fire and zeal that had been characteristic of him when Andrew first came to him had gone out of him by now. Already he had had several major prosthetic operations himself-a double kidney replacement, first, and then a new liver. Soon Magdescu would reach retirement age.
And then, no doubt, he would die, in ten or twenty years more, Andrew told himself. Another friend gone, swept away by the remorseless river of time.
Andrew himself, naturally, showed no signs of aging at all. For a time that troubled him enough that he debated having some cosmetic wrinkles added-a touch of crow's feet around his eyes, for example-and graying his hair. After giving the matter a little thought, though, he decided that to go in for such things would be a foolish affectation. Andrew did not see his upgrades that way at all: they represented his continued attempt to leave his robot origins behind and approach the physical form of a human being. He did not deny to himself that it had become his goal to do that But there was no sense in becoming more human than the humans themselves. It struck him as pointless and absurd to subject his ever-more-human but still ageless android body to the external marks of aging.
Vanity had nothing to do with Andrew's decision-only logic. He was aware that humans had always tried to do everything in their power to conceal the effects that growing old had on their appearance. Andrew realized that it would be altogether ridiculous for him, exempted as he was from aging by his inherent android nature, to go out of his way deliberately to take those effects upon himself.
So he remained ever youthful-looking. And, of course, there was never any slackening of his physical vigor: a careful maintenance program made certain of that But the years were passing, and passing swiftly now. Andrew was approaching the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his construction.
By this time Andrew was not only exceedingly wealthy but covered with the honors that Alvin Magdescu had foretold for him. Learned societies hastened to offer him fellowships and awards-in particular one society which was devoted to the new science he had established, the one he had called robobiology but which had come to be termed prosthetology. He was named its honorary president for life. Universities vied with one another to give him degrees. An entire room in his house-the one upstairs that once had been his woodworking studio, five generations before-was given over now to storing the myriad diplomas, medals, scrolls of honor, testimonial volumes, and other artifacts of Andrew's worldwide status as one of humanity's greatest benefactors.
The desire to recognize Andrew's contribution became so universal that he needed one full-time secretary simply to reply to all the invitations to attend testimonial banquets or accept awards and degrees. He rarely did attend any such ceremonies any longer, though he was unfailingly courteous in refusing, explaining that the continued program of his research made it inadvisable for him to do a great deal of traveling. But in fact most of these functions had come to irritate and bore him.
The first honorary degree from a major university had given him a thrill of vindication. No robot had ever received such an honor before.
But the fiftieth honorary degree? The hundredth? They had no meaning for him. They said more about the giver than about the recipient. Andrew had proved whatever point it was that he had set out to make about his intelligence and creativity long ago, and now he simply wanted to proceed with his work in peace, without having to make long trips and listen to speeches in his honor. He was surfeited with honor.
Boredom and irritation, Andrew knew, were exceedingly human traits, and it seemed to him that he had only begun to experience them in the past twenty or thirty years. Previously-so far as he could recall-he had been notably free from such afflictions, though from the beginning there had always been a certain unrobotic component of impatience in his makeup that he had chosen not to acknowledge for a long time. This new irritability, though: it was some side effect of the upgrades, he suspected. But not a troublesome one, at least not so far.
When his hundred and fiftieth anniversary came around and the U. S. Robots people let it be known that they wanted to hold a great testimonial dinner to mark the occasion, Andrew instructed his secretary, with some annoyance in his voice, to