"Is anything wrong, George?" Andrew asked, a moment after George had entered.
"I'm afraid that there is, Andrew. My grandfather is dying."
"Dying?" Andrew said numbly.
Death was a concept he had long thought about, but had never really understood.
George nodded somberly. "My mother is at his bedside now. Grandfather wants you to be there too."
"He does? It isn't your mother who has sent for me, but Sir himself?"
"Sir himself, yes."
Andrew felt a faint tremor in his fingertips. It was as close as he could come to a physical expression of excitement. But there was distress mingled with the sensation.
Sir-dying!
He shut down his tools and hurried across to the main house, with George Charney trotting along beside him.
Sir was lying quietly in the bed in which he had spent most of his time in recent years. His hair had thinned to a few white wisps; even his glorious mustache now was a sad drooping thing. He looked very pale, as though his skin were becoming transparent, and he scarcely seemed to be breathing. But his eyes were open-his fierce old eyes, his piercing, intense blue eyes-and he managed a small smile, the merest upturning of his lips, as he saw Andrew come into the room.
"Sir-oh, Sir, Sir-"
"Come here, Andrew." Sir's voice sounded surprisingly strong: the voice of the Sir of old.
Andrew faltered, too confused to respond.
"Come here, I said. That's an order. I said once that I wasn't going to give you any more orders, but this is an exception. Just about the last one I'm ever going to give you-you can count on that."
"Yes, Sir. " Andrew came forward.
Sir pulled one hand out from under the coverlet. It seemed to be something of a struggle for him to move the blanket aside, and George rushed forward to help him.
"No," Sir said, with a trace of his familiar irascibility. "Damn it, don't try to do it for me, George! I'm only dying, not crippled." Angrily he pushed the coverlet down just far enough to raise his hand, and held it out toward the robot. "Andrew," he said. "Andrew-"
"Oh, Sir," Andrew began.
And he fell silent. He did not know what to say.
He had never before been at the side of someone who was dying, had never so much as seen a dead person. He knew that death was the human way of ceasing to function. It was an involuntary and irreversible dismantling that happened eventually to all human beings. Since it was inevitable, Andrew wanted to think that it was something that humans took for granted as a natural process and did not look upon with fear or distaste. But he was not entirely sure of that. And Sir had lived so long-he must be so accustomed to being alive, and there had always been so much life and vitality in him- "Give me your hand, Andrew."
"Of course, Sir."
Andrew took Sir's cool, pale, shriveled hand into his own: gnarled ancient flesh against smooth ageless plastic that was without flaw.
Sir said, "You're a splendid robot, do you know that, Andrew? Truly splendid. The finest robot that was ever made."
"Thank you, Sir."
"I wanted to tell you that. And one other thing. I'm glad you're free. That's all. It's important to me that I had a chance to tell you that. All right, Andrew."
It was an unmistakable dismissal. Andrew no longer had Sir's attention. He released Sir's trembling hand and stepped back from the bed, taking up a position alongside George and Little Miss. Little Miss reached forward and touched Andrew's arm just above the elbow, lightly, affectionately. But she said nothing. Nor did George.
The old man seemed to have withdrawn into some private realm, far away. The only sound in the room now was Sir's increasingly rough breathing, becoming ever more harsh, ever less regular. Sir lay motionless, staring upward at nothing at all. His face was as expressionless as any robot's.
Andrew was utterly at a loss. He could only remain standing, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless, watching what he knew must be Sir's final moments.
The old man's breathing grew rougher yet. He made an odd gargling sound, deep in his throat, that was like no sound Andrew had ever heard in his entire existence.
Then all was still. Other than the cessation of Sir's breathing, Andrew was unable to detect any change in him. He had been virtually motionless a moment ago and he was motionless now. He had stared blindly upward before and he was staring upward now. Andrew realized, though, that something profound had just happened, something that was wholly beyond his comprehension. Sir had passed across that mysterious threshold that separated death from life. There was no more Sir. Sir was gone. Only this empty husk remained.
Little Miss broke the endless silence at last with a soft cough. There were no tears in her eyes, but Andrew could see that she was deeply moved.
She said, "I'm glad you got here before he went, Andrew. You belonged here. You were one of us."
Once more Andrew did not know what to reply.
Little Miss said, " And it was wonderful to hear him say what he did to you. He may not have seemed friendly to you toward the end, Andrew, but he was old, you know. And it hurt him that you should have wanted to be free. But he forgave you for that right at the last, didn't he, Andrew?"
And then Andrew found the words to say. He said, "I never would have been free without him, Little Miss."
Ten
IT WAS ONLY AFTER Sir's death that Andrew started to wear clothes. He began with an old pair of trousers at first, a pair that he had obtained from George Charney.
It was a daring experiment, and he knew it. Robots, being metallic in exterior cladding and sexless in design-despite the "he" or "she" designations that their owners tended to hang on them-had no need for clothing, neither as protection against the elements nor as any sort of shield for modesty. And no robot, so far as Andrew knew, had ever worn any.
But some curious longing within Andrew seemed to have arisen lately that led him to want to cover his body in the way humans did, and-without pausing to examine the motivation that was leading him toward it-he set out to do so.
The day Andrew acquired the trousers, George had been with him in his workshop, helping him stain some porch furniture for his own house. Not that Andrew needed the help-indeed, it would have been very much simpler all around if George had let him do it by himself-but George had insisted on participating in the job. It was furniture for his own porch, after all. He was the man of the house-George was married now, and a lawyer with the old Feingold firm, which for the past few months had been caned Feingold and Charney, with Stanley Feingold as the senior partner-and he took his adult responsibilities very, very seriously.
At the end of the day the furniture was stained and so, quite thoroughly, was George. He had splotches of stain on his hands, on his ears, on the tip of his nose. His russet mustache and ever more flamboyant side-whiskers were stained too. And, of course, there was stain allover his clothing. But at least George had come prepared for that, bringing an expendable shirt to work in and a disreputable-looking pair of trousers that he must have had since his high school days.
As he was changing back into his regular clothes when the job was done, George crumpled up the old shirt and trousers and said, as he tossed them aside, "You might as well just throw these things in the trash, Andrew. They're of no use to me any more."
George was right about the shirt. Not only was it badly stained, but it had split right down the seam from the arm to the shirt-tail when George reached out too far too quickly while trying to turn a porch table on its side. But the trousers, frayed and worn as they were, seemed salvageable to Andrew.
He held them up with their legs dangling. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'd like to keep these for myself."
George grinned. "To use as rags, you mean?"
Andrew paused just a moment before replying.
"To wear," he said.
Now it was George's turn to pause. Andrew could see the surprise on his face, and then the amusement. George was trying hard not to smile, and he was more or less succeeding at it, but the effort was all too obvious to Andrew's eyes.