The Positronic Man (19 page)

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.