Pris clipped off another leg, restraining the spider with the edge of her hand. She was smiling.
“Blowups of the video pictures,” a new voice from the TV said, “when subjected to rigorous laboratory scrutiny, reveal that the gray backdrop of sky and daytime moon against which Mercer moves is not only not Terran—it is artificial.”
“You’re missing it!” Irmgard called anxiously to Pris; she rushed to the kitchen door, saw what Pris had begun doing. “Oh, do that afterward,” she said coaxingly. “This is so important, what they’re saying; it proves that everything we believed—”
“Be quiet,” Roy Baty said.
“—is true,” Irmgard finished.
The TV set continued, “The ‘moon’ is painted; in the enlargements, one of which you see now on your screen, brush strokes show. And there is even some evidence that the scraggly weeds and dismal, sterile soil—perhaps even the stones hurled at Mercer by unseen alleged parties—are equally faked. It is quite possible in fact that the ‘stones’ are made of soft plastic, causing no authentic wounds.”
“In other words,” Buster Friendly broke in, “Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all.”
The research chief said, “We at last managed, Mr. Friendly, to track down a former Hollywood special-effects man, a Mr. Wade Cortot, who flatly states, from his years of experience, that the figure of ‘Mercer’ could well be merely some bit player marching across a sound stage. Cortot has gone so far as to declare that he recognizes the stage as one used by a now out-of-business minor moviemaker with whom Cortot had various dealings several decades ago.”
“So according to Cortot,” Buster Friendly said, “there can be virtually no doubt.”
Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.
“Quite frankly, we believed Cortot,” the research chief said in his dry, pedantic voice, “and we spent a good deal of time examining publicity pictures of bit players once employed by the now defunct Hollywood movie industry.”
“And you found—”
“Listen to this,” Roy Baty said. Irmgard gazed fixedly at the TV screen, and Pris had ceased her mutilation of the spider.
“We located, by means of thousands upon thousands of photographs, a very old man now, named Al Jarry, who played a number of bit parts in pre-war films. From our lab we sent a team to Jarry’s home in East Harmony, Indiana. I’ll let one of the members of that team describe what he found.” Silence, then a new voice, equally pedestrian. “The house on Lark Avenue in East Harmony is tottering and shabby and at the edge of town, where no one, except Al Jarry, still lives. Invited amiably in, and seated in the stale-smelling, moldering, kipple-filled living room, I scanned by telepathic means the blurred, debris-cluttered, and hazy mind of Al Jarry seated across from me.”
“Listen,” Roy Baty said, on the edge of his seat, poised as if to pounce.
“I found,” the technician continued, “that the old man did in actuality make a series of short fifteen-minute video films, for an employer whom he never met. And, as we had theorized, the ‘rocks’ did consist of rubber-like plastic. The ‘blood’ shed was catsup, and”—the technician chuckled—“the only suffering Mr. Jarry underwent was having to go an entire day without a shot of whisky.”
“A1 Jarry,” Buster Friendly said, his face returning to the screen. “Well, well. An old man who even in his prime never amounted to anything which either he or ourselves could respect. Al Jarry made a repetitious and dull film, a series of them in fact, for whom he knew not—and does not to this day. It has often been said by adherents of the experience of Mercerism that Wilbur Mercer is not a human being, that he is in fact an archetypal superior entity perhaps from another star. Well, in a sense this contention has proven correct. Wilbur Mercer is not human, does not in fact exist. The world in which he climbs is a cheap, Hollywood, commonplace sound stage which vanished into kipple years ago. And who, then, has spawned this hoax on the Sol System? Think about that for a time, folks.”
“We may never know,” Irmgard murmured.
Buster Friendly said, “We may never know. Nor can we fathom the peculiar purpose behind this swindle. Yes, folks, swindle. Mercerism is a swindle!”
“I think we know,” Roy Baty said. “It’s obvious. Mercerism came into existence—”
“But ponder this,” Buster Friendly continued. “Ask yourselves what is it that Mercerism does. Well, if we’re to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses—”
“It’s that empathy that humans have,” Irmgard said.
“—men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of ‘Mercer.’ Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could—”
“No, it’s that empathy,” Irmgard said vigorously. Fists clenched, she roved into the kitchen, up to Isidore. “Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing. How’s the spider?” She bent over Pris’s shoulder.
With the scissors, Pris snipped off another of the spider’s legs. “Four now,” she said. She nudged the spider. “He won’t go. But he can.”
Roy Baty appeared at the doorway, inhaling deeply, an expression of accomplishment on his face. “It’s done. Buster said it out loud, and nearly every human in the system heard him say it. ‘Mercerism is a swindle.’ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle.” He came over to look curiously at the spider.
“It won’t try to walk,” Irmgard said.
“I can make it walk.” Roy Baty got out a book of matches, lit a match; he held it near the spider, closer and closer, until at last it crept feebly away.
“I was right,” Irmgard said. “Didn’t I say it could walk with only four legs?” She peered up expectantly at Isidore. “What’s the matter?” Touching his arm she said, “You didn’t lose anything; we’ll pay you what that—what’s it called?—that Sidney’s catalogue says. Don’t look so grim. Isn’t that something about Mercer, what they discovered? All that research? Hey, answer.” She prodded him anxiously.
