“And if he waits,” Irmgard said in agreement, “we slip away, like we’ve done. I bet Roy is right; I bet he has our names but no location. Poor Luba; stuck in the War Memorial Opera House, right out in the open. No difficulty finding her.”
“Well,” Roy said stiltedly, “she wanted it that way; she believed she’d be safer as a public figure.”
“You told her otherwise,” Irmgard said.
“Yes,” Roy agreed, “I told her, and I told Polokov not to try to pass himself off as a W.P.O. man. And I told Garland that one of his own bounty hunters would get him, which is very possibly, just conceivably, exactly what did happen.” He rocked back and forth on his heavy heels, his face wise with profundity.
Isidore spoke up. “I-I-I gather from 1–1-listening to Mr. Baty that he’s your n-n-natural leader.”
“Oh yes, Roy’s a leader,” Irmgard said.
Pris said, “He organized our—trip. From Mars to here.”
“Then,” Isidore said, “you better do what h-h-he suggests.” His voice broke with hope and tension. “I think it would be t-t-terrific, Pris, if you l-l-lived with me. I’ll stay home a couple of days from my job—I have a vacation coming. To make sure you’re okay.” And maybe Milt, who was very inventive, could design a weapon for him to use. Something imaginative, which would slay bounty hunters…whatever they were. He had an indistinct, glimpsed darkly impression: of something merciless that carried a printed list and a gun, that moved machine-like through the flat, bureaucratic job of killing. A thing without emotions, or even a face; a thing that if killed got replaced immediately by another resembling it. And so on, until everyone real and alive had been shot.
Incredible, he thought, that the police can’t do anything. I can’t believe that. These people must have done something. Perhaps they emigrated back to Earth illegally. We’re told—the TV tells us—to report any landing of a ship outside the approved pads. The police must be watching for this.
But even so, no one got killed deliberately anymore. It ran contrary to Mercerism.
“The chickenhead,” Pris said, “likes me.”
“Don’t call him that, Pris,” Irmgard said; she gave Isidore a look of compassion. “Think what he could call you.”
Pris said nothing. Her expression became enigmatic.
“I’ll go start rigging up the bug,” Roy said. “Irmgard and I’ll stay in this apartment; Pris you go with—Mr. Isidore.” He started toward the door, striding with amazing speed for a man so heavy. In a blur he disappeared out the door, which banged back as he flung it open. Isidore, then, had a momentary, strange hallucination; he saw briefly a frame of metal, a platform of pullies and circuits and batteries and turrets and gears—and then the slovenly shape of Roy Baty faded back into view. Isidore felt a laugh rise up inside him; he nervously choked it off. And felt bewildered.
“A man,” Pris said distantly, “of action. Too bad he’s so poor with his hands, doing mechanical things.”
“If we get saved,” Irmgard said in a scolding, severe tone, as if chiding her, “it’ll be because of Roy.”
“But it is worth it,” Pris said, mostly to herself. She shrugged, then nodded to Isidore. “Okay, J. R. I’ll move in with you and you can protect me.”
“A-A-All of you,” Isidore said immediately.
Solemnly, in a formal little voice, Irmgard Baty said to him, “I want you to know we appreciate it very much, Mr. Isidore. You’re the first friend I think any of us have found here on Earth. It’s very nice of you and maybe sometime we can repay you.” She glided over to pat him on the arm.
“Do you have any pre-colonial fiction I could read?” he asked her.
“Pardon?” Irmgard Baty glanced inquiringly at Pris.
“Those old magazines,” Pris said; she had gathered a few things together to take with her, and Isidore lifted the bundle from her arms, feeling the glow that comes only from satisfaction at a goal achieved. “No, J. R. We didn’t bring any back with us, for reasons I explained.”
“I’ll g-g-go to a library tomorrow,” he said, going out into the hall. “And g-g-get you and me, too, some to read, so you’ll have something to do besides just waiting.”
