Usually a letter like that was enough to get him off the hook. But not this time.
Alvin Magdescu called him and said, "Look, Andrew, you can't do this."
"Can't do what?"
"Toss the U.S.R.M.M. testimonial dinner back in their faces like that."
"But I don't want it, Alvin."
"I realize that. All the same, you've got to go through with it. Once in a while you need to get out of that laboratory of yours and sit around letting a bunch of human beings bore you silly by telling you how remarkable you are."
"I've had quite enough of that over the past decade or two, thank you."
"Well, have a little more. You don't want to offend me, do you, Andrew?"
"You? What do you have to do with this? Why is it any concern of yours?" Magdescu was ninety-four years old now, and had retired six years before.
"Because," said Magdescu bitterly, "I was the one who suggested the whole thing. As a way of demonstrating my affection for you, you damned walking scrapheap, and also to express my thanks for the assortment of fantastic Andrew Martin prosthetic devices that have turned me into the same sort of scrapheap and permitted me to go on living as long as I have. I was going to be the master of ceremonies, the principal speaker. But no, Andrew, you simply can't be bothered, which makes me look extremely foolish. The finest creation that U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men ever brought into this world, and you can't take a single evening off to accept acknowledgment of that fact, and to give an old friend a little pleasure-a little pleasure, Andrew-"
Magdescu fell silent. His face, weathered now and gray-bearded, stared at Andrew somberly out of the screen.
"Well, then-" Andrew said, abashed. And so he agreed to go to the testimonial dinner, after all. A chartered U. S. Robots luxury flitter picked him up and flew him to the company headquarters. The dinner, in the grand wood-paneled meeting-hall of the great robotics complex, had some three hundred guests, all of them attired in the antiquated and uncomfortable clothing that was still considered proper formal dining costume for great occasions.
And it was a great occasion. Half a dozen members of the Regional Legislature were there, and one of the justices of the World Court, and five or six Nobel Prize laureates, and of course a scattering of Robertsons and Smythes and Smythe-Robertsons, along with a wide assortment of other dignitaries and celebrities from all over the world.
"So you showed up after all," Magdescu said. "I had my doubts right up to the last "
Andrew was struck by how small and bent Magdescu looked, how frail, how weary. But there was still a glow of the old mischief in the man's eyes.
"You know I could not have stayed away," Andrew told him. "Not really."
"I'm glad, Andrew. You're looking good."
"And so are you, Alvin."
Magdescu smiled ruefully. "You get more and more human all the time, don't you? You lie just like one of us, now. And how easily that bit of flattery rolled off your lips, Andrew! You didn't even hesitate."
"There is really no law against a robot's telling an untruth to a human being," said Andrew. "Unless the untruth would do harm, of course. And you do look good to me, Alvin."
"For a man my age, you mean."
"Yes, for a man your age, I suppose I should say. If you insist on my being so precise."
The after-dinner speeches were the usual orotund pompous things: expressions of admiration and wonder over Andrew's many achievements. One speaker followed another, and they all seemed ponderous and dreary to Andrew, even those who in fact managed a good bit of wit and grace. Their styles of delivery might vary, but the content was always the same. Andrew had heard it all before, many too many times.
And there was an unspoken subtext in each speech that never ceased to trouble him: the patronizing implication that he had done wonderful things for a robot, that it was close to miraculous that a mere mechanical construction like himself should have been able to think so creatively and to transmute his thoughts into such extraordinary accomplishments. Perhaps it was the truth; but it was a painful truth for Andrew to face, and there seemed no way of escaping it.
Magdescu was the last to speak.
It had been a very long evening, and Magdescu looked pale and tired as he stood up. But Andrew, who was seated next to him, observed him making a strenuous effort to pull himself together, raising his head high, squaring his shoulders, filling his lungs-his Andrew Martin Laboratories prosthetic lungs-with a deep draught of air.
"My friends, I won't waste your time repeating the things that everyone else has said here tonight. We all know what Andrew Martin has done for mankind. Many of us have experienced his work at first hand-for I know that sitting before me tonight as I speak are scores of you who have Andrew's prosthetic devices installed in your bodies. And I am of your number. So I want to say, simply, that it was my great privilege to work with Andrew Martin in the early days of prosthetology-for I myself played a small part in the development of those devices of his which are so essential to our lives today. And in particular I want to acknowledge that I would not be here tonight but for Andrew Martin. But for him and his magnificent work, I would have been dead fifteen or twenty years ago-and so would many of you.
"Therefore, my friends, let me propose a toast. lift your glasses with me now, and take a sip of this good wine, in honor of the remarkable individual who has brought such great changes to medical science, and who today attains the imposing and significant age of one hundred fifty years-I give you, my friends, Andrew Martin, the Sesquicentennial Robot!"
Andrew had never managed to cultivate a liking for wine or even any understanding of its merits, but as a result of his combustion-chamber upgrades at least he had the physiological capacity to consume it. Sometimes he actually did, when social contexts seemed to require him to. And so when Alvin Magdescu turned toward him, therefore, his eyes shining with emotion, his face flushed, his glass upraised, Andrew raised his own glass in response, and downed a long drink of the wine that it contained.
But in fact he felt little joy. Though the sinews of his face had long since been redesigned to display a range of emotions, he had sat through the entire evening looking solemnly passive, and even at this climactic moment he could manage nothing better than a perfunctory half-smile. Even that took effort. Magdescu had meant well, but his words had given Andrew pain. He did not want to be a Sesquicentennial Robot.
Eighteen
IT WAS PROSTHETOLOGY that finally took Andrew off the Earth. He had not felt any need in the past to take trips into space-or to travel very widely on Earth itself, for that matter-but Earth was no longer the prime center of human civilization, and most of what was new and eventful was taking place in the offworld settlements-notably on the Moon, which now had come to be a world more Earthlike than Earth in every respect but its gravitational pull. The underground cities that had begun as mere crude cavern-shelters in the Twenty-First Century now were opulent, brightly lit cities, densely populated and rapidly growing.
The citizens of the Moon, like humans everywhere, had need of prosthetic work. No one was content any more with the traditional three score and ten, and when organs broke down, it was standard procedure to replace them.
But the low lunar gravity, though in some ways it had its advantages for humans living under reduced gravitational stress, created a host of problems for the prosthetic surgeons. Devices designed to deliver a smooth and regular flow of blood or hormones or digestive fluid or some other fundamental substance of life in Earth's gravity would not function as reliably under a gravitational pull that was only one sixth as great. There were problems, too, of tensile strength, of durability, of unexpected and unwanted feedback complications.
The lunar prosthetologists had begged Andrew for years to visit the Moon and get a first-hand look at the problems of adaptation that they were forced to deal with. The U. S. Robots marketing division on the Moon repeatedly urged him to go.