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Buster Friendly / Pris mutilating the spider
'- yes sir, folks; the time is now. This is Buster Friendly, who hopes and trusts you're as eager as I am to share the discovery which I've made and by the way had verified by top trained research workers working extra hours over the past week. Ho ho, folks; this is it!'
John Isidore said, 'I found a spider.'
The three androids glanced up, momentarily moving their attention from the TV screen to him.
'Let's see it,' Pris said, She held out her hand.
Roy Baty said, 'Don't talk while Buster is on.'
I've never seen a spider,' Pris said. She cupped the medicine bottle in her palms, surveying the creature within, 'All those legs. Why's it need so many legs, J.R.?'
'That's the way spiders are,' Isidore said, his heart pounding difficulty breathing. 'Eight legs.'
Rising to her feet, Pris said, 'You know what I think. J.R.? I think it doesn't need all those legs.'
'Eight?' Irmgard Baty said. 'Why couldn't it get by on four? Cut four off and see.' Impulsively opening her purse she produced a pair of clean, sharp cuticle scissors, which she passed to Pris.
A weird terror struck at J.R. Isidore.
Carrying the medicine bottle into the kitchen Pris seated herself at J.R. Isidore's breakfast table. She removed the lid from the bottle and dumped the spider out. 'It probably won't be able to run as fast,' she said, 'but there's nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It'll die anyway.' She reached for scissors.
'Please,' Isidore said.
Pris glanced up inquiringly. 'Is it worth something?'
'Don't mutilate it,' he said wheezingly. Imploringly.
With the scissors Pris snipped off one of the spider's legs.
In the living-room Buster Friendly on the TV screen said, 'Take a look at this enlargement of a section of background. This is the sky you usually see. Wait, I'll have Earl Parameter, head of my research staff, explain their virtually world-shaking discovery to you.'
Pris clipped off another leg, restraining the spider with the edge of her hand. She was smiling.
'Blowups of the video pictures,' a new voice from the TV said, 'when subjected to rigorous laboratory scrutiny, reveal that the grey backdrop of sky and daytime moon against which Mercer moves is not only on Terran - it is artificial.'
'You're missing it!' Irmgard called anxiously to Pris; she rushed to the kitchen door, saw what Pris had begun doing. 'Oh, do that afterward,' she said coaxingly. 'This is so important, what they're saying; it proves that everything we believed -'
'Be quiet,' Roy Baty said.
'- is true,' Irmgard finished.
The TV set continued. 'The "moon" is painted; in the enlargements, one of which you see now on your screen, brushstrokes show. And there is even some evidence that the scraggly weeds and dismal, sterile soil - perhaps even the stones hurled at Mercer by unseen alleged parties - are equally faked. It is quite possible in fact that the "stones" are made of soft plastic, causing no authentic wounds.'
'In other words,' Buster Friendly broke in, 'Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all.'
The research chief said, 'We at last managed, Mr Friendly, to track down a former Hollywood special-effects man, a Mr Wade Cortot, who flatly states, from his years of experience, that the figure of "Mercer" could well be merely some bit player marching across a sound stage. Cortot has gone so far as to declare that he recognizes the stage as one used by a now out-of-business minor movemaker with whom Cartot had various dealings several decades ago?
'So according to Cortot,' Buster Friendly said, 'there can be virtually no doubt.'
Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.
'Quite frankly we believed Cortot,' the research chief said in his dry pedantic voice, 'and we spent a good deal of time examinig publicity pictures of bit players once employed by the now defunct Hollywood movie industry.'
'And you found -'
'Listen to this,' Roy Baty said. Irmgard gazed fixedly at the TV screen and Pris had ceased her mutilation of the spider.
Al Jarry
'We located, by means of thousands upon thousands of photographs, a very old man now, named Al Jarry, who played a number of bit parts in pre-war films. From our lab we sent a team to Jarry's home in East Harmony, Indiana. I'll let one of the members of that team describe what he found.' Silence, then a new voice, equally pedestrian. 'The house on Lark Avenue in East Harmony is tottering and shabby and at the edge of town, where no one, except Al Jarry, still lives. Invited amiably in, and seated in the stale-smelling, mouldering, kipple-filled living-room, I scanned by telepathic means the blurred, debris-cluttered, and hazy mind of Al Jarry seated across from me.'
'Listen' Roy Baty said, on the edge of his seat, poised as if to pounce.
'I found,' the technician continued, 'that the old man did in actuality make a series of short fifteen minute video films, for an employer whom he never met. And, as we had theorized, the "rocks" did consist of rubber-like plastic. The "blood" shed was catsup, and' - the technician chuckled - 'the only suffering Mr Jarry underwent was 'having to go an entire day without a shot of whisky.'
'Al Jarry,' Buster Friendly said, his face returning to the Screen. 'Well, well. An old man who even in his prime never amounted to anything which either he or ourselves could respect. Al Jarry made a repetitious and dull film, a series of them in fact, for whom he knew not - and does not to this day. It has often been said by adherents of the experience of Mercerism that Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, that he is in fact an archetypal superior entity perhaps from another star. Well, in a sense this contention has proven correct. Wilbur Mercer is not human, does not in fact exist. The world in which he climbs is a cheap, Hollywood, commonplace sound stage which vanithed into kipple years ago. And who, then, has spawned this hoax on the Sol System? Think about that for a time, folks.'
'We may never know,' Irmgard murmured.
Buster Friendly said, 'We may never know. Nor can we fathom the peculiar purpose behind this swindle. Yes, folks, swindle. Mercerism is a swindle!'
'I think we know,' Roy Baty said. 'It's obvious. Mercerism came into existence -'
'But ponder this,' Buster Friendly continued. 'Ask yourselves what is it that Mercerism does. Well, if we're to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses -'
'It's that empathy that humans have,' Irmgard said.
