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

"You could buy a cat," Barbour offered. "Cats are cheap; look in your Sidney's catalogue."
Rick said quietly, "I don't want a domestic pet. I want what I originally had, a large animal.
A sheep or if I can get the money a cow or a steer or what you have; a horse." The bounty
from retiring five andys would do it, he realized. A thousand dollars apiece, over and above
my salary. Then somewhere I could find, from someone, what I want. Even if the listing in
Sidney's Animal & Fowl is in italics. Five thousand dollars Ч but, he thought, the five andys
first have to make their way to Earth from one of the colony planets; I can't control that, I can't
make five of them come here, and even if I could there are other bounty hunters with other
police agencies throughout the world. The andys would specifically have to take up
residence in Northern California, and the senior bounty hunter in this area, Dave Holden,
would have to die or retire.
"Buy a cricket," Barbour suggested wittily. "Or a mouse. Hey, for twenty-five bucks you can
buy a full-grown mouse."
Rick said, "Your horse could die, like Groucho died, without warning. When you get home
from work this evening you could find her laid out on her back, her feet in the air, like a bug.
Like what you said, a cricket." He strode off, car key in his hand.
"Sorry if I offended you," Barbour said nervously.
In silence Rick Deckard plucked open the door of his hovercar. He had nothing further to
say to his neighbor; his mind was on his work, on the day ahead.


TWO

In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set
hawked its wares to an uninhabited room.
This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here
had been the suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit; the entire
peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and now the
watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world. Mostly the former; it had been
a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel,
the Rand Corporation Ч which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like the apartment
owners, the corporation had departed, evidently for good. No one missed it.
In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had
won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no
country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had
died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in
yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls
escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form
of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above.
After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been
grasped and understood. A meager colonization program had been underway before the
war but now that the sun had ceased to shine on Earth the colonization entered an entirely
new phase. In connection with this a weapon of war, the Synthetic Freedom Fighter, had
been modified; able to function on an alien world the humanoid robot Ч strictly speaking, the
organic android Ч had become the mobile donkey engine of the colonization program.
Under U.N. law each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of
his choice, and, by 1990, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of
American automobiles of the ig6os.
That had been the ultimate incentive of emigration: the android servant as carrot, the
radioactive fallout as stick. The U.N. had made it easy to emigrate, difficult if not impossible