Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Chapters 16–22

In the sumptuous and enormous hotel room Rick Deckard sat reading the typed carbon sheets on the two androids Roy and Irmgard Baty.

Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android “life.”

No excess flesh, a flat belly, small behind and smaller bosom—Rachael had been modeled on the Celtic type of build, anachronistic and attractive.

The total impression was good, however. Although definitely that of a girl, not a woman. Except for the restless, shrewd eyes.

She laughed sardonically.

He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose.

“We’re working on the spinal ganglia, too. Someday the Boneli test will fade into yesterday’s hoary shroud of spiritual oblivion.”

She smiled innocuously—at variance with her words.

At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance, yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait, possibly, he thought.

Imperceptibly she had passed from lamenting her condition to taunting him about his.

Imperceptibly she had passed from lamenting her condition to taunting him about his.

She reached out, toyed with a button of his shirt; in slow, facile twists she began unbuttoning it.

Standing there he realized, all at once, that he had acquired an overt, incontestable fear directed toward the principal android.

Like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse; he found himself rooting interminably.

Like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse; he found himself rooting interminably.

...with careful deliberation and attention she drew the bedcovers back, got in, drew the covers over her.

“Thanks, Rick,” she said wanly.

Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary.

Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to.

Braking, he managed to bring the car to a staggering, careening halt; he slammed off the motor and got out his laser tube.

Assurance had returned to her; the litany of her voice picked up pace.

Beside him in the darkness the coal of her cigarette glowed like the rump of a complacent lightning bug: a steady, unwavering index of Rachael Rosen’s achievement.

Others depend on me now, he exulted as he trudged down the dust-impacted steps to the level beneath.

I think, he thought, they’re exploiting me sort of.

“Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly.

“Blowups of the video pictures,” a new voice from the TV said, “when subjected to rigorous laboratory scrutiny, reveal that the gray backdrop of sky and daytime moon against which Mercer moves is not only not Terran—it is artificial.”

“Quite frankly, we believed Cortot,” the research chief said in his dry, pedantic voice, “and we spent a good deal of time examining publicity pictures of bit players once employed by the now defunct Hollywood movie industry.”

“Quite frankly, we believed Cortot,” the research chief said in his dry, pedantic voice, “and we spent a good deal of time examining publicity pictures of bit players once employed by the now defunct Hollywood movie industry.”

It has often been said by adherents of the experience of Mercerism that Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, that he is in fact an archetypal superior entity perhaps from another star.

Well, in a sense this contention has proven correct. Wilbur Mercer is not human, does not in fact exist.

Except the frail, dim figure of Mercer; the old man faced him, a placid expression on his face.

It had turned into a craven dish, with cowering, tiny, lidless eyes.

Now he could see the spider; it rested on a serrated leaf.

“Good night,” he said, and walked away, up the path and into the building, his flashlight bleeding a yellowed, diffuse path before him.

The rustling, ancient voice gained abrupt fervor.

His laser tube thrust out, Rick spun and sank onto his haunches facing the flight of stairs.

What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows.

A noxious, unexpected wind filtered through his clothes and he began to walk, rubbing his hands together.

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.

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.

That’s where Mercer’s triumph manifests itself, there at the end of the great sidereal cycle.

So this is what Mercer sees, he thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box shut—tied it again and again.

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.

At the stove she pressed the coffee button, and in a moment had put the imposing mug by his place at the kitchen table.