Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 22: The Electric Toad
This is the last chapter of the book. And it ends not with a bang, not with a chase, not with a dramatic revelation. It ends with a man going to sleep and his wife ordering artificial flies from a catalog.
That’s it. That’s the ending. And it’s perfect.
The Toad
Rick is still out in the desert, sitting in his hovercar after everything that happened on the hill. He spots something moving in the dirt. A bulge among the stones. Something alive.
He checks his Sidney’s catalogue with shaking fingers. Toad, Bufonidae, all varieties. Marked with an E. Extinct. Gone from the Earth for years. And toads, of all creatures, are the animal most sacred to Mercer. More than the donkey. More than anything.
Rick can barely believe it. He finds a cardboard box in the trunk, dumps out a spare fuel pump, and carefully scoops up the toad. It’s big, full-grown, cool to the touch. Its legs push weakly against his hands. He ties the box shut again and again, like a kid wrapping a present he’s afraid will escape.
He thinks about Mercer, about seeing through Mercer’s eyes. Life buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. He thinks no android will cut the legs from this one, the way Pris did with Isidore’s spider.
The weight lifts from him. All the exhaustion, the guilt, the confusion. Gone. He flies home to San Francisco, seven hundred miles, eager as a boy coming back from an adventure.
Coming Home
Iran is sitting at the Penfield mood organ, too listless to even dial a setting. She’s been alone all night, not knowing if Rick would come back at all. Then there’s a knock.
She opens the door and there he is. Dusty, cut on his cheek, clothes wrinkled and gray. But his eyes are shining. She says he looks like a little boy who’s been playing all day and now it’s time to come home.
He sits at the kitchen table, holding the box with both hands, not willing to put it down. She makes him coffee. He drinks it because she wants him to. And then he tells her what’s inside.
“A toad.”
The Control Panel
Iran picks up the toad. Turns it over. Pokes at its belly. And finds the tiny control panel.
She flips it open.
Rick’s face falls. “Yeah, so I see; you’re right.” He takes the toad back, fiddles with its legs like he doesn’t quite understand. Puts it carefully back in the box. Wonders out loud how an electric toad ended up in the middle of nowhere in California.
Iran feels guilty. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you,” she says.
“No,” Rick says. “I’m glad to know.” Then he pauses. “I’d prefer to know.”
Here’s the thing. This could have destroyed him. After everything he went through, the six retirements, the night with Rachael, the climb up the hill, the vision of Mercer, finding what he thought was the rarest animal on Earth. After all that, discovering the toad is fake could have been the final blow.
But it’s not. Rick is tired. He’s broken. And somehow, because of that, he accepts it. He says something that might be the most important line in the entire book: “The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”
That one sentence answers the question the title has been asking all along.
Long Deserved Peace
Iran asks Rick if it’s over. He stares at her, almost like he needs her to confirm it for him. His own words don’t feel real until she agrees.
“It’s over,” she says.
Rick talks about the day. How once he started the assignment, there was no way to stop. How it carried him from one retirement to the next until he reached the Batys, and then suddenly there was nothing. And the nothing was worse. He tells Iran she was right that morning when she called him a crude cop with crude cop hands.
But Iran has changed too. She doesn’t feel that way anymore. She’s just glad he came home.
He asks if what he did was wrong. She says no. He says Mercer told him it was wrong but he should do it anyway. Sometimes it’s better to do something wrong than right.
Iran offers to set the mood organ to 670. Long deserved peace.
Rick walks to the bedroom. Falls onto the bed. Dust sifts from his clothes and hair onto the white sheets. Iran presses the button to darken the windows. The gray light disappears.
Rick sleeps.
The Flies
And then comes the final scene of the entire novel. Iran sits at the kitchen table. The electric toad flops and rustles in its box beside her. She opens the phone book, looks up “animal accessories, electric” in the yellow pages, and orders one pound of artificial flies that really fly around and buzz.
The saleswoman tries to upsell her. Mixed assortment of bugs. A perpetually renewing puddle. A periodic tongue adjustment service. Iran takes it all. “I want it to work perfectly,” she says. “My husband is devoted to it.”
She hangs up. And, feeling better, makes herself a cup of black, hot coffee.
Why This Ending Is Brilliant
Philip K. Dick could have ended this book a hundred different ways. Rick could have found a real toad. Or he could have found nothing and given in to despair. The androids could have won. Mercer could have appeared one final time with some grand speech.
Instead, Dick gives us an electric toad and a woman ordering flies for it.
Think back to Chapter 1. Rick was ashamed of his electric sheep. He hid the control panel from his neighbors. Having a fake animal was a social humiliation. Now, twenty-one chapters later, his wife discovers the toad is fake and her response is to order it proper food. Not disappointment. Not rejection. Care.
The whole book asks one question: does it matter if something is real or artificial? And the answer, in the end, is both yes and no. It matters because knowing the truth matters. Rick prefers to know. But it doesn’t change how you treat the thing. You still feed it. You still care for it. The electric things have their lives too.
Iran, who spent the first chapter scheduling her own depression so she wouldn’t lose touch with reality, ends the book by tenderly caring for a machine. And it’s not sad. It’s actually kind of beautiful.
No grand finale. No explosions. Just a man sleeping off the worst day of his life and a woman making sure his fake toad gets fed.
That’s the whole book, right there in two images.
The closing thoughts post is next, where I’ll wrap up the full series and share what this book left me thinking about.