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-"
"You see, it's really hard for us to walk right up to you and call you, Andrew' just like that," the one called Carlos said. "Even though in fact you are-you are-"
He faltered into silence" A robot?" Andrew finished for him.
"A robot, yes," Carlos said indistinctly, not meeting Andrew's gaze.
"Besides," David said, "you don't look much like a robot. You don't look like a robot at all, as a matter of fact. We know that you are, of course, but nevertheless-I mean-that is-" And he flushed and looked away, too.
Things were getting tangled again. They seemed destined to put their feet in their mouths no matter what they tried to say. Andrew felt sorry for them, but a little annoyed, too.
"Please," he said, "I may not look much like a robot, but a robot is what I have been for more than a hundred fifty years and it comes as no great shock to me to think of myself as one. And where I come from, robots are addressed by their first names only. That seems to be the custom here too, I gather-except for me. If you have too much respect for my great accomplishments to be able to do that easily, then I appeal to the freewheeling informality you were just telling me about. This is a frontier world: let's all be equals, then. If you are Sandra and Carlos and David, then I am Andrew. Is that all right?"
They were beaming now.
"Well, if you put it that way, Andrew-" Carlos said, and stuck out his hand a second time.
After that everything went more smoothly. Some of the U. S. Robots people called him "Andrew," and some called him "Dr. Martin," and some of them would go back and forth between the two almost at random.
Andrew grew used to it. He saw that this was indeed a rough and ready culture up here, with many fewer taboos and ingrained social patterns than on Earth. The line between humans and robots was still a distinct one, yes; but Andrew himself, because of his android body and his record of high scientific achievement, occupied an ambiguous place somewhere along that boundary, and in the easygoing society on the Moon it evidently was possible for the people he worked among to forget for long stretches of time that he was a robot at all.
As for the lunar robots, they didn't seem to recognize any sign of his robot origins. Invariably they treated him with the robotic obsequiousness that was considered a human being's due. He was always "Dr. Martin" to them, with plenty of bowing and scraping and general subservience.
Andrew had mixed feelings about all of this. Despite all that he had told them about being quite accustomed to thinking of himself as a robot and being addressed like one, he was not completely sure that it was true.
On the one hand, being called "Mr." or "Dr." instead of "Andrew" was a tribute to the excellence of his android upgradings and to the high quality of his positronic brain. It had been his intention for many years to transform himself in such a way that he would move from a purely robotic identity into the gray zone of an identity that approached being human, and obviously he had achieved just that.
And yet-and yet- How strange it felt to be addressed in terms of such respect by humans! How uncomfortable it made him, really. He grew used to it but Andrew never really felt at ease with it.
These people couldn't seem to remember for any significant length of time that he was a robot; but a robot was what he was, all the same-much as he sometimes would