Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Chapter 8: First Kill
Chapter 8 is the one where the talking stops and the killing starts. Rick Deckard has spent the last few chapters traveling, testing, arguing. Now he has to actually shoot someone. And it almost goes very wrong.
Hunting Polokov
Rick gets back to the Hall of Justice and his boss Bryant tells him to go after Polokov first. This is the android that lasered Dave Holden, the one who put the senior bounty hunter in the hospital. Bryant’s logic is simple: Polokov already knows he’s been identified, so he’s the most dangerous and the most likely to run.
Here’s an interesting detail. Polokov has been working as a garbage collector, pretending to be a “special,” one of those mentally deteriorated humans. Trash collection is actually a huge industry in this world. The entire planet is slowly drowning in junk, and someone has to haul it away. The scavenger company has deep-pile carpets and real wood desks. Garbage is big business when civilization is falling apart.
But when Rick shows up at the scavenger company offices, Polokov didn’t come to work today. No surprise there. Rick flies to Polokov’s apartment in the Tenderloin. Also empty. Abandoned furniture, no personal items. The android is gone.
Rick uses a neat piece of equipment here, a nondirectional Penfield wave transmitter that broadcasts catalepsy. Everyone in the area, human and android, just freezes. Rick protects himself with a counterwave. Then he walks in with his laser ready. But the apartment is a dead end. Polokov cleared out.
One thousand dollars bounty, gone. Or so Rick thinks.
Rachael Calls
While Rick sits on a rooftop waiting for his next move, Rachael Rosen calls him from Seattle. The Rosen Association wants to send her along with Rick on his hunt. Her argument: a Nexus-6 android would be suspicious of a human approaching, but another Nexus-6 could get close.
Rick says no. He has too much help already. A Soviet cop named Kadalyi is supposedly on his way from the W.P.O. to tag along as an observer. Rick doesn’t need a corporate android riding shotgun too.
Rachael pushes. “Without me, one of them will get you before you can get it.”
Rick hangs up. He tells the operator to block all calls from Seattle. But here’s the thing. Rachael was right. And Rick is about to find that out the hard way.
The Trap
A hovercar taxi lands on the roof. Out steps a red-faced, cheerful man in a heavy Russian greatcoat. Sandor Kadalyi, the Soviet cop. He squeezes into Rick’s car, shakes hands, and immediately shows off an unusual laser tube he says was made on Mars.
“Press the trigger,” Kadalyi says after handing it over.
Rick aims upward and squeezes. Nothing happens. No beam.
And then Kadalyi explains, still smiling like a Slavic Santa Claus, that the triggering circuit is separate. He holds a tiny device in his palm that can aim and fire the gun remotely. Wherever the gun is pointed, Kadalyi controls it.
Think about that for a second. Rick is holding a weapon that his new “partner” can fire at any time, in any direction. Including at Rick’s head.
This is the moment Rick gets it. He says it out loud: “You’re Polokov.”
The Kill
Polokov tries to fire the remote trigger. It doesn’t work. Rick had an emergency sine wave running that scrambles laser beams. Smart move. So Polokov drops the device and goes for Rick’s throat with both hands.
Here is where Philip K. Dick does something I appreciate. He doesn’t write a long action scene. It’s three sentences. Polokov grabs Rick’s throat. Rick fires his old-style .38 magnum from a shoulder holster. The slug hits the android in the head and the Nexus-6 brain unit explodes.
That’s it. First kill. Bits of android brain raining down inside the car. Rick shoves the twitching body away and calls it in.
“Tell Harry Bryant that I got Polokov.”
One thousand dollars. His hands are shaking.
The Phone Call Home
What Rick does next is very human. He calls his wife Iran. He’s running on adrenaline, proud, scared, wanting to share something big that just happened to him. He tells her he retired a Nexus-6, that there’s money coming, that something good is happening.
Iran doesn’t hear any of it. She redialed her mood organ to the six-hour self-accusatory depression as soon as Rick left that morning. She’s deep in it now. Buster Friendly blares from the TV in the background, drowning out her words. She stares at Rick through the vidscreen and says “Oh.”
He hasn’t even told her what they’re going to buy yet. She already stopped listening.
Rick hangs up bitter. He thinks about divorce. He thinks about how most androids he’s known have more vitality and desire to live than his wife. And then, naturally, he thinks about Rachael Rosen again.
My Take
This chapter moves fast, but it’s doing a lot of work under the surface. The action scene with Polokov is great, sure. The disguise, the trick gun, the close call. Classic thriller stuff. But the real weight of the chapter is in what comes after.
Rick just killed something that looks human. He’s shaking. And the first person he wants to tell doesn’t care. His wife is so lost in artificial depression that she can’t even register good news. So Rick, the man who kills machines for a living, finds himself comparing his human wife unfavorably to an android.
That comparison is going to matter more and more as the book goes on. I won’t say how. But pay attention to it.
The chapter ends with Rick singing made-up Italian arias in his hovercar, spirits high, flying toward his next target. One down. Five to go. He’s optimistic. He’s hungry.
That should probably worry us.