Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 7: The Dead Cat
We’re back with John Isidore, and this chapter is one of those scenes where you don’t know if you should laugh or feel terrible. So you do both.
Off to Work
Isidore is still thinking about Pris. Hoping she’ll let him cook dinner for her, already planning the meal. But he’s late for work, so he throws on his white uniform and heads to the roof where his beat-up hovercar sits waiting.
His job, remember, is driving a pickup truck for the Van Ness Pet Hospital. Sounds official, right? It’s not. It’s a fake animal repair shop. They fix electric animals. That’s the whole business. But the name, the truck, the white uniform, it all creates the impression of a real veterinary operation. Because nobody wants their neighbors to know their pet is a machine.
The Cat That Won’t Quit
First pickup of the day: an electric cat. The owner shoved it at Isidore and took off for work. No estimate, no conversation. Just “it broke during the night” and gone.
The cat is in bad shape. Wheezing, gurgling, blowing bubbles. Its eyes are glassy. Isidore tries to find the control panel to recharge it. He’s feeling along the belly fur for the hidden battery terminals. Can’t find them. He figures it must be really high-end work, maybe a Wheelright and Carpenter model.
He gives up when the cat stops functioning entirely. Must have shorted out its whole power supply.
But pay attention to that detail. He couldn’t find the control panel. He couldn’t find the battery cables. On a guy whose entire job is handling electric animals. That’s a clue Dick is dropping right in front of us.
Buster Friendly vs. Mercer
On the drive back, Isidore listens to Buster Friendly’s radio show. Buster is on 23 hours a day. His guests appear 70 hours a week. How do they never get tired? How do they never run out of things to say?
But what really bugs Isidore is that Buster keeps taking shots at Mercerism. Subtle jokes about climbing mountains with a beer instead of an empathy box. The audience laughs. And Isidore feels this quiet rage building.
He comes up with a sharp insight: Buster Friendly and Wilbur Mercer are fighting for control of people’s minds. Entertainment on one side, empathy on the other.
The Awful Discovery
Back at the shop, Isidore carries the cat cage into the office of Hannibal Sloat. Sloat is a man the dust has already started to bury. His glasses are caked with radioactive dirt he never cleans. His face is gray, his legs are spindly. Not a special, but stuck on Earth same as Isidore, slowly eroding.
Isidore shares his Buster vs. Mercer theory. Sloat says, “If so, Buster is winning.” Then he drops a strange hint: Buster is immortal, just like Mercer. So are Amanda Werner and the other guests. What they are exactly, Sloat won’t say.
But then Sloat opens the cage. Pulls out the cat. And his whole attitude changes.
“This cat isn’t false. And it’s dead.”
The room just stops.
Isidore picked up a real cat. A living animal. And it died on his watch. The thing he couldn’t find the control panel on, the thing with expert workmanship so perfect he was impressed by it, that was actual fur and actual bone and an actual heartbeat that stopped somewhere between the owner’s roof and the shop.
The Phone Call
Now somebody has to tell the owner. And Sloat, because he’s a piece of work, decides it should be Isidore. The same Isidore who has a phobia about the vidphone. Who stammers when he’s nervous. Who describes himself, in this exact order, as “hairy, ugly, dirty, stooped, snaggle-toothed, and gray.”
Milt Borogrove, the repairman, tries to defend Isidore. But Sloat says make the call or you’re fired.
So Isidore calls. And of course the owner isn’t home. His wife is. Mrs. Pilsen answers, and Isidore stumbles through the worst possible conversation. “Your c-c-c-c-c-c…” He can’t even get the word “cat” out.
When he finally tells her Horace is dead, Mrs. Pilsen breaks down. She talks about how the cat used to stand and stare up at them as a kitten, as if asking a question they never understood. “Maybe now he knows the answer,” she says through tears. “I guess we all will eventually.”
That hit me harder than I expected.
The Electric Replacement
But then something interesting happens. Isidore, who was falling apart a minute ago, gets an idea. What about an exact electric duplicate? Handcrafted by Wheelright and Carpenter, every detail faithfully reproduced?
Mrs. Pilsen is horrified at first. But then she thinks about it. Her husband Ed loved Horace so much that he was afraid to get close to him. Ed never cleaned the sandbox, never physically held the cat. He was terrified of losing him. And when the cat got sick, Ed panicked and wouldn’t face it.
So Mrs. Pilsen agrees. Make a replica. Deliver it while Ed is at work. He might never know.
Milt warns her that owners usually figure it out. But she wants to try.
Why This Chapter Is Brilliant
On the surface this is a comedy about a guy who can’t tell a real cat from a fake one. But underneath, Dick is saying something painful about how people deal with loss. Mr. Pilsen loves his cat so much he can’t touch it. Mrs. Pilsen would rather live with a lie than watch her husband suffer. And Isidore, the chickenhead who everyone says can’t tell real from fake, is the one who comes up with a solution that might work.
Sloat even admits it. “In some ways you’re not so stupid after all, Isidore.” That’s about as close to a compliment as you get in this book.
And here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: this is a chapter about replacing a real thing with a perfect copy and hoping nobody notices. Sound familiar? That’s the whole android problem, just played out with a house cat.