Blade Runner (Do Androids dream of electric
sheep)
To Maren Augusta Bergrud
A TURTLE WHICH EXPLORER CAPTAIN COOK GAVE TO THE KING OF TONGA IN 1777 DIED
YESTERDAY. IT WAS NEARLY 200 YEARS OLD. Reuters, 1966; 1 A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood
organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised - it always surprised him
to find himself awake without prior notice - he rose from the bed, stood up in
his multicoloured pyjamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened
her grey, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again. 2 In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a
single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room. 3 On his way to work Rick Deckard, as lord knew how many other people, stopped
briefly to skulk about in front of one of San Francisco's larger pet shops,
along animal row. In the centre of the block-long display window an ostrich, in
a heated clear-plastic cage, returned his stare. The bird, according to the info
plaque attached to the cage, had just arrived from a zoo in Cleveland. It was
the only ostrich on the West Coast. After staring at it, Rick spent a few more
minutes staring grimly at the price tag. He then continued on to the Hall of
Justice on Lombard Street and found himself a quarter of an hour late to
work. 4 Maybe I'm worried, Rick Deckard conjectured, that what happened to Dave will
happen to me. An andy smart enough to laser him could probably take me, too. But
that didn't seem to be it.
August 10, 1923 - June 14, 1967
AND STILL I DREAM HE TREADS THE LAWN,
WALKING GHOSTLY IN THE DEW,
PIERCED BY MY GLAD SINGING THROUGH
Yeats;
Auckland
THE ANIMAL, CALLED TU'IMALILA, DIED
AT THE ROYAL PALACE GROUND IN THE TONGAN CAPITAL OF NUKU, ALOFA.
THE PEOPLE
OF TONGA REGARDED THE ANIMAL AS A CHIEF AND SPECIAL KEEPERS WERE APPOINTED TO
LOOK AlTER IT. IT WAS BLINDED IN A BUSH FIRE A FEW YEARS AGO.
TONGA RADIO
SAID TU'IMALILA'S CARCASS WOULD BE SENT TO THE AUCKLAND MUSEUM IN NEW
ZEALAND.
'You
set your Penfield too weak,' he said to her. 'I'll reset It and you'll be awake
and-'
'Keep your hand off my settings.' Her voice held bitter sharpness. 'I
don't want to be awake.'
He seated himself beside her, bent over her, and
explained softly. 'If you set the surge up high enough, you'll be glad you're
awake; that's the whole point. At setting C it overcomes the threshold barring
consciousness, as it does for me.' Friendlily, because he felt well-disposed
toward the world - his setting had been at D - he patted her bare, pale
shoulder.
'Get your crude cop's hand away,' Iran said.
'I'm not a cop.' He
felt irritable, now, although he hadn't dialled for it.
'You're worse,' his
wife said, her eyes still shut. 'You're a murderer hired by the
cops.'
'I've,never killed a human being in my life.' His irritability bad
risen, now; had become outright hostility.
Iran said, 'Just those poor
andys.'
'I notice you've never had any hesitation as to spending the bounty
money I bring home on whatever momentarily attracts your attention.' He rose,
strode to the console of his mood organ. 'Instead of saving,' he said, 'so we
could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake electric one upstairs. A mere
electric animal, and me earning all that I've worked my way up to through the
years.' At his console he hesitated between dialling for a thalamic suppressant
(which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make
him irked enough to win the argument).
3rd january
1992
'If you dial,' Iran said, eyes open and
watching, 'for greater venom, then I'll dial the same. I'll dial the maximum and
you'll see a fight that makes every argument we've had up to now seem like
nothing. Dial and see; just try me.' She rose swiftly, loped to the console of
her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
He sighed, defeated by her
threat. 'I'll dial what's on my schedule for today.' Examining the schedule for
3 January 1992, he saw that a businesslike professional attitude was called for.
'If I dial by schedule,' he said warily, 'will you agree to also?' He waited,
canny enough not to commit himself until his wife had agreed to follow
suit.
'My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,'
Iran said.
'What? Why did you schedule that?' It defeated the whole purpose
of the mood organ. 'I didn't even know you could set it for that,' he said
gloomily.
'I was sitting here one afternoon,' Iran said, 'and naturally I had
turned on Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends and he was talking about a
big news item he's about to break and then that awful commercial came on, the
one I hate; you know, for Mountibank Lead Codpieces. And so for a minute I shut
off the sound. And I heard the building, this building; I heard the-' She
gestured.
'Empty apartments,' Rick said. Sometimes he heard them at night
when he was supposed to be asleep. And yet, for this day and age a one-half
occupied conapt building rated high in the scheme of population density; out in
what had been before the war the suburbs one could find buildings entirely empty
... or so he had heard. He had let the information remain secondhand; like most
people he did not care to experience it directly.
'At that moment,' Iran
said, 'when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialled it.
So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn't feel it. My first
reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ.
ut then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just
in this building but everywhere, and not reacting - do you see? I guess you
don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it
"absence of appropriate affect". So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my
mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair.' Her
dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth.
'So I put it on my schedule for twice a month: I think that's a reasonable
amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth
after everybody who's smart has emigrated, don't you think?'
'But a mood like
that,' Rick said, 'you're apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like
that, about total reality, is self.perpetuating.'
'I programme an automatic
resetting for three hours later,' his wife said sleekly. 'A 481. Awareness of
the manifold possibilities open to me in the future; new hope that -'
'I know
481.' he interrupted. He had dialled out the combination many times; he relied
on it greatly. 'Listen,' he said, seating himself on his bed and taking hold of
her hands to draw her down beside him, 'even with an automatic cut-off its
dangerous to undergo a depression, any kind. Forget what you've scheduled and
I'll forget what I've scheduled; we'll dial a 104 together and both experience
it, and then you stay in it while I reset mine for my usual businesslike
attitude. That way I'll want to hop up to the roof and check out the sheep and
then head for the office; meanwhile I'll know you're not sitting here brooding
with no TV.' He released her slim, long fingers, passed through the spacious
apartment to the living. room, which smelled faintly of last night's cigarettes.
There he bent to turn on the TV.
From the bedroom Iran's voice came 'I can't
stand TV before breakfast.'
dial
888
'Dial 888,' Rick said as the set warmed. 'The
desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it.'
'I don't feel like dialling
anything at all now,' Iran said.
'Then dial 3,' he said.
'I can't dial a
setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want
to dial, I don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to
dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I
just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor' Her voice had become
sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move,
as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute
inertia, settled over her.
