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 tu

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.