade himself that he had met her in life.

            Smythe-Robertson said finally, “A total replacement, you say? But what does that mean?”

            “Exactly what I said. When you call in an obsolete robot, you provide its owner with a replacement. Well, I want you to provide me with a replacement for me.”

            Still looking confused, Smythe-Robertson said, “But how can we do that? If we replace you, how can we turn the new robot over to you as owner, since in the very act of being replaced you would have to cease to exist?” And he smiled grimly.

            “Perhaps Andrew hasn’t made himself sufficiently clear,” interposed Paul. “May I try? --the seat of Andrew’s personality is his positronic brain, which is the one part that cannot be replaced without creating a new robot. The positronic brain, therefore, is the locus of Andrew Martin, who is the owner of the robot in which Andrew Martin’s positronic brain is currently housed. Every other part of the robotic body can be replaced without affecting the Andrew Martin personality--most of those parts, as you may know, have already been replaced, sometimes more than once, in the hundred-odd years since Andrew was first manufactured. Those subsidiary parts are the brain’s possessions. The brain, at its option, can have them replaced at any time, but the continuity of the brain’s existence is unbroken. What Andrew actually wants, Mr. Smythe-Robertson, is simply for you to transfer his brain to a new robotic body.”

            “I see,” Smythe-Robertson said. “ A total upgrade, in other words.” But his face showed perplexity again. “To what kind of body, may I ask? You already are housed in the most advanced mechanical body that we manufacture.”

            “But you have manufactured androids, haven’t you?” said Andrew. “Robots that have the outward appearance of humans, complete to the texture of the skin? That is what I want, Mr. Smythe-Robertson. An android body.”

            Paul seemed astounded by that. “Good Lord,” he blurted. “Andrew, I never dreamed that that was what you--” His voice trailed off.

            Smythe-Robertson stiffened. “It’s an absolutely impossible request. Impossible.”

            “Why do you say that?” Andrew asked. “I’m willing to pay any reasonable fee, as I have for all the numerous upgrades you’ve given me up to now.”

            “We don’t manufacture androids,” Smythe-Robertson said flatly. “You have, though. I know that you have.”

            “Formerly, yes. The line was discontinued.”

            “Because of technical problems?” Paul asked.

            “Not at all. The experimental android line was quite successful, actually--technically speaking. Their appearance was strikingly human in form, and yet they had all the versatility and ruggedness of robots. We used synthetic carbon-fiber skins and silicone tendons. There was virtually no structural metal involved anywhere--the brain, of course, was still platinum-iridium--and yet they were nearly as tough as conventional metal robots. They were tougher, in fact, weight for weight.”

            “Despite all of which, you never put them on the market?” Paul asked.

            “Correct. We worked up about a dozen experimental models and ran some marketing surveys and decided not to go ahead with the line.”

            “Why was that?”

            “For one thing,” said Smythe-Robertson, “a line of androids would have had to be far more expensive than the standard metal robots--so expensive that we would have had to regard them purely as luxury items, with a potential market so limited in size that it would take many years for us to be able to amortize the expense of setting up a production facility. But that was only a small part of the difficulty. The real problem was negative consumer reaction. The androids looked too human, you see. They reawakened all the ancient fears of making real humans obsolete that had caused us so much trouble two hundred years ago. It made no sense for us to open all that psychotic nonsense up again simply for the sake of setting up a line that was doomed from the outset to be unprofitable anyway.”

            “But the corporation has maintained its expertise in the area of making androids, has it not?” Andrew asked.

            Smythe-Robertson shrugged. “I suppose we still could make them if we saw any sense to it, yes.”

            “You choose not to, though,” said Paul. “You’ve got the technology but you simply decline to exercise it. That’s not quite the same thing as what you told us before, that it would be impossible to manufacture an android body for Andrew.”

            “It would be possible, yes--technically. But completely against public policy.”

            “Why? There isn’t any law that I know of against making androids.”

            “Nevertheless,” Smythe-Robertson said, “we don’t manufacture them and we don’t intend to. Therefore we are unable to provide the android body that Andrew Martin has requested. And I suggest to you that this conversation has reached a point of no return. If you’ll excuse me, therefore--” And he half rose from his seat.

            “Just a little time longer, if you please,” said Paul in an easy tone that had something more forceful just beneath its surface. He cleared his throat. Smythe-Robertson subsided, looking even more displeased than he had. Paul went on, “Mr. Smythe-Robertson, Andrew is a free robot who falls under the protection of the laws that govern robot rights. You are aware of this, of course.”

            “Only too well.”

            “This robot, as a free robot, freely chooses to wear clothes. This has resulted in his being frequently humiliated by thoughtless human beings, despite the law that supposedly protects robots against such humiliation. It’s quite difficult, you realize, to prosecute vague offenses that don’t meet with the general disapproval of those whose responsibility it is to decide between guilt and innocence.”

            “I’m not at all surprised to hear that,” said Smythe-Robertson restlessly. “U. S. Robots understood that from the start. Your father’s law firm unfortunately did not.”

            “My father is dead now,” said Paul. “But what I see is that we have here a clear offense with a clear target, and we stand ready to take the appropriate action.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “My client, Andrew Martin--he has been the client of my firm for many years--is a free robot, by decree of the World Court. That is to say, Andrew is his own owner, and in him, therefore, are vested the legal rights that any human robot owner has in regard to robots in his possession. One of those rights is that of replacement. As you yourself pointed out some time ago during this discussion, the owner of any robot is entitled to ask U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation for a replacement when his robot reaches the point of obsolescence. In fact, the corporation insists on offering such replacements, and where leased robots are involved will call them in automatically. I’ve stated your policy correctly, is that not so?”

            “Well--yes.”

            “Good.” Paul was smiling and thoroughly at his ease. He continued, “Now, the positronic brain of my client is the owner of the body of my client--and that body, obviously, is far more than twenty-five years old. By your own definition that body is obsolete and my client is entitled to a replacement.”

            “Well--” Smythe-Robertson said again, reddening. His gaunt, almost fleshless face looked like a mask, now.

            “The positronic brain which is my actual client demands the replacement of the robot body in which it is housed, and has offered to pay any reasonable fee for that replacement.”

            “Then let him sign up in the ordinary way and we’ll give him his updating!”

            “He wants more than an updating. He wants the finest replacement body within your technical capacity, by which he means an android body.”

            “He can’t have one.”

            “By refusing,” Paul said smoothly, “you condemn him to continued humiliation at the hands of those who, recognizing him as a robot, treat him with contempt because he prefers to wear clothes and otherwise behave in traditionally ‘human’ fashion.”

            “That’s not our problem,” said Smythe-Robertson.

            “It becomes your problem when we sue you for refusing to provide my client with a body that would allow him to avoid much of the humiliation he now encounters.”

            “Go ahead and sue, then. Do you think anybody’s going to give a damn about a robot who wants to look human? People will be outraged. He’ll be denounced everywhere for the arrogant upstart that he is.”

            “I’m not so sure,” Paul said. “ Agreed, public opinion wouldn’t ordinarily support the claim of a robot in a lawsuit of that kind. But may I remind you that U. S. Robots is not very popular with the general public, Mr. Smythe-Robertson? Even those who most use robots to their own benefit and profit are suspicious of you. This may be a hangover from the days of anti-robot paranoia: I suspect that’s a good part of it. Or it may be resentment against the immense power and wealth of your company, which has so successfully managed to defend its worldwide monopoly on robot manufacture through a long and clever series of patent maneuvers. Whatever the cause may be, the resentment may exist. If there’s any entity that would be even less popular in such a lawsuit than the robot who wants to look like a human being, it would be the corporation that has filled the world with robots in the first place.”

            Smythe-Robertson glared. The clenched muscles of his face stood out clearly. He said nothing.

            Paul went on, “In addition, think about what people would say when they find out you’re capable of manufacturing human-looking robots? The lawsuit would very definitely focus a great deal of attention on that very point. Whereas if you quietly and simply provided my client with what he requests--”

            Smythe-Robertson seemed about to explode. “This is coercion, Mr. Charney.”

            “On the contrary. We’re simply trying to show you where your own best interests lie. A quick and peaceful resolution is all that we’re looking for. Of course, if you compel us to seek legal redress in the courts, that’s a different matter. And then, I think, you will find yourself in an awkward and disagreeable position, particularly since my client is quite wealthy and will live for many centuries to come and will have no reason to refrain from fighting this battle forever.”

            “We’re not without resources ourselves, Mr. Charney.”

            “I’m aware of that. But can you withstand an endless legal siege that will expose the deepest secrets of your company? --I put it to you one last time, Mr. Smythe-Robertson. If you prefer to reject my client’s quite reasonable request, you may by all means do so and we’ll leave here without another word being spoken. But we will sue, as is certainly our right, and we will sue most strenuously and publicly, which is bound to create immense difficulties for u. S. Robots, and you will find that you will eventually lose. Are you willing to take that risk?”

            “Well--” Smythe-Robertson said, and paused.

            “Good. I see that you’re going to accede,” said Paul. “You may still be hesitating now, but you’re going to come around in the end. A very wise decision, may I add. But that leads to a further important point.”

            Smythe-Robertson’s fury seemed to be fading into sullen glumness. He did not try to speak.

            Paul continued, “Let me assure you that if, in the process of transferring my client’s positronic brain from his present body to the organic one that you ultimately will agree to create for him, there is any damage, however slight, then I will never rest until I have nailed this corporation to the ground.”

            “You can’t expect us to guarantee--”

            “I can and I will. You’ve had a hundred-odd years of experience in transferring positronic brains from one robot body to another. You can surely use the same techniques in transferring one safely to an android body. And I warn you of this: if one brain-path of my client’s platinum-iridium essence happens to get scrambled in the course of the work, you can be quite certain that I’ll take every possible step to mobilize public opinion against this corporation--that I will expose it before all the world for the criminally vindictive operation that it has plainly revealed itself to be.”

            Smythe-Robertson said, shifting about miserably in his seat, “There’s no way we can provide you with a total waiver of liability. There are risks in any sort of transfer.”

            “Low-probability ones. You don’t lose a lot of positronic brains while you move them from one body to another. We’re willing to accept risks of that sort. It’s the possibility of deliberate and malevolent action against my client that I’m warning you against.”

            “We wouldn’t be so stupid,” said Smythe-Robertson. “ Assuming we go through with this, and I haven’t yet said we would, we’d exert our utmost skills. That’s the way we’ve always worked and the way we intend to continue. You’ve backed me into a corner, Charney, but you’ve still got to realize that we can’t give you a 100% assurance of success. 99%, yes. Not 100.”

            “Good enough. But remember: we’ll throw everything we have at you if we have reason to suspect any sort of intentional harm to our client.” Paul turned to Andrew and said, “What do you say, Andrew? Is this acceptable to you?”

            Andrew hesitated for nearly a full minute, caught in an equilibrium of First Law potentials. What Paul wanted from him amounted to the approval of lying, of blackmail, of the badgering and humiliation of a human being.

            But at least no physical harm was involved, he told himself. No physical harm.

            And he managed at last to come out with a barely audible “Yes.”

FIFTEEN

IT WAS LIKE being constructed allover again. For days, for weeks, for months, Andrew found himself not himself somehow, and the simplest actions kept giving rise to hesitation.

            He had always been utterly at home in his body. He had only to recognize the need for a motion and he was instantly able to make that motion, smoothly, automatically. Now it took a conscious effort of self-direction. Raise your arm, he had to tell himself. Move it over here. Now put it down.

            Was this what it was like for a young human child as it strived to master the mysteries of bodily coordination? Andrew wondered.

            Perhaps so. He was over a hundred years old and yet he felt very much like a child as he moved about in this startling new body of his.

            It was a splendid body. They had made him tall, but not so tall that he would seem overbearing or frightening. His shoulders were broad, his waist was slim, his limbs were supple and athletic. He had chosen light-brown hair for himself, since he found red too flamboyant and yellow too obvious and black too somber, and human hair did not seem to come in other colors than those, except for the gray or white or silver of age, and he had not wanted that. His eyes--photo-optic cells, really, but very convincing in appearance--were brown also, flecked ever so subtly with gold. For his skin color Andrew had selected something neutral in tone, a kind of blend of the prevailing skin colors of the various human types, darker than the pale pink of the Charneys but not quite as dark as some. That way no one would be able to tell at a glance which race he belonged to, since in fact he belonged to none. He had had the U. S. Robots designers peg his apparent age at somewhere between thirty-five and fifty human years: old enough to seem mature, not so old as to show serious signs of aging.

            A fine body, yes. He was certain he would be very happy in it, once he grew accustomed to it.

            Each day there was a little progress. Each day he gained more control over his elegant new android housing. But the process was terribly slow --agonizingly slow

            Paul was frantic. “They’ve damaged you, Andrew. I’m going to have to file suit.”

            Andrew said, “You mustn’t, Paul. You’ll never be able to prove something--m-m-m-m--

            “Malicious?”

            “Malicious, yes. Besides, I grow stronger, better. It’s just the tr-tr--”

            “Tremble?”

            “Trauma. After all, there’s never been such an op-op-op--before.”

            Andrew spoke very slowly. Speech was surprisingly hard now for him too, one of the hardest functions of all, a constant struggle to enunciate. It was an agony for Andrew to get the words out and an agony for anyone who had to listen to him. His entire vocal mechanism was different from what it had been previously. The efficient electronic synthesizer that had been able to make such convincingly human sounds had given way to an arrangement of resonating chambers and muscle-like structures to control them that was supposed to make his voice utterly indistinguishable from that of an organic human being; but now Andrew had to shape each syllable in a way that had been done for him before, and that was difficult work, very difficult.

            Yet he felt no despair. Despair was not really a quality that he was capable of, and in any case he knew that these problems were merely temporary. He could feel his brain from the inside. No one else could; and no one else could know as well as he did that his brain was still intact, that it had come through the transfer operation unharmed. His thoughts flowed freely through the neural connections of his new body, even if the body was not yet as swift as it might be in reacting to them. Every parameter checked out perfectly.

            He was merely having a few interface problems, that was all. But Andrew knew he was fundamentally well and that it would be only a matter of time until he had achieved complete control over his new housing. He had to think of himself as very young, still. Like a child, a newborn child.

            The months passed. His coordination improved steadily. He moved swiftly toward full positronic interplay.

            Yet not everything was as he would have wished it. Andrew spent hours before the mirror, evaluating himself as he went through his repertoire of facial expressions and bodily motions. And what he saw fell far short of the expectations he had had for his new body.

            Not quite human! The face was stiff--too stiff--and he doubted that that was going to improve with time. He would press his finger against his cheek and the flesh would yield, but not in the way that true human flesh would yield. He could smile or scowl or frown, but they were studied, imitative smiles and scowls and frowns. He would give the smile-signal or the frown-signal or whatever, and the muscles of his face would obediently hoist the smile-expression or the frown-expression into view, pulling his features around in accordance with a carefully designed program. He was always conscious of the machinery, organic though it might be, clanking ponderously around beneath his skin to produce the desired effect. That was not how it happened with human beings, Andrew suspected.

