retinue of servants to keep it up; but of course there were no servants to be had any longer, except for robots, and that had been causing some problems for the Martins before Gerald Martin offered himself up for this experiment. Now a pair of robot gardeners tended the glistening green lawns and pruned the glorious hedges of fiery red azaleas and trimmed away the dead fronds of the towering palm trees that ran along the ridge behind the house. A robot housecleaner kept dust and cobwebs at bay. And Andrew the robot served as valet, butler, lady's maid, and chauffeur for the Martin family. He prepared meals; he selected and poured the wines of which Gerald Martin was so fond; he supervised their wardrobes; he arranged and cared for their fine furniture, their works of art, their myriad distinctive possessions.
Andrew had one other duty, too, which in fact monopolized much of his time to the detriment of the rest of his formal household routine.
The Martin estate-for that was what it was, nothing less, a great estate-was an isolated one, alone on its beautiful ridge overlooking the chilly blue ocean. There was a little town nearby, but it was some distance away. The nearest city of any size, San Francisco, was far down the coast. Cities were starting to become obsolete now, anyway, and people preferred to communicate electronically and keep plenty of distance between one house and the next. So the Martin girls, in their grand and wonderful isolation, had very few playmates.
They did, however, have Andrew.
It was Miss who first figured out how that might best be arranged.
("Miss" was what Andrew invariably called Melissa, not because he was incapable of pronouncing her first name but because it seemed improper to him to address her in such a familiar way. Amanda was always "Little Miss"-never anything else. Mrs. Martin-Lucie was her first name-was "Ma'am" to Andrew. And as for Gerald Martin, he was "Sir." Gerald Martin was the sort of individual whom many people, not simply robots, felt most comfortable calling "Sir." The number of people in the world who called him "Gerald" was a very small number indeed, and it was impossible to suppose him being "Jerry" to anybody at all.)
Miss quickly came to understand more than a little about how to take advantage of the presence of a robot in the house. It was a simple matter of utilizing the Second Law.
"Andrew," she said, "we order you to stop what you're doing and play with us."
At the moment Andrew was arranging the books in the Martin library, which had wandered a little out of alphabetical order, as books have a way of doing.
He paused and looked down from the high mahogany bookcase between the two great leaded-glass windows at the north end of the room. Mildly he said, "I'm sorry, Miss. I'm occupied at present by a task requested by your father. A prior order from Sir must take precedence over this request of yours."
"I heard what Daddy told you," Miss replied. "He said, 'I'd like you to tidy up those books, Andrew. Get them back into some kind of sensible arrangement.' Isn't that so?"
"That is exactly what he said, yes, Miss. Those were his very words."
"Well, then, if all he said was that he'd like you to tidy up those books -and you don't deny that he did-then it wasn't much of an order, was it? It was more of a preference. A suggestion. A suggestion isn't an order. Neither is a preference. Andrew, I order you. Leave the books where they are and come take Amanda and me out for a walk along the beach."
It was a perfect application of the Second Law. Andrew put the books down immediately and descended from his ladder. Sir was the head of the household; but he hadn't actually given an order, not in the formal sense of the concept, and Miss had. She certainly had. And an order from a human member of this household-any human member of the household-had to take priority over a mere expression of preference from some other human member of the household, even if that member happened to be Sir himself.
Not that Andrew had any problem with any of that. He was fond of Miss, and even more fond of Little Miss. At least, the effect that they had upon his actions was that which in a human being would have been called the result of fondness. Andrew thought of it as fondness,