“He almost did,” Rick said. “He had a big utility-model laser beam on me part of the time. He was considering it. But it was you he was worried about, not me.”
“The android flees,” Resch said humorlessly, “where the bounty hunter pursues. You realize, don’t you, that you’re going to have to double back to the opera house and get Luba Luft before anyone here has a chance to warn her as to how this came out. Warn it, I should say. Do you think of them as ‘it’?”
“I did at one time,” Rick said. “When my conscience occasionally bothered me about the work I had to do; I protected myself by thinking of them that way, but now I no longer find it necessary. All right, I’ll head directly back to the opera house. Assuming you can get me out of here.”
“Suppose we sit Garland up at his desk,” Resch said; he dragged the corpse of the android back up into its chair, arranging its arms and legs so that its posture appeared reasonably natural—if no one looked closely. If no one came into the office. Pressing a key on the desk intercom, Phil Resch said, “Inspector Garland has asked that no calls be put through to him for the next half hour. He’s involved in work that can’t be interrupted.”
“Yes, Mr. Resch.”
Releasing the intercom key, Phil Resch said to Rick, “I’m going to handcuff you to me during the time we’re still here in the building. Once we’re airborne I’ll naturally let you go.” He produced a pair of cuffs, slapped one onto Rick’s wrist and the other around his own. “Come on; let’s get it over with.” He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and pushed open the office door.
Uniformed police stood or sat on every side, conducting their routine business of the day; none of them glanced up or paid any attention as Phil Resch led Rick across the lobby to the elevator.
“What I’m afraid of,” Resch said as they waited for the elevator, “is that the Garland one had a dead man’s throttle warning component built into it. But—” He shrugged. “I would have expected it to go off by now; otherwise it’s not much good.”
The elevator arrived; several police-like nondescript men and women disemelevatored, clacked off across the lobby on their several errands. They paid no attention to Rick or Phil Resch.
“Do you think your department will take me on?” Resch asked as the elevator doors shut, closing the two of them inside; he punched the roof button and the elevator silently rose. “After all, as of now I’m out of a job. To say the least.”
Guardedly, Rick said, “I—don’t see why not. Except that we already have two bounty hunters.” I’ve got to tell him, he said to himself. It’s unethical and cruel not to. Mr. Resch, you’re an android, he thought to himself. You got me out of this place and here’s your reward; you’re everything we jointly abominate. The essence of what we’re committed to destroy.
“I can’t get over it,” Phil Resch said. “It doesn’t seem possible. For three years I’ve been working under the direction of androids. Why didn’t I suspect—I mean, enough to do something?”
“Maybe it isn’t that long. Maybe they only recently infiltrated this building.”
“They’ve been here all the time. Garland has been my superior from the start, throughout my three years.”
“According to it,” Rick said, “the bunch of them came to Earth together. And that wasn’t as long ago as three years; it’s only been a matter of months.”
“Then at one time an authentic Garland existed,” Phil Resch said. “And somewhere along the way got replaced.” His sharklike lean face twisted and he struggled to understand. “Or—I’ve been impregnated with a false memory system. Maybe I only remember Garland over the whole time. But—” His face, suffused now with growing torment, continued to twist and work spasmodically. “Only androids show up with false memory systems; it’s been found ineffective in humans.”
The elevator ceased rising; its doors slid back, and there, spread out ahead of them, deserted except for empty parked vehicles, lay the police station’s roof field.
“Here’s my car,” Phil Resch said, unlocking the door of a nearby hovercar and waving Rick rapidly inside; he himself got in behind the wheel and started up the motor. In a moment they had lifted into the sky and, turning north, headed back in the direction of the War Memorial Opera House. Preoccupied, Phil Resch drove by reflex; his progressively more gloomy train of thought continued to dominate his attention. “Listen, Deckard,” he said suddenly. “After we retire Luba Luft—I want you to—” His voice, husky and tormented, broke off. “You know. Give me the Boneli test or that empathy scale you have. To see about me.”
“We can worry about that later,” Rick said evasively.
“You don’t want me to take it, do you?” Phil Resch glanced at him with acute comprehension. “I guess you know what the results will be; Garland must have told you something. Facts which I don’t know.”
Rick said, “It’s going to be hard even for the two of us to take out Luba Luft; she’s more than I could handle, anyhow. Let’s keep our attention focused on that.”
“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.”
“I guess squirrels aren’t too bright,” Rick said.
They flew on, then, in silence.
12
At the opera house Rick Deckard and Phil Resch were informed that the rehearsal had ended. And Miss Luft had left.
“Did she say where she intended to go?” Phil Resch asked the stagehand, showing his police identification.
“Over to the museum.” The stagehand studied the ID card. “She said she wanted to take in the exhibit of Edvard Munch that’s there now. It ends tomorrow.”
And Luba Luft, Rick thought to himself, ends today.
