"Dick, Philip K - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

below. I have to keep calm, he realized. Not let him know I'm a chickenhead. If he finds out
I'm a cliickenhead he won't talk to me; that's always the way it is for some reason. I wonder
why?
He hurried down the hall.


THREE

On his way to work Rick Deckard, as lord knew how many other people, stopped briefly to
skulk about in front of one of San Francisco's larger pet shops, along animal row. In the
center of the block-long display window an ostrich, in a heated clear-plastic cage, returned
his stare. The bird, according to the info plaque attached to the cage, had just arrived from a
zoo in Cleveland. It was the only ostrich on the West Coast. After staring at it, Rick spent a
few more minutes staring grimly at the price tag. He then continued on to the Hall of justice
on Lombard Street and found himself a quarter of an hour late to work.
As he unlocked his office door his superior Police Inspector Harry Bryant, jug-eared and
redheaded, sloppily dressed but wise-eyed and conscious of nearly everything of any im-
portance, hailed him. "Meet me at nine-thirty in Dave Holden's office." Inspector Bryant, as
he spoke, flicked briefly through a clipboard of onionskin typed sheets. "Holden," he
continued as he started off, "is in Mount Zion Hospital with a laser track through his spine.
He'll be there for a month at least. Until they can get one of those new organic plastic spinal
sections to take hold."
"What happened?" Rick asked, chilled. The department's chief bounty hunter had been all
right yesterday; at the end of the day he had as usual zipped off in his hovercar to his
apartment in the crowded high-prestige Nob Hill area of the City.
Bryant muttered over his shoulder something about nine-thirty in Dave's office and
departed, leaving Rick standing alone.
As he entered his own office Rick heard the voice of his secretary, Ann Marsten, behind
him. "Mr. Deckard, you know what happened to Mr. Holden? He got shot." She followed after
him into the stuffy, closed-up office and set the air-filtering unit into motion.
"Yeah," he responded absently.
"It must have been one of those new, extra-clever andys the Rosen Association is turning
out," Miss Marsten said. "Did you read over the company's brochure and the spec sheets?
The Nexus-6 brain unit they're using now is capable of selecting within a field of two trillion
constituents, or ten million separate neural pathways." She lowered her voice. "You missed
the vidcall this morning. Miss Wild told me; it came through the switchboard exactly at nine."
"A call in?" Rick asked.
Miss Marsten said, "A call out by Mr. Bryant to the W.P.O. in Russia. Asking them if they
would be willing to file a formal written complaint with the Rosen Association's factory
representative East."
"Harry still wants the Nexus-6 brain unit withdrawn from the market?" He felt no surprise.
Since the initial release of its specifications and performance charts back in August of 1991
most police agencies which dealt with escaped andys had been protesting. "The Soviet
police can't do any more than we can," he said. Legally, the manufacturers of the Nexus-6
brain unit operated under colonial law, their parent auto-factory being on Mars. "We had
better just accept the new unit as a fact of life," he said. "It's always been this way, with every
improved brain unit that's come along. I remember the howls of pain when the Sudermann
people showed their old T-14 back in '89. Every police agency in the Western Hemisphere
clamored that no test would detect its presence, in an instance of illegal entry here. As a
matter of fact, for a while they were right." Over fifty of the T-14 android as he recalled had