by Isaac Asimov
“We’ve gone as far as we can, Andrew,” Li-hsing admitted. “We’ll try once more after recess, but, to be honest, defeat is certain and then the whole thing will have to be given up. All my most recent efforts have only earned me certain defeat in the coming congressional campaign.”
“I know,” said Andrew, “and it distressed me. You said once you would abandon me if it came to that. Why have you not done so?”
“One can change one’s mind, you know. Somehow, abandoning you became a higher price than I cared to pay for just one more term. As it is, I’ve been in the Legislature, for over a quarter of a century. It’s enough.”
“Is there no way we can change minds, Chee?”
“We’ve changed all that are amenable to reason. The rest — the majority — cannot be moved from their emotional antipathies.”
“Emotional antipathy is not a valid reason for voting one way or the other.”
“I know that, Andrew, but they don’t advance emotional antipathy as their reason.”
“It all comes down to the brain, then,” Andrew said cautiously. “But must we leave it at the level of cells versus positrons? Is there no way of forcing a functional definition? Must we say that a brain is made of this or that? May we not say that a brain is something — anything — capable of a certain level of thought?”
“Won’t work,” said Li-hsing. “Your brain is manmade, the human brain is not. Your brain is constructed, theirs developed. To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and a robot, those differences are a steel wall a mile high and a mile thick.”
“If we could get at the source of their antipathy, the very source —”
“After all your years,” Li-hsing said, sadly, “you are still trying to reason out the human being. Poor Andrew, don’t be angry, but it’s the robot in you that drives you in that direction.”
“I don’t know,” said Andrew. “If I could bring myself —”
1. (Reprise)
IF HE COULD bring himself —
He had known for a long time it might come to that, and in the end he was at the surgeon’s. He had found one, skillful enough for the job at hand — which meant a surgeon — robot, for no human surgeon could be trusted in this connection, either in ability or in intention.
The surgeon could not have performed the operation on a human being, so Andrew, after putting off the moment of decision with a sad line of questioning that reflected the turmoil within himself, had put First Law to one side by saying “I, too, am a robot.”
He then said, as firmly as he had learned to form the words even at human beings over these past decades, “I order you to carry through the operation on me.”
In the absence of the First Law, an order so firmly given from one who looked so much like a man activated the Second Law sufficiently to carry the day.
21
ANDREW’S FEELING OF weakness was, he was sure, quite imaginary. He had recovered from the — operation. Nevertheless, he leaned, as unobtrusively as he could manage, against the wall. It would be entirely too revealing to sit.
Li-hsing said, “The final vote will come this week, Andrew. I’ve been able to delay it no longer, and we must lose. And that will be it, Andrew.”
“I am grateful for your skill at delay. It gave me the time I needed, and I took the gamble I had to.”
“What gamble is this?” Li-hsing asked with open concern.
“I couldn’t tell you, or even the people at Feingold and Martin. I was sure I would be stopped. See here, if it is the brain that is at issue, isn’t the greatest difference of all the matter of immortality. Who really cares what a brain looks like or is built of or how it was formed. What matters is that human brain cells die; must die. Even if every other organ in the body is maintained or replaced, the brain cells, which cannot be replaced without changing and therefore killing the personality, must eventually die.
“My own positronic pathways have lasted nearly two centuries without perceptible change, and can last for centuries more. Isn’t that the fundamental barrier? Human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn’t matter how long a machine lasts, but they cannot tolerate an immortal human being since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal. And for that reason they won’t make me a human being.”
“What is it you’re leading up to, Andrew?” Li-hsing asked.
“I have removed that problem. Decades ago, my positronic brain was connected to organic nerves. Now, one last operation has arranged that connection in such a way that slowly — quite slowly — the potential is being drained from my pathways.”
Li-hsing’s finely wrinkled face showed no expression for a moment. Then her lips tightened. “Do you mean you’ve arranged to die, Andrew? You can’t have. That violates the Third Law.”
“No,” said Andrew, “I have chosen between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires. To have let my body live at the cost of the greater death is what would have violated the Third Law.”
Li-hsing seized his arm as though she were about to shake him. She stopped herself. “Andrew, it won’t work! Change it back.”
“It can’t be done. Too much damage was done. I have a year to live more or less. I will last through the two-hundredth anniversary of my construction. I was weak enough to arrange that.”
“How can it be worth it? Andrew, you’re a fool.”
“If it brings me humanity, that will be worth it. If it doesn’t, it will bring an end to striving and that will be worth it, too.”
Then Li-hsing did something that astonished herself. Quietly, she began to weep.
22
IT WAS ODD how that last deed caught the imagination of the world. All that Andrew had done before had not swayed them. But he had finally accepted even death to be human, and the sacrifice was too great to be rejected.
The final ceremony was timed, quite deliberately, for the two hundredth anniversary. The World President was to sign the act and make the people’s will law. The ceremony would be visible on a global network and would be beamed to the Lunar state and even to the Martian colony.
