"Want to know what the Russian police said?" Miss Marsten asked. "I know that, too." Her freckled, orange face glowed.
Rick said, "I'll find out from Harry Bryant." He felt irritable; office gossip annoyed him because it always proved better than the truth. Seating himself at his desk he pointedly fished about in a drawer until Miss Marsten, perceiving the hint, departed.
From the drawer he produced an ancient, creased manila envelope. Leaning back, tilting his important - style chair, he rummaged among the contents of the envelope until he came across what he wanted: the collected, extant data on the Nexus-6.
A moment's reading vindicated Miss Marsten's statement; the Nexus-6 did have two trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure could assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no intelligence test would trap such an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not since the primordial, crude varieties of the '70s -
The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major - but inferior - segment of mankind. For better or worse. The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism - an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.
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 arachnids. For one thing, the emphatic 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, ultimatley, the emphatic 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.
Rick liked to think of them that way; it made his job palatable. In retiring - i.e. killing - an andy he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers, Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism, as it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown insidiously. In Mercerism, an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of the tottering, ascending old man, but it was never clear who or what this evil presence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel emphatic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat - that, for him, epitomized The Killers.
Thinking about animals reminded him of the ostrich he had seen in the pet store. Temporarily he pushed away the specs on the Nexus-6 brain unit, took a pinch of Mrs. Siddons' No. 3 & 4 snuff and cogitated. Then he examined his watch, saw that he had time; he picked up his desk vidphone and said to Miss Marsten, "Get me the Happy Dog Pet Shop on Sutter Street."
"Yes sir," Miss Marsten said, and opened her phone book.
They can't really want that much for the ostrich, Rick said to himself. They expect you to car-trade, like in the old days.
"Happy Dog Pet Shop," a man's voice declared, and on Rick's vidscreen a minute happy face appeared. Animals could be heard bawling.
"That ostrich you have in your display window," Rich said; he toyed with a ceramic ashtray before him on the desk. "What sort of a down payment would I need for that?"
"Let's see," the animal salesman said, groping for a pen and pad of paper. "One-third down." He figured. "May I ask, sit, if you're going to trade something in?
Guardedly, Rick said, "I haven't decided."
"Let's say we put the ostrich on a thirty-month contract," the salesman said. "At a low, low interest rate of six percent a month. That would make your monthly payment, after a reasonable down - "
"You'll have to lower the price you're asking," Rick said. Knock off two thousand and I won't trade anything in; I'll come up with cash." Dave Holden, he reflected, is out of action. That could mean a great deal . . . depending on how many assignments show up during the coming month.