“He’s upset,” Pris said. “Because he has an empathy box. In the other room. Do you use it, J. R.?” she asked Isidore.
Roy Baty said, “Of course he uses it. They all do—or did. Maybe now they’ll start wondering.”
“I don’t think this will end the cult of Mercer,” Pris said. “But right this minute there’re a lot of unhappy human beings.” To Isidore she said, “We’ve waited for months; we all knew it was coming, this pitch of Buster’s.” She hesitated and then said, “Well, why not. Buster is one of us.”
“An android,” Irmgard explained. “And nobody knows. No humans, I mean.”
Pris, with the scissors, cut yet another leg from the spider. All at once John Isidore pushed her away and lifted up the mutilated creature. He carried it to the sink and there he drowned it. In him, his mind, his hopes, drowned, too. As swiftly as the spider.
“He’s really upset,” Irmgard said nervously. “Don’t look like that, J. R. And why don’t you say anything?” To Pris and to her husband she said, “It makes me terribly upset, him just standing there by the sink and not speaking; he hasn’t said anything since we turned on the TV.”
“It’s not the TV,” Pris said. “It’s the spider. Isn’t it, John R. Isidore? He’ll get over it,” she said to Irmgard, who had gone into the other room to shut off the TV.
Regarding Isidore with easy amusement, Roy Baty said, “It’s all over now, Iz. For Mercerism, I mean.” With his nails he managed to lift the corpse of the spider from the sink. “Maybe this was the last spider,” he said. “The last living spider on Earth.” He reflected. “In that case it’s all over for spiders, too.”
“I—don’t feel well,” Isidore said. From the kitchen cupboard he got a cup; he stood h
olding it for an interval—he did not know exactly how long. And then he said to Roy Baty, “Is the sky behind Mercer just painted? Not real?”
“You saw the enlargements on the TV screen,” Roy Baty said. “The brush strokes.”
“Mercerism isn’t finished,” Isidore said. Something ailed the three androids, something terrible. The spider, he thought. Maybe it had been the last spider on Earth, as Roy Baty said. And the spider is gone; Mercer is gone; he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere—he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. It grew around him as he stood holding the empty ceramic cup; the cupboards of the kitchen creaked and split and he felt the floor beneath his feet give.
Reaching out, he touched the wall. His hand broke the surface; gray particles trickled and hurried down, fragments of plaster resembling the radioactive dust outside. He seated himself at the table and, like rotten, hollow tubes the legs of the chair bent; standing quickly, he set down the cup and tried to reform the chair, tried to press it back into its right shape. The chair came apart in his hands, the screws which had previously connected its several sections ripping out and hanging loose. He saw, on the table, the ceramic cup crack; webs of fine lines grew like the shadows of a vine, and then a chip dropped from the edge of the cup, exposing the rough, unglazed interior.
“What’s he doing?” Irmgard Baty’s voice came to him, distantly. “He’s breaking everything! Isidore, stop—”
“I’m not doing it,” he said. He walked unsteadily into the living room, to be by himself; he stood by the tattered couch and gazed at the yellow, stained wall with all the spots which dead bugs, that had once crawled, had left, and again he thought of the corpse of the spider with its four remaining legs. Everything in here is old, he realized. It long ago began to decay and it won’t stop. The corpse of the spider has taken over.
In the depression caused by the sagging of the floor, pieces of animals manifested themselves, the head of a crow, mummified hands which might have once been parts of monkeys. A donkey stood a little way off, not stirring and yet apparently alive; at least it had not begun to deteriorate. He started toward it, feeling stick-like bones, dry as weeds, splinter under his shoes. But before he could reach the donkey—one of the creatures which he loved the most—a shiny blue crow fell from above to perch on the donkey’s unprotesting muzzle. Don’t, he said aloud, but the crow, rapidly, picked out the donkey’s eyes. Again, he thought, It’s happening to me again. I will be down here a long time, he realized. As before. It’s always long, because nothing here ever changes; a point comes when it does not even decay.
A dry wind rustled, and around him the heaps of bones broke. Even the wind destroys them, he perceived. At this stage. Just before time ceases. I wish I could remember how to climb up from here, he thought. Looking up, he saw nothing to grasp.
Mercer, he said aloud. Where are you now? This is the tomb world and I am in it again, but this time you’re not here, too.
Something crept across his foot. He knelt down and searched for it—and found it because it moved so slowly. The mutilated spider, advancing itself haltingly on its surviving legs; he picked it up and held it in the palm of his hand. The bones, he realized, have reversed themselves; the spider is again alive. Mercer must be near.
The wind blew, cracking and splintering the remaining bones, but he sensed the presence of Mercer. Come here, he said to Mercer. Crawl across my foot or find some other way of reaching me. Okay? Mercer, he thought. Aloud he said, “Mercer!”