Andrew was in a wheelchair. He could still walk, but only shakily.
With mankind watching, the World President said, “Fifty years ago, you were declared The Sesquicentennial Robot, Andrew.” After a pause, and in a more solemn tone, he continued, “Today we declare you The Bicentennial Man, Mr. Martin.”
And Andrew, smiling, held out his hand to shake that of the President.
23
ANDREW’S THOUGHTS WERE slowly fading as he lay in bed. Desperately he seized at them. Man! He was a man!
He wanted that to be his last thought. He wanted to dissolve — die with that.
He opened his eyes one more time and for one last time recognized Li-hsing, waiting solemnly. Others were there, but they were only shadows, unrecognizable shadows. Only Li-hsing stood out against the deepening gray.
Slowly, inchingly, he held out his hand to her and very dimly and faintly felt her take it.
She was fading in his eyes as the last of his thoughts trickled away. But before she faded completely, one final fugitive thought came to him and rested for a moment on his mind before everything stopped.
“Little Miss,” he whispered, too low to be heard.
Mother Earth
2425 A.D.
“BUT CAN YOU be certain? Are you sure that even a professional historian can always distinguish between victory and defeat?”
Gustav Stein, who delivered himself of that mocking question with a whiskered smile and a gentle wipe at the gray mustache from the neighborhood of which he had just removed an empty glass, was not an historian. He was a physiologist.
But his companion was an historian, and he accepted the gentle thrust with a smile of his own.
Stein’s apartment was, for Earth, quite luxurious. It lacked the empty privacy of the Outer Worlds, of course, since from its window there stretched ou
tward a phenomenon that belonged only to the home planet-a city. A large city, full of people, rubbing shoulders, mingling sweat
Nor was Stein’s apartment fitted with its own power and its own utility supply. It lacked even the most elementary quota of positronic robots. In short, it lacked the dignity of self-sufficiency, and like all things on Earth, it was merely part of a community, a pendant unit of a cluster, a portion of a mob.
But Stein was an Earthman by birth and used to it. And after all, by Earth standards the apartment was still luxurious.
It was just that looking outward through the same windows before which lay the city, one could see the stars and among them the Outer Worlds, where there were no cities but only gardens; where the lawns were streaks of emerald, where all human beings were kings, and where all good Earthmen earnestly and vainly hoped to go some day.
Except for a few who knew better-like Gustav Stein.
The Friday evenings with Edward Field belonged to that class of ritual which comes with age and quiet life. It broke the week pleasantly for two elderly bachelors, and gave them an innocuous reason to linger over the sherry and the stars. It took them away from the crudities of life, and, most of all, it let them talk.
Field, especially, as a lecturer, scholar and man of modest means quoted chapter and verse from his still uncompleted history of Terrestrian Empire.
“I wait for the last act, “he explained. “Then I can call it the ‘Decline and Fall of Empire’ and publish it.”
“You must expect the last act to come soon, then.”
“In a sense, it has come already. It is just that it is best to wait for all to recognize that fact. You see, there are three times when an Empire or an Economic System or a Social Institution falls, you skeptic-”
Field paused for effect and waited patiently for Stein to say, “And those times are?”
“First,” Field ticked off a right forefinger, “there is the time when just a little nub shows up that points an inexorable way to finality. It can’t be seen or recognized until the finality arrives, when the original nub becomes visible to hindsight.”
“And you can tell what that little nub is?”
“I think so, since I already have the advantage of a century and a half of hindsight. It came when the Sirian sector colony, Aurora, first obtained permission of the Central Government at Earth to introduce positronic robots into their community life. Obviously, looking back at it, the road was clear for the development of a thoroughly mechanized society based upon robot labor and not human labor. And it is this mechanization that has been and will yet be the deciding factor in the struggle between the Outer Worlds and Earth.”
“It is?” murmured the physiologist. “How infernally clever you historians are. What and where is the second time the Empire fell?”
“The second point in time,” and Field gently bent his right middle finger backward, “arrives when a signpost is raised for the expert so large and plain that it can be seen even without the aid of perspective. And that point has been passed, too, with the first establishment of an immigration quota against Earth by the Outer Worlds. The fact that Earth found itself unable to prevent an action so obviously detrimental to itself was a shout for all to hear, and that was fifty years ago.”
“Better and better. And the third point?”
“The third point?” Down went the ring finger. “That is the least important. That is when the signpost becomes a wall with a huge ‘The End’ scrawled upon it. The only requirement for knowing that the end has come, then, is neither perspective nor training, but merely the ability to listen to the video.”
“I take it that the third point in time has not yet come.”
“Obviously not, or you would not need to ask. Yet it may come soon; for instance, if there is war.”
“Do you think there will be?”
Field avoided commitment. “Times are unsettled, and a good deal of futile emotion is sweeping Earth on the immigration question. And if there should be a war, Earth would be defeated quickly and lastingly, and the wall would be erected.”
