The Positronic Man (Robot #0.6) 5

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.