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TWENTY ONE
In the early morning light the land below him extended seemingly forever, gray 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 himself. 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; be 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 bovercar 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 dialed
the operator at San Francisco. "Give me Mount Zion
Hospital," he told her.
Presently he had 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," be said; be 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; be 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 be 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, be
decided. Dave would have approved what I did. But
also be would have understood the other part, which I
don't think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer
everything is easy, be 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, and with each step the
weight on him grew. Too tired, he thought, to climb.
Stopping, be wiped stinging sweat from his eyes, salt
tears produced by his skin, his whole aching body.
Then, angry at himself, he spat -- spat with wrath and
contempt, for himself, with utter hate, onto the barren
ground. Thereupon he 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, he fell; clouds of
dust obscured everything, and he ran from the dust -- he
hurried faster, sliding and tumbling on the loose pebbles. Ahead be 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 be 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 dialed 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, operating in
--"
"Life thieves," he said.
"I don't understand you, Mr. Deckard." Miss Marsten peered at him intently.
"Mr. Deckard, you look
awful. So tired. 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 terribly, 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-by," he 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.
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