The Positronic Man

by Isaac Asimov

  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, occupi
ed 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 o
f 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.