'- men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of "Mercer". Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could-'
'No, it's that empathy, Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. 'Isn't it a way of proving that humans can do something we can't do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How's the spider?' She bent over Pris's shoulder.
With the scissors Pris snipped off another of the spider's legs. 'Four now,' she said. She nudged the spider. 'He won't go. But he can.'
Roy Batty appeared at the doorway, inhaling deeply, an expression of accomplishment on his face. It's done. Buster said it out loud, and nearly every human in the system heard him say it. "Mercerism is a swindle." The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.' He came over to look curiously at the spider.
'It won't try to walk,' Irmgard said.
'I can make it walk.' Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away.
I was right,' Lrmgard said. 'Didn't I say it could walk with only four legs?' She peered up expectantly at Isidore. 'What's matter?' Touching his arm she said, 'You didn't lose anythig; we'll pay you what that - what's it called? - that Sidney's catalogue says. Don't look so grim. Isn't that something about Mercer, what they discovered? All that research? Hey, answer.' She prodded him anxiously.
'He's upset,' Pris said. 'Because he has an empathy box. In the other room. Do you use it. LR.?' she asked Isidore.
Roy Baty said, 'Of course he uses it. They all do - or did. Maybe now they'll start wondering.'
Buster Friendly is an android
'I don't think this will end the cult of Mercer,' Pris said. 'But right this minute there're a lot of unhappy human beings.' To Isidore she said, 'We've waited for months; we all knew it was coming, this pitch of Buster's.' She hesitated and then said, 'Well, why not. Buster is one of us.'
'An Android,' Irmgard explained. 'And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.'
Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.
'He's really upset,' Irmgard said nervously. 'Don't look like that J.R.. And why don't you say anything?' To Pris and to her husband she said, 'It makes me terribly upset, him just standing there by the sink and not speaking; he hasn't said anythinG since we turned on the TV.'
'It's not the TV,' Pris said. 'It's the spider. Isn't it, John R. Isidore? He'll get over it,' she said to Irmgard, who had gone into the other room to shut off the TV.
Regarding Isidore with easy amusement, Roy Baty said, 'It's all over now, Iz. For Mercerism, I mean.' With his nails he managed to lift the corpse of the spider from the sink. 'Maybe this was the last spider,' he said. 'The last living spider on Earth.' He reflected. 'In that case it's all over for spiders, too.'
'I - don't feel well' Isidore said. From the kitchen cupboard he got a cup; he stood holding it for an interval - he did not know exactly how long. And then he said to Roy Baty, 'Is the sky behind Mercer just painted? Not real?'
'You saw the enlargements on the TV screen,' Roy Baty said. 'The brushstrokes.'
'Mercerism isn't finished,' Isidore said. Something ailed the three androids, something terrible. The spider, be thought. Maybe it had been the last spider on Earth, as Roy Baty said. And the spider is gone; Mercer is gone; he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere - he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. It grew around him as he stood holding the empty ceramic cup; the cupboards of the kitchen creaked and split and he felt the floor beneath his feet give.
Reaching out, he touched the wall. His hand broke the surface; grey particles trickled and hurried down, fragments of plaster resembling the radioactive dust outside. He seated himself at the table and, like rotten, hollow tubes the legs of the chair bent; standing quickly, he set down the cup and tried to reform the chair, tried to press it back into its right shape. The chair came apart in his hands, the screws which had previously connected its several sections ripping out and hanging loose. He saw, on the table, the ceramic cup crack; webs of fine lines grew like the shadows of a vine, and then a chip dropped from the edge of the cup, exposing the rough, unglazed interior.
'What's he doing?' Irmgard Baty's voice came to him, distantly. 'He's breaking everything! Isidore, stop -'
'I'm not doing it,' he said. He walked unsteadily into the living-room, to be by himself; he stood by the tattered couch and gazed at the yellow, stained wall with all the spots which dead bugs, that had once crawled, had left, and again he thought of the corpse of the spider with its four remaining legs. Everything in here is old, he realized. It long ago began to decay and it won't stop. The corpse of the spider has taken over.
In the depression caused by the sagging of the floor, pieces of animals manifested themselves, the head of a crow, mummified hands which might have once been parts of monkeys. A Donkey stood a little way off, not stirring and yet apparently alive; at least it had not begun to deteriorate. He started toward it, feeling stick-like bones, dry as weeds, splinter under his shoes. But before he could reach the donkey - one of the creatures which he loved the most - a shiny blue crow fell from above to perch on the donkey's unprotesting muzzle. Don't, he said aloud, but the crow, rapidly, picked out the donkey's eyes. Again, he thought. It's happening to me again. I will be down here a long time, he realized. As before. It's always long, because nothing here ever changes; a point comes when it does not even decay.
A dry wind rustled, and around him the heaps of bones broke. Even the wind destroys them, he perceived. At this stage. Just before time ceases. I wish I could remember how to climb up from here, he thought. Looking up he saw nothing to gasp.
Mercer ,he said aloud. Where are you now? This is the tomb world and I am in it again, but this time you're not here too.
Something crept across his foot. He knelt down and searched for it - and found it because it moved so slowly. The mutilated spider, advancing itself haltingly on its surviving legs; he picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand. The bones, realized, have reversed themselves; the spider is again alive. Mercer must be near.
The wind blew, cracking and splintering the remaining bones, but he sensed the presence of Mercer. Come here, he said to Mercer. Crawl across my foot or find some other way of reaching me. Okay? Mercer, he thought. Aloud he said, 'Mercer!'
