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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, pale 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, 2021, he saw that a businesslike professional attitude was called for. "If I dial by schedule,"
he said warily, "will you agree to also?" He waited,
canny enough not to commit himself until his wife had
agreed to follow suit.
"My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression," Iran said.
"What? Why did you schedule that?" It defeated the
whole purpose of the mood organ. "I didn't even know
you could set it for that," he said gloomily.
"I was sitting here one afternoon," Iran said, "and
naturally I had turned on Buster Friendly and His
Friendly Friends and he was talking about a big news
item he's about to break and then that awful commercial came on, the one I hate; you know, for Mountibank Lead Codpieces. And so for a minute I shut off
the sound. And I heard the building, this building; I
heard the --" She gestured.
"Empty apartments," Rick said. Sometimes he heard
them at night when he was supposed to be asleep. And
yet, for this day and age a one-half occupied conapt
building rated high in the scheme of population density;
out in what had been before the war the suburbs one
could find buildings entirely empty ... or so he had
heard. He had let the information remain secondhand;
like most people he did not care to experience it directly.
"At that moment," Iran said, "when I had the TV
sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just 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
realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of
life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not
reacting -- do you see? I guess you don't. But that used
to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it
'absence of appropriate affect.' So I left the TV sound
off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair." Her
dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had
achieved something of worth. "So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable
amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about
staying here on Earth after everybody who's smart has
emigrated, don't you think?"
"But a mood like that," Rick said, "you're apt to
stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that,
about total reality, is self- perpetuating."
"I 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
forget what I've scheduled; we'll dial a 104 together
and both experience it, and then you stay in it while I
reset mine for my usual businesslike attitude. That way
I'll want to hop up to the roof and check out the sheep
and then head for the office; meanwhile I'll know you're
not sitting here brooding with no TV." He released -- her
slim, long fingers, passed through the spacious apartment to the living room, which smelled faintly of last
night's cigarettes. There he bent to turn on the TV.
From the bedroom Iran's voice came. "I can't stand
TV before breakfast."
"Dial 888," Rick said as the set warmed. "The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it."
"I don't feel like dialing anything at all now," Iran
said.
"Then dial 3," he said.
"I can't dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral
cortex into wanting to dial! If I don't want to dial, I
don't want to dial that most of all, because then I will
want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most
alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the
bed and stare at the floor." Her voice had become
sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed
and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great
weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.
He turned up the TV sound, and the voice of Buster
Friendly boomed out and filled the room. "-- ho ho,
folks. Time now for a brief note on today's weather.
The Mongoose satellite reports that fallout will be especially pronounced toward noon and will then taper
off, so all you folks who'll be venturing out --"
Appearing beside him, her long nightgown trailing
wispily, Iran shut off the TV set. "Okay, I give up; I'll
dial. Anything you want me to be; ecstatic sexual bliss -- I feel so bad I'll even endure that. What the hell.
What difference does it make?"
"I'll dial for both of us," Rick said, and led her back
into the bedroom. There, at her console, he dialed 594:
pleased acknowledgment of husband's superior wisdom
in all matters. On his own console he dialed for a creative and fresh attitude toward his job, although this he
hardly needed; such was his habitual, innate approach
without recourse to Penfield artificial brain stimulation.
***
After a hurried breakfast -- he had lost time due to
the discussion with his wife -- he ascended clad for venturing out, including his Ajax model Mountibank Lead
Codpiece, to the covered roof pasture whereon his electric sheep "grazed." Whereon it, sophisticated piece of
hardware that it was, chomped away in simulated contentment, bamboozling the other tenants of the building.
Of course, some of their animals
undoubtedly consisted of electronic circuitry fakes, too; he had of
course never nosed into the matter, any more than they,
his neighbors, had pried into the real workings of his
sheep. Nothing could be more impolite. To say, "Is
your sheep genuine?" would be a worse breach of manners than to inquire whether a citizen's teeth, hair, or
internal organs would test out authentic.
The morning air, spilling over with radioactive
motes, gray and sun-beclouding, belched about him,
haunting his nose; he sniffed involuntarily the taint of
death. Well, that was too strong a description for it, he
decided as he made his way to the particular plot of sod
which he owned along with the unduly large apartment
below. The legacy of World War Terminus had diminished in potency; those who could not survive the dust
had passed into oblivion years ago, and the dust,
weaker now and confronting the strong survivors, only
deranged minds and genetic properties. Despite his lead
codpiece the dust -- undoubtedly -- filtered in and at
him, brought him daily, so long as he failed to emigrate,
its little load of befouling filth. So far, medical checkups
taken monthly confirmed him as a regular: a man who
could reproduce within the tolerances set by law. Any
month, however, the exam by the San Francisco Police
Department doctors could reveal otherwise. Continually, new specials came into existence, created out of
regulars by the omnipresent dust. The saying currently
blabbed by posters, TV ads, and government junk mail,
ran: "Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!"
Very true, Rick thought as he opened the gate to his
little pasture and approached his electric sheep. But I
can't emigrate, he said to himself. Because of my job.
The owner of the adjoining pasture, his conapt
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? Because back before W. W .T . there
existed literally hundreds --"
"But," Rick interrupted, "for you to have two horses
and me none, that violates the whole basic theological
and moral structure of Mercerism."
"You have your sheep; hell, you can follow the Ascent in your individual life, and when you grasp the two
handles of empathy you approach 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. W. T. but the feeling's still there."
"God," Rick said futilely, and gestured empty-handed. "I want to have an animal; I keep trying to buy
one. But on my salary, on what a city employee
makes --" If, he thought, I could get lucky in my work
again. As I did two years ago when I managed to bag
four andys during one month. If I had known then, he
thought, that Groucho was going to die ... but that had
been before the tetanus. Before the two-inch piece of
broken, hypodermic-like baling wire.
"You could buy a cat," Harbour offered. "Cats are
cheap; look in your Sidney's catalogue."
Rick said quietly, "I don't want a domestic pet. I
want what I originally had, a large animal. A sheep or
if I can get the money a cow or a steer or what you
have; a horse." The bounty from retiring five andys
would do it, he realized. A thousand dollars apiece,
over and above my salary. Then somewhere I could
find, from someone, what I want. Even if the listing in
Sidney's Animal & Fowl is in italics. Five thousand
dollars -- but, he thought, the five andys first have to make their way
to Earth from one of the colony planets; I can't control that, I can't make five of them come
here, and even if I could there are other bounty hunters
with other police agencies throughout the world. The
andys would specifically have to take up residence in
Northern California, and the senior bounty hunter in
this area, Dave Holden, would have to die or retire.
"Buy a cricket," Barbour suggested wittily. "Or a
mouse. Hey, for twenty-five bucks you can buy a full-grown mouse."
Rick said, "Your horse could die, like Groucho died,
without warning. When you get home from work this
evening you could find her laid out on her back, her
feet in the air, like a bug. Like what you said, a cricket."
He strode off, car key in his hand.
"Sorry if I offended you," Barbour said nervously.
In silence Rick Deckard plucked open the door of his
hovercar. He had nothing further to say to his neighbor;
his mind was on his work, on the day ahead.
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