Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 20: The Dead Goat
This is the shortest chapter in the book. It’s also one of the cruelest. Philip K. Dick puts it right here near the end, like a knife slipped between your ribs when you thought the fight was over.
The Aftermath
Rick finishes up. He calls Bryant. The three androids are dead. Bryant says “good” and sends a patrol car for the bodies. That’s it. Three lives, or whatever they were, reduced to a cleanup job.
Then Rick turns to Isidore. And this is a rough moment. Rick tells him the police will take care of the apartment, suggests he go stay somewhere else. Even offers him a vacant unit in his own building.
Isidore’s response: “I don’t w-w-want to live near you.”
Can you blame him? Rick just killed three people Isidore was living with. Three beings who talked to him, ate with him, made him feel less alone in that empty building. To Rick they were targets on a list. To Isidore they were friends.
Rick stands there alone in the apartment and thinks: “I am a scourge, like famine or plague.” He remembers what Mercer told him. He is required to do wrong. Everything he has done has been wrong from the start.
That’s a man who just successfully completed his mission and feels like garbage about it. He wants to go home, be with Iran, and forget.
The Goat
He gets home. Iran is waiting on the roof. And something is wrong. He can see it in her face. She looks at him in a way he has never seen before.
Rick starts talking about the future. Maybe he can transfer to a different assignment. But Iran cuts him off.
“Rick, I have to tell you something. I’m sorry. The goat is dead.”
Remember the goat? Chapter 15. Rick spent his entire bounty on a real black Nubian goat. It was the one good thing to come out of this nightmare day. For twenty minutes on the roof with Iran, life felt worth living. He was in debt, sure, but he owned a living animal.
And now it’s dead.
But not from sickness. Not from old age. Someone came up to the roof, pulled the goat out of its cage, dragged it to the edge, and pushed it off.
Iran saw the whole thing. So did their neighbor Barbour. They called the police, but the woman was already gone and the animal was dead on the ground below.
Iran describes her: a small, young-looking girl with dark hair, large black eyes, very thin, wearing a long fish-scale coat with a mail-pouch purse. She made no effort to hide. She wanted to be seen.
Rick knows immediately. Rachael.
Rachael’s Revenge
Here’s the thing that makes this so vicious. Rachael didn’t do this because she’s evil or because it was part of some android survival plan. She did it because Rick slept with her and then went and killed the other androids anyway.
In the last few chapters, Rachael told Rick that she had slept with bounty hunters before. Every time, they couldn’t retire androids after that. The empathy kicked in, or the guilt, or whatever you want to call it. They quit. That was her real purpose. Not to help Rick hunt, but to make him stop.
But Rick didn’t stop. He went ahead and killed Roy, Irmgard, and Pris. Rachael’s strategy failed. And so she took the one thing that made Rick happy.
It’s calculated. It’s personal. And it worked.
Rick doesn’t rage. He doesn’t swear revenge. He just says, “She had what seemed to her a reason.” And then he thinks: an android reason.
But is it? Honestly, this feels very human. Rejection, betrayal, revenge. People do this to each other all the time. They take the thing you love because you took something from them. Rachael’s response is ugly, but it’s not alien.
Into the Wilderness
Iran asks Rick to come downstairs. She tells him about Buster Friendly’s broadcast, how Mercer has been exposed as a fake. She asks what he thinks.
Rick says, “Everything is true. Everything anybody has ever thought.”
That’s not an answer. That’s a man who has stopped filtering. He has no energy left to decide what matters and what doesn’t. So everything matters. Or nothing does. Same thing at this point.
Iran asks if he’ll be all right. He says yes. And then he thinks: and I’m going to die. Both those are true, too.
He gets in his hovercar and flies north. Away from San Francisco. Into the uninhabited wasteland where the dust is so thick you can’t see the stars. A place where no living thing goes unless it feels like the end has come.
What This Chapter Does
This chapter is barely four pages. But it destroys everything Rick built. The goat was his proof that the awful work he does has a payoff. That killing androids puts food on the table, or in this case, a living animal on the roof. Without the goat, the day’s work produced nothing except guilt, exhaustion, and three corpses.
And Dick connects Rachael’s act to something bigger. The goat was real. Rick paid for it with money earned from killing beings who might or might not be truly alive. Now the goat is dead because one of those beings struck back. The whole economy of life and death in this book just collapsed on Rick’s roof.
He drives into the desert. No destination. No plan. Just a man who has lost everything he gained and kept everything he didn’t want.