            And his motions were too deliberate. They lacked the careless free flow of the human being. He could hope that that would come after a while--he was already far beyond the first dismal days after the operation, when he had staggered awkwardly about his room like some sort of crude pre-positronic automaton--but something told him that even with this extraordinary new body he was never going to be able to move in the natural way that virtually every human being took for granted.

            Still, things were not all that bad. The U. S. Robots people had kept their part of the bargain honorably and had carried out the transfer with all the formidable technical skill at their disposal. And Andrew had what he wanted. He might not fool the truly observant onlooker into thinking he was human, but he was far more human-looking than any robot ever had been, and at least he could wear clothes now without the ridiculous anomaly of an expressionless metal face rising up above them.

            Eventually Andrew declared, “I will be getting back to work now.”

            Paul Charney laughed and said, “Then you must be well. What will you be doing? Another book?”

            “No,” said Andrew seriously. “I live too long for anyone career to seize me by the throat and never let me go. There was a time when I was primarily an artist, and I still dabble in that now and then. And there was a time when I was a historian and I can always write another book or two, if I feel the need for it. But I have to keep moving on. What I want to be now, Paul, is a robobiologist.”

            “A robopsychologist, you mean?”

            “No. That would imply the study of positronic brains and at the moment I have no interest in doing that. A robobiologist, it seems to me, would be concerned with the workings of the body that is attached to that brain.”

            “Wouldn’t that be a roboticist?”

            “In the old days, yes. But roboticists work with metallic bodies. I would be studying an organic humanoid body--of which I have the only one, as far as I know. Examining the way it functions, the way it simulates a true human body. I want to know more about artificial human bodies than the android-makers know themselves.”

            “You narrow your field of endeavor,” said Paul thoughtfully. “As an artist, the whole range of expression was yours. Your work could stand up with the best that was being produced anywhere in the world. As a historian, you dealt chiefly with robots. As a robobiologist, your subject will be yourself.”

            Andrew nodded. “So it would seem.”

            “Do you really want to turn inward that way?”

            “Understanding of self is the beginning of understanding of the entire universe,” said Andrew. “Or so I believe now. A newborn child thinks he is the whole universe, but he is wrong, as he soon begins to discover. So he must study what is outside himself--must try to learn where the boundaries are between himself and the rest of the world--in order to arrive at any comprehension of who he is and how he is to conduct his life. And in many ways I am like a newborn child now, Paul. I have been something else before this, something mechanical and relatively easy to understand, but now I am a positronic brain within a body that is almost human, and I can barely begin to comprehend myself. I am alone in the world, you know. There is nothing like me. There never has been. As I move through the world of humans, no one will understand what I am, and I barely understand it myself. So I must learn. If that is what you call turning inward, Paul, so be it. But it is the thing that I must do.”

            Andrew had to start from the very beginning, for he knew nothing of ordinary biology, almost nothing of any branch of science other than robotics. The nature of organic life, the chemical and electrical basis of it, was a mystery to him. He had never had any particular reason to study it before. But now that he was organic himself--or his body was, at any rate--he experienced a powerful need to expand his knowledge of living things. To understand how the designers of his android body had been able to emulate the workings of the human form, he needed first to know how the genuine article functioned.

            He became a familiar sight in the libraries of universities and medical schools, where he would sit at the electronic indices for hours at a time. He looked perfectly normal in clothes and his presence caused no stir whatever. Those few who knew that he was a robot made no attempt to interfere with him.

            He added a spacious room to his house to serve as a laboratory, and equipped it with an elaborate array of scientific instruments. His library grew, too. He set up research projects for himself that occupied him for weeks on end of his sleepless twenty-four-hour-a-day days. For sleep was still something for which Andrew had no need. Though virtually human in outer appearance, he had been given ways of restoring and replenishing his strength that were far more efficient than those of the species after which he had been patterned.

            The mysteries of respiration and digestion and metabolism and cell division and blood circulation and body temperature, the whole complex and wondrous system of bodily homeostasis that kept human beings functioning for eighty or ninety or, increasingly, even a hundred years, ceased to be mysteries to him. He delved deep into the mechanisms of the human body--for Andrew saw that that was every bit as much a mechanism as were the products of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men. It was an organic mechanism, yes--but a mechanism nevertheless, a beautifully designed one, with its own firm laws of metabolic rhythm, of balance and decay, of breakdown and repair.

            Years went by, quiet ones not only within Andrew’s secluded retreat on the grounds of the old Martin estate, but in the world outside. The Earth’s population was stable, held level not only by a low birth rate but by steady emigration to the growing settlements in space. Giant computers controlled most economic fluctuations, keeping supply and demand in balance between one Region and another so that the ancient business cycles of boom and bust were flattened into gentle curves. It was not a challenging, dynamic era; but it was not a turbulent or perilous one, either.

            Andrew paid next to no attention to developments that might be going on beyond his doorstep. There were more fundamental things that he needed and wanted to explore, and he was exploring them. That was all that mattered to him these days. His income, which came from the invested proceeds of his now terminated career as an artist in wood and from the money that Little Miss had left him, was more than sufficient to take care of his bodily-maintenance needs and to cover the costs of his research.

            It was a private, hermetic life: precisely what he wanted. He had long since gained complete mastery over his android body, after the awkward early days, and often he took long walks through the forest atop the bluff, or along the lonely, tempestuous beach where once he had gone with Little Miss and her sister. Sometimes he went swimming--the iciness of the water was no problem for him--and even occasionally risked the journey out to the isolated, forlorn cormorant rock that Miss had asked him to undertake when she was a child. It was a difficult swim even for him, and the cormorants did not seem to enjoy his company. But he enjoyed testing his strength against such a challenge, aware that no human, even the strongest of swimmers, could safely manage the trip out and back through that chilly, violent sea.

            Much of the time, though, Andrew spent at his research. There were frequent periods when he did not go out of his house for weeks on end.

            Then Paul Charney came to him one day and said, “It’s been a long time, Andrew.”

            “Indeed it has.” They rarely saw each other now, though there had been no estrangement of any sort. The Charney family still maintained its home along the upper coast of Northern California, but Paul had taken to spending most of his time nearer to San Francisco.

            “Are you still deep in your program of ‘biological research?” Paul asked.

            “Very much so,” Andrew said.

            He was startled by how much Paul had aged. The phenomenon of human aging was something that Andrew had been studying lately with particular interest, and he thought he had arrived at some understanding of its causes and its processes. And yet--for all his experience of age in the generations of this one family, from Sir down through Little Miss to George and now to Paul--it always came as a surprise to him that humans so swiftly grew gray and withered and bent and old. As Paul had done. His long-limbed frame seemed shorter now, and his shoulders were slumped, and the bony structure of his face had undergone subtle changes so that his chin had begun to jut and his cheekbones were less prominent. His eyesight, too, must have suffered, for his eyes had been replaced with gleaming photo-optic cells much like the ones by which Andrew viewed the world. So he and Paul had grown closer in that one respect, at least.

            Paul said, “It’s a pity you’re no longer as concerned as you once were with the history of robots. Your book would need a new chapter, now.”

            “What do you mean, Paul?”

            “A chapter that deals with the radical new policy that U. S. Robots has established.”

            “I know nothing about that. What new policy are you referring to?”

            Paul’s eyebrows lifted. “You haven’t heard? Really? --Well, Andrew, what they have done is to begin manufacturing central control stations for their robots--giant positronic computers, actually, which are able to communicate with anywhere from a dozen to a thousand robots by microwave transmission. The robots they’re turning out now have no brains at all.”

            “No brains? But how do they--”

            “The gigantic central brains do all the data-processing for them. The robot units themselves are nothing more than mobile limbs of the main thinking center.”

            “Is that more efficient?”

            “U. S. Robots insists that it is. Whether it really is, I can’t say. But it’s my notion that the whole thing is mainly a long-range way of getting back at you. Smythe-Robertson authorized the turn toward the new direction just before he died, you see. He was old and ill, but he pushed his program through and made it stick. And I suspect that what he wanted was to make certain that the company would never again be confronted by a robot able to give them all the trouble that you have. So they’ve begun to separate brain and body. A mindless mechanical laboring unit can’t be deemed worthy of civil rights or legislative protection; and a big brain that sits in a box is just a computer. The brain isn’t going to be able to turn up in the office of the Chairman of the Board one day and demand to be put into a fancy new body. And the robot bodies, since they’re completely brainless, aren’t in a position to conceive any demands at all.”

            “It seems like a long step backward,” Andrew said. “They’ve undone two hundred years of progress in robotics merely to spare themselves some small degree of political trouble.”

            “Indeed. Indeed.” Paul smiled and slowly shook his head. “It’s astonishing, Andrew, the influence you have had on the history of robotics. It was your artistry that encouraged U. S. Robots to make more robots more precise and specialized, because you seemed too clever by half, and they were afraid that that would frighten people. It was your winning your freedom that resulted in the establishment of the principle of robot rights. And it was your insistence on having an android body that made U. S. Robots switch over to this brain-body separation.”

            Andrew said, “I suppose in the end what the corporation will have created is a world that has just one vast brain controlling several billion robot bodies. All the eggs will be in one basket, then. Dangerous. Not in any way sensible.”

            “I think you’re right,” said Paul. “But I don’t suspect it will come to pass for a century, at least. Which means I won’t be here to see it.”

            He had crossed the room, and stood by the open doorway, looking out into the wooded grove just beyond. A mild moist spring breeze was blowing from the ocean, and Paul inhaled deeply as though trying to drink it in. After a moment he turned to face Andrew, and he seemed suddenly to have grown ten years older in just the time that he had been here.

            “In fact,” Paul said in a voice that was no more than a husk of itself, “I may not live to see next year.”

            “Paul!”

            “Don’t sound so surprised. We’re mortal, Andrew,” Paul said, with a shrug. “We’re not like you, and by this time you ought to understand what that means.”

            “I do. But--”

            “Yes. Yes, I know. I’m sorry, Andrew. I know how devoted you’ve been to our family, and what a sad and dreary thing it must be for you constantly to see us growing up and getting older and older and eventually dying. Well, we don’t like it much either, I have to tell you, but there’s no sense railing against it. We live twice as long as human beings usually did just a few hundred years ago. That’s long enough for most of us, I suppose. We simply have to be philosophical about it.”

            “But I don’t understand. How can you be so calm in the face of--of complete termination? Of the total end of all your striving, all your desire to achieve and learn and grow?”

            “I wouldn’t be, I suppose, if I were twenty years old right now, or even forty. But I’m not. And part of the system, Andrew--the good part, I guess--is that when you reach a certain age it generally stops mattering to you so much that you’re inevitably going to die soon. You aren’t really achieving and learning and growing any more. For better or for worse, you’ve lived your life and done whatever you can for the world and for yourself, and now your time is up and your body knows that and accepts it. We get very tired, Andrew. You don’t know what that word means, not really, do you? No. No, I see that you don’t. You can’t. You aren’t able to get tired and so you have only a theoretical knowledge of what it’s like. But it’s different for us. We slog on and on for seventy or eighty or maybe a hundred years and eventually it all just becomes too much, and so we sit down and then we lie down and finally we close our eyes and don’t open them again, and right at the end we know that it is the end and we simply don’t mind. Or don’t care: I’m not sure that’s the same thing, really, but perhaps it is. --Don’t look at me that way, Andrew.”

            “Dying is a natural thing for humans,” Andrew said. “I do understand that, Paul.”

            “No. You don’t. You really don’t. It just isn’t possible for you to understand. You secretly think that death is some sort of lamentable design flaw in us and you can’t understand why it hasn’t been fixed, because it ought to be pretty simple to keep on replacing our parts indefinitely as they wear out and break down, the way yours have always been replaced. You’ve even had an entire body replaced.”

            “But surely it would be theoretically possible for you to be transferred into--”

            “No. It isn’t. Not even in theory. We don’t have positronic brains and ours aren’t transferable, so we can’t simply ask someone to scoop us out of a body that we’re finished with and put us into a nice shiny new one. You can’t comprehend the fact that humans inevitably have to reach a point where they’re incapable of being repaired any more. But that’s all right. Why should anyone expect you to be able to conceive the inconceivable? I’m going to die soon and that’s all there is to it. And I want to reassure you at least in one respect, Andrew: you’ll be well provided for financially when I go.”

            “But I am already quite well provi--”

            “Yes. I know that. All the same, things can change very quickly, sometimes. We think we live in a very secure world, but other civilizations have felt just as smug and they had reason sooner or later to see that they were wrong. Anyway, Andrew: I’m the last of the Charneys. I have no heirs except you. There are collateral relatives descended from my great-aunt, but they don’t count. I don’t know them and I don’t care about them. I care about you. The money I control personally will be left in trust in your name and you’ll continue to be economically secure as far into the future as anyone can foresee.”

            “This is unnecessary, Paul,” Andrew said, with difficulty. He had to admit to himself that what Paul had said about his not understanding death, not being able to understand it, was true. In all this time he had not really managed to get used to the deaths of the Charneys.

            Paul said, “Let’s not argue, all right? I can’t take the money with me and there isn’t anything I’d rather do with it than leave it to you, so that’s the way it’s going to be. And I don’t want to consume any more of my remaining life-span discussing the matter with you. Let’s talk about something else. --What are you working on these days?”

            “Biology, still.”

            “What aspect in particular?”

            “Metabolism.”

            “Robot metabolism, you mean? There isn’t any such thing, is there? Or is there? Do you mean android metabolism? Human metabolism?”

            “All three,” Andrew said. “ A synthesis of sorts.” He paused, and then he went plunging ahead. Why hold anything back from Paul? “I’ve been designing a system that would allow androids--I mean myself; I am still the only functioning android, am I not?--to draw energy from the combustion of hydrocarbons rather than from atomic cells.”

            Paul gave him a long, slow look.

            “You mean,” he said finally, “that you want to make it possible for an android to be able to breathe and eat the same way humans do?”

            “Yes.”

            “You’ve never mentioned any such project as this to me before, Andrew. Is it something new?”

            “Not really. In truth, Paul, it is the reason I began all this biological research in the first place.”

            Paul nodded abstractedly. It was as though he was listening from a very great distance. He seemed to be having a difficult time absorbing what Andrew was telling him.

            “And have you achieved anything significant so far?” he asked, after a time.

            “I am approaching something significant,” Andrew said. “It needs more work but I think I have succeeded in designing a compact combustion chamber that will be adequate for catalyzed controlled breakdown.”

            “But why, Andrew? What’s the point of it? You know that it can’t possibly be as efficient as the atomic cell your body uses now.”

            “Very likely not,” said Andrew. “But it ought to be efficient enough. At least as efficient as the system that the human body uses, I would say, and not all that different from it in fundamental principle. The main problem with the atomic cell, Paul, is that it is inhuman. My energy--my very life, you could say--is drawn from a source that is wholly other than human. And I am not content with that.”