As the two of them walked down the sidewalk to the museum, Phil Resch said, “What odds will you give? She’s flown; we won’t find her at the museum.”
“Maybe,” Rick said.
They arrived at the museum building, noted on which floor the Munch exhibit could be found, and ascended. Shortly, they wandered amid paintings and woodcuts. Many people had turned out for the exhibit, including a grammar school class; the shrill voice of the teacher penetrated all the rooms comprising the exhibit, and Rick thought, That’s what you’d expect an andy to sound—and look—like. Instead of like Rachael Rosen and Luba Luft. And—the man beside him. Or rather the thing beside him.
“Did you ever hear of an andy having a pet of any sort?” Phil Resch asked him.
For some obscure reason he felt the need to be brutally honest; perhaps he had already begun preparing himself for what lay ahead. “In two cases that I know of, andys owned and cared for animals. But it’s rare. From what I’ve been able to learn, it generally fails; the andy is unable to keep the animal alive. Animals require an environment of warmth to flourish. Except for reptiles and insects.”
“Would a squirrel need that? An atmosphere of love? Because Buffy is doing fine, as sleek as an otter. I groom and comb him every other day.” At an oil painting Phil Resch halted, gazed intently. 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.
“He did a woodcut of this,” Rick said, reading the card tacked below the painting.
“I think,” Phil Resch said, “that this is how an andy must feel.” He traced in the air the convolutions, visible in the picture, of the creature’s cry. “I don’t feel like that, so maybe I’m not an—” He broke off as several persons strolled up to inspect the picture.
“There’s Luba Luft.”
Rick pointed and Phil Resch halted his somber introspection and defense; the two of them walked at a measured pace toward her, taking their time as if nothing confronted them; as always, it was vital to preserve the atmosphere of the commonplace. Other humans, having no knowledge of the presence of androids among them, had to be protected at all costs—even that of losing the quarry.
Holding a printed catalogue, Luba Luft, wearing shiny tapered pants and an illuminated gold vestlike top, stood absorbed in the picture before her: a drawing of a young girl, hands clasped together, seated on the edge of a bed, an expression of bewildered wonder and new, groping awe imprinted on the face.
“Want me to buy it for you?” Rick said to Luba Luft; he stood beside her, holding laxly onto her upper arm, informing her by his loose grip that he knew he had possession of her—he did not have to strain in an effort to detain her. On the other side of her Phil Resch put his hand on her shoulder and Rick saw the bulge of the laser tube. Phil Resch did not intend to take chances, not after the near miss with Inspector Garland.
“It’s not for sale.” Luba Luft glanced at him idly, then violently as she recognized him; her eyes faded and the color dimmed from her face, leaving it cadaverous, as if already starting to decay. As if life had in an instant retreated to some point far inside her, leaving the body to its automatic ruin. “I thought they arrested you. Do you mean they let you
go?
”
“Miss Luft,” he said, “this is Mr. Resch. Phil Resch, this is the quite well-known opera singer Luba Luft.” To Luba he said, “The harness bull that arrested me is an android. So was his superior. Do you know—did you know—an Inspector Garland? He told me that you all came here in one ship as a group.”
“The police department which you called,” Phil Resch said to her, “operating out of a building on Mission, is the organizing agency by which it would appear your group keeps in touch. They even feel confident enough to hire a human bounty hunter; evidently—”
“You?” Luba Luft said. “You’re not human. No more than I am: you’re an android, too.”
An interval of silence passed and then Phil Resch said in a low but controlled voice, “Well, we’ll deal with that at the proper time.” To Rick he said, “Let’s take her to my car.”
One of them on each side of her, they prodded her in the direction of the museum elevator. Luba Luft did not come willingly, but on the other hand she did not actively resist; seemingly she had become resigned. 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.
And it could flare up again furiously.
Androids, however, had, as he knew, an innate desire to remain inconspicuous. In the museum, with so many people roaming around, Luba Luft would tend to do nothing. The real encounter—for her probably the final one—would take place in the car, where no one else could see. Alone, with appalling abruptness, she could shed her inhibitions. He prepared himself—and did not think about Phil Resch. As Resch had said, it would be dealt with at a proper time.
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—”
“I can’t take this.” Phil Resch dug into his coat, groped.
“No,” Rick said; he grabbed at Phil Resch’s hand; Resch retreated, eluding him. “The Boneli test,” Rick said.
“It’s admitted it’s an android,” Phil Resch said. “We don’t have to wait.”
“But to retire it,” Rick said, “because it’s needling you—give me that.” He struggled to pry the laser tube away from Phil Resch. The tube remained in Phil Resch’s possession; Resch circled back within the cramped elevator, evading him, his attention on Luba Luft only. “Okay,” Rick said. “Retire it; kill it now. Show it that it’s right.” He saw, then, that Resch meant to. “Wait—”