Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (5 page)

Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator.

Rick liked to think of them that way; it made his job palatable. In retiring—i.e., killing—an andy, he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer.
You shall kill only the killers,
Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism, as it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown insidiously. In Mercerism, an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of the tottering, ascending old man, but it was never clear who or what this evil presence was. A Mercerite
sensed
evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which 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 empathic joy for another life form’s success or grief at its defeat—that, for him, epitomized The Killers.

Thinking about animals reminded him of the ostrich he had seen in the pet store. Temporarily he pushed away the specs on the Nexus-6 brain unit, took a pinch of Mrs. Sid-dons’ No. 3 & 4 snuff and cogitated. Then he examined his watch, saw that he had time; he picked up his desk vidphone and said to Miss Marsten, “Get me the Happy Dog Pet Shop on Sutter Street.”

“Yes, sir,” Miss Marsten said, and opened her phone book.

They can’t really want that much for the ostrich, Rick said to himself. They expect you to car-trade, like in the old days.

“Happy Dog Pet Shop,” a man’s voice declared, and on Rick’s vidscreen a minute happy face appeared. Animals could be heard bawling.

“That ostrich you have in your display window,” Rick said; he toyed with a ceramic ashtray before him on the desk. “What sort of a down payment would I need for that?”

“Let’s see,” the animal salesman said, groping for a pen and pad of paper. “One-third down.” He figured. “May I ask, sir, if you’re going to trade something in?”

Guardedly, Rick said, “I—haven’t decided.”

“Let’s say we put the ostrich on a thirty-month contract,” the salesman said. “At a low, low interest rate of six 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-bye.” 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.

4

Maybe I’m worried, Rick Deckard conjectured, that what happened to Dave will happen to me. An andy smart enough to laser him could probably take me, too. But that didn’t seem to be it.

“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 my agenda,” Rick offered. “I’m ready to take over in Dave’s place.”

Bryant said thoughtfully, “Dave used the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale in testing out the individuals he suspected. You realize—you ought to, anyhow—that this test isn’t specific for the new brain units.
No
test is; the Voigt scale, altered three years ago by Kampff, is all we have.” He paused, pondering. “Dave considered it accurate. Maybe it is. But I would suggest this, before you take out after these six.” Again he tapped the pile of notes. “Fly to Seattle and talk with the Rosen people. Have them supply you a representative sampling of types employing the new Nexus-6 unit.”

“And put them through the Voigt-Kampff,” Rick said.

“It sounds so easy,” Bryant said, half to himself.

“Pardon?”

Bryant said, “I think I’ll talk to the Rosen organization myself, while you’re on your way.” He eyed Rick, then, silently. Finally he grunted, gnawed on a fingernail, and eventually decided on what he wanted to say. “I’m going to discuss with them the possibility of including several humans, as well as their new androids. But you won’t know. It’ll be my decision, in conjunction with the manufacturers. It should be set up by the time you get there.” He abruptly pointed at Rick, his face severe. “This is the first time you’ll be acting as senior bounty hunter. Dave knows a lot; he’s got years of experience behind him.”

“So have I,” Rick said tensely.

“You’ve handled assignments devolving to you from Dave’s schedule; he’s always decided exactly which ones to turn over to you and which not to. But now you’ve got six that he intended to retire himself—one of which managed to get him first. This one.” Bryant turned the notes around so that Rick could see. “Max Polokov,” Bryant said. “That’s what it calls itself, anyhow. Assuming Dave was right.
Everything
is based on that assumption, this entire list. And yet the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale has only been administered to the first three, the two Dave retired and then Polokov. It was while Dave was administering the test; that’s when Polokov lasered him.”

“Which proves that Dave was right,” Rick said. Otherwise he would not have been lasered; Polokov would have no motive.

“You get started for Seattle,” Bryant said. “Don’t tell them first; I’ll handle it. Listen.” He rose to his feet, soberly confronted Rick. “When you run the Voigt-Kampff scale up there, if one of the humans fails to pass it—”

“That can’t happen,” Rick said.

“One day, a few weeks ago, I talked with Dave about exactly that. He had been thinking along the same lines. I had a memo from the Soviet police, W.P.O. itself, circulated throughout Earth plus the colonies. A group of psychiatrists in Leningrad have approached W.P.O. with the following proposition. They want the latest and most accurate personality profile analytical tools used in determining the presence of an android—in other words, the Voigt-Kampff scale—applied to a carefully selected group of schizoid and schizophrenic human patients. Those, specifically, which reveal what’s called a ‘flattening of affect.’ You’ve heard of that.”

Rick said, “That’s specifically what the scale measures.”

“Then you understand what they’re worried about.”

“This problem has always existed. Since we first encountered androids posing as humans. The consensus of police opinion is known to you in Lurie Kampff’s article, written eight years ago.
Role-taking Blockage in the Undeteriorated Schizophrenic.
Kampff compared the diminished empathic faculty found in human mental patients and a superficially similar but basically—”

“The Leningrad psychiatrists,” Bryant broke in brusquely, “think that a small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work, you’d assess them as humanoid robots. You’d be wrong, but by then they’d be dead.” He was silent, now, waiting for Rick’s answer.

“But these individuals,” Rick said, “would all be—”

“They’d be in institutions,” Bryant agreed. “They couldn’t conceivably function in the outside world; they certainly couldn’t go undetected as advanced psychotics—unless of course their breakdown had come recently and suddenly and no one had gotten around to noticing.
But this could happen.
”

“A million to one odds,” Rick said. But he saw the point.

“What worried Dave,” Bryant continued, “is this appearance of the new Nexus-6 advance type. The Rosen organization assured us, as you know, that a Nexus-6 could be delineated by standard profile tests. We took their word for it. Now we’re forced, as we knew we would be, to determine it on our own. That’s what you’ll be doing in Seattle. You understand, don’t you, that this could go wrong either way. If you can’t pick out all the humanoid robots, then we have no reliable analytical tool and we’ll never find the ones who’re already escaping. If your scale factors out a human subject, identifies him as android—” Bryant beamed at him icily. “It would be awkward, although no one, absolutely not the Rosen people, will make the news public. Actually we’ll be able to sit on it indefinitely, although of course we’ll have to inform W.P.O. and they in turn will notify Leningrad. Eventually it’ll pop out of the ’papes at us. But by then we may have developed a better scale.” He picked the phone up. “You want to get started? Use a department car and fuel yourself at our pumps.”

Standing, Rick said, “Can I take Dave Holden’s notes with me? I want to read them along the way.”

Bryant said, “Let’s wait until you’ve tried out 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.