Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 12: The Museum
This is the chapter that breaks Rick Deckard. Not physically. Not even professionally. Something worse. It breaks the wall between him and the things he kills.
Finding Luba
Rick and Phil Resch head back to the opera house, but rehearsal is over. A stagehand tells them Luba Luft went to the museum to see an Edvard Munch exhibit before it closes tomorrow. And Rick thinks to himself, coldly: “And Luba Luft ends today.”
They walk over. Resch bets she’s already gone, already fled. But no. She’s there. Standing in a room full of people, grammar school kids, tourists, looking at paintings. An android hiding in plain sight among humans, doing something very human. Enjoying art.
Before they find her, Resch stops at one particular painting. It’s Munch’s “The Scream.” You’ve seen it, probably as a meme or an emoji. But Dick describes it in full: a hairless creature on a bridge, hands pressed to its ears, mouth open in a soundless howl, the whole world rippling with its torment. Alone. Cut off from everything.
Resch stares at it and says, “I think this is how an android must feel.”
That line hits different when you remember Resch still doesn’t know if he’s human or android.
The Art Book
They spot Luba Luft nearby. She’s looking at another Munch painting called “Puberty,” a young girl sitting on the edge of a bed with an expression of confused wonder. Rick takes her arm gently. Resch puts a hand on her other shoulder, laser tube ready in his coat. They have her.
But here’s what happens next, and it’s the part I keep thinking about. As they walk her toward the elevator, they pass a little museum gift shop. Luba stops. She asks Rick to buy her a reproduction of the painting she was looking at.
And Rick does it. He pays twenty-five dollars of his own money for a hardcover book of Munch’s collected works. Not bounty money. His own.
Resch can’t understand it. His departmental budget would never cover something like that. But Rick isn’t thinking about budgets. He’s buying a condemned android a last gift.
Luba takes the book and says something that cuts right through everything: “It’s very nice of you. There’s something very strange and touching about humans. An android would never have done that.”
Then she looks at Resch and adds, “It wouldn’t have occurred to him. As he said, never in a million years.”
She’s calling Resch an android. To his face. In an elevator.
The Killing
Resch snaps. He goes for his laser tube. Rick tries to stop him, tries to grab the weapon. “The Boneli test,” Rick says. Meaning: at least test her properly first.
But Resch fires. The first shot misses, then the beam burns into Luba’s stomach. She screams. She drops against the elevator wall.
And Rick thinks: like the painting. Like “The Scream.”
Then Rick finishes it with his own laser. Quick. She falls forward and doesn’t move.
What Rick does after is strange and important. He takes the art book he just bought, the twenty-five dollar book of Munch prints, and he burns it to ash with his laser tube. Slowly. Thoroughly. Resch watches and doesn’t understand.
“You could have kept the book yourself,” Resch says.
Rick asks, “Do you think androids have souls?”
The Test
They get to Resch’s hovercar. Rick sets up the Voigt-Kampff equipment. This is the moment they’ve been building toward since the fake police station. Is Resch human or android?
Resch is nervous. He talks too much. He says if he tests as android, Rick can have his squirrel. He hands over his laser tube voluntarily. He even says he’ll kill himself by holding his breath if the test comes back positive. Androids apparently can do that. No automatic nervous system override like humans have.
Rick runs the test.
Resch passes. He’s human.
But here’s the thing. Rick isn’t relieved. He’s disappointed. He wanted Resch to be an android. Because Resch kills without hesitation, without feeling. He enjoys it. And if that’s human behavior, Rick has a problem with being human.
Rick Tests Himself
This is the real turning point of the whole book. Rick hooks himself up to his own equipment. He asks Resch to read the dials. Then he describes a scenario out loud: “I’m going down by elevator with an android I’ve captured. And suddenly someone kills it, without warning.”
Small response on the needles. Then Rick adds one word: “A female android.”
The needles jump. Hard. 4.0 and 6.0. That’s a strong empathic response. The kind a human shows for most test questions.
Rick Deckard, professional bounty hunter, is feeling empathy for androids.
Not all androids. Not the ones like Polokov who tried to strangle him. But for Luba Luft, who sang opera and loved Munch paintings and asked for an art book before she died. For her, yes.
Resch tries to explain it away as sexual attraction. Rick asks, “What about not sex, but love?” Resch says love is just another name for sex. Rick mentions love of country, love of music. Resch doesn’t get it and probably never will.
Why This Chapter Changes Everything
Up until now, Rick has been able to treat his job as pest control. Androids are machines. You test them, you retire them, you collect the bounty. Clean and simple.
But Luba Luft made that impossible. She was an android who loved beautiful things. She acknowledged humans as a superior life-form. She was grateful for a small kindness in her last minutes of existence. And Rick felt more empathy watching her die than he felt calling his own wife on the phone after his first kill.
The data from his own test doesn’t lie. Rick is changing. He can feel it. And he knows what it means. If bounty hunters start seeing androids as beings worthy of empathy, they can’t do their jobs anymore. The Nexus-6 types would “roll all over us and mash us flat,” as Resch puts it.
So Rick is stuck. He has the evidence on his own dials that he’s becoming the thing every bounty hunter fears: someone who cares about the quarry.
The chapter ends with Phil Resch grinning and Rick wondering, for the first time in his life, if he’s really cut out for this job.
Three androids retired. Three more on the list. But now Rick is hunting with a crack in his armor, and that crack has a name.