He led Pris upstairs to his own apartment, dark and empty and stuffy and lukewarm as it was; carrying her possessions into the bedroom, he at once turned on the heater, lights, and the TV to its sole channel.
“I like this,” Pris said, but in the same detached and remote tone as before. She meandered about, hands thrust in her skirt pockets; on her face a sour expression, almost righteous in the degree of its displeasure, appeared. In contrast to her stated reaction.
“What’s the matter?” he asked as he laid her possessions out on the couch.
“Nothing.” She halted at the picture window, drew the drapes back, and gazed morosely out.
“If you think they’re looking for you—” he began.
“It’s a dream,” Pris said. “Induced by drugs that Roy gave me.”
“P-Pardon?”
“You really think that bounty hunters exist?”
“Mr. Baty said they killed your friends.”
“Roy Baty is as crazy as I am,” Pris said. “Our trip was between a mental hospital on the East Coast and here. We’re all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives—flattening of affect, it’s called. And we have group hallucinations.”
“I didn’t think it was true,” he said, full of relief.
“Why didn’t you?” She swiveled to stare intently at him; her scrutiny was so strict that he felt himself flushing.
“B-B-Because things like that don’t happen. The g-g-government never kills anyone, for any crime. And Mercerism—”
“But you see,” Pris said, “if you’re not human, then it’s all different.”
“That’s not true. Even animals—even eels and gophers and snakes and spiders—are sacred.”
Pris, still regarding him fixedly, said, “So it can’t be, can it? As you say, even animals are protected by law. All life. Everything organic that wriggles or squirms or burrows or flies or swarms or lays eggs or—” She broke off, because Roy Baty had appeared, abruptly throwing the door of the apartment open and entering; a trail of wire rustled after him.
“Insects,” he said, showing no embarrassment at overhearing them, “are especially sacrosanct.” Lifting a picture from the wall of the living room, he attached a small electronic device to the nail, stepped back, viewed it, then replaced the picture. “Now the alarm.” He gathered up the trailing wire, which led to a complex assembly. Smiling his discordant smile, he showed the assembly to Pris and John Isidore. “The alarm. These wires go under the carpet; they’re antennae. It picks up the presence of a—” He hesitated. “A mentational entity,” he said obscurely, “which isn’t one of us four.”
“So it rings,” Pris said, “and then what? He’ll have a gun. We can’t fall on him and bite him to death.”
“This assembly,” Roy continued, “has a Penfield unit built into it. When the alarm has been triggered, it radiates a mood of panic to the—intruder. Unless he acts very fast, which he may. Enormous panic; I have the gain turned all the way up. No human being can remain in the vicinity more than a matter of seconds. That’s the nature of panic: it leads to random circus-motions, purposeless flight, and muscle and neural spasms.” He concluded, “Which will give us an opportunity to get him. Possibly. Depending on how good he is.”
Isidore said, “Won’t the alarm affect us?”
“That’s right,” Pris said to Roy Baty. “It’ll affect Isidore.”
“Well, so what,” Roy said. And resumed his task of installation. “So they both go racing out of here panic-stricken. It’ll still give us time to react. And they won’t kill Isidore; he’s not on their list. That’s why he’s usable as a cover.”
Pris said brusquely, “You can’t do any better, Roy?”
“No,” he answered. “I can’t.”
“I’ll be able to g-g-get a weapon to
morrow,” Isidore spoke up.
“You’re sure Isidore’s presence here won’t set off the alarm?” Pris said. “After all, he’s—you know.”
“I’ve compensated for his cephalic emanations,” Roy explained. “Their sum won’t trip anything; it’ll take an additional human. Person.” Scowling, he glanced at Isidore, aware of what he had said.
“You’re androids,” Isidore said. But he didn’t care; it made no difference to him. “I see why they want to kill you,” he said. “Actually you’re not alive.” Everything made sense to him now. The bounty hunter, the killing of their friends, the trip to Earth, all these precautions.