SIXTEEN

IT TOOK TIME, but Andrew had all the time he needed. And he was in no hurry to complete his research. He wanted everything to be properly worked out before he attempted to have it put into service. There was another reason for going slowly, also. Andrew had decided not to undergo any further upgrading beyond the android level while Paul Charney was still alive.

            Paul had not expressed any overt criticism of the work Andrew was doing, other than his initial response that Andrew’s new combustion chamber might be less efficient than the atomic cell that powered his body now. But Andrew could see that Paul was troubled by the idea. It was too bold for him, too strange, too great a leap. Even Paul, it seemed, had his limits when it came to the progress of robot design. Even Paul!

            Perhaps that was one of the side effects of aging, Andrew thought. Challenging new ideas become too challenging for you, no matter how open your mind may have been to dynamic change when you were younger. Everything new comes to seem disturbing and threatening to you. You feel the world rushing past you in a frightening stampede; you want things to slow down, you want the ferocious pace of progress to slacken.

            Was that how it was? Andrew wondered.

            Did humans inevitably become more conservative with age?

            So it would seem. Little Miss had been uneasy about his wearing clothing. George had thought it odd that he would want to write a book. And Paul--Paul--

            Looking back now, Andrew remembered how startled, even shocked, Paul had been when he learned for the first time, in Smythe-Robertson’s office, that what Andrew wanted was to be transferred into an android body. Paul had made a quick enough adaptation to the idea and had fought furiously and brilliantly to make it a reality. But that did not necessarily mean that he thought it was a good idea for Andrew.

            They have all let me do what I felt I needed to do, Andrew thought, even when they privately disagreed with it. They have granted me my wishes--out of love for me.

            Yes, love. For a robot.

            Andrew dwelled on that thought for a while, and sensations of warmth and pleasure went through him. But it was a little troubling, too, to realize that sometimes the Charneys had supported him not out of personal convictions of their own but simply because they so wholeheartedly and unconditionally believed in allowing him to follow his own path, whether or not they thought it was the correct one.

            So Paul, then, had won him the right to have an android body. But that transformation had taken Paul to his own limit of acceptance of Andrew’s upward path. The next step--the metabolic converter--was beyond him.

            Very well. Paul did not have very much longer to live. Andrew would wait.

            And so he did; and in time came news of Paul’s death, not as soon as Paul had supposed it would be, but very soon, all the same. Andrew was invited to attend Paul’s funeral--the public ceremony, he was aware, that marked the end of a human life--but there was scarcely anyone there whom he knew, and he felt ill at ease and out of place, even though everyone was scrupulously polite to him. These young strangers--friends of Paul’s, members of his law firm, distant relatives of the Charneys--had no more substance than shadows for Andrew, and he stood among them heavy with the double grief of having lost his good friend Paul and of finding himself bereft of his last real connection with the family that had given him his place in life.

            In fact there no longer were any humans in the world with whom he had close emotional ties. Andrew had come to realize by this time that he had cared deeply for the Martins and the Charneys in a way that went beyond the robotic--that his devotion to them was not merely a manifestation of the First and Second Laws, but something that might indeed be called love. His love, for them. In his earlier days Andrew would never have admitted such a thing, even to himself; but he was different now.

            These thoughts led Andrew inevitably, around the time of Paul Charney’s death, to a consideration of the entire concept of family ties--the love of parent for child, of child for parent--and how that was related to the inexorable passing of the generations. If you are human, Andrew told himself, you are part of a great chain, a chain that hangs suspended across vast spans of time and links you to all those who have come before you and those who follow after. And you understand that individual links of the chain may perish--indeed, must perish--but the chain itself is ever-renewing and will survive. People died, whole families might become extinct--but the human race, the species, went on and on through the centuries and the millennia and the eons, everyone connected through the heritage of blood to those who had gone before.

            It was a difficult thing for Andrew to understand, that sense of connection, of infinite linkage with intimately related predecessors. He had no predecessors, not really, and he would have no successors, either. He was unique--individual--something that had been brought forth at a certain moment in time out of nothing at all.

            Andrew found himself wondering what it might be like to have had a parent himself--but all he could come up with was a vague image of assembly-robots weaving his body together in a factory. Or what it was like to have a child--but the best he could manage was to envision a table or desk, something that he had made with his own hands.

            But human parents were not assembly-mechs, and human children were nothing like tables and desks. He had it all wrong.

            It was a mystery to him. And very likely always would be. He was not human; why then should he expect human family linkages to be comprehensible to him?

            Then Andrew thought of Little Miss, of George, of Paul, even of fierce old Sir, and what they had meant to him. And he realized that he was part of a family chain after all, though he had had no parents and was incapable of siring children. The Martins had taken him in and had made him one of them. He was a Martin, indeed. An adopted Martin, yes; but that was the best he could have hoped for. And there were plenty of humans who had not had the comfort of belonging to such a loving family. He had done very well, all things considered. Though only a robot, he had known the continuity and stability of family life; he had known warmth; he had known love.

            All those whom Andrew had--loved--were gone, though. That was saddening and liberating both. The chain was broken, for him. It could never be restored. But at least he could do as he pleased, now, without fear of troubling those who had been so close to him. Now, with the death of the great-grandson of Sir, Andrew felt free to proceed with his plan for upgrading his android body. That was some sort of partial consolation for his loss.

            Nevertheless he was alone in the world, or so it seemed to him--not simply because he was a positronic brain in a unique android body, but because he had no affiliations of any sort.  And it was a world that had every reason to be hostile to his aspirations.  All the more reason, Andrew thought, to continue along the path he had long ago chosen--the path that he hoped would ultimately make him invulnerable to the world into which he had been thrust so impersonally, without his leave, so many years before.

            In fact Andrew was not quite as alone as he thought.  Men and women might die, but corporations lived on just as robots did, and the law firm of Feingold and Charney still functioned even though no Feingolds and no Charneys remained.  The firm had its directions and it followed them impeccably and soullessly.  By way of the trust that held his investments and through the income that Andrew drew from the firm as Paul Charney’s heir, Andrew continued to be wealthy.  That enabled him to pay a large annual retainer to Feingold and Charney to keep them involved in the legal aspects of his research--in particular, the new combustion chamber.

            It was time now for Andrew to pay another call on the headquarters of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men.

            This would be the third time in his long life that Andrew had had face-to-face dealings with high executives of the powerful robot-manufacturing corporation.  On the first occasion, back in the days of Merwin Mansky, Mansky and managing director Elliot Smythe had come out to California to see him. But that was when Sir had still been alive, and imperious old Sir had been able to command even Smythes and Robertsons into his presence.  On the next occasion, many years later, Andrew and Paul had been the ones to make the journey to the company--to see Harley Smythe-Robertson and arrange for Andrew’s transfer to the android body.

            Now Andrew would make the journey east a second time, but he would go alone.  And this time he would have the visage and bodily frame, if not the inner organs, of a human being.

            U.S. Robots had changed greatly since Andrew’s last visit.  The main production factory had been shifted to a large space station, as was the case with many other industrial facilities.  Only the research center remained behind on Earth, in a grand and lovely parklike setting of vast green lawns and sturdy wide-spreading leafy trees.

            The Earth itself, its population long since stabilized at about a billion-plus a robot population about equally large--was becoming parklike virtually everywhere.  The terrible damage to the environment that had been perpetrated in the hectic early centuries of the Industrial Revolution was largely only a memory, now.  The sins of the past had not exactly been forgotten, but they had come to seem unreal to the inhabitants of the reborn Earth, and with each passing generation it became harder and harder to believe that people once had been willing to commit such monstrous and ultimately self-destructive crimes against their own world. Now that industry had largely moved to space and clean, efficient robot labor served the needs of those humans who had remained behind, the planet’s natural healing powers had been allowed to come into play, and the seas were pure again, the skies were clear, the woodlands had reclaimed territory once occupied by dense, grimy cities.

            A robot greeted Andrew when his aeroflitter landed at the U. S. Robots airstrip. Its face was bland and blank and its red photoelectric eyes were utterly expressionless. Scarcely thirty percent of the robots of Earth, Andrew knew, were still independently brained: this one was an empty creature, nothing more than the mindless metal puppet of some immobile positronic thinking-device housed deep within the U. S. Robots complex.

            “I am Andrew Martin,” Andrew said. “I have an appointment with Director of Research Magdescu.”

            “Yes. You will follow me.”

            Lifeless. Brainless. A mere machine. A thing.

            The robot greeter led Andrew briskly along a paved path that gleamed with some inner crystalline brightness and up a shining spiral ramp into a domed many-leveled building covered with a glistening and iridescent translucent skin. To Andrew, who had had little experience of modern architecture, it had the look of something out of a storybook--light, airy, shimmering, not entirely real.

            He was allowed to wait in a broad oval room carpeted with some lustrous synthetic material that emitted a soft glow and a faint, pleasant sort of music whenever Andrew moved about on its surface. He found that if he walked in a straight line the glow was pale pink and the music was mildly percussive in texture, but that when he sauntered in a curve that followed the border of the room the light shifted more toward the blue end of the spectrum and the music seemed more like the murmuring of the wind. He wondered if any of this had any significance and decided that it did not: that it was mere ornamentation, a decorative frill. In this placid and unchallenging era such lovely but meaningless decorative touches were ubiquitous, Andrew knew

            “Ah--Andrew Martin at last,” a deep voice said.

            A short, stocky man had appeared in the room as though some magic had conjured him out of the carpet. The newcomer was dark of complexion and hair, with a little pointed beard that looked as though it had been lacquered, and he wore nothing above the waist except the breastband that fashion now dictated. Andrew himself was more thoroughly covered. He had followed George Charney in adopting the “drapery” style of clothing, thinking that its flowing nature would better conceal what he still imagined to be a certain awkwardness of his movements, and though the stylishness of drapery was several decades obsolete now and Andrew could move as easily and gracefully as any human, he had continued to dress in that manner ever since.

            “Dr. Magdescu?” Andrew asked.

            “Indeed. Indeed.” Alvin Magdescu took up a stance a couple of meters from Andrew and scanned him with undisguised fascination, as though Andrew were an exhibit in a museum. “Splendid! You are absolutely splendid!”

            “Thank you,” Andrew said, a little coolly. Magdescu’s compliment did not strike him as entirely welcome. It was the kind of impersonal appraisal that some finely manufactured machine might receive; and Andrew saw no reason to take pleasure these days in that sort of thing when it was directed at him.

            “How good of you to come!” Magdescu cried. “How eager I have been to see you! But I am being impolite.” And he stepped forward with a sort of lunging, bounding motion until he was virtually standing toe to toe with Andrew. He held out his hand, palm upward, fingers outstretched.

            Yes. A new form of greeting that evidently had replaced the handshake that had dominated human social intercourse for so many hundreds of years. Andrew wasn’t in the habit of shaking hands with human beings, let alone making this new gesture. Shaking hands was simply not something that occurred to a robot to do. But Magdescu seemed to be expecting it, and the offer helped to ease the sting of his first few words. And so Andrew responded as he realized he was meant to, by offering his own hand. He held it above Magdescu’s and bent the tips of his fingers downward until they touched the tips of the other man’s.

            It was an odd feeling, this touching of hands with a human as though they were equals. Odd and a little disturbing, but encouraging, also.

            “Welcome, welcome, welcome!” Magdescu said. He seemed bubbling with energy: a little too much energy, maybe, Andrew thought. But it seemed genuine enough. “The famous Andrew Martin! The notorious Andrew Martin!”

            “Notorious?”

            “Absolutely. The most notorious product in our history. Though it seems almost obscene to call something as lifelike as you a product, I have to say. You aren’t offended, are you?”

            “How could I be? I am a product,” said Andrew, though without much warmth. He saw that Magdescu was unable to hold a consistent position toward him. Touching hands as though they were simply two men at a business meeting, yes; but in the next breath speaking of him as a something. And describing him as “lifelike.” Andrew had no illusions about himself: he knew that that was what he was. Humanoid, not human. Lifelike, not living. A product, not a person. But he did not enjoy hearing it.

            “They did such a wonderful job with you! Remarkable! Remarkable! Almost human!”

            “Not quite,” Andrew said.

            “But amazingly lifelike, all things considered. Amazingly! It’s a damned shame that old Smythe-Robertson was so set against you. You’re terrifically humanoid-looking, no question about it, a wonderful technical accomplishment--but of course he let the company take the android concept only so far. If our people had been allowed really to go all out, we could have done a great deal with you.”

            “You still can,” said Andrew.

            “No, I don’t think so,” Magdescu said, and much of the manic gusto went out of him as though he were a balloon that had been pricked. It was a startlingly sudden change of mood. He swung away from Andrew and began to pace the room in an angular zigzagging way that brought greenish light and odd chiming music up from the carpeting. “We’re past the time,” said Magdescu gloomily. “The era of significant progress in robotics--well, forget it, it’s just history now. At least here, that is. We’ve been using robots freely on Earth for something close to a hundred fifty years now, but it’s all changing again. It’s back to space for them now, and those that stay here won’t be brained.”

            “But there remains myself, and I stay on Earth.”

            “Well, that’s true. But you’re you, a complete anomaly, a robot unto himself, the only android robot. You aren’t the prototype of a line. You’re simply a unique item that they happened to have turned out in a very different sort of era, and after you were produced they made good and sure that you’d remain unique. No scope for further development there. No state-of-the-art advances. No art; no state. There doesn’t seem to be much of the robot about you, anyway. You’re pretty much out of our horizon. --why have you come here, anyway?”

            “For an upgrade,” Andrew said.

            Magdescu laughed harshly. “Didn’t you pay any attention to anything I’ve just been telling you? There’s no real progress going on here! This is a research center, yes, but all our research is headed in exactly the wrong direction! We’re trying to make robots simpler and more mechanical all the time. And here you are--the most advanced robot that ever existed or apparently ever will exist--coming in here and asking us to make you even better? How could we? What could we possibly do for you that hasn’t already been done?”

            “This,” said Andrew.

            He handed Magdescu a memory disk. The research director stared at it balefully, as though Andrew had put a jellyfish or a frog into the palm of his hand.

            “What’s this?” he asked, finally. “The schematics for my next upgrade.”

            “Schematics,” Magdescu said puzzledly. “Upgrade.”

            “Yes. I wish to be even less a robot than I am now. Since I am organic up to a point, I want now to have an organic source of energy. You can provide it for me. The necessary research work has already been done.”

            “By whom?”

            “Me.”

