Highlights from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick Last read on December 19, 2023
Highlights from this book
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At it's best, science fiction attempts to reconcile the human scale of the universe with the smaller compass of human life. Often it does so noisily and gleefully, foregoing battles between huge spaceships against vast backdrops of stars, winding up plots that totter across interstellar distances and deep galactic time. Philip K. Dick's novels are on a smaller, intimately human scale, yet deal with questions as any found in the most Wagnerian of space operas.
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“Get your crude cop’s hand away,” Iran said.
“I’m not a cop.” He felt irritable, now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.
“You’re worse,” his wife said, her eyes still shut. “You’re a murderer hired by the cops.”
“I’ve never killed a human being in my life.” His irritability had risen now; had become outright hostility.
Iran said, “Just those poor andys.”
“I notice you’ve never had any hesitation as to spending the bounty money I bring home on whatever momentarily attracts your attention.” He rose, strode to the console of his mood organ. “Instead of saving,” he said, “so we could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake electric one upstairs. A mere electric animal, and me earning all that I’ve worked my way up to through the years.” At his console he hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which would make him irked enough to win the argument).
“If you dial,” Iran said, eyes open and watching, “for greater venom, then I’ll dial the same. I’ll dial the maximum and you’ll see a fight that makes every argument we’ve had up to now seem like nothing. Dial and see; just try me.” She rose swiftly, loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at him, waiting.
He sighed, defeated by her threat. “I’ll dial what’s on my schedule for today.” Examining the schedule for January 3, 2021, he saw that a businesslike professional attitude was called for. “If I dial by schedule,” he said warily, “will you agree to also?” He waited, canny enough not to commit himself until his wife had agreed to follow suit.
“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression,” Iran said.
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“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.”
“I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now,” Iran said.
“Then dial 3,” he said.
“I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial! If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine; I just want to sit here on the bed and stare at the floor.” Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.
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“Ever thought of selling your horse?” Rick asked. He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article. He had therefore no choice except to continue. Even were he not to care himself, there remained his wife, and Iran did care. Very much.
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Rick said, “Sheep get strange diseases. Or put another way, sheep get a lot of diseases but the symptoms are always the same; the sheep can’t get up and there’s no way to tell how serious it is, whether it’s a sprained leg or the animal’s dying of tetanus. That’s what mine died of: tetanus.”
“Up here?” Barbour said. “On the roof?”
“The hay,” Rick explained. “That one time I didn’t get all the wire off the bale; I left a piece and Groucho—that’s what I called him then—got a scratch and in that way contracted tetanus. I took him to the vet’s and he died, and I thought about it, and finally I called one of those shops that manufacture artificial animals and I showed them a photograph of Groucho. They made this.” He indicated the reclining ersatz animal, which continued to ruminate attentively, still watching alertly for any indication of oats. “It’s a premium job. And I’ve put as much time and attention into caring for it as I did when it was real. But—” He shrugged.
“It’s not the same,” Barbour finished.
“But almost. You feel the same doing it; you have to keep your eye on it exactly as you did when it was really alive.
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Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
Better, perhaps, to turn the TV back on.
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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.
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“I’d like to watch,” Rachael said, also seating herself. “I’ve never seen an empathy test being administered. What do those things you have there measure?”
Rick said, “This”—he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires—“measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so-called ‘shame’ or ‘blushing’ reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can’t be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate.” He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. “This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of—”
“And these can’t be found in androids,” Rachael said.
“They’re not engendered by the stimuli-questions; no. Although biologically they exist. Potentially.”
Rachael said, “Give me the test.”
“Why?” Rick said, puzzled.
Speaking up, Eldon Rosen said hoarsely, “We selected her as your first subject. She may be an android. We’re hoping you can tell.” He seated himself in a series of clumsy motions, got out a cigarette, lit it, and fixedly watched.
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After making a jot of notation, Rick continued, turning to the eighth question of the Voigt-Kampff profile scale. “You have a little boy and he shows you his butterfly collection, including his killing jar.”