Across the landscape weeds advanced; weeds corkscrewed their way into the walls around him and worked the walls until they the weeds became their own spore. The spore expanded, split and burst within the corrupted steel and shards of concrete that had formerly been walls. But the desolation remained after the walls had gone; the desolation followed after everything else. Except the frail, dim figure of Mercer; the old man faced him, a placid expression on his face.
'Is the sky painted?' Isidore asked. 'Are there really brushstrokes that show up under magnification?'
'Yes,' Mercer said.
'I can't see them.'
'You're too close,' Mercer said. 'You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.'
'Is that why they claim you're a fraud?'
'I am a fraud,' Mercer said. 'They're sincere; their research is genuine. From their standpoint I am an elderly retired bit player named Al Jarry. All of it, their disclosure, is true. They interviewed me at my home, as they claim; I told them whatever they wanted to know, which was everything.'
'Including about the whisky?'
Mercer smiled. 'It was true. They did a good job and from their standpoint Buster Friendly's disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you're still here and I'm still here.' Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. 'I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.'
'I didn't like that about the whisky,' Isidore said. 'That's lowering.'
'That's because you're a highly moral person. I'm not. I don't judge, not even myself.' Mercer held out a closed hand, palm up. 'Before I forget it, I have something of yours here.' He opened his fingers. On his hand rested the mutilated spider, but with its snipped-off legs restored.
'Thanks.' Isidore accepted the spider. He started to say something further -
An alarm bell clanged.
Roy Baty snarled. 'There's a bounty hunter in the building!' Get all the lights off. Get him away from that empathy box; he has to be ready at the door. Go on - move him!'

the arrival
Looking down, John Isidore saw his own hands; they gripped the twin handles of the empathy box. As he stood gaping at them the lights in the living-room of his apartment plunged out. He could see, in the kitchen, Pris hurrying to catch the table lamps there.
'Listen J.R.,' Irmgard whispered harshly in his ear; she had grabbed him by the shoulder, her nails digging into him with frantic intensity. She seemed unaware of what she did, now; in the dim nocturnal light from outdoors Irmgard's face had become distorted, astigmatic. It had turned into a craven dish, with covering tiny, lidless eyes. 'You have to go,' she whispered, 'to the door, when he knocks, if he does knock; you have to show him your identification and tell him this is your apartment and no one else is here. And you ask to see a warrant.'
Pris, standing on the other side of him, her body arched, whispered, 'Don't let him in, J.R. Say anything; do anything that will stop him. Do you know what a bounty hunter would do let loose in here? Do you understand what he would do to us?'
Moving away from the two android females Isidore groped his way to the door; with his fingers he located the knob, halted listening. He could sense the hall outside, as he always had sensed it: vacant and reverberating and lifeless.
'Hear anything?' Roy Baty said, bending close. Isidore smelled the rank, cringing body; he inhaled fear from it, fear puring out, forming a mist. 'Step out and take a look.'
Opening the door, Isidore looked up and down the indistinct hall. The air out here had a clear quality, despite the weight of dust. He still held the spider which Mercer had given him. Was it actually the spider which Pris had snipped apart with Irmgard Baty's cuticle scissors? Probably not. He would never know. But anyhow it was alive; it crept about within his - hand, not biting him: as with most small spiders its mandibles could not puncture human skin.
He reached the end of the hall, descended the stairs, and stepped outside, onto what had once been a terraced path, garden-enclosed. The garden had perished during the war and the path had ruptured in a thousand places. But he knew its surface; under his feet the familiar path felt good, and he followed it, passed along the greater side of the building, coming at last to the only verdant spot in the vicinity - a yard-square patch of dust-saturated, drooping weeds. There he deposited the spider. He experienced its wavering progress as it departed his hand. Well, that was that; he straightened up.
Deckard and J.R.
A flashlight beam focused on the weeds; in its glare their half-dead stalks appeared stark, menacing. Now he could see the spider; it rested on a serrated leaf. So it had gotten away all right.
'What did you do?' the man holding the flashlight asked.
'I put down a spider,' he said, wondering why the man didn't see; in the beam of yellow light the spider bloated up larger than life. 'So it could get away.'
'Why don't you take it up to your apartment? You ought to keep it in a jar. According to the January Sidney's most spiders are up ten per cent in retail price. You could have gotten a hundred and some odd dollars for it.'
Isidore said, 'If I took it back up there she'd cut it apart again. Bit by bit, to see what it did.'
'Androids do that,' the man said. Reaching into his overcoat he brought out something which he flapped open and extended toward Isidore.
In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. Methodical but informal. Not demi-god in shape; not at all as Isidore had anticipated him.
'I'm an investigator for the San Francisco Police Department. Deckard. Rick Deckard.' The man flapped his ID shut again, stuck it back in his overcoat pocket. 'They're up there now? The three?'
'Well, the thing is.' Isidore said, 'I'm looking after them. Two are women. They're the last ones of the group; the rest are dead. I brought Pris's TV set up from her apartment and put it in mine, so they could watch Buster Friendly. Buster proved beyond a doubt that Mercer doesn't exist.' Isidore felt excitement, knowing something of this importance - news that the bounty hunter evidently hadn't heard.
'Let's go up there,' Deckard said. Suddenly he held a laser pointed at Isidore; then, indecisively, he put it away. 'You're a special, aren't you,' he said. 'A chickenhead.'
'But I have a job. I drive a truck for -' Horrified, he discovered he had forgotten the name. '- a pet hospital,' he said. 'The Van Ness Pet Hospital.' he said. 'Owned b-b-by Hannibal Sloat.'
Deckard said: 'Will you take me up there and show me which apartment they're in? There're over a thousand separate apartments; you can save me a lot of time.' His voice dipped with fatigue.