            “You’ve designed your own upgrade?” Magdescu began to chuckle. Then the chuckle became a laugh, and then the laugh dissolved into a manic giggle. “Wonderful! The robot walks in here and hands the Director of Research the upgrade schematics! And who did them? The robot himself did them! Wonderful! Wonderful! --You know, when I was a little boy my grandmother used to read a book to me, an ancient book that I guess has been completely forgotten by now, a book called Alice in Wonderland. About a little girl of three or four hundred years ago who follows a rabbit down a hole and lands in a world where everything is completely absurd, except no one knows it’s absurd so they all take it terribly seriously. This is like something right out of that book. Or the sequel. Alvin in Wonderland, I could call it. Although I think there already is a sequel, actually.” Magdescu was speaking very rapidly now, almost wildly. “Should I take this seriously, this set of upgrade schematics? It’s all just a joke, isn’t it?”

            “No. Not at all.”

            “Not--a--joke.”

            “No. I am quite serious, I assure you. Why don’t you play my disk, Dr. Magdescu?”

            “Yes. Why don’t I?” He touched a stud in the wall and a desk rose from somewhere, with a scanner outlet on it. Swiftly he slid the disk into the scanner slot and the screen instantly blossomed into vivid color. Andrew’s name appeared in bright crimson, with a long list of patent numbers below it. Magdescu nodded and told the scanner to keep going. A sequence of complicated diagrams began to appear on the screen.

            Magdescu stood stiffly, watching the screen with increasingly intense concentration. Now and then he murmured something to himself or toyed with his beard. After a while he glanced toward Andrew with a strange expression in his eyes and said, “This is remarkably ingenious. Remarkably. Tell me: you really did all of this yourself?”

            “Yes.”

            “Hard to believe!”

            “Is it? Please try.”

            Magdescu shot a sharp, inquiring look at Andrew, who met his gaze steadily and calmly. The research director shrugged and ordered the scanner to continue. Diagram succeeded diagram. The entire metabolic progression was there, from intake to absorption. Occasionally Magdescu would back the sequence up so that he could restudy one that he had seen before. After a little while he paused again and said, “What you’ve set out here is something more than just an upgrade, you know. It’s a major qualitative alteration of your biological program.”

            “Yes. I realize that.”

            “Highly experimental. Unique. Unheard-of. Nothing like it has ever been attempted or even proposed. --why do you want to do something like this to yourself?”

            ‘‘I have my reasons,” Andrew said.

            “Whatever they are, they can’t really be very carefully thought out.”

            Andrew, as ever, maintained tight self-control. “On the contrary, Dr. Magdescu. What you have just seen is the result of years of study.”

            “I suppose so; And technically it’s all very impressive, you know. These are terrific schematics and the only word I can find for the conceptual framework is ‘brilliant.’ But all the same I can think of a million reasons why you shouldn’t go in for these changes and none at all why you should. We’re looking at really risky stuff, here. Trust me: what you’re proposing to have done to yourself is right out on the farthest reaches of the possible. Take my advice and stay the way you are.”

            It was more or less what Andrew had feared Magdescu would say. But he had not come here with any intention of yielding.

            “I’m sure you mean well, Dr. Magdescu. I hope you do, at any rate. But I insist on having this work done.”

            “Insist, Andrew?” Magdescu said.

            He looked astounded--as though, despite all his earlier talk of what a lifelike product Andrew was, he was only just now beginning to comprehend that it was a robot with which he was having this conversation.

            “Insist, yes.” Andrew wondered whether the impatience that he felt was sufficiently visible in his face, but he was certain that Magdescu could detect it in his voice. “Dr. Magdescu, you’re overlooking an important point here. You have no choice but to accede to my request.”

            “Oh?”

            “If such devices as I’ve designed here can be built into my body, they can be built into human bodies as well. The tendency to lengthen human life by prosthetic devices is already well established--artificial hearts, artificial lungs, kidneys, liver-surrogates, a whole host of replacement organs have come into use in the past two or three centuries. But not all of these devices work equally well and some are highly unreliable indeed and no one can deny that there is still much room for improvement. The principles underlying my work represent such an improvement. I speak of the interface between the organic and inorganic: the linkage that will permit artificial bodily parts to be connected with organic tissue. It is a new departure. No existing prosthetic devices are the equal of the ones I have designed and am designing.”

            “That’s a pretty bold claim,” Magdescu said.

            “Maybe so. But not unwarranted by the facts, as I think you yourself have already been able to see from the data at hand. The proof of it is that I’m willing to make myself the first experimental subject for the metabolic converter, despite the risks that you seem to see in it.”

            “All that proves is that you’re willing to take foolhardy chances. Which probably means nothing more than that you don’t have a properly functioning Third Law parameter.”

            Andrew remained calm. “It may seem that way to you, perhaps. But my outward appearance may be deceiving you. My Three Laws parameters are quite intact. And thus, if I saw anything at all suicidal about my request for this upgrade, you can be quite certain that I would not only be unwilling but also unable to ask you to perform it. No, Dr. Magdescu: the combustion chamber will work. If you won’t build and install it for me, I can have it done elsewhere.”

            “Elsewhere? Who else can upgrade a robot? This corporation controls all the technical knowhow there is when it comes to robots!”

            “Not all,” said Andrew quietly. “Do you think I could have designed this device without full knowledge of my own interior workings?”

            Magdescu looked stunned.

            “Are you saying that you’re prepared to set up a rival robotics company if we won’t do this upgrade for you?”

            “Of course not. One is quite enough. But if you compel me to, Dr. Magdescu, I will set up a company that produces prosthetic devices like my converter. Not for the android market, Dr. Magdescu, because that market is confined to a single individual, but for the general human market. And then, I think, U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men is going to regret that I was not offered the cooperation I requested.”

            There was a long silence. Then Magdescu said numbly, “I think I see what you’re driving at, now.”

            “I hope so. But I’ll be very explicit,” Andrew said. “ As it happens, I control the patents on this device and on the entire family of devices that can be derived from it. The firm of Feingold and Charney has represented me very ably in all the legal work, and will continue to do so. It would not be very difficult for me to find backers and go into business for myself--the business of developing a line of prosthetic devices which, in the end, may give human beings many of the advantages of durability and easy repair that robots enjoy, with none of the drawbacks. What do you think will happen to United States Robots and Mechanical Men, in that case?”

            Magdescu nodded. His face was grim.

            Andrew continued, “If, however, you build and install in me the device that I have just shown you, and you agree to outfit me upon demand with such other prosthetic upgrades as I may subsequently devise, I’m prepared to work out a licensing agreement with your company. A quid pro quo, that is: I have need of your expertise in robot/android technology, though I’m confident that I could duplicate it myself if you forced me to, and you have need of the devices I’ve developed. Under the licensing agreement that I intend to propose, United States Robots and Mechanical Men would receive permission to make use of my patents, which control the new technology that would permit not only the manufacture of highly advanced humaniform robots but also the full prostheticization of human beings. --The initial licenses will not be granted, of course, until the first operation on me has been successfully completed, and after enough time has passed to make it unquestionably clear that it has been a success.”

            Magdescu said lamely, “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

            “I certainly hope so.”

            “I can hardly believe that you’re a robot. You’re so damned--aggressive!”

            “Hardly, Dr. Magdescu.”

            “Demands--conditions--threats of setting up competitive companies --my God, don’t you have any First Law inhibitions at all?”

            Andrew smiled the broadest smile that was possible for him to smile.

            “Most certainly I do,” he replied. “But I happen to feel no First Law pressure at this moment. The First Law forbids me to harm human beings, of course, and I assure you that I am as incapable of doing that as you would be to detach your left leg and reattach it while I stood here watching you. But where does the First Law enter into our present discussion? You are a human being and I am a robot, yes, and I have set certain stern conditions for you which I suppose you may interpret as demands and threats, but I see the matter entirely differently. To my way of thinking I am not threatening you or the company for which you work at all. What I am doing is offering it the greatest opportunity it has had in many years. --What do you say, Dr. Magdescu?”

            Magdescu moistened his lips, tugged at the point of his little beard, nervously adjusted and readjusted the sash that lay across his bare chest. “Well,” he said. “You have to understand, Mr. Martin, that it’s not in my power to make any sort of decision on something as big as this. The Board of Directors would have to deal with it, not a mere employee like me. And that’s going to take time.”

            “How much time?”

            “I can’t say. I’ll pass everything you’ve told me today up to them, and they’ll take it up at their regular monthly meeting, and then I suppose they’ll create a study committee, and so on. --it could be a while.”

            “I can wait a reasonable time,” said Andrew. “But only a reasonable time, and I will be the judge of what is reasonable. You would do well to tell them that.” He thanked Magdescu for his time and announced that he was ready to be conducted back to the airstrip. And he thought with satisfaction that Paul himself could not have done any of this in a better way.

SEVENTEEN

MAGDESCU MUST HAVE made things very clear to the Board of Directors, and the urgency of the message must have gotten through to them. For it was within quite a reasonable time indeed that word reached Andrew that the corporation was willing to do business with him. U.S.R.M.M. would build and design the combustion chamber and install it in his android body at its own expense; and it was prepared to enter into negotiations for a licensing arrangement covering manufacture and distribution of the entire range of prosthetic organs that Andrew might have under development.

            Under Andrew’s supervision a prototype metabolic converter was constructed and extensively tested at a newly constructed facility in Northern California, first within robot hulls, then with newly fabricated android bodies that had not been equipped with positronic brains and were operated on external life-support systems.

            The results were impressive, everyone agreed. And finally Andrew declared that he was ready to have the device installed in himself.

            “You’re absolutely certain?” Magdescu asked.

            The bouncy little Director of Research looked concerned. During the course of the project Magdescu and Andrew had developed a curious but sturdy friendship, for which Andrew was quietly grateful now that none of the Charneys were left. In the time since Paul Charney’s death Andrew had come clearly to recognize that he needed some sort of sense of close connection with human beings. He knew now that he did not want to be a completely solitary creature, that in fact he could not exist comfortably in total solitude, though he was not sure why. Nothing in the design of the robot brain mandated any need for companionship. But it often seemed to Andrew now that he was more like a human in many ways than he was like a robot, although he understood that he really existed in a strange indefinable limbo, neither man nor machine, partaking of some characteristics of each.

            “Yes,” he said. “I have no doubts that the work will be done skillfully and well.”

            “I’m not talking about our part of the work,” said Magdescu. “I’m talking about yours.”

            “You can’t possibly doubt that the combustion chamber will work!”

            “The tests leave no question of that.”

            “Then what--?”

            “I’ve been against this thing from the start, Andrew, as you know. But I don’t think you fully understand why.”

            “It’s because you think that the radical technological upheaval that my prosthetics will cause for U. S. Robots is going to be too much for the company to handle.”

            “No! Absolutely not! Not even remotely! I’m all in favor of experiment for the sake of experimentation! Don’t you think I want to see some forward movement in this damned field of ours, after all these decades of stupid and furtive backscuttling toward ever more simpleminded and now downright brainless robots? No, Andrew, it’s you that I’m worried about.”

            “But if the combustion chamber--”

            Magdescu threw up his hands. “It’s safe, it’s safe! Nobody disagrees on that score. But--look, Andrew, we’ll be opening your body and taking out your atomic cell and installing a bunch of revolutionary new equipment, and then we’ll be hooking everything up to your positronic pathways. What if something goes wrong with your body during the operation? There’s always a possibility of that--small, maybe, but real. You aren’t just a positronic brain sitting inside a metal framework any more, you know. Your brain is linked to the android housing in a far more complex way now. I know how they must have had to do the transfer operation. Your positronic pathways are tied into simulated neural pathways. Suppose your android body starts malfunctioning on the operating table? Suppose it begins to enter a terminal malfunction, Andrew?”

            “Dies, is that what you’re trying to say?”

            “Dies, yes. Your body begins to die.”

            “There’ll be a backup android body sitting on the table right next to it.”

            “And if we can’t make the transfer in time? If your positronic brain suffers irreversible decay while we’re trying to untangle it from the million and one linkages that were set up in Smythe-Robertson’s time and lift it over to the backup body? Your positronic brain is you, Andrew. There’s no way to back up a brain, positronic or otherwise. If it’s damaged it’s damaged for good. If it’s damaged beyond a certain point you’ll be dead.”

            “And this is why you’re hesitant about the operation?”

            “You’re the only one of you that there is. I’d hate to lose you.”

            “I’d hate to lose me too, Alvin. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

            Magdescu looked bleak. “You insist on going through with it, then.”

            “I insist. I have every faith in the skill of the staff at U. S. Robots.”

            And that was where the matter rested. Magdescu was unable to budge him; and once more Andrew made the journey eastward to the U. S. Robots research center, where an entire building had been reconfigured to serve as the operating theater.

            Before he went, he took a long solitary stroll one afternoon along the beach, under the steep rugged cliffs, past the swarming tide pools where Miss and Little Miss had liked to play in their childhood of a century and more ago, and stood for a long while looking out at the dark turbulent sea, the vast arch of the sky, the white flecks of cloud in the west.

            The sun was beginning to set. It cast a golden track of light across the water. How beautiful it all was! The world was really an extraordinarily splendid place, Andrew told himself. The sea--the sky--a sunset--a glossy leaf shining with the morning dew--everything. Everything!

            And, he thought, perhaps he was the only robot who had ever been able to respond to the beauty of the world in this way. Robots were a dull plodding bunch, in the main. They did their jobs and that was that. It was the way they were supposed to be. It was the way everyone wanted them to be.

            “You’re the only one of you that there is,” Magdescu had said.

            Yes. It was true. He had a capacity for aesthetic response that went far beyond the emotive range of any other robot that had ever been.

            Beauty meant something to him. He appreciated it when he saw it; he had created beauty himself.

            And if he never saw any of this again, how very sad that would be.

            And then Andrew smiled at his own foolishness. Sad? For whom? He would never know it, if the operation should fail. The world and all its beauty would be lost to him, but what would that matter? He would have ceased to function. He would be permanently out of order. He would be dead, and after that it would make no difference to him at all that he could no longer perceive the beauties of the world. That was what death meant: a total cessation of function, an end to all processing of data.

            There were risks, yes. But they were risks he had to take, because otherwise--

            Otherwise--

            He simply had to. There was no otherwise. He could not go on as he was, outwardly human in form, more or less, but incapable of the most basic human biological functions--breathing, eating, digesting, excreting--

            An hour later Andrew was on his way east. Alvin Magdescu met him in person at the U. S. Robots airstrip.

            “Are you ready?” Magdescu asked him.

            “Totally.”

            “Well, then, Andrew, so am I.”

            Obviously they intended to take no chances. They had constructed a wondrous operating theater for him, far more advanced in capability than the earlier room in which they had carried out his transformation from the metallic to the androidal form.

            It was a magnificent tetrahedral enclosure illuminated by a cross-shaped cluster of chromed fixtures at its summit that flooded the room with brilliant but not glaring light. A platform midway between floor and ceiling jutted from one wall, dividing the great room almost in half, and atop this platform rested a dazzling transparent aseptic bubble within which the surgery would be performed. Beneath the platform that supported the bubble was the surgical stage’s environmental-support apparatus: an immense cube of dull green metal, housing an intricate tangle of pumps, filters, heating ducts, reservoirs of sterilizing chemicals, humidifiers, and other equipment. On the other side of the room was a great array of supplementary machinery covering an entire wall: an autoclave, a laser bank, a host of metering devices, a camera boom and associated playback screens that would allow consulting surgeons outside the operating area to monitor the events.

