The Positronic Man

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."