“Talk all you want,” Rick said. Talk all the way to the tomb, he said to himself. If you feel like it. It didn’t matter to him.
“If I test out android,” Phil Resch prattled, “you’ll undergo renewed faith in the human race. But, since it’s not going to work out that way, I suggest you begin framing an ideology which will account for— ”
“Here’s the first question,” Rick said; the gear had now been set up and the needles of the two dials quivered. “Reaction time is a factor, so answer as rapidly as you can.” From memory he selected an initial question. The test had begun.
Afterward, Rick sat in silence for a time. Then he began gathering his gear together, stuffing it back in the briefcase.
“I can tell by your face,” Phil Resch said; he exhaled in absolute, weightless, almost convulsive relief. “Okay; you can give me my gun back.” He reached out, his palm up, waiting.
“Evidently you were right,” Rick said. “About Garland’s motives. Wanting to split us up; what you said.” He felt both psychologically and physically weary.
“Do you have your ideology framed?” Phil Resch asked. “That would explain me as part of the human race?”
Rick said, “There is a defect in your empathic, role-taking ability. One which we don’t test for. Your feelings toward androids.”
“Of course we don’t test for that.”
“Maybe we should.” He had never thought of it before, had never felt any empathy on his own part toward the androids he killed. Always fie had assumed that throughout his psyche he experienced the android as a clever machine — as in his conscious view. And yet, in contrast to Phil Resch, a difference had manifested itself. And he felt instinctively that he was right. Empathy toward an artificial construct? he asked himself. Something that only pretends to be alive? But Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of a simulation.
“You realize,” Phil Resch said quietly, “what this would do. If we included androids in our range of empathic identification, as we do animals.”
“We couldn’t protect ourselves.”
“Absolutely. These Nexus-6 types . . . they’d roll all over us and mash us flat. You and I, all the bounty hunters — we stand between the Nexus-6 and mankind, a barrier which keeps the two distinct. Furthermore — ” He ceased, noticing that Rick was once again hauling out his test gear. “I thought the test was over.”
“I want to ask myself a question,” Rick said. “And I want you to tell me what the needles register. Just give me the calibration; I can compute it.” He plastered the adhesive disk against his cheek, arranged the beam of light until it fed directly into his eye. “Are you ready? Watch the dials. We’ll exclude time lapse in this; I just want magnitude.”
“Sure, Rick,” Phil Resch said obligingly.
Aloud, Rick said, “I’m going down by elevator with an android I’ve captured. And suddenly someone kills it, without warning.”
“No particular response,” Phil Resch said.
“What’d the needles hit?”
“The left one 2.8. The right one 3.3”
Rick said, “A female android.”
“Now they’re up to 4.0 and 6. respectively.”
“That’s high enough,” Rick said; he removed the wired adhesive disk from his cheek and shut off the beam of light. “That’s an emphatically empathic response,” he said. “About what a human subject shows for most questions. Except for the extreme ones, such as those dealing with human pelts used decoratively . . . the truly pathological ones.”
“Meaning?”
Rick said, “I’m capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids. Not for all of them but — one or two.” For Luba Luft, as an example, he said to himself. So I was wrong. There’s nothing unnatural or unhuman about Phil Resch’s reactions; it’s me.
I wonder, he wondered, if any human has ever felt this way before about an android.
Of course, he reflected, this may never come up again in my work; it could be an anomaly, something for instance to do with my feelings for The Magic Flute. And for Luba’s voice, in fact her career as a whole. Certainly this had never come up before; or at least not that he had been aware of. Not, for example, with Polokov. Nor with Garland. And, he realized, if Phil Resch had proved out android I could have killed him without feeling anything, anyhow after Luba’s death.
So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs. In that elevator at the museum, he said to himself, I rode down with two creatures, one human, the other android . . . and my feelings were the reverse of those intended. Of those I’m accustomed to feel — am required to feel.
“You’re in a spot, Deckard,” Phil Resch said; it seemed to amuse him.
Rick said, “What — should I do?”
“It’s sex,” Phil Resch said.
“Sex?
“Because she — it — was physically attractive. Hasn’t that ever happened to you before?” Phil Resch laughed. “We were taught that it constitutes a prime problem in bounty hunting. Don’t you know, Deckard, that in the colonies they have android mistresses?”
“It’s illegal,” Rick said, knowing the law about that.
“Sure it’s illegal. But most variations in sex are illegal. But people do it anvhow.”
“What about — not sex — but love?”
“Love is another name for sex.”
“Like love of country,” Rick said. “Love of music.”
“If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android — nothing more, nothing less. I felt that way, on one occasion. When I had just started bounty hunting. Don’t let it get you down; you’ll heal. What’s happened is that you’ve got your order reversed. Don’t kill her — or be present when she’s killed — and then feel physically attracted. Do it the other way.”
Rick stared at him. “Go to bed with her first — ”
” — and then kill her,” Phil Resch said succinctly. His grainy, hardened smile remained.
You’re a good bounty hunter, Rick realized. Your attitude proves it. But am I?
Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he had begun to wonder.
THIRTEEN
Like an arc of pure fire, John R. Isidore soared across the late-afternoon sky on his way home from his job. I wonder if she’s still there, he said to himself. Down in that kipple-infested old apt, watching Buster Friendly on her TV set and quaking with fear every time she imagines someone coming down the hall. Including, I suppose, me.
He had already stopped off at a blackmarket grocery store. On the seat beside him a bag of such delicacies as bean curd, ripe peaches, good soft evil-smelling cheese rocked back and forth as he alternately speeded up and slowed down his car; being tense, tonight, he drove somewhat erratically. And his allegedly repaired car coughed and floundered, as it had been doing for months prior to overhaul. Rats, Isidore said to himself.
The smell of peaches and cheese eddied about the car, filling his nose with pleasure. All rarities, for which he had squandered two weeks’ salary—borrowed in advance from Mr. Sloat. And, in addition, under the car seat where it could not roll and break, a bottle of Chablis wine knocked back and forth: the greatest rarity of all. He had been keeping it in a safety deposit box at the Bank of America, hanging onto it and not selling it no matter how much they offered, in case at some long, late, last moment a girl appeared. That had not happened, not until now.
The rubbish-littered, lifeless roof of his apartment building as always depressed him. Passing from his car to the elevator door he damped down his peripheral vision; he concentrated on the valuable bag and bottle which he carried, making certain that he tripped over no trash and took no ignominious pratfall to economic doom. When the elevator creakily arrived he rode it — not to his own floor — but to the lower level on which the new tenant, Pris Stratton, now lived. Presently he stood in front of her door, rapping with the edge of the wine bottle, his heart going to pieces inside his chest.
“Who’s there?” Her voice, muffled by the door and yet clear. A frightened, but blade-sharp tone.
“This is J. R. Isidore speaking,” he said briskly, adopting the new authority which he had so recently acquired via Mr. Sloat’s vidphone. “I have a few desirable items here and I think we can put together a more than reasonable dinner.”
The door, to a limited extent, opened; Pris, no lights on in the room behind her, peered out into the dim hall. “You sound different,” she said. “More grown up.”
“I had a few routine matters to deal with during business hours today. The usual. If you c-c-could let me in — “