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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
By Phillip K. Dick
TO MAREN AUGUSTA BERGRUD 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
A TURTLE WHICH EXPLORER CAPTAIN COOK GAVE TO THE KING OF TONGA IN
1777 DIED YESTERDAY. IT WAS NEARLY 200 YEARS OLD.
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 AFTER 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.
Reuters, 1966
ONE
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 multicolored pajamas, and stretched. Now, in her bed, his wife Iran opened her gray, unmerry eyes, blinked, then groaned and shut her eyes again. "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, pate shoulder. "Get your crude cop's hand away," Iran said. "I'm not a cop — " He felt irritable, now, although he hadn't dialed 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 had 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 dialing 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). "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 January 3, 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 tamed 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 dialed 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. But then I read 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 small 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 program 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 dialed 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 cutoff it's dangerous to undergo a depression, any kind. Forget what you've scheduled and I'll fo get what I've scheduled; we'll dial a 104
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 neighbor 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. He 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? Becaus e 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 honorably. 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 closing the panel covering of his electric sheep; he straightened up, turned, and faced his neighbor. "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 baaing — 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 hurriedly, "Um, 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. .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
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 non- emigrant 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 TV 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 program, 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 an 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 most 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, fortunately forever." To himself John Isidore thought acidly, And it's gone away for 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 Sloat accepted him as human and this he appreciated. Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally 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. Sloat, 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, having 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 gray 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 deteriorating, 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 atone 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 unlit hall, then shrank back as he 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.
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 secret , in the still remaining woods, but an old woman whom he had never 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 know; nothing had happened, generally, so it had been measureless. But at last the bones had regained flesh; the empty eyepits 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 extra- sensory 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. Releasing the handles he examined his arm, then made his way unsteadily to the bathroom of his apartment to wash the cut off 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 alien 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; he 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. 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 — he found
a dubious cube of margarine. And, with it, set off excitedly, his heart laboring, for the level below. I have to keep calm, he realized. Not let him know I'm a chickenhead. If he finds out I'm a cliickenhead he won't talk to me; that's always the way it is for some reason. I wonder why? He hurried down the hall.
THREE
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 center 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. As he unlocked his office door his superior Police Inspector Harry Bryant, jug-eared and redheaded, sloppily dressed but wise-eyed and conscious of nearly everything of any im- portance, hailed 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 nine-thirty in Dave's office and departed, leaving Rick standing alone. As he entered his own office Rick heard the voice of his secretary, 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 air-filtering 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 W.P.O. 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- 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 clamored that no test would detect its presence, in an instance of illegal entry here. As a
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 had 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 emphatic 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. Siddons' 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," Rich 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, sit, 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 percent a 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 dialed — 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-by." He hurriedly hung up, rose, and shortly thereafter stood before Inspector Bryant's office door. He passed by 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 be at least guardedly pleased.
FOUR
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. "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. "Dave 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 I 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 bunter. Dave
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 your 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 3-D 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 list 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 started toward a
small, distant cage, in the center of which jutted up a branching dead tree. There are no owls, he started to say. Or so we've been told. Sidney's, he 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 crash program and overall planning 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 hypnotic state, had sighed. Breaking away from the sight — k 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,
fished out the Voigt-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments. "You may send the first testee in," he informed Eldon Rosen, who now looked more haggard than ever. "I'd like to watch," Rachael said, also seating herself. "I've never seen an empathy test being administered. What do those things you have there measure?" Rick said, "This" — he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires — "measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so — called 'shame' or 'blushing' reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can't be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate." He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. "This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of — " "And these can't be found in androids," Rachael said. "They're not engendered by the stimuli-questions; no. Although biologically they exist. Potentially." Rachael said, "Give me the test." "Why?" Rick said, puzzled. Speaking up, Eldon Rosen said hoarsely, "We selected her as your first subject. She may be an android. We're hoping you can tell." He seated himself in a series of clumsy motions, got out a cigarette, lit it and fixedly watched.
