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 he 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-bye,” 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.
22
He set the receiver back down and did not take his eyes from the spot that had moved outside the car. The bulge in the ground, among the stones. An animal, he said to himself. And his heart lugged under the excessive load, the shock of recognition. I know what it is, he realized; I’ve never seen one before but I know it from the old nature films they show on Government TV.
They’re extinct! he said to himself; swiftly he dragged out his much-creased Sidney’s, turned the pages with twitching fingers.
TOAD (Bufonidae), all varieties……E.
Extinct for years now. The critter most precious to Wilbur Mercer, along with the donkey. But toads most of all.
I need a box. He squirmed around, saw nothing in the back seat of the hovercar; he leaped out, hurried to the trunk compartment, unlocked and opened it. There rested a cardboard container, inside it a spare fuel pump for his car. He dumped the fuel pump out, found some furry hempish twine, and walked slowly toward the toad. Not taking his eyes from it.
The toad, he saw, blended in totally with the texture and shade of the ever-present dust. It had, perhaps, evolved, meeting the new climate as it had met all climates before. Had it not moved, he would never have spotted it; yet he had been sitting no more than two yards from it. What happens when you find—if you find—an animal believed extinct? he asked himself, trying to remember. It happened so seldom. Something about a star of honor from the U.N. and a stipend. A reward running into millions of dollars. And of all possibilities—to find the critter most sacred to Mercer. Jesus, he thought; it can’t be. Maybe it’s due to brain damage on my part: exposure to radioactivity. I’m a special, he thought. Something has happened to me. Like the chickenhead Isidore and his spider; what happened to him is happening to me. Did Mercer arrange it? But I’m Mercer. I arranged it; I found the toad. Found it because I see through Mercer’s eyes.
He squatted on his haunches, close beside the toad. It had shoved aside the grit to make a partial hole for itself, displaced the dust with its rump. So that only the top of its flat skull and its eyes projected above ground. Meanwhile, its metabolism slowed almost to a halt, it had drifted off into a trance. The eyes held no spark, no awareness of him, and in horror he thought, It’s dead, of thirst maybe. But it had moved.
Setting the cardboard box down, he carefu
lly began brushing the loose soil away from the toad. It did not seem to object, but of course it was not aware of his existence.
When he lifted the toad out, he felt its peculiar coolness; in his hands its body seemed dry and wrinkled—almost flabby—and as cold as if it had taken up residence in a grotto miles under the earth away from the sun. Now the toad squirmed; with its weak hind feet it tried to pry itself from his grip, wanting, instinctively, to go flopping off. A big one, he thought; full-grown and wise. Capable, in its own fashion, of surviving even that which we’re not really managing to survive. I wonder where it finds the water for its eggs.
So this is what Mercer sees, he thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box shut—tied it again and again. Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer’s eyes, I probably will never stop.
And no android, he thought, will cut the legs from this. As they did from the chickenhead’s spider.
He placed the carefully tied box on the car seat and got in behind the wheel. It’s like being a kid again, he thought. Now all the weight had left him, the monumental and oppressive fatigue. Wait until Iran hears about this; he snatched the vidphone receiver, started to dial. Then paused. I’ll keep it as a surprise, he concluded. It’ll only take thirty or forty minutes to fly back there.
Eagerly he switched the motor on, and, shortly, had zipped up into the sky, in the direction of San Francisco, seven hundred miles to the south.
At the Penfield mood organ, Iran Deckard sat with her right index finger touching the numbered dial. But she did not dial; she felt too listless and ill to want anything: a burden which closed off the future and any possibilities which it might once have contained. If Rick were here, she thought, he’d get me to dial 3 and that way I’d find myself wanting to dial something important, ebullient joy or if not that then possibly an 888, the desire to watch TV no matter what’s on it. I wonder what is on it, she thought. And then she wondered again where Rick had gone. He may be coming back, and on the other hand he may not be, she said to herself, and felt her bones within her shrink with age.
A knock sounded at the apartment door.
Putting down the Penfield manual, she jumped up, thinking, I don’t need to dial now; I already have it—if it is Rick. She ran to the door, opened the door wide.
“Hi,” he said. There he stood, a cut on his cheek, his clothes wrinkled and gray, even his hair saturated with dust. His hands, his face—dust clung to every part of him, except his eyes. Round with awe his eyes shone, like those of a little boy; he looks, she thought, as if he has been playing and now it’s time to give up and come home. To rest and wash and tell about the miracles of the day.
“It’s nice to see you,” she said.
“I have something.” He held a cardboard box with both hands; when he entered the apartment he did not set it down. As if, she thought, it contained something too fragile and too valuable to let go of; he wanted to keep it perpetually in his hands.
