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It’s unethical and cruel not to.
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.” “I guess squirrels aren’t too bright,” Rick said. They flew on, then, in silence.
The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by—or despite—its outcry.
Rick had seen that before in androids, in crucial situations. The artificial life force animating them seemed to fail if pressed too far…at least in some of them. But not all.
“Do you have a print of Munch’s Puberty?”
“Do you think androids have souls?” Rick interrupted.
they’re murderous illegal aliens masquerading as—”
“I see a pattern. The way you killed Garland and then the way you killed Luba. You don’t kill the way I do; you don’t try to—Hell,” he said. “I know what it is. You like to kill. All you need is a pretext. If you had a pretext, you’d kill me. That’s why you picked up on the possibility of Garland being an android; it made him available for being killed. I wonder what you’re going to do when you fail to pass the Boneli test. Will you kill yourself? Sometimes androids do that.”
“Did you really like that Munch picture that Luba Luft was looking at?” he asked. “I didn’t care for it. Realism in art doesn’t interest me; I like Picasso and—”
“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—”
“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—”
“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 6.0 respectively.”
he damped down his peripheral vision;
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.”
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.
He found himself yabbering away like a folletto. “You can’t come here; I can’t—” He calmed himself.
stentorian
Mr. Isidore is—” She searched for the word. “Special,” Pris said.
The experience with Phil Resch—I have to get my confidence, my faith in myself and my abilities, back. Or I won’t keep my job.
“They’ll have our joy,” Rick said, “but we’ll lose. We’ll exchange what we feel for what they feel. Our joy will be lost.”
A real sheep this time, he said to himself. I have to get one. In compensation.
Mercer doesn’t have to do anything alien to him. He suffers but at least he isn’t required to violate his own identity.
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.”
deteriorated specials, antheads and chickenheads, hang out and go through their versions of living.”
Like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse; he found himself rooting interminably.
“I’m not alive! You’re not going to bed with a woman. Don’t be disappointed; okay? Have you ever made love to an android before?”
“Thanks, Rick,” she said wanly. “Remember, though: don’t think about it, just do it. Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both.”
“I love you,” Rachael said. “If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I’d score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.”
“But,” he said, “if I can kill you then I can kill them.”
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.
You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed. You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them. Thank god they stayed.
The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.”
“You’re too close,” Mercer said. “You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.”
They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you’re still here and I’m still here.”
What a job to have to do, Rick thought. I’m a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I’ve done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it’s time to go home. Maybe, after I’ve been there awhile with Iran, I’ll forget.
“Everything is true,” he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.” He snapped on the car motor.
But also he would have understood the other part, which I don’t think even Mercer comprehends. For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought; that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self.
falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else’s degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.
This isn’t new. But it was. Because, he thought, I did it alone.