“I’d take him to the doctor.” Rachael’s voice was low but firm. Again the twin gauges registered, but this time not so far. He made a note of that, too.
“You’re sitting watching TV,” he continued, “and suddenly you discover a wasp crawling on your wrist.”
Rachael said, “I’d kill it.” The gauges, this time, registered almost nothing: only a feeble and momentary tremor. He noted that and hunted cautiously for the next question.
“In a magazine you come across a full-page color picture of a nude girl.” He paused.
“Is this testing whether I’m an android,” Rachael asked tartly, “or whether I’m homosexual?” The gauges did not register.
He continued, “Your husband likes the picture.” Still the gauges failed to indicate a reaction. “The girl,” he added, “is lying facedown on a large and beautiful bearskin rug.” The gauges remained inert, and he said to himself, An android response. Failing to detect the major element, the dead animal pelt. Her—Its—mind is concentrating on other factors. “Your husband hangs the picture up on the wall of his study,” he finished, and this time the needles moved.
“I certainly wouldn’t let him,” Rachael said.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Now consider this. You’re reading a novel written in the old days before the war. The characters are visiting Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. They become hungry and enter a seafood restaurant. One of them orders lobster, and the chef drops the lobster into the tub of boiling water while the characters watch.” “Oh god,” Rachael said. “That’s awful! Did they really do that? It’s depraved! You mean a live lobster?” The gauges, however, did not respond. Formally, a correct response. But simulated.
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“This problem,” Rick said, “stems entirely from your method of operation, Mr. Rosen. Nobody forced your organization to evolve the production of humanoid robots to a point where—”
“We produced what the colonists wanted,” Eldon Rosen said. “We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit. But your Voigt-Kampff test was a failure before we released that type of android. If you had failed to classify a Nexus-6 android as an android, if you had checked it out as human—but that’s not what happened.” His voice had become hard and bitingly penetrating. “Your police department—others as well—may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped empathic ability, such as my innocent niece here. Your position, Mr. Deckard, is extremely bad morally. Ours isn’t.”
“In other words,” Rick said with acuity, “I’m not going to be given a chance to check out a single Nexus-6. You people dropped this schizoid girl on me beforehand.” And my test, he realized, is wiped out. I shouldn’t have gone for it, he said to himself. However, it’s too late now.
“We have you, Mr. Deckard,” Rachael Rosen agreed in a quiet, reasonable voice; she turned toward him then and smiled.
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“The scale has been adequate in your case,” he answered. “I can extrapolate from that; it’s clearly still effective.” To Eldon Rosen, who slumped morosely by the door of the room, he said, “Does she know?” Sometimes they didn’t; false memories had been tried various times, generally in the mistaken idea that through them, reactions to testing would be altered.
Eldon Rosen said, “No. We programmed her completely. But I think toward the end she suspected.” To the girl he said, “You guessed when he asked for one more try.”
Pale, Rachael nodded fixedly.
“Don’t be afraid of him,” Eldon Rosen told her. “You’re not an escaped android on Earth illegally; you’re the property of the Rosen Association, used as a sales device for prospective emigrants.” He walked to the girl, put his hand comfortingly on her shoulder; at the touch the girl flinched. “He’s right,” Rick said. “I’m not going to retire you, Miss Rosen. Good day.” He started toward the door, then halted briefly. To the two of them he said, “Is the owl genuine?”
Rachael glanced swiftly at the elder Rosen.
“He’s leaving anyhow,” Eldon Rosen said. “It doesn’t matter; the owl is artificial. There are no owls.”
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“Listen,” he said earnestly. “If we go all over the building looking, we can probably find you things that aren’t so tattered. A lamp from one apartment, a table from another.”
“I’ll do it,” the girl said. “Myself, thanks.”
“You’d go into those apartments alone?” He could not believe it.
“Why not?” Again she shuddered nervously, grimacing in awareness of saying something wrong.