            “What do you think?” Magdescu asked proudly.

            “Very impressive. I find it most reassuring. And highly flattering as well.”

            “You know that we don’t want to lose you, Andrew. You’re a very important--individual.”

            Andrew did not fail to notice the slight hesitation in Magdescu’s voice before that last word. As though Magdescu had been about to say man, and had checked himself just barely in time. Andrew smiled thinly but said nothing.

            The operation took place the next morning, and it was an unqualified success. There turned out to be no need for any of the elaborate safety devices that the U. S. Robots people had set up. The operating team, following procedures that Andrew himself had helped to devise, went briskly about the task of removing his atomic cell, installing the combustion chamber, and establishing the new neural linkages, and performed its carefully choreographed work without the slightest hitch.

            Half an hour after it was over Andrew was sitting up, checking his positronic parameters, exploring the altered data-flow surging through his brain as a torrent of messages came in from the new metabolic system.

            Magdescu stood by the window, watching him.

            “How do you feel?”

            “Fine. I told you there’d be no problems.”

            “Yes. Yes.”

            “As I said, my faith in the skill of your staff was unwavering. And now it’s done. I have the ability to eat.”

            “So you do. You can sip olive oil, at any rate.”

            “That’s eating. I’m told that olive oil has a delicious taste.”

            “Well, sip all you want. It’ll mean occasional cleaning of the combustion chamber, as of course you already realize. Something of a nuisance, I’d say, but there’s no way around it.”

            “A nuisance for the time being,” Andrew said. “But it’s not impossible to make the chamber self-cleaning. I’ve already had some ideas about that. And other things.”

            “Other things?” Magdescu asked. “Such as?’’

            “A modification that will deal with solid food.”

            “Solid food is going to contain incombustible fractions, Andrew--indigestible matter, so to speak, that’s going to have to be discarded.”

            “I’m aware of that.”

            “You would have to equip yourself with an anus.”

            “The equivalent.”

            “The equivalent, yes. --What else are you planning to develop for yourself, Andrew?”

            “Everything else.”

            “Everything?”

            “Everything, Alvin.”

            Magdescu tugged at the point of his beard and raised one eyebrow. “Genitalia, too?”

            “I don’t see any reason why not. Do you?”

            “You aren’t going to be able to give yourself any kind of reproductive ability. You simply aren’t, Andrew.”

            Andrew managed a faint smile. “ As I understand it, human beings make use of their genitalia even at times when they don’t have the slightest interest in reproduction. In fact they seem to use them for reproduction only once or twice in their lifetimes, at best, is that not so, and the rest of the time--”

            “Yes,” Magdescu said. “I know, Andrew.”

            “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that I plan to have sexual relations with anyone,” Andrew said. “I tend to doubt very much that I would. But I want the anatomical features to be present, all the same. I regard my body as a canvas on which I intend to draw--”

            He left the sentence unfinished.

            Magdescu stared at him, waiting for the next word. When it seemed certain that it would not be forthcoming, he completed the statement himself, and this time Magdescu spoke the word that he had not been able to bring himself to utter on the day before the operation.

            “A man, Andrew?”

            “A man, yes. Perhaps.” Magdescu said, “I’m disappointed in you. It’s really such a puny ambition. You’re better than a man, Andrew. You’re superior in every way I can think of. Your body is disease-proof, self-sustaining, self-repairing, virtually invulnerable, a marvelously elegant example of biological engineering, just as it stands. It doesn’t need any improvements. But no, for some reason you want to put totally useless food inside yourself and then find a way of excreting it, you want to give yourself genitalia even though you aren’t capable of reproduction and you aren’t interested in sex, you’ll want to start having body odor next, and dental decay--” He shook his head scornfully. “I don’t know, Andrew. The way it seems to me, you’ve been going downhill ever since you opted for organicism.”

            “My brain hasn’t suffered.”

            “No, it hasn’t I’ll grant you that. But there’s no guarantee that this new set of upgrades that you’ve started to sketch out won’t involve you in tremendous risks, once we start the actual installations. Why take chances? You’ve got very little to gain and everything to lose.”

            “You are simply not capable of seeing this from my viewpoint, Alvin.”

            “No. No, I guess not I’m a mere flesh-and-blood human being who doesn’t think there’s anything very wonderful about perspiration and excretion and skin blemishes and headaches. You see this beard I wear? I wear it because hair insists on growing on my face every single day--useless, bothersome, ugly hair, some kind of evolutionary survival from God knows what primordial phase of human life, and I have my choice between going to the bother of removing it every single day so that I’ll conform to the conventional neatness modes of my society or else letting it grow on at least some areas of my face so that I can be spared the nuisance of depilation. Is that what you want? Facial hair? Stubble, Andrew? Do you intend to devote all your immense technical ingenuity to the challenging task of finding out a way of creating five o’clock shadow for yourself?”

            “You can’t possibly understand,” said Andrew.

            “So you keep saying. I understand this, though: you’ve developed a patented line of prosthetic devices that amounts to an immense technological breakthrough. They’re going to extend the human life-span enormously and transform the existence of millions of people who otherwise would be facing crippling and debilitating circumstances as they age. I realize that you’re wealthy already, but once your devices are on the market they’ll make you rich beyond anybody’s comprehension. Maybe having more money doesn’t mean much to you, but there’ll be fame along with it--honors galore--the gratitude of an entire world. It’s an enviable position, Andrew. Why can’t you settle for what you have now? Why take all these crazy chances, and run the risk of losing everything? Why do you insist on playing further games with your body?”

            Andrew did not answer.

            Nor did he let any of Alvin Magdescu’s objections prevent him from continuing to follow his chosen path. With the basic principles of his prosthetic devices established, he was able to develop a host of new applications involving virtually every organ of the body. And everything went pretty much as Magdescu had said it would--the money, the honors, the fame.

            But the personal risks of which Magdescu had spoken did not materialize. The frequent upgrades which Andrew underwent over the next decade had no harmful effects whatever as they brought his android body closer and closer in its operational systems to the human norm.

            The Feingold and Charney people had helped him to draft and negotiate the licensing agreement under which all the patent-protected prosthetic devices developed by Andrew Martin Laboratories would be manufactured and marketed by United States Robots and Mechanical Men on a royalty-payment basis. Andrew’s patents were air-tight and the contract was a highly favorable one. Whatever irritation or resentment U. S. Robots might have felt all these years over the mere fact of Andrew’s existence was forgotten, or at least put aside. Willy-nilly, they had to treat him with respect. He and the company were partners, now.

            U. S. Robots established a special division to produce Andrew’s devices, with factories on several continents and in low orbit. Marketing experts from the parent company were brought in to develop plans for distributing the new products everywhere on Earth and the space settlements. Surgeons, both human and robot, underwent courses of instruction at the U. S. Robots prosthetics facility so that they would be able to carry out the complicated installation procedures.

            Demand for Andrew’s prosthetic devices was immense. The flow of royalties was heavy right from the start and within a few years became overwhelming.

            Andrew now owned the entire Martin-Charney estate, and much of the surrounding land--a wondrous stretch of clifftop terrain overlooking the Pacific Ocean for eight or ten kilometers. He lived in Sir’s big house, but maintained his own old cottage nearby as a sentimental reminder of his early days of independent life after gaining free-robot status.

            Farther down the property he built the imposing research facilities of Andrew Martin Laboratories. There was a little trouble with the zoning authorities about that, because this was supposed to be a quiet residential area and the research center that Andrew wanted to set up would be the size of a small university campus. There was also, perhaps, some lingering anti-robot feeling at work among the opposition.

            But when his application came up for approval, Andrew’s lawyer simply said, “Andrew Martin has given the world the prosthetic kidney, the prosthetic lung, the prosthetic heart, the prosthetic pancreas. In return all he asks is the right to continue his research in peace on the property where he has lived and worked for well over a hundred years. Who among us would refuse such a small request when it comes from so great a benefactor of mankind?” And after a certain amount of debate the zoning variance was granted and the buildings of the Andrew Martin Laboratories Research Center began to rise amid the somber cypresses and pines of what had, long ago, been the wooded estate of Gerald Martin.

            Every year or two, Andrew would return to the gleaming operating theater at u. S. Robots for additional prosthetic upgrading of his own. Some of the changes were utterly trivial ones: the new fingernails and toenails, for example, virtually indistinguishable now from those of humans. Some of the changes were major: the new visual system, which although synthetically grown was able to duplicate the human eyeball in virtually every respect.

            “Don’t blame us if you come out of this permanently blind,” Magdescu told him sourly, when Andrew went to him for the eye transplant.

            “You aren’t looking at this rationally, my friend,” replied Andrew. “The worst that can happen to me is that I will be forced to go back to photo-optic cells. There is no risk whatever that I will suffer complete loss of eyesight.”

            “Well--” Magdescu said, and shrugged.

            Andrew was right, of course. No one was forced to be permanently blind any more. But there were artificial eyes and then there were artificial eyes, and the photo-optic cells that had been a feature of Andrew’s original android body were replaced with the new synthetic-organic eyes that Andrew Martin Laboratories had perfected. The fact that hundreds of thousands of aging human beings had been content for more than a generation to use photo-optic cells was irrelevant to Andrew. To him they looked artificial; they looked inhuman. He had always wanted true eyes. And now he had them.

            Magdescu, after a while, gave up protesting. He had come to see that Andrew was destined to have his way in all things and that there was no point in raising objections to Andrew’s schemes for new prosthetic upgrades. Besides, Magdescu was beginning to grow old now, and much of the fire and zeal that had been characteristic of him when Andrew first came to him had gone out of him by now. Already he had had several major prosthetic operations himself--a double kidney replacement, first, and then a new liver. Soon Magdescu would reach retirement age.

            And then, no doubt, he would die, in ten or twenty years more, Andrew told himself. Another friend gone, swept away by the remorseless river of time.

            Andrew himself, naturally, showed no signs of aging at all. For a time that troubled him enough that he debated having some cosmetic wrinkles added--a touch of crow’s feet around his eyes, for example--and graying his hair. After giving the matter a little thought, though, he decided that to go in for such things would be a foolish affectation. Andrew did not see his upgrades that way at all: they represented his continued attempt to leave his robot origins behind and approach the physical form of a human being. He did not deny to himself that it had become his goal to do that But there was no sense in becoming more human than the humans themselves. It struck him as pointless and absurd to subject his ever-more-human but still ageless android body to the external marks of aging.

            Vanity had nothing to do with Andrew’s decision--only logic. He was aware that humans had always tried to do everything in their power to conceal the effects that growing old had on their appearance. Andrew realized that it would be altogether ridiculous for him, exempted as he was from aging by his inherent android nature, to go out of his way deliberately to take those effects upon himself.

            So he remained ever youthful-looking. And, of course, there was never any slackening of his physical vigor: a careful maintenance program made certain of that But the years were passing, and passing swiftly now. Andrew was approaching the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his construction.

            By this time Andrew was not only exceedingly wealthy but covered with the honors that Alvin Magdescu had foretold for him. Learned societies hastened to offer him fellowships and awards--in particular one society which was devoted to the new science he had established, the one he had called robobiology but which had come to be termed prosthetology. He was named its honorary president for life. Universities vied with one another to give him degrees. An entire room in his house--the one upstairs that once had been his woodworking studio, five generations before--was given over now to storing the myriad diplomas, medals, scrolls of honor, testimonial volumes, and other artifacts of Andrew’s worldwide status as one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.

            The desire to recognize Andrew’s contribution became so universal that he needed one full-time secretary simply to reply to all the invitations to attend testimonial banquets or accept awards and degrees. He rarely did attend any such ceremonies any longer, though he was unfailingly courteous in refusing, explaining that the continued program of his research made it inadvisable for him to do a great deal of traveling. But in fact most of these functions had come to irritate and bore him.

            The first honorary degree from a major university had given him a thrill of vindication. No robot had ever received such an honor before.

            But the fiftieth honorary degree? The hundredth? They had no meaning for him. They said more about the giver than about the recipient. Andrew had proved whatever point it was that he had set out to make about his intelligence and creativity long ago, and now he simply wanted to proceed with his work in peace, without having to make long trips and listen to speeches in his honor. He was surfeited with honor.

            Boredom and irritation, Andrew knew, were exceedingly human traits, and it seemed to him that he had only begun to experience them in the past twenty or thirty years. Previously--so far as he could recall--he had been notably free from such afflictions, though from the beginning there had always been a certain unrobotic component of impatience in his makeup that he had chosen not to acknowledge for a long time. This new irritability, though: it was some side effect of the upgrades, he suspected. But not a troublesome one, at least not so far.

            When his hundred and fiftieth anniversary came around and the U. S. Robots people let it be known that they wanted to hold a great testimonial dinner to mark the occasion, Andrew instructed his secretary, with some annoyance in his voice, to turn the invitation down. “Tell them I’m deeply touched, et cetera, et cetera, the usual stuff. But that I’m busy right now with an extremely complex project, et cetera, et cetera, and that in any case I’d just as soon not have a lot of fuss made over the anniversary, but I thank them very much, I understand the great significance of the gesture, and so forth--et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

            Usually a letter like that was enough to get him off the hook. But not this time.

            Alvin Magdescu called him and said, “Look, Andrew, you can’t do this.”

            “Can’t do what?”

            “Toss the U.S.R.M.M. testimonial dinner back in their faces like that.”

            “But I don’t want it, Alvin.”

            “I realize that. All the same, you’ve got to go through with it. Once in a while you need to get out of that laboratory of yours and sit around letting a bunch of human beings bore you silly by telling you how remarkable you are.”

            “I’ve had quite enough of that over the past decade or two, thank you.”

            “Well, have a little more. You don’t want to offend me, do you, Andrew?”

            “You? What do you have to do with this? Why is it any concern of yours?” Magdescu was ninety-four years old now, and had retired six years before.

            “Because,” said Magdescu bitterly, “I was the one who suggested the whole thing. As a way of demonstrating my affection for you, you damned walking scrapheap, and also to express my thanks for the assortment of fantastic Andrew Martin prosthetic devices that have turned me into the same sort of scrapheap and permitted me to go on living as long as I have. I was going to be the master of ceremonies, the principal speaker. But no, Andrew, you simply can’t be bothered, which makes me look extremely foolish. The finest creation that U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men ever brought into this world, and you can’t take a single evening off to accept acknowledgment of that fact, and to give an old friend a little pleasure--a little pleasure, Andrew--”

            Magdescu fell silent. His face, weathered now and gray-bearded, stared at Andrew somberly out of the screen.

            “Well, then--” Andrew said, abashed. And so he agreed to go to the testimonial dinner, after all. A chartered U. S. Robots luxury flitter picked him up and flew him to the company headquarters. The dinner, in the grand wood-paneled meeting-hall of the great robotics complex, had some three hundred guests, all of them attired in the antiquated and uncomfortable clothing that was still considered proper formal dining costume for great occasions.

