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.
But what do I know about beauty? Andrew asked himself acidly. Or about what might be sacred? I am only a robot, after all. Whatever aesthetic or spiritual perceptions I may think I have are mere accidents of the positronic pathways, unintended, unreliable, perhaps to be regarded as manufacturing defects rather than any kind of meritorious special feature of my construction.
He turned away from the viewing screen and spent most of the rest of the voyage sitting calmly in his gravity sling, waiting to get to the Moon.
Three officials of the lunar office of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men were at the Luna City spaceport to greet Andrew when he disembarked: two men and a woman. They provided him-when he was done with all the maddening little bureaucratic maneuvers of arrival and was finally allowed to step out of the ship and approach the welcoming committee-with one of the most powerful surprises of his long life.
When he first noticed them they were waving to him. Andrew knew that they were here for him because the woman carried a brightly lettered placard that said, WELCOME TO LUNA CITY, ANDREW MARTIN! But what he didn't expect was that the younger of the two men in the group would walk up to him, put out his hand, and say with a warm smile, "We're absolutely thrilled that you decided to make the trip, Dr. Martin."
Dr. Martin? Dr. Martin?
The only doctorates that Andrew had received were honorary ones, and he would hardly have had the audacity ever to refer to himself as "Dr. Martin." But if the U. S. Robots man had greeted him simply as "Mr. Martin," that would have been astounding enough.
No one on Earth had ever called him "Dr. Martin" or "Mr. Martin" or anything else but "Andrew," not even once, never in all his hundred fifty-plus years.
It was unthinkable for anyone to do so. On formal occasions-when he had appeared in court, or when he was being given an award or an honorary degree-he was usually addressed as " Andrew Martin," but that was as far in the direction of formality as anybody ever went. Often enough, even when he was the guest of honor at some scientific meeting, he was addressed straightforwardly as " Andrew" by perfect strangers and no one, not even he, thought anything of it. Though most people tended to call robots by nicknames based on their serial designations rather than by the serial designations themselves, it was rare for a robot to have a surname at all. It had been Sir's special little pleasure to refer to him as " Andrew Martin "-a member of the family-rather than just " Andrew," and the custom had become permanent.
But to be called "Dr. Martin"-even "Mr. Martin"
"Is anything wrong, sir?" the U. S. Robots man asked, as Andrew stood blinking with amazement before him.
"No, of course not. Except-it's only that-ah-"
"Sir?"
Being called "sir" like that didn't make things any easier. It was like a repeated electrical jolt.
"Sir, what's the matter?"
They were all concerned now, frowning and gathering close around him.
Andrew said, "Are you aware that I'm a robot?"
"Well-" They exchanged troubled glances. They looked tremendously flustered. "Yes, sir. Yes, we are."
"And yet you call me 'Dr. Martin' and 'sir'?"
"Well-yes. Of course. Your work, sir-your extraordinary achievements-a simple mark of respect-you are Andrew Martin, after all!"
"Andrew Martin the robot, yes. On Earth it's not the custom to address robots as 'Dr.' something or 'Mr.' something or 'sir.' I'm not accustomed to it. It's never happened to me at all, as a matter of fact. It simply isn't done."
"Does it offend you-sir?" the woman asked, and as that last word escaped she looked as though she would have liked to swallow it.
''It surprises me, actually. It surprises me very much. On Earth-"
"Ah, but this isn't Earth," said the older of the two men. "We're a different sort of society here. You have to understand that, Dr. Martin. We're a lot more freewheeling-a lot more informal than people are on Earth-"
"Informal? And so you call a robot 'Dr.'? I would expect informal people to be calling strangers by their first names, and instead you greet me with high-flown formal honorifics, giving me a title which in fact I've never earned and have no business letting you use, and-"
They were beginning to look less distressed now. The woman said, "I think I understand. Well, sir-I hope you don't mind if I call you that, sir -we do call each other by our first names most of the time-I'm Sandra, this is David, this is Carlos-and we generally call our robots by first names too, just as people do on Earth. But you are special. You are the famous Andrew Martin, sir. You are the founder of prosthetology, you are the great creative genius who has done so much for mankind. Informal though we may be among ourselves, it's just a matter of elementary respect, sir, when we-"