Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page A

Francisco Police Department, and it doesn’t believe our unit is to the public benefit.” She eyed him from beneath long black lashes, probably artificial.
    Rick said, “A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it’s not our problem.”
    “But as a hazard,” Rachael Rosen said, “then you come in. Is it true, Mr. Deckard, that you’re a bounty hunter?”
    He shrugged, with reluctance, nodded.
    “You have no difficulty viewing an android as inert,” the girl said. “So you can ‘retire’ it, as they say.”
    “Do you have the group selected out for me?” he said. “I’d like to—” He broke off. Because, all at once, he had seen their animals.
    A powerful corporation, he realized, would of course be able to afford this. In the back of his mind, evidently, he had anticipated such a collection; it was not surprise that he felt but more a sort of yearning. He quietly walked away from the girl, toward the closest pen. Already he could smell them, the several scents of the creatures standing or sitting, or, in the case of what appeared to be a raccoon, asleep.
    Never in his life had he personally seen a raccoon. He knew the animal only from 3-D films shown on television. For some reason the dust had struck that species almost as hard as it had the birds—of which almost none survived now. In an automatic response he brought out his much-thumbed Sidney’s and looked up raccoon with all the sub-listings. The list prices, naturally, appeared in italics; like Percheron horses, none existed on the market for sale at any figure. Sidney’s catalogue simply listed the price at which the last transaction involving a raccoon had taken place. It was astronomical.
    “His name is Bill,” the girl said from behind him. “Bill the raccoon. We acquired him just last year from a subsidiary corporation.” She pointed past him and he then perceived the armed company guards, standing with their machine guns, the rapid-fire little light Skoda issue; the eyes of the guards had been fastened on him since his car landed. And, he thought, my car is clearly marked as a police vehicle.
    “A major manufacturer of androids,” he said thoughtfully, “invests its surplus capital on living animals.”
    “Look at the owl,” Rachael Rosen said. “Here, I’ll wake it up for you.” She started toward a small, distant cage, in the center of which jutted up a branching dead tree.
    There are no owls, he started to say. Or so we’ve been told. Sidney’s, he thought; they list it in their catalogue as extinct: the tiny, precise type, the E, again and again throughout the catalogue. As the girl walked ahead of him he checked to see, and he was right. Sidney’s never makes a mistake, he said to himself. We know that, too. What else can we depend on?
    “It’s artificial,” he said, with sudden realization; his disappointment welled up keen and intense.
    “No.” She smiled, and he saw that she had small even teeth, as white as her eyes and hair were black.
    “But Sidney’s listing,” he said, trying to show her the catalogue. To prove it to her.
    The girl said, “We don’t buy from Sidney’s or from any animal dealer. All our purchases are from private parties, and the prices we pay aren’t reported.” She added, “Also we have our own naturalists; they’re now working up in Canada. There’s still a good deal of forest left, comparatively speaking, anyhow. Enough for small animals and once in a while a bird.”
    For a long time he stood gazing at the owl, who dozed on its perch. A thousand thoughts came into his mind, thoughts about the war, about the days when owls had fallen from the sky; he remembered how in his childhood it had been discovered that species upon species had become extinct and how the ’papes had reported it each day—foxes one morning, badgers the next, until people had stopped reading the perpetual animal obits.
    He