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

made their way by one means or another to Earth, and had not been detected for a period in
some cases up to an entire year. But then the Voigt Empathy Test had been devised by the
Pavlov Institute working in the Soviet Union. And no T-14 android Ч insofar, at least, as was
known Ч had managed to pass that particular test.
"Want to know what the Russian police said?" Miss Marsten asked. "I know that, too." Her
freckled, orange face glowed.
Rick said, "I'll find out from Harry Bryant." He felt irritable; office gossip annoyed him
because it always proved better than the truth. Seating himself at his desk he pointedly
fished about in a drawer until Miss Marsten, perceiving the hint, departed.
From the drawer he produced an ancient, creased manila envelope. Leaning back, tilting
his important Ч style chair, he rummaged among the contents of the envelope until he came
across what he wanted: the collected, extant data on the Nexus-6.
A moment's reading vindicated Miss Marsten's statement; the Nexus-6 did have two
trillion constituents plus a choice within a range of ten million possible combinations of
cerebral activity. In .45 of a second an android equipped with such a brain structure could
assume any one of fourteen basic reaction-postures. Well, no intelligence test would trap
such an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not since the
primordial, crude varieties of the '70s Ч
The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials
in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit
had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major Ч but
inferior Ч segment of mankind. For better or worse. The servant had in some cases
become more adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-
Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how
gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took
place routinely among the followers of Mercerism Ч an experience which he, and virtually
everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.
He had wondered as had most people at one time or another precisely why an android
bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy,
evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree
could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnids. For one thing, the
emphatic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such
as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider's ability to survive.
It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. Hence all predators,
even highly developed mammals such as cats, would starve.
Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who
could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimatley, the emphatic gift blurred the boundaries
between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion with
Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together
into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but
double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other
creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest
the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher
survival factor through this; an owl or a cobra would be destroyed.
Evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator.
Rick liked to think of them that way; it made his job palatable. In retiring Ч i.e. killing Ч an
andy he did not violate the rule of life laid down by Mercer. You shall kill only the killers,
Mercer had told them the year empathy boxes first appeared on Earth. And in Mercerism, as
it evolved into a full theology, the concept of The Killers had grown insidiously. In Mercerism,
an absolute evil plucked at the threadbare cloak of the tottering, ascending old man, but it