'If you kill them you won't be able to fuse with Mercer again,' Isidore said.
'You won't take me up there? Show me which floor? Just tell me the floor. I'll figure out which apartment on the floor it is.'
'No,' Isidore said.
'Under state and federal law,' Deckard began. He ceased, then. Giving up the interrogation. 'Good night,' he said, and walked away, up the path and into the building, his flashlight bleeding a yellowed, diffuse path before him.

Inside the conapt building, Rick Deckard shut off his flashtlight; guided by the ineffectual, recessed bulbs spaced ahead of him he made his way along the hall, thinking. The chickenhead knows they're androids; he knew it already, before I told him. But he doesn't understand. On the other hand, who does? Do I? Did I? And one of them will, be a duplicate of Rachael, he reflected. Maybe the special has been living with her. I wonder how he liked it, he asked himself. Maybe that was the one who he believed would cut up his spider. I could go back and get that spider, he reflected. I've never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it'll happen some day to me like it did him.
He had brought listening gear from his car; he set it up, now, a revolving detek-snout with blip screen. In the silence of the hall the screen indicated nothing. Not on this floor, he said to himself. He clicked over to vertical. On that axis the snout absorbed a faint signal. Upstairs. He gathered up the gear and his briefcase and climbed the stairs to the next floor.
Deckard and Mercer
A figure in the shadows waited.
'If you move I'll retire you,' Rick said. The male one, waiting for him. In his clenched fingers the laser tube felt hard but he could not lift it and aim it. He had been caught first, caught too soon.
'I'm not an android,' the figure said. 'My name is Mercer.' It 'stepped into a zone of light. 'I inhabit this building because of Mr Isidore. The special who had the spider; you talked briefly to him outside.'
'Am I outside Mercerism, now?' Rick said. 'As the chickenhead said? Because of what I'm going to do in the next few minutes?'
Killing Pris
Mercer said, 'Mr Isidore spoke for himself, not for me. What you are doing has to be done, I said that already.' Raising his arm he pointed at the stairs behind Rick. 'I came to tell you that one of them is behind you and below, not in the apartment. It will be the hard one of the three and you must retire it first.' The rustling, ancient voice gained abrupt fervour. 'Quick, Mr Deckard. On the steps.'
His laser tube thrust out, Rick spun and sank onto his haunches facing the flight of stairs. Up it glided a woman, toward him, and he knew her; he recognized her and lowered his laser tube. 'Rachael,' he said, perplexed. Had she followed him in her own hovercar, tracked him here? And why? 'Go back to Seattle,' he said. 'Leave me alone; Mercer told me I've got to do it.' And then he saw that it was not quite Rachaet.
'For what we've meant to each other,' the android said as it approached him, its arms reaching as if to clutch at him. The clothes, he thought, are wrong. But the eyes, the same eyes. And there are more like this; there can be a legion of her, each with its own name, but all Rachael Rosen - Rachael, the prototype, used by the manufacturer to protect the others. He fired her as, imploringly, she dashed toward him. The android bursts and parts of it flew; he covered his face and then looked again, looked and saw the laser tube which it had carried roll away, back onto the stairs; the metal tube bounced downward, step by step, the sound echoing and diminishing and slowing. The hard one of the three, Mercer had said. He peered about, searching for Mercer. The old man had gone. They can follow me with Rachael Rosens until I die, he thought, or until the type becomes obsolete, whichever comes first. And now the other two, he thought. One of them is not in the apartment, Mercer had said. Mercer protected me, he realized. Manifested himself and offered aid. She - it - would have gotten me, he said to himself, except for the fact that Mercer warned me. I can do the rest, now, he realized. This was the possible one; she knew I couldn't do this. But it's over. In an instant. I did what I couldn't do. The Batys I can track by standard procedure; they will be hard but they won't be like this.
He stood alone in the empty hall; Mercer had left him because he had done what he came for, Rachael - or rather Pris Stratton - had been dismembered and that left nothing now, only himself. But elsewhere in the building; the Batys waited and knew. Perceived what he had done, here. Probably, at this point, they were afraid. This had been their response to his presence in the building. Their attempt. Without Mercer it would have worked. For them, winter had come.
This has to be done quickly, what I'm after now, he realized; he hurried down the hall and all at once his detection gear registered the presence of cephalic activity. He had found their apartment. No more need of the gear; he discarded it and rapped on the apartment door.
Deckard and Roy Baty
From within, a man's voice sounded. 'Who is it?'
'This is Mr Isidore,' Rick said. 'Let me in because I'm looking after you and t-t-two of you are women.'
We're not opening the door,' a woman's voice came.
'I want to watch Buster Friendly on Pris's TV set,' Rick said. 'Now that he's proved Mercer doesn't exist it's very important to watch him. I drive a truck for the Van Ness Pet Hospital, which is owned by Mr Hannibal S-s-sloat.' He made himself stammer. 'S-s-so would you open the d-d-door? It's my apartment? He waited, and the door opened. Within the apartment he saw darkness and indistinct shapes, two of them.
The smaller shape, the woman, said, 'You have to administer tests.'
'It's too late,' Rick said. The taller figure tried to push the door shut and turn on some variety of electronic equipment. 'No,' Rick said, 'I have to come in.' He let Roy Baty fire once; he held his own fire until the laser beam had passed by him as he twisted out of the way. 'You've lost your legal basis,' Rick said, 'by firing on me. You should have forced me to give you the Voigt-Kampff test. But now it doesn't matter.' Once more Roy Baty sent a laser beam cutting at him, missed, dropped the tube, and ran somewhere deeper inside the apartment, to another room, perhaps, the electronic hardware abandoned.
