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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 importance, 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 2020 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-6 brain unit
operated under colonial law, their parent autofactory
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-I4 back in '18. Every police
agency in the Western Hemisphere clamored that no test would detect its presence, in an instance of illegal entry here. As a matter of fact, for a while they were right." Over fifty of the T-I4 android as he recalled had
made their way by one means or another to Earth, and
had not been detected for a period in some cases up to
an entire year. But then the Voigt Empathy Test had
been devised by the Pavlov Institute working in the
Soviet Union. And no T-I4 android -- insofar, at least,
as was known -- had managed to pass that particular
test.
"Want to know what the Russian police said?" Miss
Marsten asked. "I know that, too." Her freckled,
orange face glowed.
Rick said, "I'll find out from Harry Bryant." He felt
irritable; office gossip annoyed him because it always
proved better than the truth. Seating himself at his desk he pointedly
fished about in a drawer until Miss Marsten, perceiving the hint, departed.
From the drawer he produced an ancient, creased
manila envelope. 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 .45 of a second an android
equipped with such a brain structure could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well,
no intelligence test would trap such an andy. But then,
intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not
since the primordial, crude varieties of the 1970s.
The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed
several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. 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. For better or
worse. The servant had in some cases become more
adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement,
for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had
emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no
matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could
make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism
-- an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including
subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.
He had wondered as had most people at one time or
another precisely why an android bounced helplessly
about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test.
Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human
community, whereas intelligence to some degree could
be found throughout every phylum and order including
the arachnida. For one thing, the empathic faculty
probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for
it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider's ability to
survive. It would make him conscious of the desire to
live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators, even
highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve.
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to
herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart
from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the
boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion
with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the
cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough
of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other
creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any
living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow
could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as
man would acquire a higher survival factor through
this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed.
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. 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,"
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.
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