            And it was a great occasion. Half a dozen members of the Regional Legislature were there, and one of the justices of the World Court, and five or six Nobel Prize laureates, and of course a scattering of Robertsons and Smythes and Smythe-Robertsons, along with a wide assortment of other dignitaries and celebrities from all over the world.

            “So you showed up after all,” Magdescu said. “I had my doubts right up to the last “

            Andrew was struck by how small and bent Magdescu looked, how frail, how weary. But there was still a glow of the old mischief in the man’s eyes.

            “You know I could not have stayed away,” Andrew told him. “Not really.”

            “I’m glad, Andrew. You’re looking good.”

            “And so are you, Alvin.”

            Magdescu smiled ruefully. “You get more and more human all the time, don’t you? You lie just like one of us, now. And how easily that bit of flattery rolled off your lips, Andrew! You didn’t even hesitate.”

            “There is really no law against a robot’s telling an untruth to a human being,” said Andrew. “Unless the untruth would do harm, of course. And you do look good to me, Alvin.”

            “For a man my age, you mean.”

            “Yes, for a man your age, I suppose I should say. If you insist on my being so precise.”

            The after-dinner speeches were the usual orotund pompous things: expressions of admiration and wonder over Andrew’s many achievements. One speaker followed another, and they all seemed ponderous and dreary to Andrew, even those who in fact managed a good bit of wit and grace. Their styles of delivery might vary, but the content was always the same. Andrew had heard it all before, many too many times.

            And there was an unspoken subtext in each speech that never ceased to trouble him: the patronizing implication that he had done wonderful things for a robot, that it was close to miraculous that a mere mechanical construction like himself should have been able to think so creatively and to transmute his thoughts into such extraordinary accomplishments. Perhaps it was the truth; but it was a painful truth for Andrew to face, and there seemed no way of escaping it.

            Magdescu was the last to speak.

            It had been a very long evening, and Magdescu looked pale and tired as he stood up. But Andrew, who was seated next to him, observed him making a strenuous effort to pull himself together, raising his head high, squaring his shoulders, filling his lungs--his Andrew Martin Laboratories prosthetic lungs--with a deep draught of air.

            “My friends, I won’t waste your time repeating the things that everyone else has said here tonight. We all know what Andrew Martin has done for mankind. Many of us have experienced his work at first hand--for I know that sitting before me tonight as I speak are scores of you who have Andrew’s prosthetic devices installed in your bodies. And I am of your number. So I want to say, simply, that it was my great privilege to work with Andrew Martin in the early days of prosthetology--for I myself played a small part in the development of those devices of his which are so essential to our lives today. And in particular I want to acknowledge that I would not be here tonight but for Andrew Martin. But for him and his magnificent work, I would have been dead fifteen or twenty years ago--and so would many of you.

            “Therefore, my friends, let me propose a toast. lift your glasses with me now, and take a sip of this good wine, in honor of the remarkable individual who has brought such great changes to medical science, and who today attains the imposing and significant age of one hundred fifty years--I give you, my friends, Andrew Martin, the Sesquicentennial Robot!”

            Andrew had never managed to cultivate a liking for wine or even any understanding of its merits, but as a result of his combustion-chamber upgrades at least he had the physiological capacity to consume it. Sometimes he actually did, when social contexts seemed to require him to. And so when Alvin Magdescu turned toward him, therefore, his eyes shining with emotion, his face flushed, his glass upraised, Andrew raised his own glass in response, and downed a long drink of the wine that it contained.

            But in fact he felt little joy. Though the sinews of his face had long since been redesigned to display a range of emotions, he had sat through the entire evening looking solemnly passive, and even at this climactic moment he could manage nothing better than a perfunctory half-smile. Even that took effort. Magdescu had meant well, but his words had given Andrew pain. He did not want to be a Sesquicentennial Robot.

EIGHTEEN

IT WAS PROSTHETOLOGY that finally took Andrew off the Earth. He had not felt any need in the past to take trips into space--or to travel very widely on Earth itself, for that matter--but Earth was no longer the prime center of human civilization, and most of what was new and eventful was taking place in the offworld settlements--notably on the Moon, which now had come to be a world more Earthlike than Earth in every respect but its gravitational pull. The underground cities that had begun as mere crude cavern-shelters in the Twenty-First Century now were opulent, brightly lit cities, densely populated and rapidly growing.

            The citizens of the Moon, like humans everywhere, had need of prosthetic work. No one was content any more with the traditional three score and ten, and when organs broke down, it was standard procedure to replace them.

            But the low lunar gravity, though in some ways it had its advantages for humans living under reduced gravitational stress, created a host of problems for the prosthetic surgeons. Devices designed to deliver a smooth and regular flow of blood or hormones or digestive fluid or some other fundamental substance of life in Earth’s gravity would not function as reliably under a gravitational pull that was only one sixth as great. There were problems, too, of tensile strength, of durability, of unexpected and unwanted feedback complications.

            The lunar prosthetologists had begged Andrew for years to visit the Moon and get a first-hand look at the problems of adaptation that they were forced to deal with. The U. S. Robots marketing division on the Moon repeatedly urged him to go.

            On a couple of occasions, it was even suggested that, under the terms of the licensing agreement, Andrew was required to go; but Andrew met that suggestion--and it was phrased as a suggestion, not as an order--with such chilly refusal that the company did not attempt to raise the issue a third time.

            But still the requests for help came from the doctors on the Moon. And again and again Andrew declined--until, suddenly, he found himself asking himself, Why not go ? Why is it so important to stay on Earth all the time?

            Obviously he was needed up there. No one was ordering him to go--no one would dare, not these days--but nevertheless he could not lose sight of the fact that he had been brought into the world for the purpose of serving mankind, and nothing said that the sphere of his service was limited only to Earth. So be it., Andrew thought. And within an hour his acceptance of the latest invitation was being beamed Moonward.

            On a cool, drizzly autumn day Andrew went by flitter down to San Francisco, and from there took the underground tube to the big Western Spaceport Facility in the district of Nevada. He had never gone anywhere by tube before. Over the past fifty years nuclear-powered subterrenes had drilled a network of wide tunnels through the deep-lying rocks of the continent, and now high-speed trains moving on silent inertialess tracks offered swift and simple long-distance travel, while much of the surface zone was allowed to revert to its natural state. To Andrew it seemed that he was reaching the spaceport in Nevada almost before the train had set out from the San Francisco terminal.

            And now into space at last--the lunar journey--

            He was handled at every stage of the embarkation procedure like some fine and highly breakable piece of rare porcelain. Important officials of U. S. Robots clustered around him, eagerly assisting him with the minutiae of checking in and being cleared for flight.

            They were surprised at how little baggage he had brought with him--just one small bag, containing a couple of changes of clothing and a few holocubes for reading during the trip--considering that he was likely to be staying on the Moon anywhere from three months to a year. But Andrew simply shrugged and said that he had never felt the need to haul a lot of possessions around with him when he traveled. That was true enough; but of course Andrew had never taken a journey of more than a few days’ duration before, either.

            It was necessary for him to go through an elaborate decontamination process before boarding the ship: a virtual fumigation and sterilization, in fact. “The Moon people have very strict rules, you understand,” the apologetic spaceport functionary told him, as Andrew was reading through the long list of procedures that would be performed on all departing passengers. “They live in such complete isolation from our terrestrial microbes up there, you see--and so they feel that they’d be at high risk of epidemic if anything that their systems couldn’t handle should happen to be brought to them from Earth--”

            Andrew saw no need to explain that his android body was not subject to infection by microorganisms of any kind. The spaceport functionary was surely aware that Andrew was a robot--it said so right on his embarkation papers, serial number and all. It didn’t take much intelligence to realize that robots, even android robots, were unlikely to be carriers of plagues.

            But the man was a bureaucrat first and foremost, and it was his job to see to it that everyone who boarded the ship to the Moon underwent the full and proper decontamination procedures, whether or not that person was capable of becoming contaminated in the first place.

            Andrew had had enough experience with this variety of humanity by this time to know that it would be a waste of time and breath to raise any objections. And so--patiently, tolerantly--he let himself be put through the entire preposterous series of treatments. They could do him no harm and by accepting them he avoided the dreary endless bureaucratic discussions that his refusal would be likely to provoke. Besides, he took a kind of perverse satisfaction in being treated like everyone else.

            Then at last he was on board the ship.

            A steward came by to see to it that Andrew was safely stowed in his gravity sling, and handed him a pamphlet--it was the fourth time he had been given a copy of it in the past two days--on what he was likely to experience during the short journey.

            It was designed to be reassuring. There would be some mild stress during the initial moments of acceleration, he was told, but nothing that he would have difficulty in handling. Once the ship was in full flight, its gravity-control mechanisms would be brought into play to compensate for the zero gravitational pull that the vessel would be under, so that the passengers would never be exposed to the sensations of free fall. (Unless they wanted to be, in which case they were welcome to enter the zero-grav lounge in the aft compartment.) During the voyage, the simulated gravity aboard ship would steadily but imperceptibly be reduced, so that by the time the ship reached its destination the passengers would be acclimated to the much weaker pull that they would be experiencing during their stay in the lunar settlements. And so on and so on, details of mealtime procedures and exercise programs and other such things, a stream of bland, soothing information.

            Andrew took it all in stride. His android body had been designed to withstand higher than Earth-norm gravitation from the outset, not by his special request, but simply because it had been relatively easy for the designers, starting from scratch, to build all sorts of little superiorities into the natural human form. How and when he took his meals aboard the ship, and what might be on the menu, were all irrelevant items to him. So was the exercise schedule. Andrew had often found undeniable pleasure in taking a brisk walk along the beach or a stroll through the forest surrounding his property, but his body needed no program of regular exercise to maintain its tone.

            The voyage, then, became for him mainly a matter of waiting. He anticipated few if any problems of adaptation to space travel and he experienced none. The ship lifted easily from its pad; the ship quickly left Earth’s atmosphere behind; the ship arced smoothly through the dark emptiness of space and followed its routine course toward the Moon. Space travel had long since passed out of the stage of being exciting; even for a first-time traveler, it was a humdrum affair these days, which was pretty much the way most people preferred it to be.

            The one aspect of the voyage that Andrew did find stirring was the view from the ship’s observation window. It gave him shivers down his ceramic spine; it sent the blood pulsing faster through his dacron arteries; it set up a tingling of excitement in the synthetic epidermal cells of his fingertips.

            The Earth seen from space looked extraordinarily lovely to him: a perfect disk of blue, stippled with white masses of clouds. The outlines of the continents were surprisingly indistinct. Andrew had expected to see them sharply traced as they were on a geographic globe; but in fact they were no more than vaguely apparent, and it was the wondrous swirling of the atmospheric clouds against the vastness of the seas that gave the Earth its beauty from this vantage-point. It was strange and wondrous, also, to be able to look upon the entire face of the world at once this way --for the ship had moved very swiftly out into space and the planet behind them was now small enough to be seen in its entirety, a turning blue ball constantly dwindling against the black star-flecked background of space.

            Andrew felt a powerful urge to carve a plaque that would represent something of what he saw now as he looked down on the small Earth set against that gigantic background. He could use inlays in dark woods and light ones, he told himself, to show the contrast between the sea and the cloud patterns. And Andrew smiled at that; for it was the first time in years that he had so much as thought of doing any work in wood.

            Then there was the Moon, brilliantly white, its scarred face growing ever larger. Its beauty--of a different kind--excited Andrew too: the starkness, the simplicity, the airless static unchangeability of it.

            Not all of Andrew’s fellow passengers agreed. “How ugly it is!” exclaimed one woman who was making her first lunar journey. “You look at it from Earth on a night when it’s full and you think, How beautiful, how wonderfully romantic. And then you get out here and you see it close up and you can’t help shuddering at all the pockmarks and cracks and blemishes. And the sheer deadness of it!”

            Perhaps you may shudder at it, Andrew thought, listening to her go on. But I do not.

            To him the marks on the Moon’s face were a fascinating kind of inscription: the long record of time, a lengthy poem that had taken billions of years to create and demanded admiration for its immensity. And he could find no deadness in the Moon’s white face, only purity, a beautiful austerity, a wonderful cool majesty that seemed almost like something sacred.

            But what do I know about beauty? Andrew asked himself acidly. Or about what might be sacred? I am only a robot, after all. Whatever aesthetic or spiritual perceptions I may think I have are mere accidents of the positronic pathways, unintended, unreliable, perhaps to be regarded as manufacturing defects rather than any kind of meritorious special feature of my construction.

            He turned away from the viewing screen and spent most of the rest of the voyage sitting calmly in his gravity sling, waiting to get to the Moon.

            Three officials of the lunar office of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men were at the Luna City spaceport to greet Andrew when he disembarked: two men and a woman. They provided him--when he was done with all the maddening little bureaucratic maneuvers of arrival and was finally allowed to step out of the ship and approach the welcoming committee--with one of the most powerful surprises of his long life.

            When he first noticed them they were waving to him. Andrew knew that they were here for him because the woman carried a brightly lettered placard that said, WELCOME TO LUNA CITY, ANDREW MARTIN! But what he didn’t expect was that the younger of the two men in the group would walk up to him, put out his hand, and say with a warm smile, “We’re absolutely thrilled that you decided to make the trip, Dr. Martin.”

            Dr. Martin? Dr. Martin?

            The only doctorates that Andrew had received were honorary ones, and he would hardly have had the audacity ever to refer to himself as “Dr. Martin.” But if the U. S. Robots man had greeted him simply as “Mr. Martin,” that would have been astounding enough.

            No one on Earth had ever called him “Dr. Martin” or “Mr. Martin” or anything else but “Andrew,” not even once, never in all his hundred fifty-plus years.

            It was unthinkable for anyone to do so. On formal occasions--when he had appeared in court, or when he was being given an award or an honorary degree--he was usually addressed as “ Andrew Martin,” but that was as far in the direction of formality as anybody ever went. Often enough, even when he was the guest of honor at some scientific meeting, he was addressed straightforwardly as “ Andrew” by perfect strangers and no one, not even he, thought anything of it. Though most people tended to call robots by nicknames based on their serial designations rather than by the serial designations themselves, it was rare for a robot to have a surname at all. It had been Sir’s special little pleasure to refer to him as “ Andrew Martin “--a member of the family--rather than just “ Andrew,” and the custom had become permanent.

            But to be called “Dr. Martin”--even “Mr. Martin”

            “Is anything wrong, sir?” the U. S. Robots man asked, as Andrew stood blinking with amazement before him.

            “No, of course not. Except--it’s only that--ah--”

            “Sir?”

            Being called “sir” like that didn’t make things any easier. It was like a repeated electrical jolt.

            “Sir, what’s the matter?”

            They were all concerned now, frowning and gathering close around him.

