Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 13: Three Fugitives
John Isidore flies home from work carrying a bag of black-market groceries: bean curd, ripe peaches, stinky soft cheese. And under the seat, a bottle of Chablis wine he’s been keeping in a bank safety deposit box for years. He was saving it for this. For the day a girl finally appeared. That day is today.
Two weeks’ salary. Borrowed in advance from his boss. All spent on food and wine for a woman who doesn’t want to see him. That is Isidore in one sentence.
The Dinner
He knocks on Pris’s door using the edge of the wine bottle. His heart is going to pieces. When she opens and sees the food, her face lights up for exactly one second. Then something cold crosses her expression and locks it down. “They’re wasted on me,” she says.
She wants him to leave. But Isidore, being Isidore, stays. He tells her he knows what’s wrong. She has no friends. And that’s when Pris finally cracks open a little.
She tells him about bounty hunters. Professional killers, paid a thousand dollars per target. They have lists. They have contracts with cities. And they enjoy it. She had seven friends. Some, maybe all, are already dead. She might be the last one left.
Isidore has never heard of bounty hunters. He can’t believe it. This goes against everything Mercerism teaches. All life is sacred. “No man is an island,” he says, quoting Shakespeare. Pris corrects him. John Donne. It’s a small moment, but I love it. Isidore gets the author wrong, but the sentiment right. That’s him all over.
Pre-Colonial Fiction
They eat. Isidore opens the wine, divides the peaches and cheese. And then something interesting happens. Isidore accidentally mentions beef gravy, a thing you’d only know about if you ate real meat, which almost nobody does anymore. Pris gives him a strange look and says, “That’s the sort of slip an android makes.”
Then she puts her arm around his waist. For one instant. And starts crying while eating a peach.
She tells him about Mars. About how awful it is. Not just lonely, but old. Billions of years old. You can feel the age in the stones. She tells him about Roy Baty, a pharmacist who sold her painkillers. About Horst Hartman, who collected rare stamps. And about pre-colonial fiction.
This is one of those moments where Philip K. Dick gets wonderfully self-aware. Pre-colonial fiction, Pris explains, is stories about space travel written before space travel existed. The writers made it all up. Based on imagination. They wrote about Venus being a jungle paradise with huge monsters and women in breastplates the size of melons.
So basically, Pris is describing science fiction. The exact genre we’re reading right now. These books are smuggled to Mars where colonists read them hungrily, dreaming about what space exploration should have been. It’s a beautiful, sad detail. People on Mars reading old stories about Mars and wishing the stories had been true.
The Knock
Pris is just warming up, getting excited about her topic, when someone knocks on the door.
She goes white. Sits perfectly still. Whispers to Isidore not to make any noise. She prays the door is locked. Her eyes are wild and fixed on him, begging.
Then a voice from the hall: “Pris, are you in there? It’s Roy and Irmgard. We got your card.”
What follows is a wonderful little scene where Pris and Isidore communicate by passing notes back and forth. She writes: YOU GO TO THE DOOR. He writes: AND SAY WHAT? She writes, with anger: SEE IF IT’S REALLY THEM.
Isidore opens the door. Two people stand in the dim hallway. Irmgard is small and blond, described as lovely in the manner of Greta Garbo. Roy is larger, with intelligent eyes and flat features that give him a brutal look. He wears a rumpled shirt and stained pants. He smiles at Isidore, but the smile doesn’t quite work. It’s “crooked” and “tuneless.”
Irmgard sees Pris past Isidore’s shoulder and her face dissolves with joy. She pushes past him, calling Pris’s name. The two women embrace. Roy Baty steps inside, somber and large.
What’s Really Happening
Here’s the thing. Isidore doesn’t know what we know. He doesn’t know Pris is an android. He doesn’t know Roy and Irmgard are androids. He thinks they’re human emigrants who came back from Mars and are being hunted by some kind of government assassins. And from his perspective, that’s terrible enough.
But we’ve been following Rick Deckard’s story too. We know these are the Nexus-6 models on his list. We know Rick is out there right now, working through that list, and he’s getting closer.
So this cozy little scene, the wine, the peaches, the embrace between old friends, it’s all happening under a countdown. Three fugitives are gathering in an abandoned building with a lonely man who doesn’t understand what he’s sheltering. And a bounty hunter is on his way.
What makes Isidore such a great character is that even if he knew, I don’t think he’d care. He spent two weeks’ salary on cheese and wine because someone new moved into his building. He offered to get a laser and take a leave of absence to protect a woman he just met. Isidore doesn’t think in categories. He thinks in loneliness and connection. Someone is here, and that’s all that matters.
The androids are using him, of course. They need a place to hide, and a building with one chickenhead resident is perfect. But there’s something fragile about this arrangement that makes you wonder how long it can last.