He turned up the TV sound, and the voice of Buster
Friendly boomed out and filled the room '- ho ho, folks. Time now for a brief
note on today's weather. The Mongoose satellite reports that fallout will be
especially pronounced toward noon and will then taper off, so all you folks
who'll be venturing out -,
Appearing beside him, her long nightgown trailing
wispily, Iran shut off the TV set. 'Okay, I give up; I'll dial. Anything you
want me to be; ecstatic sexual bliss - I feel so bad I'll even endure that. What
the hell. What difference does it make?'
'I'll dial for both of us,' Rick
said, and led her back into the bedroom. There, at her console, he dialled 594:
pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters. On his own
console he dialled for a creative and fresh attitude toward his job, although
this he hardly needed; such was his habitual, innate approach without recourse
to Penfield artificial brain stimulation.
After a hurried breakfast - he had
lost time due to the discussion with his wife - he ascended clad for venturing
out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead Codpiece, to the covered roof
pasture whereon his electric sheep 'grazed'. Whereon it, sophisticated piece of
hardware that it was, chomped away in simulated contentment, bamboozling the
other tenants of the building.
Of course, some of their animals undoubtedly
consisted of electronic circuitry fakes, too; he had of course never nosed into
the matter, any more than they, his neighbours, had pried into the real workings
of his sheep. Nothing could be more impolite. To say, 'Is your sheep genuine?'
would be worse breach of manners than to inquire whether a citizen's teeth,
hair, or internal organs would test out authentic.
The morning air, spilling
over with radioactive motes, grey and sun-beclouding, belched about him,
haunting his nose; he sniffed involuntarily the taint of death. Well, that was
too strong a description for it, he decided as he made his way to the particular
plot of sod which he owned along with the unduly 'large apartment below. The
legacy of World War Terminus had diminished in potency; those who could not
survive the dust had passed into oblivion years ago, and the dust, weaker now
and confronting the strong survivors, only deranged minds and genetic
properties. Despite his lead codpiece - the dust - undoubtedly - filtered in and
at him, brought him daily, so long as he failed to emigrate, its little load of
befoulling filth. So far, medical checkups taken monthly confirmed him as a
regular: a man who could reproduce within the tolerances set by law. Any month,
however, the exam by the San Francisco Police Department doctors could reveal
otherwise. Continually, new specials came into existence, created out of
regulars by the omnipresent dust. The saying currently blabbed by posters, TV
ads, and government junk mail, ran: 'Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is
yours!' Very true, Rick thought as he opened the gate to his little pasture and
approached his electric sheep. But I can't emigrate, he said to himself. Because
of my job.
The owner of the adjoining pasture, his conapt neighbour Bill
Barbour, hailed him; he, like Rick, had dressed for work but had stopped off on
the way to check his animal, too.
'My horse,' Barbour declared beamingly, 'is
pregnant.' He indicated the big Percheron, which stood staring off in an empty
fashion into space. 'What do you say to that?'
'I say pretty soon you'll have
two horses,' Rick said. He had reached his sheep, now; it lay ruminating, its
alert eyes fixed on him in case he had brought any rolled oats with him.
The
alleged sheep contained an oat-tropic circuit; at the sight of such cereals it
would scramble up convincingly and amble over. 'What's she pregnant by?' he
asked Barbour. 'The wind?'
'I bought some of the highest quality fertilizing
plasma' available in California,' Barbour informed him. 'Through inside contacts
I have with the State Animal Husbandry Board. Don't you remember last week when
their inspector was out here examining Judy? They're eager to have her foal;
she's an unmatched superior.' Barbour thumped his horse fondly on the neck and
she inclined her head toward him.
'Ever thought of selling your horse?' Rick
asked. He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and
maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a
social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article. He
had therefore no choice except to continue. Even were he not to care himself,
there remained his wife, and Iran did care. Very much.
Barbour said, 'It
would be immoral to sell my horse.'
'Sell the colt, then. Having two animals
is more immoral than not having any.'
Puzzled, Barbour said, 'How do you
mean? A lot of people have two animals, even three, four, and like in the case
of Fred Washborne, who owns the algae-processing plant my brother works at, even
five. Didn't you see that article about his duck in yesterday's Chronicle? It's
supposed to be the heaviest, largest Moscovy on the West Coast.' The man's eyes
glazed over, imagining such possessions; he drifted by degrees into a
trance.
Exploring about in his coat pockets, Rick found his creased,
much-studied copy of Sidney's Animal & Fowl Catalogue January supplement. Ho
looked in the index, found colts (vide horses, offsp.) and presently had the
prevailing national price. 'I can buy a Percheron colt from Sidney's for five
thousand dollars,' he said aloud.
'No you can't,' Barbour said. 'Look at the
listing again; it's in italics. That means they don't have any in stock, but
that would be the price if they did have.'
'Suppose,' Rick said, 'I pay you
five hundred dollars a month for, ten months. Full catalogue
value.'
Pityingly, Barbour said, 'Deckard, you don't understand about horses;
there's a reason why Sidney's doesn't have any Percheron colts in stock.
Percheron colts just don't change hands - at catalogue value, even. They're too
scarce, even relatively inferior ones.' He leaned across their common fence,
gesticulating. 'I've had Judy for three years and not in all that time have I
seen a Percheron mare of her quality. To acquire her I had to fly to Canada, and
I personally drove her back here myself to make sure she wasn't stolen. You
bring an animal like this anywhere around Colorado or Wyoming and they'll knock
you off to get hold of it. You know why? Because back before W.W.T. there
existed literally hundreds -'
'But,' Rick interrupted, 'for you to have two
horses and me none, that violates the whole basic theological and moral
structure of Mercerism.'
'You have your sheep; hell, you can follow the
Ascent in your individual life, and when you grasp the two handles of empathy
you approach honourably. Now if you didn't have that old sheep, there, I'd see
some logic in your position. Sure, if I had two animals and you didn't have any,
I'd be helping deprive you of true fusion with Mercer. But every family in this
building - let's see; around fifty: one to every three apts, as I compute it -
every one of us has an animal of some sort. Graveson has that chicken over
there.' He gestured north. Oakes and his wife have that big red dog that barks
in the night.' He pondered. 'I think Ed Smith has a cat down in his apt; at
least he says so, but no one's ever seen it. Possibly he's just
pretending.'
Going over to his sheep, Rick bent down, searching in the thick
white wool - the fleece at least was genuine - until he found what he was
looking for: the concealed control panel of the mechanism. As Barbour watched he
snapped open the panel covering, revealing it. 'See?' he said to Barbour. 'You
understand now why I want your colt so badly?'
After an interval Barbour
said, 'You poor guy. Has it always been this way?'
