The Positronic Man

Fifteen

IT WAS LIKE being constructed allover again. For days, for weeks, for months, Andrew found himself not himself somehow, and the simplest actions kept giving rise to hesitation.

He had always been utterly at home in his body. He had only to recognize the need for a motion and he was instantly able to make that motion, smoothly, automatically. Now it took a conscious effort of self-direction. Raise your arm, he had to tell himself. Move it over here. Now put it down.

Was this what it was like for a young human child as it strived to master the mysteries of bodily coordination? Andrew wondered.

Perhaps so. He was over a hundred years old and yet he felt very much like a child as he moved about in this startling new body of his.

It was a splendid body. They had made him tall, but not so tall that he would seem overbearing or frightening. His shoulders were broad, his waist was slim, his limbs were supple and athletic. He had chosen light-brown hair for himself, since he found red too flamboyant and yellow too obvious and black too somber, and human hair did not seem to come in other colors than those, except for the gray or white or silver of age, and he had not wanted that. His eyes-photo-optic cells, really, but very convincing in appearance-were brown also, flecked ever so subtly with gold. For his skin color Andrew had selected something neutral in tone, a kind of blend of the prevailing skin colors of the various human types, darker than the pale pink of the Charneys but not quite as dark as some. That way no one would be able to tell at a glance which race he belonged to, since in fact he belonged to none. He had had the U. S. Robots designers peg his apparent age at somewhere between thirty-five and fifty human years: old enough to seem mature, not so old as to show serious signs of aging.

A fine body, yes. He was certain he would be very happy in it, once he grew accustomed to it.

Each day there was a little progress. Each day he gained more control over his elegant new android housing. But the process was terribly slow -agonizingly slow

Paul was frantic. "They've damaged you, Andrew. I'm going to have to file suit."

Andrew said, "You mustn't, Paul. You'll never be able to prove something-m-m-m-m- "Malicious?"

"Malicious, yes. Besides, I grow stronger, better. It's just the tr-tr-"

"Tremble?"

"Trauma. After all, there's never been such an op-op-op-before."

Andrew spoke very slowly. Speech was surprisingly hard now for him too, one of the hardest functions of all, a constant struggle to enunciate. It was an agony for Andrew to get the words out and an agony for anyone who had to listen to him. His entire vocal mechanism was different from what it had been previously. The efficient electronic synthesizer that had been able to make such convincingly human sounds had given way to an arrangement of resonating chambers and muscle-like structures to control them that was supposed to make his voice utterly indistinguishable from that of an organic human being; but now Andrew had to shape each syllable in a way that had been done for him before, and that was difficult work, very difficult.

Yet he felt no despair. Despair was not really a quality that he was capable of, and in any case he knew that these problems were merely temporary. He could feel his brain from the inside. No one else could; and no one else could know as well as he did that his brain was still intact, that it had come through the transfer operation unharmed. His thoughts flowed freely through the neural co

He was merely having a few interface problems, that was all. But Andrew knew he was fundamentally well and that it would be only a matter of time until he had achieved complete control over his new housing. He had to think of himself as very young, still. Like a child, a newborn child.

The months passed. His coordination improved steadily. He moved swiftly toward full positronic interplay.

Yet not everything was as he would have wished it. Andrew spent hours before the mirror, evaluating himself as he went through his repertoire of facial expressions and bodily motions. And what he saw fell far short of the expectations he had had for his new body.

Not quite human! The face was stiff-too stiff-and he doubted that that was going to improve with time. He would press his finger against his cheek and the flesh would yield, but not in the way that true human flesh would yield. He could smile or scowl or frown, but they were studied, imitative smiles and scowls and frowns. He would give the smile-signal or the frown-signal or whatever, and the muscles of his face would obediently hoist the smile-expression or the frown-expression into view, pulling his features around in accordance with a carefully designed program. He was always conscious of the machinery, organic though it might be, clanking ponderously around beneath his skin to produce the desired effect. That was not how it happened with human beings, Andrew suspected.

And his motions were too deliberate. They lacked the careless free flow of the human being. He could hope that that would come after a while-he was already far beyond the first dismal days after the operation, when he had staggered awkwardly about his room like some sort of crude pre-positronic automaton-but something told him that even with this extraordinary new body he was never going to be able to move in the natural way that virtually every human being took for granted.

Still, things were not all that bad. The U. S. Robots people had kept their part of the bargain honorably and had carried out the transfer with all the formidable technical skill at their disposal. And Andrew had what he wanted. He might not fool the truly observant onlooker into thinking he was human, but he was far more human-looking than any robot ever had been, and at least he could wear clothes now without the ridiculous anomaly of an expressionless metal face rising up above them.

Eventually Andrew declared, "I will be getting back to work now."

Paul Charney laughed and said, "Then you must be well. What will you be doing? Another book?"

"No," said Andrew seriously. "I live too long for anyone career to seize me by the throat and never let me go. There was a time when I was primarily an artist, and I still dabble in that now and then. And there was a time when I was a historian and I can always write another book or two, if I feel the need for it. But I have to keep moving on. What I want to be now, Paul, is a robobiologist."

"A robopsychologist, you mean?"

"No. That would imply the study of positronic brains and at the moment I have no interest in doing that. A robobiologist, it seems to me, would be concerned with the workings of the body that is attached to that brain."

"Wouldn't that be a roboticist?"

"In the old days, yes. But roboticists work with metallic bodies. I would be studying an organic humanoid body-of which I have the only one, as far as I know. Examining the way it functions, the way it simulates a true human body. I want to know more about artificial human bodies than the android-makers know themselves."

"You narrow your field of endeavor," said Paul thoughtfully. "As an artist, the whole range of expression was yours. Your work could stand up with the best that was being produced anywhere in the world. As a historian, you dealt chiefly with robots. As a robobiologist, your subject will be yourself."

Andrew nodded. "So it would seem."

"Do you really want to turn inward that way?"

"Understanding of self is the begi

Andrew had to start from the very begi

He became a familiar sight in the libraries of universities and medical schools, where he would sit at the electronic indices for hours at a time. He looked perfectly normal in clothes and his presence caused no stir whatever. Those few who knew that he was a robot made no attempt to interfere with him.

He added a spacious room to his house to serve as a laboratory, and equipped it with an elaborate array of scientific instruments. His library grew, too. He set up research projects for himself that occupied him for weeks on end of his sleepless twenty-four-hour-a-day days. For sleep was still something for which Andrew had no need. Though virtually human in outer appearance, he had been given ways of restoring and replenishing his strength that were far more efficient than those of the species after which he had been patterned.

The mysteries of respiration and digestion and metabolism and cell division and blood circulation and body temperature, the whole complex and wondrous system of bodily homeostasis that kept human beings functioning for eighty or ninety or, increasingly, even a hundred years, ceased to be mysteries to him. He delved deep into the mechanisms of the human body-for Andrew saw that that was every bit as much a mechanism as were the products of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men. It was an organic mechanism, yes-but a mechanism nevertheless, a beautifully designed one, with its own firm laws of metabolic rhythm, of balance and decay, of breakdown and repair.