specialization so fiercely desired by humanity that few robots of the modern era were independently brained any more. The great majority of them nowadays were mere adjuncts of enormously powerful central processing units that had computing capacities far beyond the space limitations of a single robot frame.
A surgeon, too, really needed to be nothing more than a set of sensors and monitors and an array of tool-manipulating devices-except that people still preferred the illusion, if nothing more than that, that they were being operated on by an individual entity, not by a limb of some remote machine. So surgeons-the ones in private practice, anyway-were still independently brained. But this one, brained or not, was so limited in his capacity that he didn't recognize Andrew Martin-had probably never heard of Andrew Martin at all, in fact.
That was something of a novelty for Andrew. He was more than a little famous. He had never asked for his fame, of course-that was not his style-but fame, or at any rate notoriety, had come to him all the same. Because of what he had achieved: because of what he was. Not who, but what.
Instead of replying to what the surgeon had asked him Andrew said, with sudden striking irrelevance, "Tell me something, Doctor. Have you ever thought you would like to be a man?"
The question, startling and strange, obviously took the surgeon aback. He hesitated a moment as though the concept of being a man was so alien to him that it would fit nowhere in his allotted positronic pathways.
Then he recovered his aplomb and replied serenely, "But I am a robot, sir."
"Wouldn't it be better to be a man, don't you think?"
"If I were allowed the privilege of improving myself, sir, I would choose to be a better surgeon. The practice of my craft is the prime purpose of my existence. There is no way I could be a better surgeon if I were a man, but only if I were a more advanced robot. It would please me very much indeed to be a more advanced robot."
"But you would still be a robot, even so."
"Yes. Of course. To be a robot is quite acceptable to me. As I have just explained, sir, in order for one to excel at the extremely difficult and demanding practice of modern-day surgery it is necessary that one be-"
"A robot, yes," said Andrew, with just a note of exasperation creeping into his tone. "But think of the subservience involved, Doctor! Consider: you're a highly skilled surgeon. You deal in the most delicate matters of life and death-you operate on some of the most important individuals in the world, and for all I know you have patients come to you from other worlds as well. And yet-and yet-a robot? You're content with that? For all your skill, you must take orders from anyone, any human at all: a child, a fool, a boor, a rogue. The Second Law commands it. It leaves you no choice. Right this minute I could say, 'Stand up, Doctor,' and you'd have to stand up. 'Put your fingers over your face and wiggle them,' and you'd wiggle. Stand on one leg, sit down on the floor, move right or left, anything I wanted to tell you, and you'd obey. I could order you to disassemble yourself limb by limb, and you would. You, a great surgeon! No choice at all. A human whistles and you hop to his tune. Doesn't it offend you that I have the power to make you do whatever damned thing I please, no matter how idiotic, how trivial, how degrading?"
The surgeon was unfazed.
"It would be my pleasure to please you, sir. With certain obvious exceptions. If your orders should happen to involve my doing any harm to you or any other human being, I would have to take the primary laws of my nature into consideration before obeying you, and in all likelihood I would not obey you. Naturally the First Law, which concerns my duty to human safety, would take precedence over the Second Law relating to obedience. Otherwise, obedience is my pleasure. If it would give you pleasure to require me to do certain acts that you regard as idiotic or trivial or degrading, I would perform those acts. But they would not seem idiotic or trivial or degrading to me."
There was nothing even remotely surprising to Andrew Martin in the things the robot surgeon had said. He would have found it astonishing, even revolutionary, if