could move as easily and gracefully as any human, he had continued to dress in that manner ever since.
"Dr. Magdescu?" Andrew asked.
"Indeed. Indeed." Alvin Magdescu took up a stance a couple of meters from Andrew and scanned him with undisguised fascination, as though Andrew were an exhibit in a museum. "Splendid! You are absolutely splendid!"
"Thank you," Andrew said, a little coolly. Magdescu's compliment did not strike him as entirely welcome. It was the kind of impersonal appraisal that some finely manufactured machine might receive; and Andrew saw no reason to take pleasure these days in that sort of thing when it was directed at him.
"How good of you to come!" Magdescu cried. "How eager I have been to see you! But I am being impolite." And he stepped forward with a sort of lunging, bounding motion until he was virtually standing toe to toe with Andrew. He held out his hand, palm upward, fingers outstretched.
Yes. A new form of greeting that evidently had replaced the handshake that had dominated human social intercourse for so many hundreds of years. Andrew wasn't in the habit of shaking hands with human beings, let alone making this new gesture. Shaking hands was simply not something that occurred to a robot to do. But Magdescu seemed to be expecting it, and the offer helped to ease the sting of his first few words. And so Andrew responded as he realized he was meant to, by offering his own hand. He held it above Magdescu's and bent the tips of his fingers downward until they touched the tips of the other man's.
It was an odd feeling, this touching of hands with a human as though they were equals. Odd and a little disturbing, but encouraging, also.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome!" Magdescu said. He seemed bubbling with energy: a little too much energy, maybe, Andrew thought. But it seemed genuine enough. "The famous Andrew Martin! The notorious Andrew Martin!"
"Notorious?"
"Absolutely. The most notorious product in our history. Though it seems almost obscene to call something as lifelike as you a product, I have to say. You aren't offended, are you?"
"How could I be? I am a product," said Andrew, though without much warmth. He saw that Magdescu was unable to hold a consistent position toward him. Touching hands as though they were simply two men at a business meeting, yes; but in the next breath speaking of him as a something. And describing him as "lifelike." Andrew had no illusions about himself: he knew that that was what he was. Humanoid, not human. Lifelike, not living. A product, not a person. But he did not enjoy hearing it.
"They did such a wonderful job with you! Remarkable! Remarkable! Almost human!"
"Not quite," Andrew said.
"But amazingly lifelike, all things considered. Amazingly! It's a damned shame that old Smythe-Robertson was so set against you. You're terrifically humanoid-looking, no question about it, a wonderful technical accomplishment-but of course he let the company take the android concept only so far. If our people had been allowed really to go all out, we could have done a great deal with you."
"You still can," said Andrew.
"No, I don't think so," Magdescu said, and much of the manic gusto went out of him as though he were a balloon that had been pricked. It was a startlingly sudden change of mood. He swung away from Andrew and began to pace the room in an angular zigzagging way that brought greenish light and odd chiming music up from the carpeting. "We're past the time," said Magdescu gloomily. "The era of significant progress in robotics-well, forget it, it's just history now. At least here, that is. We've been using robots freely on Earth for something close to a hundred fifty years now, but it's all changing again. It's back to space for them now, and those that stay here won't be brained."
"But there remains myself, and I stay on Earth."
"Well, that's true. But you're you, a complete anomaly, a robot unto himself, the only android robot. You aren't the prototype of a line. You're simply a unique item that they happened to have turned out in a very different sort of era, and after you were produced they made good and sure that you'd remain unique. No scope for further development there. No state-of-the-art advances. No art; no state. There doesn't seem to be much of the robot about you, anyway. You're pretty much out of our horizon. -why have you come here, anyway?"