'No,' Rick said, once
again dosing the panel covering of his electric sheep; be straightened up,
turned, and faced his neighbour. 'I had a real sheep, originally. My wife's
father gave it to us outright when he emigrated. Then, about a year ago,
remember that time I took it to the vet - you were up here that morning when I
came out and found it lying on its side and it couldn't get up.'
'You got it
to its feet,' Barbour said, remembering and nodding. 'Yeah, you managed to lift
it up but then after a minute or two of walking around it fell over
again.'
Rick said, 'Sheep get strange diseases. Or put another way, sheep get
a lot of diseases but the symptoms are always the same; the sheep can't get up
and there's no way to tell how serious it is, whether it's a sprained leg or the
animal's dying of tetanus. That's what mine died of: tetanus.'
'Up here?'
Barbour said. 'On the roof?'
'The hay,' Rick explained. 'That one time I
didn't get all the wire off the bale; I left a piece and Groucho - that's what I
called him, then - got a scratch and in that way contracted tetanus. I took him
to the vet's and he died, and I thought about it, and finally I called one of
those shops that manufacture artificial animals and I showed them a photograph
of Groucho. They made this.' He indicated the reclining ersatz animal, which
continued to ruminate attentively, still watching alertly for any indication of
oats. 'It's a premium job. And I've put as much time and attention into caring
for it as I did when it was real. But-' He shrugged.
'It's not the same,'
Barbour finished.
'But almost. You feel the same doing it; you have to keep
your eye on it exactly as you did when it was really alive. Because they break
down and then everyone in the building knows I've had it at the repair shop six
times, mostly little malfunctions, but if anyone saw them - for instance one
time the voice tape broke or anyhow got fouled and it wouldn't stop basing -
they'd recognize it as a mechanical breakdown.' He added, 'The repair outfit's
truck is of course marked "animal hospital something". And the driver dresses
like a vet, completely in white'. He glanced suddenly at his watch, remembering
the time. 'I have to get to work,' he said to Barbour. 'I'll see you this
evening.'
As he started toward his car Barbour called after him hurdedly,
'U'm, I won't say anything to anybody here in the building.'
Pausing, Rick
started to say thanks. But then something of the despair that Iran had been
talking about tapped him on the shoulder and he said, 'I don't know; maybe it
doesn't make any difference.'
'But they'll look down on you. Not all of them,
but some. You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they
consider it immoral and anti-empathic. I mean, technically it's not a crime like
it was right after W.W.T. but the feeling's still there.'
'God,' Rick said
futilely, and gestured empty-handed. 'I want to have an animal; I keep trying to
buy one. But on my salary on what a city employee makes -' If, he thought, I
could get lucky in my work again. As I did two years ago when I managed to bag
four andys during one month. If I had known then, he thought, that Groucho was
going to die but that had been before the tetanus. Before the two-inch piece of
broken, hypodermic-like baling wire,
'You could buy a cat,' Barbour offered.
'Cats are cheap; look in Sidney's catalogue.'
Rick said quietly, 'I don't
want a domestic pet. I want what I originally had, a large animal. A sheep or if
I can get the money a cow or a steer or what have you: a horse.' The bounty from
retiring five andys would do it, he realized. A thousand dollars apiece, over
and above my salary. Then somewhere I could find, from someone, what I want.
Even if the listing in Sidney's Animal & Fowl is in italics. Five thousand
dollars - but, he thought,- the five andys first have to make their way to Earth
from one of the colony planets; I can't control that, I can't make five of them
come here, and even if I could there are other bounty hunters with other police
agencies throughout the world. The andys would specifically have to take up
residence in Northern California, and the senior bounty hunter in this area,
Dave Holden, would have to die or retire.
'Buy a cricket,' Barbour suggested
wittily. 'Or a mouse. Hey, for twenty-five bucks you can buy a full-grown
mouse.'
Rick said, 'Your horse could die, like Groucho died, without warning.
When you get home from work this evening you could find her laid out on her
back, her feet in the air, like a bug. Like what you said, a cricket,' He strode
off, car key in his hand.
'Sorry if I offended you,' Barbour said
nervously.
In silence Rick Deckard plucked open the door of his hovercar. He
had nothing further to say to his neighbour; his mind was on his work, on the
day ahead.
This ownerless ruin
had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the
suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit; the entire
peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints,
and now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world.
Mostly the former; it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of
the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel, the Rand Corporation - which had,
in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like the apartment owners, the
corporation had departed, evidently for good. Noone missed it.
In addition,
no one today remembered why the War had come about or who, if anyone, bad won.
The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in
no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First,
strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat,
fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no
earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval
plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead
rats. This plague, however, had descended from above.
After the owls, of
course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and
understood. A meagre colonization programme had been underway before the war but
now that the sun had ceased to shine on Earth the colonizalion entered an
entirely new phase. In connection with this a weapon of war, ihe Synthetic
Freedom Fighter, had been modified; able to function on an alien world the
humanoid robot - strictly speaking, the organic android - had become the mobile
donkey engine of the colonization programme. under U.N. law each emigrant
automatically received possesion of an android subtype of his choice, and, by
1990, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of
American automobiles of the 1960s.
That had been the ultimate incentive of
emigration: the android servant as carrot, the radioactive fallout as stick. The
U.N. had made it easy to emigrate, difficult if not impossible to stay.
Loitering on Earth potentially meant finding oneself abruptly classed as
biologically unacceptable, a menace to the pristine heredity of the race. Once
pegged as special, a citizen, even if accepting sterilization, dropped out of
history. He ceased, in effect, to be part of mankind. And yet persons here and
there declined to migrate; that, even to those involved, constituted a
perplexing irrationality. Logically, every regular should have emigrated
already. Perhaps, deformed as it was, Earth remained familiar, to be clung to.
Or possibly the nonemigrant imagined that the tent of dust would deplete itself
finally. In any case thousands of individuals remained, most of them
constellated in urban areas where they could physically see one another, take
heart at their mutual presence. Those appeared to be the relatively sane ones.
And, in dubious addition to them, occasional peculiar entities remained in the
virtually abandoned suburbs.
John Isidore, being yammered at by the
television set in his living-room as he shaved in the bathroom, was one of
these.
He simply had wandered to this spot in the early days following the
war. In those evil times no one had known, really, what they were doing.
Populations, detached by the war, had roamed, squatted temporarily at first one
region and then another. Back then the fallout had been sporadic and highly
variable; some states had been nearly free of it, others became saturated. The
displaced populations moved as the dust moved. The peninsula south of San
Francisco had been at first dust-free, and a great body of persons had responded
by taking up residence there; when the dust arrived, some had died and the rest
had departed. J.R Isidore remained.