FIVE
The small beam of white light shone steadily into the left eye of Rachael Rosen, and against her cheek the wire-mesh disk adhered. She seemed calm. Seated where he could catch the readings on the two gauges of the Voigt-Kampff testing apparatus, Rick Deckard said, "I'm going to outline a number of social situations. You are to express your reaction to each as quickly as possible. You will be timed, of course." "And of course," Rachael said distantly, "my verbal responses won't count. It's solely the eye-muscle and capillary reaction that you'll use as indices. But I'll answer; I want to go through this and — " She broke off. "Go ahead, Mr. Deckard." Rick, selecting question three, said, "You are given a calfskin wallet on your birthday." Both gauges immediately registered past the green and onto the red; the needles swung violently and then subsided. "I wouldn't accept it," Rachael said. "Also I'd report the person who gave it to me to the police." After making a jot of notation Rick continued, turning to the eighth question of the Voigt- Kampff profile scale. "You have a little boy and he shows you his butterfly collection, including his killing jar." "I'd take him to the doctor." Rachael's voice was low but firm. Again the twin gauges registered, but this time not so far. He made a note of that, too. "You're sitting watching TV," he continued, "and suddenly you discover a wasp crawling on your wrist." Rachael said, "I'd kill it." The gauges, this time, registered almost nothing: only a feeble and momentary tremor. He noted that and hunted cautiously for the next question. "In a magazine you come across a full-page color picture of a nude girl." He paused. "Is this testing whether I'm an android," Rachael asked tartly, "or whether I'm homosexual?" The gauges did not register. He continued, "Your husband likes the picture." Still the gauges failed to indicate a
reaction. "The girl," he added, "is lying face down on a large and beautiful bearskin rug." The gauges remained inert, and he said to himself, An android response. Failing to detect the major element, the dead animal pelt. Her — its — mind is concentrating on other factors. "Your husband hangs the picture up on the wall of his study," he finished, and this time the needles moved. "I certainly wouldn't let him," Rachael said. "Okay," he said, nodding. "Now consider this. You' re reading a novel written in the old days before the war. The characters are visiting Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They become hungry and enter a seafood restaurant. One of them orders lobster, and the chef drops the lobster into the tub of boiling water while the characters watch." "Oh god," Rachael said. "That's awful! Did they really do that? It's depraved! You mean a live lobster?" The gauges, however, did not respond. Formally, a correct response. But simulated. "You rent a mountain cabin," he said, "in an area still verdant. It's rustic knotty pine with a huge fireplace." "Yes," Rachael said, nodding impatiently. "On the walls someone has hung old maps, Currier and Ives prints, and above the fireplace a deer's head has been mounted, a full stag with developed horns. The people with you admire the decor of the cabin and you all decide — " "Not with the deer head," Rachael said. The gauges, however, showed an amplitude within the green only. "You become pregnant," Rick continued, "by a man who has promised to marry you. The man goes off with another woman, your best friend; you get an abortion and — " "I would never get an abortion," Rachael said. "Anyhow you can't. It's a life sentence and the police are always watching." This time both needles swung violently into the red. "How do you know that?" Rick asked her, curiously. "About the difficulty of obtaining an abortion?" "Everybody knows that," Rachael answered. "It sounded like you spoke from personal experience."' He watched the needles intently; they still swept out a wide path across the dials. "One more. You're dating a man and he asks you to visit his apartment. While you're there he offers you a drink. As you stand holding your glass you see into the bedroom; it's attractively decorated with bullfight posters, and you wander in to look closer. He follows after you, closing the door. Putting his arm around you, he says — " Rachael interrupted, "What's a bullfight poster?" "Drawings, usually in color and very large, showing a matador with his cape, a bull trying to gore him." He was puzzled. "How old are you?" he asked; that might be a factor. "I'm eighteen," Rachael said. "Okay; so this man closes the door and puts his arm around me. What does he say?" Rick said, "Do you know how bullfights ended;" "I suppose somebody got hurt." "The bull at the end, was always killed." He waited, watching the two needles. They palpitated restlessly, nothing more. No real reading at all. "A final question," he said. "Two- part. You are watching an old movie on TV, a movie from before the war. It shows a banquet in progress; the guests are enjoying raw oysters." "Ugh," Rachael said; the needles swung swiftly. "The entree," he continued, "consists of boiled dog, stuffed with rice." The needles moved less this time, less than they had for the raw oysters. "Are raw oysters more acceptable to you than a dish of boiled dog? Evidently not." He put his pencil down, shut off the beam of light, removed the adhesive patch from her check. "You're an android," he said. "That's the