Isidore said, “I’ve tried it. Once. After that I just come home and go in my own place and I don’t think about the rest. The apartments in which no one lives—hundreds of them and all full of the possessions people had, like family photographs and clothes. Those that died couldn’t take anything and those who emigrated didn’t want to. This building, except for my apartment, is completely kipple-ized.”
“Kipple-ized’?” She did not comprehend.
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”
“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.
“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. “‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’ Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.”
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“As far as I’m concerned,” the girl said, “you can count that as a major objection to Mercerism.” Her voice was clean and neutral; she intended only to state a fact, he realized. The fact of her attitude toward chickenheads.
“I guess I’ll go back upstairs,” he said, and started away from her, his cube of margarine clutched; it had become plastic and damp from the squeeze of his hand.
The girl watched him go, still with the neutral expression on her face. And then she called, “Wait.”
Turning, he said, “Why?”
“I’ll need you. For getting myself adequate furniture. From other apartments, as you said.” She strolled toward him, her bare upper body sleek and trim, without an excess gram of fat. “What time do you get home from work? You can help me then.”
Isidore said, “Could you maybe fix dinner for us? If I brought home the ingredients?”
“No, I have too much to do.” The girl shook off the request effortlessly, and he noticed that, perceived it without understanding it. Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or said but what she did not do and say. “Some other time,” the girl said, and moved back toward her apartment door.
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Too old to emigrate, Hannibal Sloat, although not a special, was doomed to creep out his remaining life on Earth. The dust, over the years, had eroded him; it had left his features gray, his thoughts gray; it had shrunk him and made his legs spindly and his gait unsteady. He saw the world through glasses literally dense with dust. For some reason, Sloat never cleaned his glasses. It was as if he had given up; he had accepted the radioactive dirt and it had begun its job, long ago, of burying him.
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“He doesn’t know; he doesn’t suspect; he doesn’t have the slightest idea. Otherwise he couldn’t live out a life as a bounty hunter, a human occupation—hardly an android occupation.” Garland gestured toward Rick’s briefcase. “Those other carbons, the other suspects you’re supposed to test and retire. I know them all.” He paused, then said, “We all came here together on the same ship from Mars. Not Resch; he stayed behind another week, receiving the synthetic memory system.” He was silent then. Or rather it was silent.
Rick said, “What’ll he do when he finds out?”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” Garland said remotely. “It ought, from an abstract, intellectual viewpoint, to be interesting. He may kill me, kill himself; maybe you, too. He may kill everyone he can, human and android alike. I understand that such things happen, when there’s been a synthetic memory system laid down. When one thinks it’s human.”
“So when you do that, you’re taking a chance.”
Garland said, “It’s a chance anyway, breaking free and coming here to Earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and wood louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together.”
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“It’s not just false memory structures,” Phil Resch said. “I own an animal; not a false one but the real thing. A squirrel. I love the squirrel, Deckard; every goddamn morning I feed it and change its papers—you know, clean up its cage—and then in the evening when I get off work I let it loose in my apt and it runs all over the place. It has a wheel in its cage; ever seen a squirrel running inside a wheel? It runs and runs, the wheel spins, but the squirrel stays in the same spot. Buffy seems to like it, though.”
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At the end of the corridor near the elevators, a little storelike affair had been set up; it sold prints and art books, and Luba halted there, tarrying. “Listen,” she said to Rick. Some of the color had returned to her face; once more she looked—at least briefly—alive. “Buy me a reproduction of that picture I was looking at when you found me. The one of the girl sitting on the bed.”
After a pause Rick said to the clerk, a heavy-jowled, middle-aged woman with netted gray hair, “Do you have a print of Munch’s Puberty?”
“Only in this book of his collected work,” the clerk said, lifting down a handsome glossy volume. “Twenty-five dollars.”
“I’ll take it.” He reached for his wallet.
Phil Resch said, “My departmental budget could never in a million years be stretched—”
“My own money,” Rick said; he handed the woman the bills and Luba the book. “Now let’s get started down,” he said to her and Phil Resch.