The TV set shouted, '- duplicates the
halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states! Either as body servants or
tireless field hands, the custom-tailored humanoid robot - designed specifically
for YOUR UNIQUE NEEDS, FOR YOU AND YOU ALONE - given to you on your arrival
absolutely free, equipped fully, as specified by you before your departure from
Earth; this loyal, trouble-free companion in the greatest, boldest adventure
contrived by man in modern history will provide -' It continued on and on.
I
wonder if I'm late for work, Isidore wondered as he scraped. He did not own a
working clock; generally he depended on the TV for time signals, but today was
Interspace Horizons Day, evidently. Anyhow the TV claimed this to be the fifth
(or sixth?) anniversary of the founding of New America, the chief U.S.
settlement on Mars. And his TY set, being partly broken, picked up only the
channel which had been nationalized during the war and still remained so; the
government in Washington, with its colonization programme, constituted the sole
sponsor which Isidore found himself forced to listen to.
'Let's hear from Mrs
Maggie Klugman,' the TV announcer suggested to John Isidore, who wanted only to
know the time. 'A recent immigrant to Mars, Mrs Klugman in a interview taped
live in New New York had this to say. Mrs Klugman, how would you contrast your
life back on contaminated Earth with your new life here in a world rich with
every imaginable possibility?' A pause, and then a tired, dry, middle-aged,
female voice said, 'I think what I and my family of three noticed was the
dignity.' 'The dignity, Mrs Klugman?' the announcer asked. 'Yes,' Mrs Klugman,
now of New New York, Mars, said. 'It's a hard thing to explain. - Having a
servant you can depend on in these troubled times... . I find it
reassuring.'
'Back on Earth, Mrs Klugman, in the old days, did you also worry
about finding yourself classified, ahem, as a special?'
'Oh my husband and
myself worried ourselves nearly to death. Of course, once we emigrated that
worry vanished, fotunately forever.'
To himself John Isidore thought acidly,
And it's gone away me, too, without my having to emigrate. He had been a special
now for over a year, and not merely in regard to the distorted genes which he
carried. Worse still, he had failed to pass the minimum mental faculties test,
which made him in popular parlance a chickenhead. Upon him the contempt of three
planets descended. However, despite this, he survived. He had his job, driving a
pickup and delivery truck for a false animal repair firm; the Van Ness Pet
Hospital and his gloomy, gothic boss Hannibal Stoat accepted him as human and
this he appreciated. Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr Stoat occasionaly declared.
Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a
dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he
would cease to be a chickenhead. Mr Stoat, when this was pointed out to him,
acknowledged its truth. And there existed chickenheads infinitely stupider than
Isidore, who could hold no jobs at all, who remained in custodial institutions
quaintly called 'Institute of Special Trade Skills of America', the word
'special' having to get in there somehow, as always.
'- your husband felt no
protection,' the TV announcer was saying, 'in owning and continually wearing an
expensive and clumsy radiation-proof lead codpiece, Mrs Klugman?'
'My
husband,' Mrs Klugman began, but at that point, have finished shaving, Isidore
strode into the living room and shut off the TV set.
Silence. It flashed from
the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if
generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered grey
wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken
appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time
Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed
out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked
ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of
vision, as if it - the silence - meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it
assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he
experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had
often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without
subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back
its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then,
if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it
peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept
sensory apparatus? - Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he
compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorated, blind building of a
thousand uninhabited apartments which like all its counterparts, fell, day by
day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would
merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the
ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself
would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then,
naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as
he stood here in his stricken living-room alone with the lungless,
all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
Better, perhaps, to turn the TV
back on. But the ads, directed at the remaining regulars, frightened him. They
informed him in a countless procession of ways that he, a special, wasn't
wanted. Had no use. Could not, even if he wanted to, emigrate. So why listen to
that? he asked himself irritably. Fork them and their colonization; I hope a war
gets started there - after all, it theoretically could - and they wind up like
Earth. And everybody who emigrated turns out to be special.
Okay, he thought;
I'm off to work. He reached for the doorknob that opened the way out into the
unfit hall, then shrank back as "e glimpsed the vacuity of the rest of the
building. It lay in wait for him, out here, the force which he had felt busily
penetrating his specific apartment. God, he thought, and reshut the door. He was
not ready for the trip up those clanging stairs to the empty roof where he had
no animal. The echo of himself ascending: the echo of nothing. Time to grasp the
handles, he said to himself, and crossed the living room to the black empathy
box.
black empathy
box
When he turned it on the' usual faint smell
of negative ions emerged from the power supply; be breathed in eagerly, already
buoyed up. Then the cathode-ray tube glowed like an imitation, feeble TV image;
a collage formed, made of apparently random colours, trails, and configurations
which, until the handles were grasped, amounted to nothing. So, taking a deep
breath to steady himself, he grasped the twin handles.
The visual image
congealed; he saw at once a famous landscape, the old, brown, barren ascent,
with tufts of dried-out bonelike weeds poking slantedly into a dim and sunless
sky.
One single figure, more or less human in form, toiled its way up the
hillside, an elderly man wearing a dull, featureless robe covering as meagre as
if it bad been snatched from the hostile emptiness of the sky. The man, Wilbur
Mercer, ploaded ahead, and, as he clutched the handles, John Isidore gradually
experienced a waning of the living doom in which he stood; the dilapidated
furniture and walls ebbed out and he ceased to experience them at all. He found
himself, instead, as always before, entering into the landscape of drab hill,
drab sky. And at the same time he no longer witnessed the climb of the elderly
man. His own feet now scraped, sought purchase, among the familiar loose stones;
he felt the same old painful, irregular roughness beneath his feet and once
again smelled the acrid haze of the sky - not Earth's sky but that of some place
alien, distant, and yet, by means of the empathy box, instantly available.
He
had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging - accompanied
by mental and spiritual identification - with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred. As
it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on
Earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others,
incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of
their many individual existences. They - and he - cared about one thing; this
fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the
need to ascend. Step by step it evolved, so slowly as to be nearly
imperceptible. But it was there. Higher, he thought as stones rattled downward
under his feet. Today we are higher than yesterday, and tomorrow - he, the
compound figure of Wilbur Mercer, glanced up to view the ascent ahead.
Impossible to make out the end. Too far. But it would come.
A rock, hurled at
him, struck his arm. He felt the pain. He half turned and another rock sailed
past him, missing him; it collided with the earth and the sound startled him.