            Andrew said, “Are you aware that I’m a robot?”

            “Well--” They exchanged troubled glances. They looked tremendously flustered. “Yes, sir. Yes, we are.”

            “And yet you call me ‘Dr. Martin’ and ‘sir’?”

            “Well--yes. Of course. Your work, sir--your extraordinary achievements--a simple mark of respect--you are Andrew Martin, after all!”

            “Andrew Martin the robot, yes. On Earth it’s not the custom to address robots as ‘Dr.’ something or ‘Mr.’ something or ‘sir.’ I’m not accustomed to it. It’s never happened to me at all, as a matter of fact. It simply isn’t done.”

            “Does it offend you--sir?” the woman asked, and as that last word escaped she looked as though she would have liked to swallow it.

            ‘‘It surprises me, actually. It surprises me very much. On Earth--”

            “Ah, but this isn’t Earth,” said the older of the two men. “We’re a different sort of society here. You have to understand that, Dr. Martin. We’re a lot more freewheeling--a lot more informal than people are on Earth--”

            “Informal? And so you call a robot ‘Dr.’? I would expect informal people to be calling strangers by their first names, and instead you greet me with high-flown formal honorifics, giving me a title which in fact I’ve never earned and have no business letting you use, and--”

            They were beginning to look less distressed now. The woman said, “I think I understand. Well, sir--I hope you don’t mind if I call you that, sir --we do call each other by our first names most of the time--I’m Sandra, this is David, this is Carlos--and we generally call our robots by first names too, just as people do on Earth. But you are special. You are the famous Andrew Martin, sir. You are the founder of prosthetology, you are the great creative genius who has done so much for mankind. Informal though we may be among ourselves, it’s just a matter of elementary respect, sir, when we--”

            “You see, it’s really hard for us to walk right up to you and call you, Andrew’ just like that,” the one called Carlos said. “Even though in fact you are--you are--”

            He faltered into silence” A robot?” Andrew finished for him.

            “A robot, yes,” Carlos said indistinctly, not meeting Andrew’s gaze.

            “Besides,” David said, “you don’t look much like a robot. You don’t look like a robot at all, as a matter of fact. We know that you are, of course, but nevertheless--I mean--that is--” And he flushed and looked away, too.

            Things were getting tangled again. They seemed destined to put their feet in their mouths no matter what they tried to say. Andrew felt sorry for them, but a little annoyed, too.

            “Please,” he said, “I may not look much like a robot, but a robot is what I have been for more than a hundred fifty years and it comes as no great shock to me to think of myself as one. And where I come from, robots are addressed by their first names only. That seems to be the custom here too, I gather--except for me. If you have too much respect for my great accomplishments to be able to do that easily, then I appeal to the freewheeling informality you were just telling me about. This is a frontier world: let’s all be equals, then. If you are Sandra and Carlos and David, then I am Andrew. Is that all right?”

            They were beaming now.

            “Well, if you put it that way, Andrew--” Carlos said, and stuck out his hand a second time.

            After that everything went more smoothly. Some of the U. S. Robots people called him “Andrew,” and some called him “Dr. Martin,” and some of them would go back and forth between the two almost at random.

            Andrew grew used to it. He saw that this was indeed a rough and ready culture up here, with many fewer taboos and ingrained social patterns than on Earth. The line between humans and robots was still a distinct one, yes; but Andrew himself, because of his android body and his record of high scientific achievement, occupied an ambiguous place somewhere along that boundary, and in the easygoing society on the Moon it evidently was possible for the people he worked among to forget for long stretches of time that he was a robot at all.

            As for the lunar robots, they didn’t seem to recognize any sign of his robot origins. Invariably they treated him with the robotic obsequiousness that was considered a human being’s due. He was always “Dr. Martin” to them, with plenty of bowing and scraping and general subservience.

            Andrew had mixed feelings about all of this. Despite all that he had told them about being quite accustomed to thinking of himself as a robot and being addressed like one, he was not completely sure that it was true.

            On the one hand, being called “Mr.” or “Dr.” instead of “Andrew” was a tribute to the excellence of his android upgradings and to the high quality of his positronic brain. It had been his intention for many years to transform himself in such a way that he would move from a purely robotic identity into the gray zone of an identity that approached being human, and obviously he had achieved just that.

            And yet--and yet--

            How strange it felt to be addressed in terms of such respect by humans! How uncomfortable it made him, really. He grew used to it but Andrew never really felt at ease with it.

            These people couldn’t seem to remember for any significant length of time that he was a robot; but a robot was what he was, all the same--much as he sometimes would like to pretend otherwise--and it felt vaguely fraudulent to be treated like a fellow human being by them.

            Indeed, Andrew knew, he had explicitly asked for it. “Let’s all be equals, then,” he had told Sandra and Carlos and David at the spaceport. And they had agreed.

            But there was hardly a day thereafter when he was not amazed at his own boldness. Equals? Equals? How could he have dared even to suggest such a thing? Phrasing it as a direct instruction, no less--virtually an order! Saying it in a casual, jaunty way, like one human being to another.

            Hypocrisy, Andrew thought

            Arrogance.

            Delusions of grandeur.

            Yes. Yes. Yes. He could buy a human-appearing body for himself, he could fill it with prosthetic devices that performed many of the functions of a human body whether he needed those functions performed or not, he could look human beings straight in the eye and speak coolly to them as though he were their equal--but none of that made him their equal. That was the reality that Andrew could not deny.

            In the eyes of the law he was a robot and always would be, no matter how many upgrades he was given, or how ingenious they might be. He had no citizenship. He could not vote. He could not hold public office, even the most trivial. About the only civil rights Andrew had, despite all that the Charneys had done over the years on his behalf, were the right to own himself, and the right to go about freely without being humiliated by any passing human who cared to harass him, and the right to do business as a corporation. And also the right--such as it was--to pay taxes.

            “Let’s all be equals,” he had said, as if by merely saying so he could make it be. What folly! What gall!

            But the mood soon passed and rarely returned. Except in the dark moments when he berated himself this way, though, Andrew found himself enjoying his stay on the Moon, and it was a particularly fruitful time for him creatively.

            The Moon was an exciting, intellectually stimulating place. The civilization of Earth was mature and sedate, but the Moon was the frontier, with all the wild energy that frontier challenges inevitably called forth.

            Life was a little on the frantic side in the underground lunar cities--constant expansion was going on, and you could not help being aware of the eternal throbbing of the jackhammer subterrenes as new caverns were melted into being daily so that in six months the next group of suburbs could be undergoing construction. The pace was fast and the people were far more competitive and vigorous than those Andrew had known on Earth. Startling new technical developments came thick and fast there. Radical new ideas were proposed at the beginning of one week and enacted into law by the end of the next.

            One of the prosthetologists explained it to him: “It’s a genetic thing, Andrew. Everyone on Earth with any get-up-and-go got up and went a long time ago, and here we all are out on the edge of civilization, inventing our way as we go along, while those who remained behind have raised a race that’s been bred to remain behind and do things the most familiar comfortable way possible. From here on in, I think, the future belongs to those of us who live in space. Earth will become a mere backwater world.”

            “You really believe that?” Andrew asked.

            “Yes. I do.”

            He wondered what would become of him, living on and on through the decades and centuries ahead, if any such decadence and decline truly was going to overcome the world. His immediate answer was that it made no difference to him if Earth became some sort of sleepy backwater where “progress” was an obscene word. He no longer had need of progress now that he had attained the upgrade he had most deeply desired. His body was virtually human in form; he had his estate; he had his work, in which he had achieved enormous success; he would live as he always had, no matter what might be going on around him.

            But then he sometimes thought wistfully of the possibility of remaining on the Moon, or even going deeper out into space. On Earth he was Andrew the robot, forced to go into court and do battle every time he wanted one of the rights or privileges that he felt his intelligence and contributions to society entitled him to have. Out here, though, where everything was starting with a fresh slate, it was quite conceivable that he could simply leave his robot identity behind and blend into the human population as Dr. Andrew Martin.

            Nobody here seemed to be troubled by that possibility. From his very first moments on the Moon they had virtually been inviting him to step across the invisible boundary between human and robot if that was what he wanted to do.

            It was tempting.

            It was very tempting indeed.

            The months turned into years--three of them, now--and Andrew remained on the Moon, working with the lunar prosthetologists, helping them make the adaptations that were necessary in order that the Andrew Martin Laboratories artificial organs could function at perfect efficiency when installed in human beings who lived under low-gravity conditions.

            It was challenging work, for, though he himself was untroubled by the lower gravity of the lunar environment, humans in whom standard Earth-model prosthetic devices had been installed tended to have a much more difficult time of it. Andrew was able, though, to meet each difficulty with a useful modification, and one by one the problems were resolved.

            Now and then Andrew missed his estate on the California coast--not so much the grand house itself as the cool fogs of summer, the towering redwood trees, the rugged beach, the crashing surf. But it began to seem to him as though he had settled into permanent residence on the Moon. He stayed on into a fourth year, and a fifth.

            Then one day he paid a visit to a bubbledome on the lunar surface, and saw the Earth in all its wondrous beauty hanging in the sky--tiny, at this distance, but vivid, glowing, a blue jewel that glistened brilliantly in the night.

            It is my home, he thought suddenly. The mother world--the fountain of humanity--

            Andrew felt it pulling him--calling him home. At first it was a pull he could scarcely understand. It seemed wholly irrational to him.

            And then understanding came. His work on the Moon was done, basically. But he still had unfinished business down there on Earth.

            The following week, Andrew booked his passage home on a liner that was leaving at the end of the month. And then he called back and arranged to take an even earlier flight.

            He returned to an Earth that seemed cozy and ordinary and quiet in comparison to the dynamic life of the lunar settlement. Nothing of any significance appeared to have changed in the five years of his absence. As his Moon-ship descended toward it, the Earth seemed to Andrew like a vast placid park, sprinkled here and there with the small settlements and minor cities of the decentralized Third Millennium civilization.

            One of the first things Andrew did was to visit the offices of Feingold and Charney to announce his return.

            The current senior partner, Simon DeLong, hurried out to greet him. In Paul Charney’s time, DeLong had been a very junior clerk, callow and self-effacing, but that had been a long time ago and he had matured into a powerful, commanding figure whose unchallenged ascent to the top rung of the firm had been inevitable. He was a broad-shouldered man with heavy features, who wore his thick dark hair shaven down the middle in the tonsured style that had lately become popular.

            There was a surprised look on DeLong’s face. “We had been told you were returning, Andrew,” he said--with just a bit of uncertainty in his voice at the end, as though he too had briefly considered calling him “Mr. Martin”--”but we weren’t expecting you until next week.”

            “I became impatient,” said Andrew brusquely. He was anxious to get to the point. “On the Moon, Simon, I was in charge of a research team of twenty or thirty human scientists. I gave orders and nobody questioned my authority. Many of them referred to me as ‘Dr. Martin’ and I was treated in all ways as an individual worthy of the highest respect. The lunar robots deferred to me as they would to a human being. For all practical purposes I was a human being for the entire duration of my stay on the Moon.”

            A wary look entered DeLong’s eyes. Plainly he had no idea where Andrew was heading with all this, and it was the natural caution of a lawyer who did not quite understand yet the troublesome new direction in which an important client seemed to be veering.

            “How unusual that must have seemed, Andrew,” he said, in a flat, remote way.

            “Unusual, yes. But not displeasing. Not displeasing at all, Simon.”

            “Yes. I’m sure that’s so. How interesting, Andrew.”

            Andrew said sharply, “Well, now I’m back on Earth and I’m a robot again. Not even a second-class citizen--not a citizen at all, Simon. Nothing. I don’t care for it. If I can be treated as a human being while I’m on the Moon, why not here?”

            Without varying his careful, cautious tone DeLong said, “But you are treated as a human being here, my dear Andrew! You have a fine home and title to it is vested in your name. You are the head of a great research laboratory. Your income is so huge it staggers the mind, and no one would question your right to it. When you come here to the offices of Feingold and Charney, the senior partner himself is at your beck and call, as you see. In every de facto way you have long since won acceptance for yourself as a human being, on Earth and on the Moon, by humans and by robots. What more can you want?”

            “To be a human being de facto isn’t enough. I want not only to be treated as one, but to have the legal status and rights of one. I want to be a human being de jure. “

            “Ah,” DeLong said. He looked extremely uncomfortable. “ Ah. I see.”

            “Do you, Simon?”

            “Of course. Don’t you think I know the whole background of the Andrew Martin story? Years ago, Paul Charney spent hours going over your files with me--showing your step-by-step evolution, beginning as a metallic robot of the--NDR series, was it?--and going on to the transformation into your android identity. And of course I’ve been apprised of each new upgrading of your present body. Then the details of the legal evolution as well as the physical--the winning of your freedom, and the other civil rights that followed. I’d be a fool, Andrew, if I didn’t realize that it’s been your goal from the start to turn yourself into a human being.”

            “Perhaps not from the start, Simon. I think there was a long period when I was content simply to be a superior robot--a period when I denied even to myself any awareness of the full capabilities of my brain. But I deny it no longer. I’m the equal of any human being in any ability you could name, and superior to most. I want the full legal status that I’m entitled to.”

            “Entitled?”

            “Entitled, yes.”

            DeLong pursed his lips, toyed nervously with one earlobe, ran his hand down the middle of his scalp where a swath of thick black hair had been mowed away.

            “Entitled,” he said again, after a moment or two. “Now that’s another matter altogether, Andrew. We have to face the undeniable fact that, however much you may be like a human being in intelligence and capabilities and even appearance, nevertheless you simply are not a human being.”

            “In what way not?” Andrew demanded. “I have the shape of a human being and bodily organs equivalent to some of those that a prosthetized human being has. I have the mental ability of a human being--a highly intelligent one. I have contributed artistically, literarily, and scientifically to human culture as much as any human being now alive. What more can one ask?”

            DeLong flushed. “Forgive me, Andrew: but I have to remind you that you are not part of the human gene pool. You are outside it entirely. You resemble a human being but in fact you are something else, something--artificial.”

            “Granted, Simon. And the people who are walking around with bodies full of prosthetic devices? Devices which, incidentally, I invented for them? Are those people not artificial at least in part?”

            “In part, yes.”

            “Well, I’m human in part.”

            DeLong’s eyes flashed. “Which part, Andrew?”

            “Here,” said Andrew. He pointed to his head. “And here.” He tapped a finger against his chest. “My mind. My heart. I may be artificial, alien, inhuman so far as your strict genetic definition goes. But I’m human in every way that counts. And I can be recognized as such legally. In the old days when there were a hundred separate countries on the Earth and each one had its own complicated rules of citizenship, it was, even so, possible for a Frenchman to become English or a Japanese to become a Brazilian, simply by going through a set of legal procedures. There was nothing genetically Brazilian about the Japanese, but he became Brazilian all the same, once the law had recognized him as such. The same can be done for me. I can become a naturalized human the way people once became naturalized as citizens of countries not their own.”

