"How much time?"
"I can't say. I'll pass everything you've told me today up to them, and they'll take it up at their regular monthly meeting, and then I suppose they'll create a study committee, and so on. -it could be a while."
"I can wait a reasonable time," said Andrew. "But only a reasonable time, and I will be the judge of what is reasonable. You would do well to tell them that." He thanked Magdescu for his time and announced that he was ready to be conducted back to the airstrip. And he thought with satisfaction that Paul himself could not have done any of this in a better way.
Chapter Seventeen
MAGDESCU MUST HAVE made things very clear to the Board of Directors, and the urgency of the message must have gotten through to them. For it was within quite a reasonable time indeed that word reached Andrew that the corporation was willing to do business with him. U.S.R.M.M. would build and design the combustion chamber and install it in his android body at its own expense; and it was prepared to enter into negotiations for a licensing arrangement covering manufacture and distribution of the entire range of prosthetic organs that Andrew might have under development.
Under Andrew's supervision a prototype metabolic converter was constructed and extensively tested at a newly constructed facility in Northern California, first within robot hulls, then with newly fabricated android bodies that had not been equipped with positronic brains and were operated on external life-support systems.
The results were impressive, everyone agreed. And finally Andrew declared that he was ready to have the device installed in himself.
"You're absolutely certain?" Magdescu asked.
The bouncy little Director of Research looked concerned. During the course of the project Magdescu and Andrew had developed a curious but sturdy friendship, for which Andrew was quietly grateful now that none of the Charneys were left. In the time since Paul Charney's death Andrew had come clearly to recognize that he needed some sort of sense of close connection with human beings. He knew now that he did not want to be a completely solitary creature, that in fact he could not exist comfortably in total solitude, though he was not sure why. Nothing in the design of the robot brain mandated any need for companionship. But it often seemed to Andrew now that he was more like a human in many ways than he was like a robot, although he understood that he really existed in a strange indefinable limbo, neither man nor machine, partaking of some characteristics of each.
"Yes," he said. "I have no doubts that the work will be done skillfully and well."
"I'm not talking about our part of the work," said Magdescu. "I'm talking about yours."
"You can't possibly doubt that the combustion chamber will work!"
"The tests leave no question of that."
"Then what-?"
"I've been against this thing from the start, Andrew, as you know. But I don't think you fully understand why."
"It's because you think that the radical technological upheaval that my prosthetics will cause for U. S. Robots is going to be too much for the company to handle."
"No! Absolutely not! Not even remotely! I'm all in favor of experiment for the sake of experimentation! Don't you think I want to see some forward movement in this damned field of ours, after all these decades of stupid and furtive backscuttling toward ever more simpleminded and now downright brainless robots? No, Andrew, it's you that I'm worried about."
"But if the combustion chamber-"
Magdescu threw up his hands. "It's safe, it's safe! Nobody disagrees on that score. But-look, Andrew, we'll be opening your body and taking out your atomic cell and installing a bunch of revolutionary new equipment, and then we'll be hooking everything up to your positronic pathways. What if something goes wrong with your body during the operation? There's always a possibility of that-small, maybe, but real. You aren't just a positronic brain sitting inside a metal framework any more, you know. Your brain is linked to the android housing in a far more complex way now. I know how they must have had to do the transfer operation. Your positronic pathways are tied into simulated neural pathways. Suppose your android body starts malfunctioning on the operating table? Suppose it begins to enter a terminal malfunction, Andrew?"
"Dies, is that what you're trying to say?"
"Dies, yes. Your body begins to die."
"There'll be a backup android body sitting on the table right next to it."
"And if we can't make the transfer in time? If your positronic brain suffers irreversible decay while we're trying to untangle it from the million and one linkages that were set up in Smythe-Robertson's time and lift it over to the backup body? Your positronic brain is you, Andrew. There's no way to back up a brain, positronic or otherwise. If it's damaged it's damaged for good. If it's damaged beyond a certain point you'll be dead."
"And this is why you're hesitant about the operation?"
"You're the only one of you that there is. I'd hate to lose you."
"I'd hate to lose me too, Alvin. But I don't think it's going to happen."
Magdescu looked bleak. "You insist on going through with it, then."
"I insist. I have every faith in the skill of the staff at U. S. Robots."
And that was where the matter rested. Magdescu was unable to budge him; and once more Andrew made the journey eastward to the U. S. Robots research center, where an entire building had been reconfigured to serve as the operating theater.
Before he went, he took a long solitary stroll one afternoon along the beach, under the steep rugged cliffs, past the swarming tide pools where Miss and Little Miss had liked to play in their childhood of a century and more ago, and stood for a long while looking out at the dark turbulent sea, the vast arch of the sky, the white flecks of cloud in the west.