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.
Years went by, quiet ones not only within Andrew's secluded retreat on the grounds of the old Martin estate, but in the world outside. The Earth's population was stable, held level not only by a low birth rate but by steady emigration to the growing settlements in space. Giant computers controlled most economic fluctuations, keeping supply and demand in balance between one Region and another so that the ancient business cycles of boom and bust were flattened into gentle curves. It was not a challenging, dynamic era; but it was not a turbulent or perilous one, either.
Andrew paid next to no attention to developments that might be going on beyond his doorstep. There were more fundamental things that he needed and wanted to explore, and he was exploring them. That was all that mattered to him these days. His income, which came from the invested proceeds of his now terminated career as an artist in wood and from the money that Little Miss had left him, was more than sufficient to take care of his bodily-maintenance needs and to cover the costs of his research.
It was a private, hermetic life: precisely what he wanted. He had long since gained complete mastery over his android body, after the awkward early days, and often he took long walks through the forest atop the bluff, or along the lonely, tempestuous beach where once he had gone with Little Miss and her sister. Sometimes he went swimming-the iciness of the water was no problem for him-and even occasionally risked the journey out to the isolated, forlorn cormorant rock that Miss had asked him to undertake when she was a child. It was a difficult swim even for him, and the cormorants did not seem to enjoy his company. But he enjoyed testing his strength against such a challenge, aware that no human, even the strongest of swimmers, could safely manage the trip out and back through that chilly, violent sea.
Much of the time, though, Andrew spent at his research. There were frequent periods when he did not go out of his house for weeks on end.
Then Paul Charney came to him one day and said, "It's been a long time, Andrew."
"Indeed it has." They rarely saw each other now, though there had been no estrangement of any sort. The Charney family still maintained its home along the upper coast of Northern California, but Paul had taken to spending most of his time nearer to San Francisco.
"Are you still deep in your program of 'biological research?" Paul asked.
"Very much so," Andrew said.
He was startled by how much Paul had aged. The phenomenon of human aging was something that Andrew had been studying lately with particular interest, and he thought he had arrived at some understanding of its causes and its processes. And yet-for all his experience of age in the generations of this one family, from Sir down through Little Miss to George and now to Paul-it always came as a surprise to him that humans so swiftly grew gray and withered and bent and old. As Paul had done. His long-limbed frame seemed shorter now, and his shoulders were slumped, and the bony structure of his face had undergone subtle changes so that his chin had begun to jut and his cheekbones were less prominent. His eyesight, too, must have suffered, for his eyes had been replaced with gleaming photo-optic cells much like the ones by which Andrew viewed the world. So he and Paul had grown closer in that one respect, at least.
Paul said, "It's a pity you're no longer as concerned as you once were with the history of robots. Your book would need a new chapter, now."
"What do you mean, Paul?"
"A chapter that deals with the radical new policy that U. S. Robots has established."
"I know nothing about that. What new policy are you referring to?"
Paul's eyebrows lifted. "You haven't heard? Really? -Well, Andrew, what they have done is to begin manufacturing central control stations for their robots-giant positronic computers, actually, which are able to communicate with anywhere from a dozen to a thousand robots by microwave transmission. The robots they're turning out now have no brains at all."
"No brains? But how do they-"
"The gigantic central brains do all the data-processing for them. The robot units themselves are nothing more than mobile limbs of the main thinking center."
"Is that more efficient?"
"U. S. Robots insists that it is. Whether it really is, I can't say. But it's my notion that the whole thing is mainly a long-range way of getting back at you. Smythe-Robertson authorized the turn toward the new direction just before he died, you see. He was old and ill, but he pushed his program through and made it stick. And I suspect that what he wanted was to make certain that the company would never again be confronted by a robot able to give them all the trouble that you have. So they've begun to separate brain and body. A mindless mechanical laboring unit can't be deemed worthy of civil rights or legislative protection; and a big brain that sits in a box is just a computer. The brain isn't going to be able to turn up in the office of the Chairman of the Board one day and demand to be put into a fancy new body. And the robot bodies, since they're completely brainless, aren't in a position to conceive any demands at all."