“When I used the word ‘human,’” Roy Baty said to Pris, “I used the wrong word.”
“That’s right, Mr. Baty,” Isidore said. “But what does it matter to me? I mean, I’m a special; they don’t treat me very well either, like for instance I can’t emigrate.” He found himself yabbering away like a folletto. “You can’t come here; I can’t—” He calmed himself.
After a pause Roy Baty said laconically, “You wouldn’t enjoy Mars. You’re missing nothing.”
“I wondered how long it would be,” Pris said to Isidore, “before you realized. We are different, aren’t we?”
“That’s what probably tripped up Garland and Max Polokov,” Roy Baty said. “They were so goddamn sure they could pass. Luba, too.”
“You’re intellectual,” Isidore said; he felt excited again at having understood. Excitement and pride. “You think abstractly, and you don’t—” He gesticulated, his words tangling up with one another. As usual. “I wish I had an IQ like you have; then I could pass the test, I wouldn’t be a chickenhead. I think you’re very superior; I could learn a lot from you.”
After an interval Roy Baty said, “I’ll finish wiring up the alarm.” He resumed work.
“He doesn’t understand yet,” Pris said in a sharp, brittle, stentorian voice, “how we got off Mars. What we did there.”
“What we couldn’t help doing,” Roy Baty grunted.
At the open door to the hall Irmgard Baty had been standing; they noticed her as she spoke up. “I don’t think we have to worry about Mr. Isidore,” she said earnestly; she walked swiftly toward him, looked up into his face. “They don’t treat him very well either, as he said. And what we did on Mars he isn’t interested in; he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that—it’s everything to him. It’s hard for us to grasp that, but it’s true.” To Isidore she said, standing very close to him once again and peering up at him, “You could get a lot of money by turning us in; do you realize that?” Twisting, she said to her husband, “See, he realizes that but still he wouldn’t say anything.”
“You’re a great man, Isidore,” Pris said. “You’re a credit to your race.”
“If he was an android,” Roy said heartily, “he’d turn us in about ten tomorrow morning. He’d take off for his job and that would be it. I’m overwhelmed with admiration.” His tone could not be deciphered; at least Isidore could not crack it. “And we imagined this would be a friendless world, a planet of hostile faces, all turned against us.” He barked out a laugh.
“I’m not at all worried,” Irmgard said.
“You ought to be scared to the soles of your feet,” Roy said.
“Let’s vote,” Pris said. “As we did on the ship, when we had a disagreement.”
“Well,” Irmgard said, “I won’t say anything more. But if we turn this down, I don’t think we’ll find any other human being who’ll take us in and help us. Mr. Isidore is—” She searched for the word.
“Special,” Pris said.
15
Solemnly, and with ceremony, the vote was taken.
“We stay here,” Irmgard said, with firmness. “In this apartment, in this building.”
Roy Baty said, “I vote we kill Mr. Isidore and hide somewhere else.” He and his wife—and John Isidore—now turned tautly toward Pris.
In a low voice Pris said, “I vote we make our stand here.” She added, more loudly, “I think J. R.’s value to us outweighs his danger, that of his knowing. Obviously we can’t live among humans without being discovered; that’s what killed Polokov and Garland and Luba and Anders. That’s what killed all of them.”
“Maybe they did just what we’re doing,” Roy Baty said. “Confided in, trusted, one given human being who they believed was different. As you said, special.”
“We don’t know that,” Irmgard said. “That’s only a conjecture. I think they, they—” She gestured. “Walked around. Sang from a stage like Luba. We trust—I’ll tell you what we trust that fouls us up, Roy; it’s our goddamn superior intelligence!” She glared at her husband, her small, high breasts rising and falling rapidly. “We’re so smart—Roy, you’re doing it right now; goddamn you, you’re doing it now!”