Who? he wondered, peering to see his tormentor. The old antagonists, manifesting
themselves at the periphery of his vision; it, or they, had followed him all the
way up the hill and they would remain until at the top -
He remembered the
top, the sudden levelling of the hill, when the climb ceased and the other part
of it began. How many times have he done this? The several times blurred; future
and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually
experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment, the standing still
and resting during which he rubbed the cut on his arm which the stone had left.
God, he thought in weariness. In what way is this fair? Why am I up here alone
like this, being tormented by something I can't even see? And then, within him,
the mutual babble of everyone else in fusion broke the illusion of
aloneness.
You felt it, too, he thought. Yes, the voices answered. We got
hit, on the left arm; it hurts like hell. Okay, he said. We better get started
moving again. He resumed walking, and all of them accompanied him
immediately.
Wilbur Mercers
story
Once, he remembered, it had been different.
Back before the curse had come, an earlier, happier part of life. They, his
foster parents Frank and Cora Mercer, had found him floating on an inflated
rubber air-rescue raft, off the coast of New England ... or had it been Mexico,
near the port of Tampico? He did not now remember the circumstances. Childhood
had been nice; he had loved all life, especially the animals, had in fact been
able for a time to bring dead animals back as they had been. He lived with
rabbits and bugs, wherever it was, either on Earth or a colony world; now he had
forgotten that, too. But he recalled the killers, because they had arrested him
as a freak, more special than any of the other specials. And due to that
everything had changed.
Local law prohibited the time-reversal faculty by
which the dead returned to life; they had spelled it out to him during his
sixteenth year. He continued for another year to do it secretly, in still
remaining woods, but an old woman whom he had seen or heard of had told. Without
his parents' consent they - the killers - had bombarded the unique nodule which
had formed in his brain, had attacked it with radioactive cobalt, and this had
plunged him into a different world, one whose existence he had never suspected.
It had been a pit of corpses and dead bones and he had struggled for years to
get up from it. The donkey and especially the toad, the creatures most important
to him, had vanished, had become extinct; only rotting fragments, an eyeless
head here, part of a hand there, remained. At last a bird which had come there
to die told him where he was. He had sunk down into the tomb world. He could not
get out until the bones strewn around him grew back into living creatures; he
had become joined to the metabolism of other lives and until they rose he could
not rise either.
How long that part of the cycle had lasted he did not now
nothing had happened, generally, so it had been measureless. But at last the
bones had regained flesh; the empty had filled up and the new eyes had seen,
while meantime the restored beaks and mouths had cackled, barked, and
caterwauled. Possibly he had done it; perhaps the extrasensory node of his brain
had finally grown back. Or maybe he hadn't accomplished it; very likely it could
have been a natural process. Anyhow he was no longer sinking he had begun to
ascend, along with the others Long ago he had lost sight of them. He found
himself evidently climbing alone. But they were there. They still accompanied
him; he felt them, strangely, inside him.
Isidore stood holding the two
handles, experiencing himself as encompassing every other living thing, and
then, reluctantly, he let go. It had to end, as always, and anyhow his arm ached
and bled where the rock had struck it.
black box
and reality
Releasing the handles he examined his
arm, then made his way unsteadily to the bathroom of his apartment to wash the
cut off. This was not the first wound he had received while in fusion with
Mercer and it probably would not be the last. People, especially elderly ones,
had died, particularly later on at the top of the hill when the torment began in
earnest. I wonder if I can go through that part again, he said to himself as he
swabbed the injury. Chance of cardiac arrest; be better, he reflected, if I
lived in town where those buildings have a doctor standing by with those
electro-spark machines. Here, alone in this place, it's too risky.
But he
knew he'd take the risk. He always had before. As did most people, even oldsters
who were physically fragile.
Using a Kleenex he dried his damaged arm.
new inhabitants
And heard,
muffled and far off, a TV set.
It's someone else in this building, he thought
wildly, unable to believe it. Not my TV; that's off, and I can feel the floor
resonance. It's below, on another level entirely! I'm not alone here any more,
he realized. Another resident has moved in, taken one of the abandoned
apartments, and close enough for me to hear him. Must be level two or level
three, certainly no deeper. Let's see, he thought rapidly. What do you do when a
new resident moves in? Drop by and borrow something, is that how it's done? He
could not remember; this had never happened to him before, here or anywhere
else: people moved out, people emigrated, but nobody ever moved in. You take
them something, he decided. Like a cup of water or rather milk; yes, it's milk
or flour or maybe an egg - or, specifically, their ersatz
substitutes.
Looking in his refrigerator - the compressor had long since
ceased working - be found a dubious cube of margarine. And, with it, set off
excitedly, his heart labouring, for the level Low, I have to keep calm, he
realized. Not let him know I'm a chickenhead. If he finds out I'm a chickenhead
he won't talk to me; that's always the way it is for some reason. I wonder why?
He hurried down the hall.
Bryant,
Holden
As be unlocked his office door his
superior Police Inspector Hardy Bryant, jug-eared and redheaded, sloppily
dressed but wise-eyed and conscious of nearly everything of any importance,
halled him. 'Meet me at nine-thirty in Dave Holden's office.' Inspector Bryant,
as he spoke, flicked briefly through a clipboard of onionskin typed sheets.
'Holden,' he continued as he started off, 'is in Mount Zion Hospital with a
laser track through his spine. He'll be there for a month at least. Until they
can get one of those new organic plastic spinal sections to take hold.'
'What
happened?' Rick asked, chilled. The department's chief bounty hunter had been
all right yesterday; at the end of the day he had as usual zipped off in his
hovercar to his apartment in the crowded high-prestige Nob Hill area of the
city.
Bryant muttered over his shoulder something about ninethirty in' Dave's
office and departed, leaving Rick standing alone.
As he entered his own
office Rick heard the voice of his scretary, Ann Marsten, behind him. 'Mr
Deckard, you know what happened to Mr Holden? He got shot.' She followed after
him into the stuffy, closed-up office and set the airfiltering unit into
motion.
'Yeah,' he responded absently.
'It must have been one of those
new, extra-clever andys the Rosen Association is turning out,' Miss Marsten
said. 'Did you read over the 'company's brochure and the spec sheets? The
Nexus-6 brain unit they're using now is capable of selecting within a field of
two trillion constituents, or ten million separate neural pathways.' She lowered
her voice. 'You missed the vidcall this morning. Miss Wild told me; it came
through the switchboard exactly at nine.'
'A call in?' Rick asked.
Miss
Marsten said, A call out by Mr Bryant to the WOP... in Russia. Asking them if
they would be willing to file a formal written complaint with the Rosen
Association's factory representative East.'
