and Mechanical Men for building the Three Laws into their brains, because some shyster will claim it's an infringement of their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Robots will want to vote. Oh, don't you see, Mandy? It'll be an immense headache for everybody."
"It doesn't have to be," Little Miss replied. "This doesn't have to be a worldwide cause cйlиbre. It's simply an understanding between Andrew and us. All that we actually want is a privately executed legal document, Father, drawn up by John Feingold, signed by you, witnessed by me, given to Andrew, which will stipulate that he-"
"No. That would be utterly worthless. Look, Mandy, I sign the paper and then I die, and Andrew stands up on his hind legs and says, 'So long, everybody, I'm a free robot and I'm heading out now to seek fame and fortune, and here's the paper that proves it,' and the first time he opens his mouth and says that to someone they'll laugh in his face and tear up his little piece of meaningless paper for him and ship him back to the factory to be dismantled. Because the piece of paper won't have given him any kind of protection that has the slightest validity in our society. No. No. If you insist on my doing this nonsensical thing, I have to do it the right way or else I won't bother at all. We can't simply give Andrew his freedom just by drawing up a little paper involving just us. This is a matter for the courts."
"Very well. Then we do it through the courts."
"But don't you realize what that would mean?" Sir demanded. He was angry again. "All the issues that I just raised will be certain to come out. There'll be tremendous controversy. And then the filing of briefs-the appeals-the public outcry-and ultimately the verdict. Which will be against us, without any question."
He glared at Andrew. "See here, you!" There was a harsh grating quality in Sir's voice that Andrew had never heard before. "Do you comprehend what we've been saying here? The only way I can free you, if it's going to have the slightest meaning, is to do it by recognized legal means. But there are no recognized legal means for freeing robots. Once this thing gets into the courts, not only are you going to fail to achieve your goal, but the court will take official cognizance of an the money that you've been amassing, and you're going to lose that too. They'll tell you that a robot has no legal right to earn money or establish bank accounts to keep it in, and either they'll confiscate it outright or they'll force me to take it away from you myself, though I don't have any need for it whatever or any desire to have it. That'll be an embarrassment to me and a dead loss to you. You still won't be free, whatever that may mean to you, and you won't have your precious bank account either. Well, Andrew? Is all this rigmarole worth the chance of losing your money?"
"Freedom is a priceless thing, Sir," Andrew said. "And the chance of gaining my freedom is worth any amount of money that I may possess."
Chapter Eight
IT TROUBLED ANDREW greatly that the process of seeking his freedom might cause further distress for Sir. Sir was very fragile now-there was no disguising that, no avoiding the reality of it-and anything that might be a drain on his flagging energies, anything that might upset or disturb or in any way trouble him, might all too readily endanger his life.
And yet Andrew felt it essential that he press onward with his legal action, now that he had brought the matter up. To turn away from it at this point would be a betrayal of his own integrity. It would mean a repudiation of the independent and self-actuated persona that he had felt burgeoning within his positronic brain for year after year.
At first the promptings of that persona had bewildered and even alarmed him. It seemed wrong to him, a flaw in his design, that it should be there at all. But over the course of time he had come to accept its existence as a real thing. Freedom-the state of not being a slave, the state of not being a thing-was what that persona demanded now. And had to have.
He knew there were risks. The court might share his attitude that freedom was a thing