“Can you be certain? Are you sure that even a professional historian can always distinguish between victory and defeat?”
Field smiled. He said: “You may know something I do not. For instance, they talk about something called the ‘Pacific Project.’”
“I never heard of it.” Stein refilled the two glasses, “Let us speak of other things.”
He held up his glass to the broad window So that the far stars flickered rosily in the clear liquid and said: “To a happy ending to Earth’s troubles.”
Field held up his own, “To the Pacific Project.”
Stein sipped gently and said: “But we drink to two different things.”
“Do we?”
It is quite difficult to describe any of the Outer Worlds to a native Earthman, since it is not So much a description of a world that is required as a description of a state of mind. The Outer Worlds-some fifty of them, originally colonies, later dominions, later nations-differ extremely among themselves in a physical sense. But the state of mind is somewhat the same throughout.
It is something that grows out of a world not originally congenial to mankind, yet populated by the cream of the difficult, the different, the daring, the deviant.
If it is to be expressed in a word, that word is “individuality.”
There is the world of Aurora, for instance, three parsecs from Earth. It was the first planet settled outside the Solar System, and represented the dawn of interstellar travel. Hence its name.
It had air and water to start with, perhaps, but on Earthly standards it was rocky and infertile. The plant life that did exist, sustained by a yellow-green pigment completely unrelated to chlorophyll and not as efficient, gave the comparatively fertile regions a decidedly bilious and unpleasant appearance to unaccustomed eyes. No animal life higher than unicellular, and the equivalent of bacteria as well, were present. Nothing dangerous, naturally, since the two biological systems, of Earth and Aurora, were chemically unrelated.
Aurora became, quite gradually, a patchwork. Grains and fruit trees came first; shrubs, flowers, and grass afterward. Herds of livestock followed. And, as if it were necessary to prevent too close a copy of the mother planet, positronic robots also came to build the mansions, carve the landscapes, lay the power units. In short, to do the work, and turn the planet green and human.
There was the luxury of a new world and unlimited mineral resources. There was the splendid excess of atomic power laid out on new foundations with merely thousands, or, at most, millions, not billions, to service. There was the vast flowering of physical science, in worlds where there was room for it.
Take the home of Franklin Maynard, for instance, who, with his wife, three children, and twenty-seven robots, lived on an estate more than forty miles away, in distance, from the nearest neighbor. Yet by community-wave he could, if he wished, share the living room of any of the seventy-five million on Aurora-with each singly; with all simultaneously.
Maynard knew every inch of his valley. He knew just where it ended, sharply, and gave way to the alien crags, along whose undesirable slopes the angular, sharp leaves of the native furze clung sullenly-as if in hatred of the softer matter that had usurped its place in the sun.
Maynard did not have to leave that valley. He was a deputy in the Gathering, and a member of the Foreign Agents Committee, but he could transact all business but the most extremely essential, by community-wave, without ever sacrificing that precious privacy he had to have in a way no Earthman could understand.
Even the present business could be performed by community-wave. The man, for instance, who sat with him in his living room, was Charles Hijkman, and he, actually, was sitting in his own living room on an island in an artificial lake stocked with fifty varieties of fish, which happened to be twenty-five hundred miles distant, in space.
The connection was an illusion, of course. If Maynard were to reach out a hand, he
could feel the invisible wall.
Even the robots were quite accustomed to the paradox, and when Hijkman raised a hand for a cigarette, Maynard’s robot made no move to satisfy the desire, though a half-minute passed before Hijkman’s own robot could do so.
The two men spoke like Outer Worlders, that is, stiffly and in syllables too clipped to be friendly, and yet certainly not hostile. Merely undefinably lacking in the cream-however sour and thin at times-of human sociability which is so forced upon the inhabitants of Earth’s ant heaps.
Maynard said: “I have long wanted a private communion, Hijkman. My duties in the Gathering, this year-”
“Quite. That is understood. You are welcome now, of course. In fact, especially so, since I have heard of the superior nature of your grounds and landscaping. Is it true that your cattle are fed on imported grass?”
“I’m afraid that is a slight exaggeration. Actually, certain of my best milkers feed on Terrestrial imports during calving time, but such a procedure would be prohibitively expensive, I’m afraid, if made general. It yields quite extraordinary milk, however. May I have the privilege of sending you a day’s output?”
“It would be most kind of you.” Hijkman bent his head, gravely. “You must receive some of my salmon in return.”
To a Terrestrial eye, the two men might have appeared much alike. Both were tall, though not unusually so for Aurora, where the average height of the adult male is six feet one and one half inches. Both were blond and hard-muscled, with sharp and pronounced features. Though neither was younger than forty, middle-age as yet sat lightly upon them.
So much for amenities. Without a change in tone, Maynard proceeded to the serious purpose of his call.
He said: “The Committee, you know, is now largely engaged with Moreanu and his Conservatives. We would like to deal with them firmly, we of the Independents, that is. But before we can do so with the requisite calm and certainty, I would like to ask you certain questions.”