“It’s very nice of you,” Luba said as they entered the elevator. “There’s something very strange and touching about humans. An android would never have done that.” She glanced icily at Phil Resch. “It wouldn’t have occurred to him; as he said, never in a million years.” She continued to gaze at Resch, now with manifold hostility and aversion. “I really don’t like androids. Ever since I got here from Mars my life has consisted of imitating the human, doing what she would do, acting as if I had the thoughts and impulses a human would have. Imitating, as far as I’m concerned, a superior life-form.” To Phil Resch she said, “Isn’t that how it’s been with you, Resch? Trying to be—”
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Phil Resch fired, and at the same instant Luba Luft, in a spasm of frantic hunted fear, twisted and spun away, dropping as she did so. The beam missed its mark but, as Resch lowered it, burrowed a narrow hole, silently, into her stomach. She began to scream; she lay crouched against the wall of the elevator, screaming. Like the picture, Rick thought to himself, and, with his own laser tube, killed her. Luba Luft’s body fell forward, facedown, in a heap. It did not even tremble.
With his laser tube, Rick systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba. He did the job thoroughly, saying nothing; Phil Resch watched without understanding, his face showing his perplexity.
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“What’s that white stuff? Not the cheese.” She pointed.
“Made from soy bean whey. I wish I had some—” He broke off, flushing. “It used to be eaten with beef gravy.”
“An android,” Pris murmured. “That’s the sort of slip an android makes. That’s what gives it away.” She came over, stood beside him, and then to his stunned surprise put her arm around his waist and for an instant pressed against him. “I’ll try a slice of peach,” she said, and gingerly picked out a slippery pink-orange furry slice with her long fingers. And then, as she ate the slice of peach, she began to cry. Cold tears descended her cheeks, splashed on the bosom of her dress.
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“We came back,” Pris said, “because nobody should have to live there. It wasn’t conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It’s so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age.
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There’s a fortune to be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction, the old magazines and books and films, to Mars. Nothing is as exciting. To read about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization. You can imagine what it might have been like. What Mars ought to be like. Canals.”
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they’re all strange. He sensed it without being able to finger it. As if a peculiar and malign abstractness pervaded their mental processes.
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“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
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“That last goddamn Nexus-6 type,” Rachael said, enunciating with effort, “is the same type as I am.” She stared down at the bedspread, found a thread, and began rolling it into a pellet. “Didn’t you notice the description? It’s of me, too. She may wear her hair differently and dress differently—she may even have bought a wig. But when you see her you’ll know what I mean.” She laughed sardonically. “It’s a good thing the association admitted I’m an andy; otherwise you’d probably have gone mad when you caught sight of Pris Stratton. Or thought she was me.”
...“I wish,” Rachael said, “that I had known that before I came. I never would have flown down here. I think you’re asking too much. You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?”
“Empathy,” he said.
“Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that’s what’ll happen. In the confusion you’ll retire me, not her. And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I—I personally —really exist; I’m just representative of a type.” She shuddered.
He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose. “Ants don’t feel like that,” he said, “and they’re physically identical.”
“Ants. They don’t feel period.”
“Identical human twins. They don’t—”
“But they identify with each other; I understand they have an empathic, special bond.”
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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. No emotional awareness, no feeling-sense of the actual meaning of what she said. Only the hollow, formal, intellectual definitions of the separate terms.
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“But the wrong way.” She seemed more externally composed now. But still fundamentally frantic and tense. Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. 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.
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“I’ve never seen a spider,” Pris said. She cupped the medicine bottle in her palms, surveying the creature within. “All those legs. Why’s it need so many legs, J. R.?”
“That’s the way spiders are,” Isidore said, his heart pounding; he had difficulty breathing. “Eight legs.”
Rising to her feet, Pris said, “You know what I think, J. R.? I think it doesn’t need all those legs.”