'Why didn't Pris get you?' Mrs Baty said.
'There is no Pris,' he said. 'Only Rachael Rosen, over and over again.' He saw the laser tube in her dimly outlined hand; Roy Baty had slipped it to her, had meant to decoy him into the apartment, far in, so that Irmgard Baty could get him from behind, in the back. 'I'm sorry, Mrs Baty,' Rick said, and shot her.
Roy Baty, in the other room, let out a cry of anguish.
'Okay, you loved her,' Rick said. 'And I loved Rachael. And the special loved the other Rachael.' He shot Roy Baty; the big man's corpse lashed about, toppled like an over-stacked collection of separate, brittle entities; it smashed into the kitchen table and carried dishes and flatware down with it. Reflex circuits in the corpse made it twitch and flutter, but it had died; Rick ignored it, not seeing it and not seeing that of Irmgard Baty by the front door. I got the last one, Rick realized. Six today; almost a record. And now it's over and I can go home, back to Iran and the goat. And we'll have enough money, for once.
He sat down on the couch and presently as-he sat there in the silence of the apartment, among the non-stirring objects, the special Mr Isidore appeareo at the door.
'Better not look,' Rick said.
'I saw her on the stairs. Pris.' The special was crying.
Don't take it so hard,' Rick said. He got dizzily to his feet, labouring. 'Where's your phone?
'The special said nothing, did nothing except stand. So Rick hunted for the phone himself, found it, and dialled Harry Bryant's office.

'Good,' Harry Bryant said, after he had been told. 'Well, go get some rest. We'll send a patrol car to pick up the three bodies.'
Deckard hung up. 'Androids are stupid,' he said savagly to the special. 'Roy Baty couldn't tell me from you; it thought you were at the door. The police will clean up in here; Why don't you stay in another apartment until they're finished? You don't want to be in here with what's left.'
'I'm leaving this b-b-building,' Isidore said. 'I'm going to l-l-live deeper in town where there's m-m-more people.'
'I think there's a vacant apartment in my building,' Rick said.
Isidore stammered, 'I don't w-w-want to live near you.'
'Go outside or upstairs,' Rick said. 'Don't stay in here.'
The special floundered, not knowing what to do; a variety of mute expressions crossed his face and then, turning, he shuffled out of the apartment, leaving Rick alone.
What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I'm a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I've done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow now it's time to go home. Maybe, after I've been there awhile with Iran I'll forget.

the goat is dead
When he got back to his own apartment building, Iran met him on the roof. She looked at him in a deranged, peculiar way; in all his years with her he had never seen her like this.
Putting his arm around her he said, 'Anyhow it's over. And I've been thinking; maybe Harry Bryant can assign me to a -'
'Rick,' she said, 'I have to tell you something. I'm sorry. The goat is dead.'
For some reason it did not surprise him; it only made him feel worse, a quantitative addition to the weight shrinking him from every side. 'I think there's a guarantee in the contract,' he said. 'If it gets sick within ninety days the dealer -'
'It didn't get sick. Someone' - Iran cleared her throat and went on huskily -. 'someone came here, got the goat out of its cage, and dragged it to the edge of the roof.'
'And pushed it off?' he said,
'Yes.' She nodded.
'Did you see who did it?'
'I saw her very clearly,' Iran said. 'Barbour was still up here fooling around; he came down to get me and we called the police, but by then the animal was dead and she had left. A small young-looking girl with dark hair and large black eyes, very thin, Wearing a long fish-scale coat. She had a mail-pouch purse. And she made no effort to keep us from seeing her. As if she didn't care.'
'No, she didn't care,' he said. 'Rachael wouldn't give a damn it you saw her; she probably wanted you to, so I'd know who had done it.' He kissed her. 'You've been waiting up here all this time?'
'Only' for half an hour. That's when it happened; half an hour ago.' Iran, gently, kissed him back. 'It's so awful. So needless.'
He turned toward his parked car, opened the door, and got in behind the wheel. 'Not needless,' he said. 'She had what seemed to her a reason.' An android reason, he thought,
'Where are you going? Won't you come downstairs and - be with me? There was the most shocking news op TV; Buster Friendly claims that Mercer is a fake. What do you think about that, Rick? Do you think it could be true?'
'Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' He snapped on the car motor. 'Will you be all right?'
'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too. He closed the car door, flicked a signal with his hand to Iran, and then swept up into the night sky.
Once, be thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it's only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at not from Earth. Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolationon to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

Sunrise
In the early morning light the land below him extended seemingly forever, grey and refuse-littered. Pebbles the size of houses had rolled to a stop next to one another and he thought, it's like a shipping room when all the merchandise has left.
Only fragments of crates remain, the containers which signify nothing in themselves. Once, he thought, crops grew here and animals grazed. What a remarkable thought, that anything could have cropped grass here.
What a strange place he thought for all of that to die.
He brought the hovercar down, coasted above the surface for a time. What would Dave Holden say about me now? he asked hhnself. In one sense I'm now the greatest bounty hunter who ever lived; no one ever retired six Nexus-6 types in one twenty-four-hour span and no one probably ever will again.I ought to call him, he said to himself.
A cluttered hillside swooped up at him; he lifted the hovercar as the world came close. Fatigue, he thought; I shouldn't be driving still. He clicked off the ignition, glided for an interval, and then set the hovercar down. It tumbled and bounced across the hillside, scattering rocks; headed upward, it came at last to a grinding, skittering stop.
Picking up the receiver of the car's phone he dialled the operator at San Francisco. 'Give me Mount Zion Hospital,' he told her.
Presently he bad another operator on the vidscreen. 'Mount Zion Hospital.'
'You have a patient named Dave Holden,' he said. 'Would it be'possible to talk to him? Is he well enough?'
