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“Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy
“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.
“We’ve waited for months; we all knew it was coming, this pitch of Buster’s.” She hesitated and then said, “Well, why not. Buster is one of us.” “An android,” Irmgard explained. “And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.”
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.
Mercer, he said aloud. Where are you now? This is the tomb world and I am in it again, but this time you’re not here, too.
The wind blew, cracking and splintering the remaining bones, but he sensed the presence of Mercer. Come here, he said to Mercer.
But the desolation remained after the walls had gone; the desolation followed after everything else.
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.”
And that's the odd thing about faith and its resistance to evidence
“There’s a bounty hunter in the building! Get all the lights off. Get him away from that empathy box; he has to be ready at the door. Go on—move him!”
“Don’t let him in, J. R. Say anything; do anything that will stop him. Do you know what a bounty hunter would do let loose in here? Do you understand what he would do to us?”
Such resistance does not speak of sentience?
“Hear anything?” Roy Baty said, bending close. Isidore smelled the rank, cringing body; he inhaled fear from it, fear pouring out, forming a mist.
The chickenhead knows they’re androids; he knew it already, before I told him. But he doesn’t understand. On the other hand, who does? Do I? Did I?
I’ve never found a live, wild animal. It must be a fantastic experience to look down and see something living scuttling along. Maybe it’ll happen someday to me like it did him.
Nature vs artifice
“Am I outside Mercerism now?” Rick said. “As the chickenhead said? Because of what I’m going to do in the next few minutes?” Mercer said, “Mr. Isidore spoke for himself, not for me. What you are doing has to be done. I said that already.”
This was the impossible one; she knew I couldn’t do this. But it’s over. In an instant. I did what I couldn’t do.
“Okay, you loved her,” Rick said. “And I loved Rachael. And the special loved the other Rachael.” He shot Roy Baty; the big man’s corpse lashed about, toppled like an overstacked collection of separate, brittle entities;
kipple
“Androids are stupid,” he said savagely to the special. “Roy Baty couldn’t tell me from you; it thought you were at the door.
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.
someone came here, got the goat out of its cage, and dragged it to the edge of the roof.” “And pushed it off?” he said. “Yes.” She nodded. “Did you see who did it?” “I saw her very clearly,”
“Rachael wouldn’t give a damn if you saw her; she probably wanted you to,
“Everything is true,” he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought.” He snapped on the car motor.
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.
I’ve been defeated in some obscure way. By having killed the androids? By Rachael’s murder of my goat? He did not know,
At that moment the first rock—and it was not rubber or soft foam plastic—struck him in the inguinal region.
Who threw the stone at me? he asked himself. No one. But why does it bother me? I’ve undergone it before, during fusion. While using my empathy box, like everyone else. This isn’t new. But it was.
“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 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.”
“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.
“Mercer isn’t a fake,” he said. “Unless reality is a fake.”
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.
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.
Maybe it’s due to brain damage on my part: exposure to radioactivity. I’m a special, he thought. Something has happened to me.
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.
“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.