'Harry still wants the Nexus-6
brain unit withdrawn from the market?' He felt no surprise. Since the initial
release of its specifications and performance charts back in August of 1991 most
police agencies which dealt with escaped andys had been protesting. 'The'Soviet
police can't do any more than we can,' he said. Legally, the manufacturers of
the Nexus-6 brain unit operated under colonial law, their parent auto-factory
being on Mars. 'We had better just accept the new unit as a fact of life,' he
said. 'It's always been this way, with every improved brain unit that's come
along. I remember the howls of pain when the Sudermann people showed their old
T-14 back in '89. Every police agency in the Western Hemisphere clamoured that
no test would detect its presence, in an instance of illegal entry here. As a
matter of fact, for a while they were right.' Over fifty of the T-l4 android as
he recalled had made their way by one means or another to Earth, and had not
been detected for a period in some cases up to an entire year. But then the
Voigt Empathy Test had been devised by the Pavlov Institute working in the
Soviet Union. And no T-14 android - insofar, at least, as was known - had
managed to pass that particular test.
'Want to know what the Russian police
said?' Miss Marsten asked. 'I know that, too.' Her freckled, orange face
glowed.
Rick said, 'I'll find out from Harry Bryant.' He felt irritable;
office gossip annoyed him because it always proved better than the truth.
Seating himself at his desk he pointedly fished about in a drawer until Miss
Marsten, perceiving the hint, departed.
From the drawer he produced an
ancient, creased manila envelope. Leaning back, tilting his important-style
chair, he rummaged among the contents of the envelope until he came across what
he wanted: the collected, extant data on the Nexus-6.
A moment's reading
vindicated Miss Marsten's statement; the Nexus-6 did have two trillion
constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations
of cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such brain
structure could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no
intelligence test would trap such an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't
trapped an andy in years, not since the primordial, crude varieties of the
'70s.
The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of
human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with
the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense
standpoint evolved beyond a major - but inferior - segment of mankind. For
better or worse. The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its
master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy
Test, had emerged as criteria. by which to judge. An android, no matter how
gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion
which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism - an experience
which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed
with no difficulty.
theory of
empathy
He had wondered as had most people at one
time or another precisely why an android bounced helplessly about when
confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidetitly, existed only
within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found
throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one thing, the
empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary
organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to
abort a spider's ability to survive. It would make him conscious of the desire
to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed
mammals such as cats, would starve.
Empathy, be once had decided, must be
limited to, herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet.
Because, ultimately, the emphatic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and
victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with. Mercer,
everyone ascended together or, when the cycle bad come to an end, fell together
into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological
insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the
condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any
living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely
cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor
through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed.
Evidently the humanoid
robot constituted a solitary predator.
abstract
evil
Rick liked to think of them that way; it
made his job palatable. In retiring - i.e. killing - an andy he did not violate
the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers, Mercer
had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism,
as it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown
insidiously. In Mercerism, an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of
the tottering, ascending old man, but it was never clear who or what this evil
presence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way,
a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he
saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which bad killed its
master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many
human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to
feel empathic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat - that,
for him, epitomized The Killers.
Thinking about animals reminded him of the
ostrich he had seen in the pet store. Temporarily he pushed away the specs on
the Nexus-6 brain unit, took a pinch of Mrs Siddon's No. 3 & 4 snuff and
cogitated. Then he examined his watch, saw that he had time; he picked up his
desk vidphone and said to Miss Marsten, 'Get me the Happy Dog Pet Shop on Sutter
Street.'
'Yes sir,' Miss Marsten said, and opened her phone book.
They
can't really want that much for the ostrich, Rick said to himself. They expect
you to car-trade, like in the old days.
'Happy Dog Pet Shop,' a man's voice
declared, and on Rick's vidscreen a minute happy face appeared. Animals could be
heard bawling.
'That ostrich you have in your display window,' Rick said; 'he
toyed with a ceramic ashtray before him on the desk. 'What sort of a down
payment would I need for that?' 'Let's see,' the animal salesman said, groping
for a pen and pad of paper. 'One-third down.' He figured. 'May I ask, sir, if
you're going to trade something in?' Guardedly, Rick said, 'I - haven't
decided.' 'Let's say we put the Ostrich on a thirty-month contract,' the
salesman said. 'At a low, low interest rate of six per cent month. That would
make your monthly payment, after a reasonable down -' 'You'll have to lower the
price you're asking,' Rick said. 'Knock off two thousand and I won't trade
anything in; I'll come up with cash.' Dave Holden, he reflected, is out of
action. That could mean a great deal ... depending on how many assignments show
up during the coming month.
'Sir,' the animal salesman said, 'our asking
price is already a thousand dollars under book. Check your Sidney's; I'll hang
on. I want you to see for yourself, sir, that our price is fair.'
Christ,
Rick thought. They're standing firm. However, just for the heck of it, he
wiggled his bent Sidney's out of his coat pocket, thumbed to ostrich comma
male-female, old-young, sick-well, mint-used, and inspected the
prices.
'Mint, male, young, well,' the salesman informed him.
'Thirty
thousand dollars.' He, too, had his Sidney's out. 'We're exactly one thousand
under book. Now, your down payment-'
'I'll think it over,' Rick said, 'and
call you back.' He started to hang up.
'Your name, sir?' the salesman asked
alertly.
'Frank Merriwell,' Rick said.
'And your address, Mr Merriwell? In
case I'm not here when you call back.'
He made up an address and put the
vidphone receiver back on its cradle. All that money, he thought. And yet,
people buy them; some people have that kind of money. Picking up the receiver
again he said harshly, 'Give me an outside line, Miss Marsten. And don't listen
in on the conversation; it's confidential.' He glared at her.
'Yes, sir,'
Miss Marsten said. 'Go ahead and dial.' She then cut herself out of the circuit,
leaving him to face the outside world.
He dialled - by memory - the number of
the false-animal shop at which he had gotten his ersatz sheep. On the small
vidscreen a man dressed like a vet appeared. 'Dr McRae,' the man
declared.
'This is Deckard. How much is an electric ostrich?'
'Oh, I'd say
we could fix you up for less than eight hundred dollars. How soon did you want
delivery? We would have to make it up for you; there's not that much call for
-'
'I'll talk to you later,' Rick interrupted; glancing at his watch he saw
that nine-thirty had arrived. 'Good-bye.' He hurriedly hung up, rose, and
shortly thereafter stood before inspector Bryant's office door. He passed
Bryant's receptionist - attractive, with waist-length braided silver hair - and
then the inspector's secretary, an ancient monster from the Jurassic swamp,
frozen and sly, like some archaic apparition fixated in the tomb world. Neither
woman spoke to him nor he to them. Opening the inner door he nodded to his
superior, who was busy on the phone; seating himself he got out the specs on
Nexus-6, which he had brought with him, and once more read them over as
Inspector Bryant talked away.