Pris said, “I think Irm’s right.”
“So we hang our lives on a substandard, blighted—” Roy began, then gave up. “I’m tired,” he said simply. “It’s been a long trip, Isidore. But not very long here. Unfortunately.”
“I hope,” Isidore said happily, “I can help make your stay here on Earth pleasant.” He felt sure he could. It seemed to him a cinch, the culmination of his whole life—and of the new authority which he had manifested on the vidphone today at work.
As soon as he officially quit work that evening, Rick Deckard flew across town to animal row: the several blocks of big-time animal dealers with their huge glass windows and lurid signs. The new and horribly unique depression which had floored him earlier in the day had not left. This, his activity here with animals and animal dealers, seemed the only weak spot in the shroud of depression, a flaw by which he might be able to grab it and exorcise it. In the past, anyhow, the sight of animals, the scent of money deals with expensive stakes, had done much for him. Maybe it would accomplish as much now.
“Yes, sir,” a nattily dressed new animal salesman said to him chattily as he stood gaping with a sort of glazed, meek need at the displays. “See anything you like?”
Rick said, “I see a lot I like. It’s the cost that bothers me.”
“You tell us the deal you want to make,” the salesman said. “What you want to take home with you and how you want to pay for it. We’ll take the package to our sales manager and get his big okay.”
“I’ve got three thou cash.” The department, at the end of the day, had paid him his bounty. “How much,” he asked, “is that family of rabbits over there?”
“Sir, if you have a down payment of three thou, I can make you owner of something a lot better than a pair of rabbits. What about a goat?”
“I haven’t thought much about goats,” Rick said.
“May I ask if this represents a new price bracket for you?”
“Well, I don’t usually carry around three thou,” Rick conceded.
“I thought as much, sir, when you mentioned rabbits. The thing about rabbits, sir, is that everybody has one. I’d like to see you step up to the goat-class where I feel you belong. Frankly you look more like a goat man to me.”
“What are the advantages to goats?”
The animal salesman said, “The distinct advantage of a goat is that it can be taught to butt anyone who tries to steal it.”
“Not if they shoot it with a hypno-dart and descend by rope ladder from a hovering hovercar,” Rick said.
The salesman, undaunted, continued, “A goat is loyal. And it has a free, natural soul which no cage can chain up. And there is one exceptional additional feature about goats, one which you may not be aware of. Often times when you invest in an animal and take it home, you find, some morning, that it’s eaten something radioactive and died. A goat isn’t bothered by contaminated quasi-foodstuffs; it can eat eclectically, even items that would fell a cow or a horse or most especially a cat. As a long term investment we feel that the goat—especially the female—offers unbeatable advantages to the serious animal-owner.”
“Is this goat
a female?” He had noticed a big black goat standing squarely in the center of its cage; he moved that way and the salesman accompanied him. The goat, it seemed to Rick, was beautiful.
“Yes, this goat is a female. A black Nubian goat, very large, as you can see. This is a superb contender in this year’s market, sir. And we’re offering her at an attractive, unusually low, low price.”
Getting out his creased Sidney’s, Rick looked up the listings on goats, black Nubian.
“Will this be a cash deal?” the salesman asked. “Or are you trading in a used animal?”
“All cash,” Rick said.
On a slip of paper the salesman scribbled a price and then briefly, almost furtively, showed it to Rick.
“Too much,” Rick said. He took the slip of paper and wrote down a more modest figure.
“We couldn’t let a goat go for that,” the salesman protested. He wrote another figure. “This goat is less than a year old; she has a very long life expectancy.” He showed the figure to Rick.
“It’s a deal,” Rick said.
He signed the time-payment contract, paid over his three thousand dollars—his entire bounty money—as down payment, and shortly found himself standing by his hovercar, rather dazed, as employees of the animal dealer loaded the crate of goat into the car. I own an animal now, he said to himself. A living animal, not electric. For the second time in my life.