She said, “I’ll fix you a cup of coffee.” At the stove she pressed the coffee button, and in a moment had put the imposing mug by his place at the kitchen table. Still holding the box, he seated himself, and on his face the round-eyed wonder remained. In all the years she had known him she had not encountered this expression before. Something had happened since she had seen him last; since, last night, he had gone off in his car. Now he had come back and this box had arrived with him: he held, in the box, everything that had happened to him.
“I’m going to sleep,” he announced. “All day. I phoned in and got Harry Bryant; he said take the day off and rest. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.” Carefully he set the box down on the table and picked up his coffee mug; dutifully, because she wanted him to, he drank his coffee.
Seating herself across from him she said, “What do you have in the box, Rick?”
“A toad.”
“Can I see it?” She watched as he untied the box and removed the lid. “Oh,” she said, seeing the toad; for some reason it frightened her. “Will it bite?” she asked.
“Pick it up. It won’t bite; toads don’t have teeth.” Rick lifted the toad out and extended it toward her. Stemming her aversion, she accepted it. “I thought toads were extinct,” she said as she turned it over, curious about its legs; they seemed almost useless. “Can toads jump like frogs? I mean, will it jump out of my hands suddenly?”
“The legs of toads are weak,” Rick said. “That’s the main difference between a toad and a frog, that and water. A frog remains near water but a toad can live in the desert. I found this in the desert, up near the Oregon border. Where everything had died.” He reached to take it back from her. But she had discovered something; still holding it upside down, she poked at its abdomen and then, with her nail, located the tiny control panel. She flipped the panel open.
“Oh.” His face fell by degrees. “Yeah, so I see; you’re right.” Crestfallen, he gazed mutely at the false animal; he took it back from her, fiddled with the legs as if baffled—he did not seem quite to understand. He then carefully replaced it in its box. “I wonder how it got out there in the desolate part of California like that. Somebody must have put it there. No way to tell what for.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you—about it being electrical.” She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.
“No,” Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather—” He became silent. “I’d prefer to know.”
“Do you want to use the mood organ? To feel better? You always have gotten a lot out of it, more than I ever have.”
“I’ll be okay.” He shook his head, as if trying to clear it, still bewildered. “The spider Mercer gave the chickenhead, Isidore; it probably was artificial, too. But it doesn’t matter. The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”
Iran said, “You look as if you’ve walked a hundred miles.”
“It’s been a long day.” He nodded.
“Go get into bed and sleep.”
He stared at her then, as if perplexed. “It is over, isn’t it?” Trustingly, he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they didn’t become real, not until she agreed.
“It’s over,” she said.
“God, what a marathon assignment,” Rick said. “Once I began on it there wasn’t any way for me to stop; it kept carrying me along, until finally I got to the Batys, and then suddenly I didn’t have anything to do. And that—” He hesitated, evidently amazed at what he had begun to say. “That part was worse,” he said. “After I finished. I couldn’t stop because there would be nothing left after I stopped. You were right this morning when you said I’m nothing but a crude cop with crude cop hands.”
“I don’t feel that anymore,” she said. “I’m just damn glad to have you come back home where you ought to be.” She kissed him and that seemed to please him; his face lit up, almost as much as before—before she had shown him that the toad was electric.
“Do you think I did wrong?” he asked. “What I did today?”
“No.”
“Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it’s better to do something wrong than right.”
“It’s the curse on us,” Iran said. “That Mercer talks about.”
“The dust?” he asked.
“The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn’t reverse time and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes, to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it’s they who’re doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us, actually. Did one of them cut your cheek, where it’s been bleeding?”
“Yes,?
?? he said wanly.
“Will you go to bed now? If I set the mood organ to a 670 setting?”
“What does that bring about?” he asked.
“Long deserved peace,” Iran said.
He got to his feet, stood painfully, his face drowsy and confused, as if a legion of battles had ebbed and advanced there, over many years. And then, by degrees, he progressed along the route to the bedroom. “Okay,” he said. “Long deserved peace.” He stretched out on the bed, dust sifting from his clothes and hair onto the white sheets.
No need to turn on the mood organ, Iran realized as she pressed the button which made the windows of the bedroom opaque. The gray light of day disappeared.
On the bed Rick, after a moment, slept.
She stayed there for a time, keeping him in sight to be sure he wouldn’t wake up, wouldn’t spring to a sitting position in fear as he sometimes did at night. And then, presently, she returned to the kitchen, reseated herself at the kitchen table.
Next to her the electric toad flopped and rustled in its box; she wondered what it “ate,” and what repairs on it would run. Artificial flies, she decided.
Opening the phone book, she looked in the yellow pages under animal accessories, electric; she dialed and when the saleswoman answered, said, “I’d like to order one pound of artificial flies that really fly around and buzz, please.”
“Is it for an electric turtle, ma’am?”
“A toad,” she said.
“Then I suggest our mixed assortment of artificial crawling and flying bugs of all types including—”
“The flies will do,” Iran said. “Will you deliver? I don’t want to leave my apartment; my husband’s asleep and I want to be sure he’s all right.”