He felt depressed. And yet, logically, because
of Dave's sudden disappearance from the work scene, he should beat least
guardedly pleased.
'I see you brought the poop sheet on that new
brain unit,' Inspector Bryant said, hanging up the vidphone.
Rick said,
'Yeah, I heard about it on the grapevine. How many andys are involved and how
far did Dave get?'
'Eight to start with,' Bryant said, consulting his
clipboard. got the first two.'
'And the remaining six are here in Northern
California?'
'As far as we know. Dave thinks so. That was him I was talking
to. I have his notes; they were in his desk. He says all he knows is here.'
Bryant tapped the bundle of notepaper. So far he did not seem inclined to pass
the notes on to Rick; for some reason he continued to leaf through them himself,
frowning and working his tongue in and around the fringes of his mouth.
' I
have nothing on my agenda,' Rick offered. 'I'm ready to take over in Dave's
place.'
Bryant said thoughtfully, 'Dave used the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale
in testing out the individuals he suspected. You realize - you ought to, anyhow
- that this test isn't specific for the new brain units. No test is; the Voigt
scale, altered three years ago by Kampff, is all we have.' He paused, pondering.
'Dave considered it accurate. Maybe it is. But I would suggest this, before you
take out after these six.' Again he tapped the pile of notes. 'Fly to Seattle
and talk with the Rosen people. Have them supply you a representative sampling
of types employing the new Nexus-6 unit.'
'And put them through the
Voigt-Kampff,' Rick said.
'It sounds so easy,' Bryant said, half to
himself.
'Pardon?'
Bryant said, 'I think I'll talk to the Rosen
organization myself, while you're on your way.' He eyed Rick, then, silently.
Finally he grunted, gnawed on a fingernail, and eventually decided on what he
wanted to say. 'I'm going to discuss with them the possibility of including
several humans, as well as their new androids. But you won't know. It'll be my
decision, in conjunction with the manufacturers. It should be set up by the time
you get there.' He abruptly pointed at Rick, his face severe. 'This is the first
time you'll be acting as senior bounty hunter. Dave knows a lot; he's got years
of experience behind him.'
'So have I,' Rick said tensely.
'You've handled
assignments devolving to you from Dave's schedule; he's always decided exactly
which ones to turn over to you and which not to. But now you've got six that he
intended to retire himself - one of which managed to get him first. This one'
Bryant turned the notes around so that Rick could see. 'Max Polokov,' Bryant
said. 'That's what it calls itself, anyhow. Assuming Dave was right. Everything
is based on that assumption, this entire list. And yet the Voigt-Kampff Altered
Scale has only been administered to the first three, the two Dave retired and
then Polokov. It was while Dave was administering the test; that's when Polokov
lasered him.'
'Which proves that Dave was right.' Rick said. Otherwise he
would not have been lasered; Polokov would have no motive.
Theory of schizophrenic and androids emphatic
reaction
'You get started for Seattle,' Bryant
said. 'Don't tell them first; I'll handle it. Listen.' He rose to his feet,
soberly confronted Rick. 'When you run the Voigt-Kampff scale up there, if one
of the humans fails to pass it -'
'That can't happen,' Rick said.
'One
day, a few weeks ago, I talked with Dave about exactly that. He had been
thinking along the same lines. I had a memo from the Soviet police, W.P.O.
itself, circulated throughout Earth plus the colonies. A group of psychiatrists
in Leningrad approached W.P.O. with the following proposition. They want the
latest and most accurate personality profile analytica tools used in determining
the presence of android - in other words the Voigt-Kampff scale - applied to a
carefully selected group of schizoid and schizophrenic human patients. Those,
specifically, which reveal what's called a "flattening of affect". You've heard
of that.'
Rick said, 'That's specifically what the scale measures.'
'Then
you understand what they're worried about.'
'This problem has always existed.
Since we first encountered androids posing as humans. The consensus of police
opinion is known to you in Lurie Kampff's article, written eight years ago.
'Role-taking Blockage in the Undeteriorated Schizophrenic'. Kampff compared the
diminished emphatic faculty found in human mental patients and a superficially
similiar but basically -'
'The Leningrad psychiatrists,' Bryant broke in
brusquely, 'think that a small class of human beings could not pass the
Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work you'd assess
them as humanoid robots. You'd be wrong, by then they'd be dead.' He was silent,
now, waiting for Rick's answer.
'But these individuals,' Rick said, 'would
all be -'
'They'd be in institutions,' Bryant agreed. 'They couldn't
conceivably function in the outside world; they certainly couldn't go undetected
as advanced psychotics - unless of course their breakdown had come recently and
suddenly and no one had gotten around to noticing. But this could happen.'
'A
million to one odds,' Rick said. But he saw the point.
'What worried Dave,'
Bryant continued, 'is this appearance of the new Nexus-6 advance type. The Rosen
organisation assured us, as you know, that a Nexus-6 could be delineated by
standard profile tests. We took their word for it. Now we're forced, as we knew
we would be, to determine it on our own. That's what you'll be doing in Seattle.
You understand, don't you, that this could go wrong either way. If you can't
pick 'out all the humanoid robots, then we have no reliable analytical tool and
we'll never find the ones who're already escaping. If your scale factors out a
human subject, identifies him as android -' Bryant beamed at him icily. 'It
would be awkward, although no one, absolutely not the Rosen people, will make
the news public. Actually we'll be able to sit on it indefinitely, although of
course we'll have to inform W.P.O. and they in turn will notify Leningrad.
Eventually it'll pop out of the 'papes at us. But by then we may have developed
a better scale.' He picked the phone up. 'You want to get started? Use a
department car and fuel yourself at our pumps.'
Standing, Rick said, 'Can I
take Dave Holden's notes with me? I want to read them along the way.'
Bryant
said, 'Let's wait until you've tried out yous scale in Seattle.' His tone was
interestingly merciless, and Rick Deckard noted it.
When he landed the police
department hovercar on the roof of the Rosen Association Building in Seattle he
found a young woman waiting for him. Black-haired and slender, wearing the new
huge dust-filtering glasses, she approached his car, her hands deep in the
pockets of her brightly striped long coat. She had, on her sharply defined small
face, an expression of sullen distaste.