Across the landscape weeds advanced; weeds corkscrewed their way into the walls around him and worked the walls until the weeds became their own spore. The spore expanded, split, and burst within the corrupted steel and shards of concrete that had formerly been walls. But the desolation remained after the walls had gone; the desolation followed after everything else. Except the frail, dim figure of Mercer; the old man faced him, a placid expression on his face.
“Is the sky painted?” Isidore asked. “Are there really brush strokes that show up under magnification?”
“Yes,” Mercer said.
“I can’t see them.”
“You’re too close,” Mercer said. “You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.”
“Is that why they claim you’re a fraud?”
“I am a fraud,” Mercer said. “They’re sincere; their research is genuine. From their standpoint I am an elderly retired bit player named Al Jarry. All of it, their disclosure, is true. They interviewed me at my home, as they claim; I told them whatever they wanted to know, which was everything.”
“Including about the whisky?”
Mercer smiled. “It was true. They did a good job and from their standpoint Buster Friendly’s disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you’re still here and I’m still here.” Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. “I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.”
“I didn’t like that about the whisky,” Isidore said. “That’s lowering.”
“That’s because you’re a highly moral person. I’m not. I don’t judge, not even myself.” Mercer held out a closed hand, palm up. “Before I forget it, I have something of yours here.” He opened his fingers. On his hand rested the mutilated spider, but with its snipped-off legs restored.
“Thanks.” Isidore accepted the spider. He started to say something further—
An alarm bell clanged.
Roy Baty snarled, “There’s a bounty hunter in the building! Get all the lights off. Get him away from that empathy box; he has to be ready at the door. Go on—move him!”
19
Looking down, John Isidore saw his own hands; they gripped the twin handles of the empathy box. As he stood gaping at them, the lights in the living room of his apartment plunged out. He could see, in the kitchen, Pris hurrying to catch the table lamp there.
“Listen, J. R.,” Irmgard whispered harshly in his ear; she had grabbed him by the shoulder, her nails digging into him with frantic intensity. She seemed unaware of what she did now; in the dim nocturnal light from outdoors Irmgard’s face had become distorted, astigmatic. It had turned into a craven dish, with cowering, tiny, lidless eyes. “You have to go,” she whispered, “to the door, when he knocks, if he does knock; you have to show him your identification and tell him this is your apartment and no one else is here. And you ask to see a warrant.”
Pris, standing on the other side of him, her body arched, whispered, “Don’t let him in, J. R. Say anything; do anything that will stop him. Do you know what a bounty hunter would do let loose in here? Do you understand what he would do to us?”
Moving away from the two android females, Isidore groped his way to the door; with his fingers he located the knob, halted there, listening. He could sense the hall outside, as he always had sensed it; vacant and reverberating and lifeless.
“Hear anything?” Roy Baty said, bending close. Isidore smelled the rank, cringing body; he inhaled fear from it, fear pouring out, forming a mist. “Step out and take a look.”
Opening the door, Isidore looked up and down the indistinct hall. The air out here had a clear quality, despite the weight of dust. He still held the spider which Mercer had given him. Was it actually the spider which Pris had snipped apart with Irmgard Baty’s cuticle scissors? Probably not. He would never know. But anyhow it was alive; it crept about within his closed hand, not biting him: as with most small spiders, its mandibles could not puncture human skin.
He reached the end of the hall, descended the stairs, and stepped outside, onto what had once been a terraced path, garden-enclosed. The garden had perished during the war and the path had ruptured in a thousand places. But he knew its su
rface; under his feet the familiar path felt good, and he followed it, passed along the greater side of the building, coming at last to the only verdant spot in the vicinity—a yard-square patch of dust-saturated, drooping weeds. There he deposited the spider. He experienced its wavering progress as it departed his hand. Well, that was that; he straightened up.
A flashlight beam focused on the weeds; in its glare their half-dead stalks appeared stark, menacing. Now he could see the spider; it rested on a serrated leaf. So it had gotten away all right.
“What did you do?” the man holding the flashlight asked.
“I put down a spider,” he said, wondering why the man didn’t see; in the beam of yellow light the spider bloated up larger than life. “So it could get away.”
“Why don’t you take it up to your apartment? You ought to keep it in a jar. According to the January Sidney’s most spiders are up ten percent in retail price. You could have gotten a hundred and some odd dollars for it.”
Isidore said, “If I took it back up there she’d cut it apart again. Bit by bit, to see what it did.”
“Androids do that,” the man said. Reaching into his overcoat, he brought out something which he flapped open and extended toward Isidore.
In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. Methodical but informal. Not demi-god in shape; not at all as Isidore had anticipated him.
“I’m an investigator for the San Francisco Police Department. Deckard, Rick Deckard.” The man flapped his ID shut again, stuck it back in his overcoat pocket. “They’re up there now? The three?”
“Well, the thing is,” Isidore said, “I’m looking after them. Two are women. They’re the last ones of the group; the rest are dead. I brought Pris’s TV set up from her apartment and put it in mine, so they could watch Buster Friendly. Buster proved beyond a doubt that Mercer doesn’t exist.” Isidore felt excitement, knowing something of this importance—news that the bounty hunter evidently hadn’t heard.