            “You’ve devoted a lot of thought to all of this, haven’t you, Andrew?”

            “Yes. I have.”

            “Very ingenious. Very, very ingenious. A naturalized human being! --and what about the Three Laws, then?”

            “What about them?”

            “They’re an innate part of your positronic brain. I need hardly remind you that they put you in a condition of permanent subservience to humans that’s beyond the power of any court of law to remedy. The Three Laws can’t be edited out of you, can they, Andrew?”

            “True enough.”

            “Then they’ll have to remain, won’t they? And they will continue to require you to obey all humans, if necessary to lay down your life for them, to refrain from doing them any sort of harm. You may somehow be able to get yourself declared human, but you’ll still be governed by built-in operating rules that no human being has ever been subject to.”

            Andrew nodded. “ And the Japanese who became Brazilians still had skin of the Japanese color and eyelids of the Japanese type and all of the other special racial characteristics that Oriental people have and the European-descended inhabitants of Brazil do not. But under Brazilian law they were Brazilians even so. And under human law I will be human, even though I still have the Three Laws structure built into me.”

            “But the very presence of that structure within your brain may be deemed to disqualify you from--”

            “No,” Andrew said. “Why should it? The First Law simply says I mustn’t injure any human being or allow one to come to harm through my inaction. Aren’t you bound by the same restriction? Isn’t every civilized person? The only difference is that I have no choice but to be law-abiding, whereas other human beings can opt to behave in an uncivilized way if they’re willing to take their chances with the police. And then the Second Law: it requires me to obey humans, yes. But they aren’t required to give me orders, and if I have full human status it might well be deemed a breach of civility for anyone to put me in a position where through my own innate makeup I would be obliged to do something against my will. That would be taking advantage of my handicap, so to speak. The fact that I have the handicap doesn’t matter. There are plenty of handicapped human beings and nobody would say that they aren’t human. And as for the Third Law, which prevents me from acting self-destructively, I would hardly say that that is much of a burden for a sane person to bear. And so you see, Simon--”

            “Yes. Yes, Andrew, I do see.” DeLong was chuckling now. “All right. You’ve beaten me down and I give in. You’re as human as anyone needs to be: you deserve to have that confirmed in some legal way.”

            “Well, then, if Feingold and Charney will set about the process of--”

            “Not so fast, please, Andrew. You’ve handed me a very tall order. Human prejudice hasn’t vanished overnight, you know. There’ll be tremendous opposition to any attempt we might make to get you declared human.”

            “I would expect so. But we’ve defeated tremendous opposition before, going back to the time when George Charney and his son Paul went out and won me my freedom.”

            “Yes. The trouble is that this time we’d have to go before the World Legislature, not the Regional one, and get a law passed that will define you as a human being. Frankly, I wouldn’t be very optimistic about that.”

            “I’m paying you to be optimistic.”

            “Yes. Yes, of course, Andrew.”

            “Good. We’re agreed, then, that this can be accomplished. The only question is how. Where do you think we ought to begin?”

            DeLong said, after only the briefest of hesitations, “One good starting point would be for you to have a conversation with some influential member of the Legislature.”

            “Any particular one?”

            “The Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee, perhaps.”

            “An excellent idea. Can you arrange a meeting for me right away, Simon?”

            “If you’d like. But you scarcely need me to serve as your intermediary, Andrew. Someone as widely known and honored as you can easily--”

            “No. You arrange it.” (It didn’t even occur to Andrew that he was giving a flat order to a human being. He had grown accustomed to that on the Moon. ) “I want him to know that the firm of Feingold and Charney is backing me in this to the hilt.”

            “Well, now--”

            “To the hilt, Simon. In one hundred and seventy-three years I have in one fashion or another contributed greatly to this firm. I might almost say that the firm in its present form would not exist but for the work that I have provided for it to do. I brought that work here because in times past I have been very well served by certain members of this firm, and I have felt myself under an obligation to reciprocate. I am under no obligation to Feingold and Charney now. It is rather the other way around, now, and I am calling in my debts.”

            DeLong said, “I’ll do whatever I can.”

NINETEEN

THE CHAIRMAN of the Science and Technology Committee of the World Legislature came from the East Asian Region and she was a woman: a small, delicately built, almost elfin woman who very likely was not nearly as fragile as she appeared. Her name was Chee Li-hsing and her transparent garments (which obscured what she wanted obscured by sheer dazzle alone) gave her the look of being nothing more than an elegant little trinket wrapped in plastic. In the splendor of her huge high-ceilinged office on the eighty-fourth floor of the magnificent green-glass tower that was the New York headquarters of the World Legislature she appeared tiny, almost insignificant. Yet she radiated a look of great competence, efficiency, forcefulness.

            She said, “I sympathize with your wish to have full human rights. As perhaps you know, there have been times in history when great segments of the human population have been deprived of their own human rights, and have fought furiously--and ultimately successfully--to regain them. But those people suffered greatly under tyrannies of one kind or another before they won their freedom. You, on the other hand, have enjoyed a successful and rewarding life of unending achievement and reward. I imagine you are a widely envied person. So tell me, please: what rights can you possibly want that you do not already have?”

            “As simple a thing as my right to life,” Andrew replied. “ A robot can be dismantled at any time.”

            “A human being can be executed at any time.”

            “And when, I ask you, was the last time that such an execution took place?”

            “Why--” Li-hsing shrugged. “Of course, the death penalty is not currently employed in our civilization, and it hasn’t been for a long time. But certainly it’s been imposed to an enormous extent throughout history. And there’s no fundamental reason why it couldn’t be reinstated next year, if the citizens and the Legislature saw fit to do so.”

            “All right. You can all go back to cutting each other’s heads off, or giving each other lethal jolts of electricity, or whatever, at a moment’s notice, if you like. But the fact remains that no human being has been put to death by legal execution in so many years that nobody can remember the last time, and there’s absolutely no agitation that I’ve ever heard of to start performing such executions again. Whereas even now--right now, here, today--I could be ended merely by the word of a human being in authority. No trial. No appeals procedure. You yourself could ring a bell and call your security guards in and say, ‘This robot has displeased me. Take him out and dismantle him.’ And they would take me out and dismantle me, just like that.”

            “Impossible!”

            “I assure you it would be perfectly legal.”

            “But you are the head of a great company--a person of wealth and substance and high reputation--”

            “Maybe after it had been done my company would be able to sue the Legislature, then, for loss of my services. But I’d still be terminated, wouldn’t I? The only laws that protect robots are property laws. If you terminate somebody else’s robot unjustifiably, that person can seek damages against you, and collect the value of the robot and maybe a punitive award as well. Fine. Very fine, if you’re the human being in the case who’s been damaged. But if you’re the robot who happened to be terminated, why, the lawsuit doesn’t bring you back into existence, does it? Does it, Madam Chairman?”

            “This is a mere reductio ad absurdum. No one would dream of--dismantling--you. Of terminating you.”

            “Perhaps not. But where is my legal protection against having it done to me?”

            “I repeat: a reductio ad absurdum. You’ve lived for nearly two hundred years, as I understand it. Tell me: how many times during that considerable period have you ever been in danger of--termination?”

            “Once, actually. I was rescued. But the order for my dismantling had already been given.”

            “I find that hard to believe,” said Chee Li-hsing.

            “It was many years ago. I was still in the metallic form, then, and had only just won my freedom.”

            “There. My point is proven. No one would dare to touch you nowadays!”

            “But I have no more legal protection now than I did then. I remain a robot in the eyes of the law. And if someone chose to have me dismantled, I would have no recourse--” Andrew broke off in mid-sentence. This line of reasoning was getting him nowhere. It was too far-fetched, he saw. “ All right. Perhaps no one would attempt to harm me. But even so--even so--” Andrew tried desperately to allow no sign of pleading to show, but his carefully designed tricks of human expression and tone of voice betrayed him here. And at last he gave in entirely. “What it really comes down to is this: I very much want to be a man. I have wanted it more and more through six generations of human beings, as the full capacity and range of my mind gradually became apparent to me, and now the urge is overwhelming in me. I can’t bear to think of myself as a robot any more--or to have others think of me that way.”

            Chee Li-hsing looked up at Andrew out of darkly sympathetic eyes.

            “So that is it,” she said. “As simple as that.”

            “Simple?”

            “A desire to belong to the human race. A powerful yearning--no matter how irrational. It’s very human of you to have such feelings, Andrew.”

            “Thank you.” He wasn’t certain whether she had meant to patronize him. He hoped not.

            Li-hsing said, “I can take your case before the Legislature, yes. And I suppose the Legislature could indeed pass a law declaring you to be a human being. The Legislature has the power to pass a law declaring a stone statue to be defined as a human being, if it cared to. But the statue would still be a statue, nonetheless. And you--”

            “No. It’s not the same thing. A statue is an inanimate thing of stone, whereas I--I--”

            “Of course. It is different. I understand that. But the Legislators may not see it that way. They will not pass any laws turning statues into living things, and I doubt very much that they’d be willing to pass a law turning a robot into a human, either, no matter how eloquently I present your case. Legislators are as human as the rest of the population and I need hardly point out to you that there are certain elements of suspicion and prejudice against robots that have existed since the first robots were developed.”

            “And exist even now?”

            “Even now. As you surely must know. And so the Legislature would be unwilling to act in the way you wish it to. We would all readily concede the fact that you have earned the prize of humanity many times over, and yet we would be frightened by the political consequences of setting an undesirable precedent.”

            “Undesirable?” Andrew cried, unable to keep a tone of exasperation from creeping into his voice. “Why undesirable? If I’m such a wonderful benefactor of humanity--”

            “Yes. But you are a robot. I can hear the outcry now. ‘Give one robot human status, and they’ll all be asking for it next, and then what’s going to happen to--’ “

            “No,” Andrew said. “Not so. I went to court years before you were born and got myself declared a free robot, and the same outcry was raised then. We were able to defeat it. And I’m still the only free robot in the world. No other robot has so much as requested free status, let alone been granted it. And none ever will. I’m unique, Madam Chairman. I’m the only robot of my type that exists, and you can be quite certain that there won’t ever be another. If you don’t believe me, ask the head of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men, and he’ll tell you that they’ll never again allow the construction of a robot as intelligent, as difficult-minded, as troublesome as I turned out to be.”

            “‘Never’ is a long time, Andrew. Or would you prefer that I call you ‘Mr. Martin’? I will, you know. I will gladly give you my personal accolade as human. But you’ll find that most Legislators will be unwilling to set such a startling precedent, even though you provide iron-clad assurances that you are unique and so it will be no precedent at all. Mr. Martin, you have my warmest sympathies. But I can’t offer you any real hope.”

            “You can’t? Nothing at all?”

            Chee Li-hsing sat back and her forehead furrowed in a deep frown. “The one thing I can offer you, Mr. Martin, is a friendly warning. You are placing yourself in great danger, you need to realize, by making these demands. Indeed, if the issue grows too heated, there might well arise a certain sentiment, both inside the Legislature and certainly outside it, for the very dismantling that you mentioned. A robot of your extraordinary level of attainment could easily be seen as highly threatening, Mr. Martin. Doing away with you could remove that threat and be the easiest way of resolving the difficult political dilemma that you will be forcing upon my colleagues. Consider that, I beg you, before deciding to push matters. “

            Andrew said, “ And will no one remember that the technique of prosthetology, which is allowing the members of the Legislature to go on holding their seats decade after decade when they should by rights be doddering off to their graves, is something that is almost entirely mine?”

            “It may seem cruel of me to say it, but they won’t. Or if they do, it’ll be something that they’ll hold against you rather than count in your favor. Have you ever heard the old saying, ‘No good deed goes unpunished?’ “

            Andrew shrugged and shook his head. “Such a statement makes no sense to me.”

            “I suppose not. You still aren’t very comfortable with our little human irrationalities, are you? But what it means, basically, is that we have a way of turning on those who do us the greatest kindnesses. --No, don’t try to dispute it. It’s just the way we are.”

            “Very well. And how does this apply to me?”

            “It’ll be said, perhaps, that you created prosthetology mainly to serve your own needs. The argument will be raised that the whole science was merely part of a campaign to roboticize human beings, or to humanify robots, and in either case it is something evil and vicious.”

            “No,” Andrew said. “I’m not able to comprehend that kind of reasoning.”

            “No. You can’t, can you? Because ultimately you are still a logical creature controlled by your positronic pathways. And there’s no sort of upgrade, I suppose, that can make your way of thinking as erratic as ours can sometimes be. The true depths of irrationality are beyond your reach --which you should not take as any criticism of you, only as a simple statement of the realities. You are very human in most essential respects, Mr. Martin, but you are incapable, I’m afraid, of understanding just how far from rationality human beings will go when they believe that their interests are at stake.”

            “But if their interests are at stake,” Andrew said, “I would think they would attempt to be as rational as possible, so that they would be able to--”

            “No. Please. There’s no way I can make you truly understand. I can only ask you to accept the validity of what I’m saying. To take it on faith, if that concept has any meaning for you. --You have never been the object of a political hate campaign, have you, Mr. Martin?”

            “I don’t believe so.”

            “You would have known it if you had. Well, you will be now. If you persist in this campaign to have yourself declared human, you’ll be the object of vilification of a kind neither you nor I would credit and there’ll be millions of people who will believe every word of it. Mr. Martin, take a word of advice from me. Accept the condition of your life as it is now. To try to do what you want to do now would be the greatest folly.”

            “That is what you believe, is it?”

            “Yes. That is what I believe.” And Chee Li-hsing rose from her desk and walked toward the window and stood there with her back to Andrew. Brilliant light was streaming in, outlining her form with great clarity. From where Andrew sat, her bare figure within the shimmering plastic wrap seemed almost like that of a child--or a doll.

            He looked toward Li-hsing for a few moments without saying anything.

            Then he asked, “If I decide to fight for my humanity despite all you’ve said, will you be on my side?”

            She continued to stare out the window. Andrew studied her long glossy black hair, her thin shoulders, her delicate arms. She seemed very much like a doll, he thought. And yet he was very much aware by now that indeed there was nothing doll-like about the Chairman of the World Legislature’s Science and Technology Committee except her appearance. There was real strength behind that fragile surface.

            After a time she said, “Yes, I will--”

            “Thank you.”

            “--insofar as it’s possible for me to be,” Li-hsing continued smoothly. “But you have to realize that, if at any time my taking a stand in your favor would appear to threaten my political career in a serious way, I might have to abandon you, since this isn’t an issue that I feel to be at the very root of my beliefs. What I’m trying to say, Mr. Martin, is that I feel for you, I am saddened by your predicament, but I don’t intend to wreck my political future for you. I’m trying to be as honest as I can with you.”

            “I’m grateful for that, and I can ask no more.”

            “And do you intend to fight?” she said.

            “Yes. Yes, I do. I’ll fight it through to the end, whatever the consequences. And I’ll count on your help--but only for as long as you can give it.”