Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Chapters 3–6

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.

Leaning back, tilting his important-style chair, he rummaged among the contents of the envelope until he came across what he wanted: the collected, extant data on the Nexus-6.

A moment’s reading vindicated Miss Marsten’s statement; the Nexus-6 did have two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity.

In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major—but inferior—segment of mankind.

The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master.

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.

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.

Temporarily he pushed away the specs on the Nexus-6 brain unit, took a pinch of Mrs. Siddons' No. 3 & 4 snuff and cogitated.

Maybe I’m worried, Rick Deckard conjectured, that what happened to Dave will happen to me.

“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.”

“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 Rosen organization assured us, as you know, that a Nexus-6 could be delineated by standard profile tests.

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.

Its chest rose conspicuously and fell, as if the owl, in its hypnagogic state, had sighed.

Its chest rose conspicuously and fell, as if the owl, in its hypnagogic state, had sighed.

“Because you police departments can’t do an adequate job in the simple matter of detecting the minuscule number of Nexus-6s who balk—”

A man, dapper and lean and elderly, approached them, hand extended; on his face a harried expression showed, as if everything recently had begun happening too fast.

A man, dapper and lean and elderly, approached them, hand extended; on his face a harried expression showed, as if everything recently had begun happening too fast.

His left hand, shakily, roved through his thinning hair.

The two members of the Rosen family studied him apprehensively and he felt the hollowness of their manner; by coming here he had brought the void to them, had ushered in emptiness and the hush of economic death.

They control inordinate power, he thought.

After an interval of silence, Eldon Rosen said wearily, “Look, officer, it hasn’t been our policy to solicit advance—”

“You may send the first testee in,” he informed Eldon Rosen, who now looked more haggard than ever.

“They’re not engendered by the stimuli-questions; no. Although biologically they exist. Potentially.”

“That’s awful! Did they really do that? It’s depraved! You mean a live lobster?”

“You rent a mountain cabin,” he said, “in an area still verdant. It’s rustic knotty pine with a huge fireplace.”

He waited, watching the two needles. They palpitated restlessly, nothing more. No real reading at all.

“In other words,” Rick said with acuity, “I’m not going to be given a chance to check out a single Nexus-6. You people dropped this schizoid girl on me beforehand.”

He gestured affably.

“You can have the owl,” Rachael said, still eyeing him. “The one up on the roof. Scrappy. But we will want to mate it if we can get our hands on a male. And any offspring will be ours; that has to be absolutely understood.”
Rick said, “I’ll divide the brood.”

“The scale has been adequate in your case,” he answered. “I can extrapolate from that; it’s clearly still effective.”

To Eldon Rosen, who slumped morosely by the door of the room, he said, “Does she know?”

The chairs, the carpet, the tables—all had rotted away; they sagged in mutual ruin, victims of the despotic force of time.

“Listen,” he said earnestly. “If we go all over the building looking, we can probably find you things that aren’t so tattered. A lamp from one apartment, a table from another.”

“No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness.

A complicated expression instantly crossed her face, fleetingly, gone at once.