"
Nor was there. How could a robot possibly take offense at anything a human said or did? But somehow Andrew thought it best not to point that out to her just now. If Miss felt a need to apologize, he must permit her to fulfill that need-even though her cruel words had not disturbed him in the first place.
It would be absurd for him to deny that he was a machine. That was exactly what he was.
And as for being a dumb machine, well, he had no real idea of what she had meant by that. He had adequate intelligence capacity to meet the needs placed upon him. Doubtless there were robots more intelligent than he was, but he had not encountered them. Had she meant that he was less intelligent than humans are? The statement was meaningless to him. He knew no way of comparing robot intelligence with human intelligence. Quantitatively and qualitatively, their manners of thinking were two entirely different processes-everyone was agreed on that.
Soon the wind became chillier. It whipped the girls' dresses about and hurled showers of sand in their faces and against Andrew's shining hull. The girls decided that they had had enough of playing on the beach.
As they started toward the path, Little Miss picked up the piece of driftwood that she had found before, and tucked it through her belt. She was always collecting strange little treasures of that sort.
That evening, when he was off duty, Andrew went down to the beach by himself and swam out to the cormorant rock simply to see how long it would take. Even in the darkness, he managed it easily and swiftly. Very likely, Andrew realized now, he could have managed it without exposing Miss and Little Miss to any great period of risk. Not that he would have done so, but it would have been possible.
No one had requested Andrew to make the nighttime swim to the rock. It was entirely his own idea. A matter of curiosity, so to speak.