'What's the matter?' Rick said as he
stepped from the parked car.
The girl said, obliquely, 'Oh, I don't know.
Something about the way we got talked to on the phone. It doesn't matter.'
Abruptly she held out her hand; he reflexively took it. 'I'm Rachael Rosen. I
guess you're Mr Deckard.'
'This is not my idea,' he said.
'Yes, Inspector
Bryant told us that. But you're officially the San Francisco Police Department,
and it doesn't believe our unit is to the public benefit.' She eyed him from
beneath long black lashes, probably artificial.
Rick said, 'A humanoid robot
is like any other machine, it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard
very rapidly. As a benefit it's not our problem.'
'But as a hazard,' Rachael
Rosen said, 'then you come in. Is it true, Mr Deckard, that you're a bounty
hunter?'
He shrugged, with reluctance, nodded.
'You have no difficulty
viewing an android as inert,' the girl said 'So you can "retire" it, as they
say.'
'Do you have the group selected out for me?' he said 'I'd like to -' He
broke off. Because, all at once, he had seen their animals.
A powerful
corporation, he realized, would of course be able to afford this. In the back of
his mind, evidently, he had anticipated such a collection; it was not surprise
that he felt but more a sort of yearning. He quietly walked away from the girl,
toward the closest pen. Already he could smell them, the several scents of the
creatures standing or sitting, or, in the case of what appeared to be a raccoon,
asleep.
Never in his life had he personally seen a raccoon. He knew the
animal only from 3D films shown on television. For some reason the dust had
struck that species almost as hard as it had the birds - of which almost none
survived, now. In an automatic response he brought out his much-thumbed Sidney's
and looked up raccoon with all the sublistings. The last prices, naturally,
appeared in italics; like Percheron horses, none existed on the market for sale
at any figure. Sidney's catalogue simply listed the price at which the last
transaction involving a raccoon had taken place. It was astronomical.
'His
name is Bill,' the girl said from behind him 'Bill the raccoon. We acquired him
just last year from a subsidiary corporation.' She pointed past him and he then
perceived the armed company guards, standing with their machine guns, the
rapid-fire little light Skoda issue; the eyes of the guards had been fastened on
him since his car landed. And, he thought, my car is clearly marked as a police
vehicle.
'A major manufacturer of androids,' he said thoughtfully, 'invests
its surplus capital on living animals.'
'Look at the owl,' Rachael Rosen
said. 'Here, I'll wake it up for you.' She stared toward a small, distant cage,
in the centre of which jutted up a branching dead tree.
There are no owls, he
started to say. Or so we've been told. Sidney's, be, thought; they list it in
their catalogue as extinct: the tiny, precise type, the E, again and again
throughout the catalogue. As the girl walked ahead of him he checked to see, and
he was right. Sidney's never makes a mistake, he said to himself. We know that,
too. What else can we depend on?
'It's artificial,' he said, with sudden
realization; his disappointment welled up keen and intense.
'No.' She smiled
and he saw that she had small even teeth, as white as her eyes and hair were
black.
'But Sidney's listing,' he said, trying to show her the catalogue. To
prove it to her.
The girl said, 'We don't buy from Sidney's or from any
animal dealer. All our purchases are from private parties and the prices we pay
aren't reported.' She added, 'Also we have our own naturalists; they're now
working up in Canada. There's still a good deal of forest left, comparatively
speaking, anyhow. Enough for small animals and once in a while a bird.'
For a
long time he stood gazing at the owl, who dozed on its perch. A thousand
thoughts came into his mind, thoughts about the war, about the days when owls
had fallen from the sky; he remembered how in his childhood it had been
discovered that species upon species had become extinct and how the 'papes had
reported it each day - foxes one morning, badgers the next, until people had
stopped reading the perpetual animal obits.
He thought, too, about his need
for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself
toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it
lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist. Like the
androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never
thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy.
The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a subform of the other, a
kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as
a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints
repelled him.
'If you sold your owl,' he said to the girl Rachael Rosen, how
much would you want for it, and how much of that down?'
'We would never sell
our owl.' She scrutinized him with a mixture of pleasure and pity; or so he read
her expression.
'And even if we sold it, you couldn't possibly pay the price.
What kind of animal do you have at home?'
'A sheep,' he said. 'A black-faced
Suffolk ewe.' 'Well, then you should be happy.' 'I'm happy,' he answered. 'It's
just that I always wanted an owl, even back before they all dropped dead.' He
corrected himself. 'All but yours.'
Rachael said, 'Our present cash programme
and overall planing call for us to obtain an additional owl which can mate with
Scrappy.' She indicated the owl dozing on its perch; It had briefly opened both
eyes, yellow slits which healed over as the owl settled back down to resume its
slumber. Its chest rose conspicuously and fell, as if the owl, in its hypoagogic
state, had sighed.
Breaking away from the sight - it made absolute bitterness
blend throughout his prior reaction of awe and yearning - he said, 'I'd like to
test out the selection, now. Can we go downstairs?' 'My uncle took the call from
your superior and by now he probably has -'
'You're a family?' Rick broke in.
'A corporation this large is a family affair?'
Continuing her sentence,
Rachael said, 'Uncle Eldon should have an android group and a control group set
up by now. So let's go.' She strode toward the elevator, hands again thrust
violently in the pockets of her coat; she did not look back, and he hesitated
for a moment, feeling annoyance, before he at last trailed after her.
What
have you got against me?' he asked her as together they descended.
She
reflected, as if up to now she hadn't known. 'Well,' she said, 'you, a little
police department employee, are in a unique position. Know what I mean?' She
gave him a malice-filled sidelong glance.
'Bow much of your current output.'
he asked, 'consists of types equipped with the Nexus-6?'
'All,' Rachael
said.
'I'm sure the Voigt-Kampff scale will work with them.'
'And if it
doesn't we'll have to withdraw all Nexus-6 types from the market.' Her black
eyes flamed up; she glowered at him as the elevator ceased descending and its
doors slid back. 'Because you police departments can't do an adequate job in the
simple matter of detecting the miniscule number of Nexus-6s who balk -'
A
man, dapper and lean and elderly, approached them, hand extended; on his face a
harried expression showed, as if everything recently had begun happening too
fast. 'I'm Eldon Rosen,' he explained to Rick as they shook hands. 'Listen,
Deckard; you realize we don't manufacture anything here on Earth, right? We
can't just phone down to production and ask for a diverse flock of items; it's
not that we don't want or intend to cooperate with you. Anyhow I've done the
best I can.' His left hand, shakily, roved through his thinning hair. NEXT