'Just a moment and I'll check on that, sir.' The screen temporarily blanked out. Time passed. Rick took a pinch of Dr Johnson Snuff and shivered; without the car's heater the temperature had begun to plunge. 'Dr Costa says that Mr Holden is not receiving calls,' the operator told him, reappearing.
'This is police business,' he said; he held his flat pack of ID up to the screen.
'Just a moment.' Again the operator vanished. Again Rick inhaled a pinch of Dr Johnson Snuff; the menthol in it tasted foul, so early in the morning. He rolled down the car window and tossed the little yellow tin out into the rubble. 'No, sir,' the operator said, once more on his screen. 'Dr Costa does not feel Mr Holden's condition will permit him to take any calls, no matter how urgent, for at least -'
'Okay,' Rick said. He hung up.
The air, too, had a foul quality; he rolled up the window again. Dave is really out, he reflected. I wonder why they didn't get me. Because I moved too fast, he decided. All in one day; they couldn't have expected it. Harry Bryant was right.
The car had become too cold, now, so he opened the door and stepped out. A noxious, unexpected wind filtered through his clothes and he began to walk, rubbing his hands together.
It would have been rewarding to talk to Dave, he decided, Dave would have approved what I did. But also he would have understood the other part, which I don't think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self.
He walked on, up the hillside
He walked on, up the hillside, and with each step the weight on him grew. Too tired, he thought, to climb. Stopping, he wiped stinging sweat from his eyes, salt tears produced by his skin, his whole aching body. Then, angry at himself, he spat - spat with with wrath and contempt, for himself, with utter hate, onto the barren ground. Thereupon be resumed his trudge up the slope, the lonely and unfamiliar terrain, remote from everything: nothing lived here except himself.
The heat. It had become hot, now; evidently time had passed. And he felt hunger. He had not eaten for god knew how long. The hunger and heat combined, a poisonous taste resembling defeat; yes. he thought, that's what it is: I've been defeated in some obscure way. By having killed the androids? By Rachael's murder of my goat? He did not know, but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certainly fatal cliffside fall - falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
At that moment the first rock - and it was not rubber or soft foam plastic - struck him in the inguinal region. And the pain, the first knowledge of absolute isolation and suffering, touched him throughout in its undisguised actual form.
He halted. And then, goaded on - the goad invisible but real, not to be challenged - he resumed his climb. Rolling upward, he thought, like the stones; I am doing what stones do, without volition. Without it meaning anything.
'Mercer.' he said, panting; he stopped, stood still. In front of him he distinguished a shadowy figure, motionless. 'Wilbur Mercer! Is that you?' My god, he realized; it's my shadow. I have to get out of here, down off this hill!
He scrambled back down. Once, be fell; clouds of dust obscured everything, and he ran from the dust - he hurried faster, sliding and tumbling on the loose pebbles. Ahead he saw his parked car. I'm back down, he said to himself. I'm off the hill. He plucked open the car door, squeezed inside. Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I've undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn't new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.
Trembling, he got a fresh new tin of snuff from the glove compartment of the car; pulling off the protective band of tape he took a massive pinch, rested, sitting half in the car and half out, his feet on the arid, dusty soil. This was the last place to go to, he realized. I shouldn't have flown here. And now he found himself too tired to fly back out.
If I could just talk to Dave, he thought, I'd be all right; I could get away from here, go home and go to bed. I still have my electric sheep and I still have my job. There'll 'be more andys to retire; my career isn't over; I haven't retired the last andy in existence. Maybe that's what it is, he thought. I'm afraid there aren't any more.
He looked at-his watch. Nine-thirty.
Picking up the vidphone receiver he dialled the Hall of Justice on Lombard. 'Let me speak to Inspector Bryant,' he said to the police switchboard operator Miss Wild.
Inspector Bryant is not in his office, Mr Deckard; he's out in his car, but I don't get any answer. He must have temporarily left his car.'
'Did he say where he intended to go?'
'Something about the androids you retired last night.'
'Let me talk to my secretary,' he said.
A moment later the orange, triangular face of Ann Marsten appeared on the screen. 'Oh, Mr Deckard - Inspector Bryant has been trying to get hold of you. I think he's turning your name over to Chief Cutter for a citation. Because you retired those six -'
'I know what I did,' he said.
'That's never happened before. Oh, and Mr Deckard; your wife phoned. She wants to know if you're all right. Are you all right?'
He said nothing.
'Anyhow,' Miss Marsten said 'maybe you should call her and tell her. She left word she'll be home, waiting to hear from you.'
'Did you hear about my goat?' he said.
'No, I didn't even know you had a goat.'
Rick said, 'They took my goat.'
'Who did, Mr Deckard? Animal thieves? We just got a report on a huge new gang of them, probably teenagers, operatin-'
'Life thieves,' be said.
'I don't understand you, Mr Deckard.' Miss Marsten peered at him intently. 'Mr Deckard. you look awful. So tired. And and God, your cheek is bleeding.'
Putting his hand up he felt the blood. From a rock, probably. More than one, evidently, had struck him.
'You look,' Miss Marsten said, 'like Wilbur Mercer.'
'I am,' he said. 'I'm Wilbur Mercer; I've permanently fused with him. And I can't unfuse. I'm sitting here waiting to unfuse. Somewhere near the Oregon border.'
'Shall we send someone out? A department car to pick you up.'
'No,' he said. 'I'm no longer with the department.'
'Obviously you did too much yesterday, Mr Deckard,' she said chidingly. 'What you need now is bed rest. Mr Deckard, you're our best bounty hunter, the best we've ever had. I'll tell Inspector Bryant when he comes in; you go on home and go to bed. Call your wife right away, Mr Deckard, because she's terrib, terribly worried. I could tell. You're both in dreadful shape.'
