did. And also about his own uniqueness. There was one statement of Paul's that Andrew could not get out of his mind.
Look, Andrew: you're probably the closest thing to a human being that has ever come out of the factories of u. s. Robots and Mechanical Men. You're uniquely equipped to tea the world what it needs to know about the human-robot relationship, because in some ways you partake of the nature of each.
Was it so? Is that what Paul really thought, Andrew wondered, or had it just been the heat of the moment that had led him to say those things?
Andrew asked himself that over and over again, and gradually he began to form an answer.
And then he decided that the time had come to pay another visit to the offices of Feingold and Charney and have another talk with Paul.
He arrived unannounced, but the receptionist greeted him without any inflection of surprise in its voice. Andrew was far from an unfamiliar figure by this time at the Feingold and Charney headquarters.
He waited patiently while the receptionist disappeared into the inner office to notify Paul that Andrew was here. It would surely have been more efficient if the receptionist had used the holographic chatterbox, but unquestionably it was unmanned (or perhaps the word was "unroboted") by having to deal with another robot rather than with a human being.
Eventually the receptionist returned. "Mr. Charney will be with you soon," the receptionist announced, and went back to its tasks without another word.
Andrew passed the time revolving in his mind the matter of his word choice of a few minutes before. Could "unroboted" be used as an analog of "unmanned"? he wondered. Or had "unmanned" become a purely metaphoric term sufficiently divorced from its original literal meaning to be applied to robots-or to women, for that matter?
Many similar semantic problems had cropped up frequently while Andrew was working on his book. Human language, having been invented by humans for the use of humans, was full of little tricky complexities of that sort. The effort that was required in order to cope with them had undoubtedly increased Andrew's own working vocabulary-and, he suspected, the adaptability of his positronic pathways as well.
Occasionally as Andrew sat in the waiting room someone would enter the room and stare at him. He was the free robot, after all-still the only one. The clothes-wearing robot. An anomaly; a freak. But Andrew never tried to avoid the glances of these curiosity-seekers. He met each one calmly, and each in turn looked quickly away.
Paul Charney finally came out. He and Andrew had not seen each other since the winter, at the funeral of Paul's father George, who had died peacefully at the family home and now lay buried on a hillside over the Pacific. Paul looked surprised to see Andrew now, or so Andrew thought-though Andrew still had no real faith in his ability to interpret human facial expressions accurately.
"Well, Andrew. So good to see you again. I'm sorry I made you wait, but there was something I had to finish."
"Quite all right. I am never in a hurry, Paul."
Paul had taken lately to wearing the heavy makeup that fashion was currently dictating for both sexes, and though it made the somewhat bland lines of his face sharper and firmer, Andrew disapproved. He felt that Paul's strong, incisive personality needed no such cosmetic enhancement. It would have been perfectly all right for Paul to allow himself to look bland; there was nothing bland about the man himself, and no need for all this paint and powder.
Andrew kept his disapproval to himself, of course. But the fact that he disapproved of Paul's appearance at all was something of a novelty for him. He had only just begun to have such thoughts. Since finishing the first draft of his book, Andrew had discovered that disapproving of the things human beings did, as long as he avoided expressing such opinions openly, did not make him as uneasy as he might have anticipated. He could think disapproving thoughts without difficulty and he was even able to put his disapproval in writing. He was certain that it had not always been like that for him.
Paul said, "Come inside, Andrew. I heard that you wanted to talk to me, but I wasn't really expecting that you'd come all the way down here to do it."
"If you are too busy to see me just now, Paul, I am prepared to continue to wait."