It was red and hot

They swung around and sped away over the top of the hill. Within moments they were down the far side and out of sight. Even now, Andrew remained in his posture of threat. He was shaking and his face was pale and sweaty. He looked very much unstrung. George was well past the age where he could comfortably face the possibility of a physical confrontation with one young man, let alone two of them at once. You know that I could never have hurt them, George. I only told you to move toward them.

Their own fears did all the rest. That and that prizefighter stance that you were clever enough to adopt. I found the note you left. So I knew you were lost.

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It broke First Law. Half an hour later, the storm died down. It had been a premature gust, and a temporary one. I hot-footed it for Base and the storms really broke next day.

It was as though it expected something special-and private-to happen to it. Apparently, something special had. We named it Emma Junior when Emma Two brought it back. Emma Two had to protect it from my gun. What is even First Law compared with the holy ties of mother love? Mercury had long been the jinx world of the System, but this was drawing it rather strong-even for a jinx. The air of disuse that touched everything about the room-and the entire Station-was infinitely depressing. No photo-banks-well, death by slow broiling is one of the more unpleasant ways of being done in.

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But Andrew knew he was fundamentally well and that it would be only a matter of time until he had achieved complete control over his new housing. He had to think of himself as very young, still. Like a child, a newborn child. His coordination improved steadily. He moved swiftly toward full positronic interplay. Yet not everything was as he would have wished it. Andrew spent hours before the mirror, evaluating himself as he went through his repertoire of facial expressions and bodily motions. And what he saw fell far short of the expectations he had had for his new body.

The face was stiff – too stiff – and he doubted that that was going to improve with time. He would press his finger against his cheek and the flesh would yield, but not in the way that true human flesh would yield. He could smile or scowl or frown, but they were studied, imitative smiles and scowls and frowns. He would give the smile-signal or the frown-signal or whatever, and the muscles of his face would obediently hoist the smile-expression or the frown-expression into view, pulling his features around in accordance with a carefully designed program. He was always conscious of the machinery, organic though it might be, clanking ponderously around beneath his skin to produce the desired effect. That was not how it happened with human beings, Andrew suspected. And his motions were too deliberate. They lacked the careless free flow of the human being.

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It is terribly dangerous. As an ex-member of the Service, I have some practical knowledge of this and I tell you that the only person in the world who could manage to abstract a disintegrator from our top-secret arsenals would be the President…. Only the President of the United States, Mr. Janek, could have arranged that assassination attempt. He said, “Added precaution. No one can overhear us now by any means.

Edwards, do you realize the danger of that statement? You must not overestimate the power of the Global Charter. A government has the right to take reasonable measures for the protection of its stability. Janek, as someone I presume to be a loyal American citizen. I come to you with news of a terrible crime that affects all Americans and the entire Federation. A crime that has produced a situation that perhaps only you can right. Why do you respond with threats? You understand, I hope, that I have no unusual powers.

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If they were Americans to begin with, there would be no difficulty in their getting into this country. The attack must come from the Bureau of Robotics and I depend on the chief of that bureau. Lynn felt bitterness rise.

It seemed to him that this was what the conference came to and was intended for. Nothing that had been said had not been said before. There was no solution to the problem, no pregnant suggestion. It was a device for the record, a device on the part of men who gravely feared defeat and who wished the responsibility for it placed clearly and unequivocally on someone else. And yet there was justice in it. It was in robotics that We had fallen short. And Lynn was not Lynn merely. He was Lynn of Robotics and the responsibility had to be his.

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To my way of thinking I am not threatening you or the company for which you work at all. What I am doing is offering it the greatest opportunity it has had in many years. The Board of Directors would have to deal with it, not a mere employee like me. You would do well to tell them that. And he thought with satisfaction that Paul himself could not have done any of this in a better way. For it was within quite a reasonable time indeed that word reached Andrew that the corporation was willing to do business with him. The results were impressive, everyone agreed. And finally Andrew declared that he was ready to have the device installed in himself.

The bouncy little Director of Research looked concerned. During the course of the project Magdescu and Andrew had developed a curious but sturdy friendship, for which Andrew was quietly grateful now that none of the Charneys were left. He knew now that he did not want to be a completely solitary creature, that in fact he could not exist comfortably in total solitude, though he was not sure why. Nothing in the design of the robot brain mandated any need for companionship. But it often seemed to Andrew now that he was more like a human in many ways than he was like a robot, although he understood that he really existed in a strange indefinable limbo, neither man nor machine, partaking of some characteristics of each. Robots is going to be too much for the company to handle.

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I think what we ought to do is order him to take himself apart. It would be fun to watch him try, anyhow. And then we can assemble him again. Someone had indeed come along and it was George. From where he lay, Andrew could see him topping a small rise in the middle distance. He would have liked to signal for help. George was looking this way, though.

And now he was breaking into a trot. The two young men stepped back a little and waited, frowning, glancing uncertainly at each other. Have you two been playing games with him? So we politely asked him to take them off. They were about to move me to a quiet spot and require me to dismember myself. He was attempting to appear fearless and bold even though he was outnumbered, but Andrew saw his chin tremble. George was no longer a young man.

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Andrew took it all in stride. His android body had been designed to withstand higher than Earth-norm gravitation from the outset, not by his special request, but simply because it had been relatively easy for the designers, starting from scratch, to build all sorts of little superiorities into the natural human form. How and when he took his meals aboard the ship, and what might be on the menu, were all irrelevant items to him. So was the exercise schedule. Andrew had often found undeniable pleasure in taking a brisk walk along the beach or a stroll through the forest surrounding his property, but his body needed no program of regular exercise to maintain its tone. The voyage, then, became for him mainly a matter of waiting. He anticipated few if any problems of adaptation to space travel and he experienced none.

The Earth seen from space looked extraordinarily lovely to him: a perfect disk of blue, stippled with white masses of clouds. The outlines of the continents were surprisingly indistinct. It was strange and wondrous, also, to be able to look upon the entire face of the world at once this way – for the ship had moved very swiftly out into space and the planet behind them was now small enough to be seen in its entirety, a turning blue ball constantly dwindling against the black star-flecked background of space. Andrew felt a powerful urge to carve a plaque that would represent something of what he saw now as he looked down on the small Earth set against that gigantic background. He could use inlays in dark woods and light ones, he told himself, to show the contrast between the sea and the cloud patterns. Then there was the Moon, brilliantly white, its scarred face growing ever larger.

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Then the details of the legal evolution as well as the physical – the winning of your freedom, and the other civil rights that followed. I think there was a long period when I was content simply to be a superior robot – a period when I denied even to myself any awareness of the full capabilities of my brain. But I deny it no longer. We have to face the undeniable fact that, however much you may be like a human being in intelligence and capabilities and even appearance, nevertheless you simply are not a human being.

I have the mental ability of a human being – a highly intelligent one. I have contributed artistically, literarily, and scientifically to human culture as much as any human being now alive. You are outside it entirely. You resemble a human being but in fact you are something else, something – artificial.

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