'It's because of my goat,' he said. 'Not the androids; Rachael was wrong - I didn't have any trouble retiring them. And the special was wrong, too, about my not being able to fuse with Mercer again. The only one who was right is Mercer.'
'You better get back here to the Bay Area, Mr Deckard. Where there're people. There isn't anything living up there near Oregon; isn't that right? Aren't you alone?'
'It's strange,' Rick said. 'I had the absolute, utter, completely real illusion that I had become Mercer and people were lobbing rocks at me. But not the way you experience it when you hold the handles of an empathy box. When you use an empathy box you feel you're with Mercer. The difference is I wasn't with anyone; I was alone.'
'They're saying now that Mercer is a fake.'
'Mercer isn't a fake,' he said. 'Unless reality is a fake.' This hill, he thought. This dust and these many stones, each one different from all the others. 'I'm afraid,' he said, 'that I can't stop being Mercer. Once you start it's too late to back off.' Will I have to climb the hill again? he wondered. Forever, as Mercer does ... trapped by eternity. 'Good-bye,' be said, and started to ring off.
'You'll call your wife? You promise?'
'Yes.' He nodded. 'Thanks, Ann.' He hung up. Bed rest, he thought. The last time I hit bed was with Rachael. A violation of a statute. Copulation with an android; absolutely against the law, here and on the colony worlds as well. She must be back in Seattle now. With the other Rosens, real and humanoid. I wish I could do to you what you did to me, he wished.
But it can't be done to an android because they don't care. If I had killed you last night my goat would be alive now. There's where I made the wrong decision. Yes, he thought; it can all be traced back to that and to my going to bed with you. Anyhow you were correct about one thing; it did change me. But not in the way you predicted.
A much worse way, he decided.
And yet I don't really care. Not any longer. Not, he thought, after what happened to me up there, toward the top of the hill. I wonder what would have come next, if I had gone on climbing and reached the top. Because that's where Mercer appears to die. That's where Mercer's triumph manifests itself, there at the end of the great sidereal cycle.
But if I'm Mercer, he thought, I can never die, not in ten thousand years. Mercer is immortal.
Once more he picked up the phone receiver, to call his wife.
And froze.

The Toad (extinct for years)
He set the receiver back down and did not take his eyes from the spot that had moved outside the car. The bulge in the ground, among the stones. An animal, he said to himself. And his heart lugged under the excessive load, the shock of recognition. I know what it is, he realized; I've never seen one before but I know it from the old nature films they show on Goverment TV.
They're extinct! he said to himself; swiftly he dragged out his much-creased Sidney's, turned the pages with twitching fingers.
toad(Bufonidae), all varieties ... E
Extinct for years now. The critter most precious to Wilbur Mercer, along with the donkey. But toads most of all.
I need a box. He squirmed around, saw nothing in the back seat of the hovercar; he leaped out, hurried to the trunk compartement, unlocked and opened it. There rested a cardboard container, inside it a spare fuel pump for his car. He dumped the fuel pump out, found some furry hempish twine, and walked slowly toward the toad. Not taking his eyes from it.
The toad, he saw, blended in totally with the texture and shade of the ever-present dust. It had, perhaps, evolved, meeting the new climate as it had met all climates before. Had it not moved he would never have spotted it; yet he had been sitting no more than two yards from it. What happens when you find - if you find - an animal believed extinct? he asked himself, trying to remember. It happened so seldom. Something about a star of honour from the U.N. and a stipend. A reward running into millions of dollars. And of all possibilities - to find the critter most sacred to Mercer. Jesus, he thought; it can't be. Maybe it's, due to brain damage on my part: exposure to radioactivity. I'm a special, he thought. Something has happened to me. Like the chickenhead Isidore and his spider; what happened to him is happening to me. Did Mercer arrange it? But I'm Mercer. I arranged it; I found the toad. Found it because I see through Mercer's eyes.
He squatted on his haunches, close beside the toad. It had shoved aside the grit to make a partial hole for itself, displaced the dust with its rump. So that only the top of its flat skull and its eyes projected above ground. Meanwhile, its metabolism slowed almost to a halt, it had drifted off into a trance. The eyes held no spark, no awareness of him, and in horror he thought, It's dead, of thirst maybe. But it had moved.
Setting the cardboard box down, he carefully began brushing the loose soil away from the toad. It did not seem to object, but of course it was not aware of his existence.
When he lifted the toad out he felt its peculiar coolness; in his hands its body seemed dry and wrinkled - almost flabby - and as cold as if it had taken up residence in a grotto miles under the earth away from the sun. Now the toad squirmed; with its weak hind feet it tried to pry itself from his grip, wanting, instinctively, to go flopping off. A big one, he thought; full-grown and wise. Capable, in its own fashion, of surviving even that which we're not really managing to survive. I wonder where it finds the water for its eggs.
So this is what Mercer sees, he thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box shut - tied it again and again. Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer's eyes I probably will never stop,
And no android, he thought, will cut the legs from this. As they did from the chickenhead's spider.
He placed the carefully tied box on the car seat and got in behind the wheel. It's like being a kid again, he thought. Now all the weight had left him, the monumental and oppressive fatigue. Wait until Iran hears about this; he snatched the vidphone receiver, started to dial. Then paused. I'll keep it as a surprise, he concluded, It'll only take thirty or forty minutes to fly back there.
Eagerly he switched the motor on, and, shortly, had zipped up into the sky, in the direction of San Francisco, seven hundred miles to the south.
