But even so-even so- The surgeon said, with not the slightest trace of impatience in his smooth bland voice, "Now, if we may return to the subject of this extraordinary operation that you have come here to discuss, sir. I can barely comprehend the nature of what you want done. It is hard for me to visualize a situation that would require such a thing. But what I need to know, first of all, is the name of the person upon whom I am asked to perform this operation."
"The name is Andrew Martin," Andrew said. "The operation is to be performed on me."
"But that would be impossible, sir!"
"Surely you'd be capable of it."
"Capable in a technical sense, yes. I have no serious doubt on that score, regardless of what may be asked of me, although in this case there are certain procedural issues that I would have to consider very carefully. But that is beside the point. I ask you please to bear in mind, sir, that the fundamental effect of the operation would be harmful to you."
"That does not matter at all," said Andrew calmly.
"It does to me."
"Is this the robot version of the Hippocratic Oath?"
"Something far more stringent than that," the surgeon said. "The Hippocratic Oath is, of course, a voluntary pledge. But there is, as plainly you must be aware, something innate in my circuitry itself that controls my professional decisions. Above and beyond everything else, I must not inflict damage. I may not inflict damage."
"On human beings, yes."
"Indeed. The First Law says-"
"Don't recite the First Law, Doctor. I know it at least as well as you. But the First Law simply governs the actions of robots toward human beings. I'm not human, Doctor."
The surgeon reacted with a visible twitch of his shoulders and a blinking of his photoelectric eyes. It was as if what Andrew had just said had no meaning for him whatever.
"Yes," said Andrew, "I know that I seem to be quite human, and that what you're experiencing now is the robot equivalent of surprise. Nevertheless I'm telling you the absolute truth. However human I may appear to you, I am simply a robot. A robot, Doctor. A robot is what I am, and nothing more than that. Believe me. And therefore you are free to operate on me. There is nothing in the First Law which prohibits a robot from performing actions on another robot. Even if the action that is performed should cause harm to that robot, Doctor."
Chapter Two
IN THE BEGINNING, of course-and the beginning for him was nearly two centuries before his visit to the surgeon's office-no one could have mistaken Andrew Martin for anything but the robot he was.
In that long-ago era when he had first come from the assembly line of United States Robots and Mechanical Men he was as much a robot in appearance as any that had ever existed, smoothly designed and magnificently functional: a sleek mechanical object, a positronic brain encased in a more-or-less humanoid-looking housing made from metal and plastic.
His long slim limbs then were finely articulated mechanisms fashioned from titanium alloys overlaid by steel and equipped with silicone bushings at the joints to prevent metal-to-metal contact. His limb sockets were of the finest flexible polyethylene. His eyes were photoelectric cells that gleamed with a deep red glow. His face-and to call it that was charitable; it was the merest perfunctory sketch of a face-was altogether incapable of expression. His bare, sexless body was unambiguously a manufactured device. All it took was a single glance to see that he was a machine, no more animate, no more human, no more alive, than a telephone or a pocket calculator or an automobile.
But that was in another era, long, long ago.
It was an era when robots were still uncommon sights on Earth-almost the very dawn of the age of robotics, not much more than a generation after the days when the great early roboticists like Alfred Lanning and Peter Bogert and the legendary robopsychologist Susan Calvin had done their historic work, developing and perfecting the principles by which the first positronic robots had come into being.
The aim of those pioneers had been to create robots capable of taking up many of the dreary burdens that human beings had for so long been compelled to bear. And that was part of the problem that the roboticists faced, in those dawning days of the science of artificial life late in the Twentieth Century