“Eight?” Irmgard Baty said. “Why couldn’t it get by on four? Cut four off and see.” Impulsively opening her purse, she produced a pair of clean, sharp cuticle scissors, which she passed to Pris.
A weird terror struck at J. R. Isidore. Carrying the medicine bottle into the kitchen, Pris seated herself at J. R. Isidore’s breakfast table. She removed the lid from the bottle and dumped the spider out. “It probably won’t be able to run as fast,” she said, “but there’s nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It’ll die anyway.” She reached for the scissors.
“Please,” Isidore said.
Pris glanced up inquiringly. “Is it worth something?”
“Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly.
With the scissors, Pris snipped off one of the spider’s legs...
Roy Baty appeared at the doorway, inhaling deeply, an expression of accomplishment on his face. “It’s done. Buster said it out loud, and nearly every human in the system heard him say it. ‘Mercerism is a swindle.’ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.” He came over to look curiously at the spider.
“It won’t try to walk,” Irmgard said.
“I can make it walk.” Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away.
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“Mercerism isn’t finished,” Isidore said. Something ailed the three androids, something terrible. The spider, he thought. Maybe it had been the last spider on Earth, as Roy Baty said. And the spider is gone; Mercer is gone; he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere—he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. It grew around him as he stood holding the empty ceramic cup; the cupboards of the kitchen creaked and split and he felt the floor beneath his feet give.
Reaching out, he touched the wall. His hand broke the surface; gray particles trickled and hurried down, fragments of plaster resembling the radioactive dust outside. He seated himself at the table and, like rotten, hollow tubes the legs of the chair bent; standing quickly, he set down the cup and tried to reform the chair, tried to press it back into its right shape. The chair came apart in his hands, the screws which had previously connected its several sections ripping out and hanging loose. He saw, on the table, the ceramic cup crack; webs of fine lines grew like the shadows of a vine, and then a chip dropped from the edge of the cup, exposing the rough, unglazed interior.
“What’s he doing?” Irmgard Baty’s voice came to him, distantly. “He’s breaking everything! Isidore, stop—”
“I’m not doing it,” he said. He walked unsteadily into the living room, to be by himself; he stood by the tattered couch and gazed at the yellow, stained wall with all the spots which dead bugs, that had once crawled, had left, and again he thought of the corpse of the spider with its four remaining legs. Everything in here is old, he realized. It long ago began to decay and it won’t stop. The corpse of the spider has taken over
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Across the landscape weeds advanced; weeds corkscrewed their way into the walls around him and worked the walls until the weeds became their own spore. The spore expanded, split, and burst within the corrupted steel and shards of concrete that had formerly been walls. But the desolation remained after the walls had gone; the desolation followed after everything else. Except the frail, dim figure of Mercer; the old man faced him, a placid expression on his face.
“Is the sky painted?” Isidore asked. “Are there really brush strokes that show up under magnification?”
“Yes,” Mercer said.
“I can’t see them.”
“You’re too close,” Mercer said. “You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.”
“Is that why they claim you’re a fraud?”
“I am a fraud,” Mercer said. “They’re sincere; their research is genuine. From their standpoint I am an elderly retired bit player named Al Jarry. All of it, their disclosure, is true. They interviewed me at my home, as they claim; I told them whatever they wanted to know, which was everything.”
“Including about the whisky?”
Mercer smiled. “It was true. They did a good job and from their standpoint Buster Friendly’s disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you’re still here and I’m still here.” Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. “I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.”
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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.” The clerk said, “For a toad I’d suggest also a perpetually renewing puddle, unless it’s a horned toad, in which case there’s a kit containing sand, multicolored pebbles, and bits of organic debris. And if you’re going to be putting it through its feed cycle regularly, I suggest you let our service department make a periodic tongue adjustment. In a toad that’s vital.”
“Fine,” Iran said. “I want it to work perfectly. My husband is devoted to it.” She gave her address and hung up. And, feeling better, fixed herself at last a cup of black, hot coffee.