At we Penfield mood organ, Iran Deckard sat with her right index finger touching the numbered dial. But she did not dial; she felt too listless and ill to want anything: a burden which closed off the future and any possibilities which it might once have contained. If Rick were here, she thought, he'd get me to dial 3 and that way I'd find myself wanting to dial something important, ebullient joy or if not that then possibly an 888, the desire to watch TV no matter what's on it. I wonder what is on it, she thought. And then she wondered again where Rick had gone. He may be coming back and on the other hand he may not be, she said to herself, and felt her bones within her shrink with age.
A knock sounded at the apartment door.
Putting down the Penfield manual she jumped up, thinking, I don't need to dial, now; I already have it - if it is Rick. She ran to the door, opened the door wide.
'Hi,' he said. There he stood, a cut on his cheek, his clothes wrinkled and grey, even his hair saturated with dust. His hands, his face - dust, clung to every part of him, except his eyes. Round with awe his eyes shone, like those of a little boy; he looks, she thought, as if he has been playing and now it's time to give up and come home. To rest and wash and tell about the miracles of the day.
'It's nice to see you,' she said.
'I have something.' He held a cardboard box with both hands; when he entered the apartment he did not set it down. As if, she thought, it contained something too fragile and too valuable to let go of; he wanted to keep it perpetually in his hands.
She said, 'I'll fix you a cup of coffee.' At the stove she pressed the coffee button and in a moment had put the imposing mug by his place at the kitchen table. Still holding the box he seated himself, and on his face the round-eyed wonder remained. In all the years she had known him she had not encountered this expression before. Something had happened since she had seen him last; since, last night, he had gone off in his car. Now he had come back and this box had arrived with him: he held, in the box, everything that had happened to him.
I'm going to sleep,' he announced. 'All day. I phoned in and got Harry Bryant; he said take the day off and rest. Which is exactly what I'm going to do.' Carefully he set the box down on the table and picked up his coffee mug; dutifully, because she wanted him to, he drank his coffee.
Seating herself across from him she said, 'What do you have in the box, Rick?'
'A toad.'
'Can I see it?' She watched as he untied the box and removed the lid. 'Oh.' she said, seeing the toad; for some reason it frightened her. 'Will it bite?' she asked.
'Pick it up. It won't bite; toads don't have teeth.' Rick lifted the toad out and extended it toward her. Stemming her aversion she accepted it. 'I thought toads were extinct,' she said as she turned it over, curious about its legs; they seemed almost useless. 'Can toads jump like frogs? I mean, will it jump out of my hands suddenly?'
'The legs of toads are weak,' Rick said. 'That's the main difference between a toad and a frog, that and water. A frog remains near water but a toad can live in the desert. I found this in the desert, up near the Oregon border. Where everything had died.' He reached to take it back from her. But she had discovered something; still holding it upside down she poked at its abdomen and then, with her nail, located the tiny control panel. She flipped the panel open.

A false toad
'Oh.' His face fell by degrees. 'Yeah, so I see; you're right.' Crestfallen, he gazed mutely at the false animal; he took it back from her, fiddled with the legs as if baffled - he did not seem quite to understand. He then carefully replaced it in its box. 'I wonder how it got out there in the desolate part of California like that. Somebody must have put it there. No way to tell what for.'
'Maybe I shouldn't have told you - about it being electrical.' She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.
'No,' Rick said. 'I'm glad to know. Or rather -' He became silent. 'I'd prefer to know.'
Do you want to use the mood organ? To feel better? You always have gotten a lot out of it, more than I ever have.'
I'll be okay.' He shook his head, as if trying to clear it, still bewildered. 'The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; probably was artificial, too. But it doesn't matter. The The electric Things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.'
Iran said, 'You look as if you've walked a hundred miles.'
'It's been a long day.' He nodded.
'Go get into bed and sleep.'
Long deserved peace
He stared at her, then, as if perplexed. 'It is over, isn't it?' Trustingly he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they didn't become real, not until she agreed.
'It's over,' she said.
'God, what a marathon assignment,' Rick said. 'Once I began on it there wasn't any way for me to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn't have anything to do. And that -' He hesitated, evidently at what he had begun to say. 'That part was worse,' he said 'After I finished. I couldn't stop because there would be nothing left after I stopped. You were right this morning when you said I'm nothing but a crude cop with crude cop hands.
'I don't feel that any more,' she said. 'I'm just damn glad to have you come back home where you ought to be.' She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before - before she had shown him that the toad was electric.
'Do you think I did wrong?' he asked. 'What I did today?'
'No.'
'Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it's better to do something wrong than right.'
'It's the curse on us,' Iran said. 'That Mercer talks about.'
'The dust?' he asked.
'The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn't reverse time and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes, to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it's they who're doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us, actually. Did one of them cut your cheek, where it's been bleeding?'
'Yes,' he said wanly.
'Will you go to bed now? If I set the mood organ to a 670 setting?'
'What does that bring about?' he asked.
'Long deserved peace,' Iran said.
He got to his feet, stood painfully, his face drowsy and confused, as if a legion of battles had ebbed and advanced there, over many years. And then, by degrees, he progressed along the route to the bedroom. 'Okay,' he said. 'Long deserved peace.' He stretched out on the bed, dust sifting from his clothes and hair onto the white sheets.
No need to turn on the mood organ, Iran realized as she pressed the button which made the windows of the bedroom opaque. The grey light of day disappeared.
On the bed Rick, after a moment, slept.
She stayed there for a time, keeping him in sight to be sure he wouldn't wake up, wouldn't spring to a sitting position in fear as he sometimes did at night. And then, presently, she returned to the kitchen, reseated herself at the kitchen table.
Next to her the electric toad flopped and rustled in its box; she wondered what it 'ate', and what repairs on it would run.

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