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  Over his shoulder he saw the heart-and-lung patient sliding helplessly toward the open bay door. Hanging on to the pilot seat, he reached back and managed to claw a handful of the billowing sheets into his fist. Shock and fear had cut through the patient's anesthetizing drugs; fully conscious, eyes nearly as wide as his gaping mouth, he stared behind and below himself, at the dizzying emptiness of air and the threadlike street rotating hundreds of meters down at the hospital tower's base.

  With the sheet as a taut sling, the other man yanked the heart-and-lung patient up toward himself. With a push of his arm, he managed to get the patient stuffed awkwardly into the other cockpit seat. The gauges and monitor screen on the attaché case strapped to the patient's chest shrieked and danced in alarm.

  A twist of the rudder pulled the spinner free of the window frame strut, the pent-up thrust sending the vehicle arcing toward the cloudless sky. The security team, arrayed in the gap in the hospital's outside wall, continued to fire as they dwindled away, the bullets rattling against the cargo-bay door as it slid shut.

  "Uhh . . ." The heart-and-lung patient was beyond words now. His pale hands fluttered against the attaché case, the pulsing machinery that kept him alive. "Uh . . . uhh . . ."

  "Knock it off." The other man, smile not yet returned to his face, looked over in annoyance at the heart-and-lung patient. His own hands continued punching a flight pattern into the spinner's on-board computer. "You're making me nervous."

  Sun flashed off the spinner's metal, pure white and dazzling, as it sped through and away from the city's upper reaches.

  "That's what they've always said."

  Deckard looked at the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "The suh-same old shit." Something almost like pity moved behind the thick lenses of Isidore's glasses. He shook his head in disgust. "Anytime people wuh-want to get themselves off the huh-hook, that's the kuh-kuh-kind of thing they say. 'I was doing my job. They told me to do it.'" His mocking voice didn't stumble. "It was a kruh-creaky old line at Nurembuh-berg."

  "Yeah, well, maybe it was true there, too."

  "Oh, guh-good one, Deckard." The head of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital pressed his hands fiat against the desk, leaning forward with his suddenly sharper gaze. "Great reh-rhetorical tuh-tactic, all right. You can duh-defend yourself and the Third Reich, all at the same tuh-time."

  "Give me a break." His turn to shake his head. "You brought me here for a lecture on ancient history? Forget it. The dead are buried, and the murderers' ashes were dumped at the side of the road."

  "I'm impressed. You nuh-know your stuff."

  "Enough of it." He leaned back in the chair. "So can I go now? Because if you just wanted to take the moral higher ground with me, you didn't have to bother. Like I said, I quit the job."

  "But maybe," said Isidore, "the juh-juh-job didn't quit you."

  He sighed. "Whatever."

  "Because . . ." The other's voice went lower and softer. "Because you never really fuh-found anything wrong with the blade runner job itself. You just didn't like duh-doing it anymore. Like you said, you got too far out on the Curve."

  The room, Isidore's office, filled with silence; the papers and old calendars on the wall hung motionless in tensed air. Deckard closed his eyes. "It was a job somebody had to do.They were dangerous."

  "Huh-who were?"

  "Come on. The replicants. They were made to be dangerous. Military issue . . . for those nasty little chores offworld. So they had to be taken care of. Retired."

  "By somebody like you."

  Deckard opened his eyes. "That's right."

  "Fuh-funny, isn't it, that they never huh-hurt anybody who wasn't trying to hurt them first. There's no ruh-record of an escaped replicant killing a human . . . at least not here on Earth . . . except when it was buh-backed into a corner, with no other way out."

  "Oh, yeah?" That brought a sharp laugh from Deckard. "Tell it to Eldon Tyrell."

  "Thuh-thuh-that was duh-different. That was something puh-personal." Isidore's expression turned brooding. "Besides, Eldon Tyrell duh-deserved to die. He was a real sonuvabitch. Believe me, I nuh-know."

  Deckard wasn't going to argue the point. Tyrell, when alive, had given him the creeps.Plus, everything he'd scoped out since -- all the bleak shimmer he'd picked up from the man's niece Sarah -- hadn't changed his mind.

  "All right," said Deckard. "Maybe replicants are nothing but saints. Human, however, they're not."

  "Is thuh-that you talking? Or the blade runner?"

  "Take your pick."

  "Buh-but you loved one. A replicant. Or you still do. You suh-suh-sleep with her. In your arms."

  "Doesn't make her human." He could hear the coldness in his own voice. Not for Rachael, but for everything else in the world. "If she were human, she wouldn't be dying now. So you're right about Tyrell -- that four-year life span was one of his bright ideas. The Nexus-6 replicants were his big chance to play God, and all he could think of to do was hard-wire death into their cells."

  Isidore gazed sadly at him for a moment. "If that duh-didn't make her human -- your loving her -- then what would?"

  "Nothing." He shook his head. "There's a difference. Between human and not. That's what the tests are all about. The Voigt-Kampff tests." He knew he sounded like a blade runner now. These were the articles of faith, the core beliefs of the job. "She couldn't pass the test the first time I gave it to her, out at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters." He wondered how much of this Isidore already knew. There was some kind of link between Isidore and Sarah Tyrell -- he just didn't know yet what it was. "I spotted her then. It took a while, but I knew. That she was a replicant."

  "Buh-but it wasn't just the vuh-Voigt-Kampff tests; that muh-muh-machine you guys haul around with yourselves. It was something else. Something inside you. That could suh-say, 'This one's human and this one's not.' That's the essential thing, isn't it? About being a buh-blade runner. That ability to muh-make the distinction between what's human and wuh-what's not. What just goes around and walks and talks and acts like a human."

  He shifted in the chair, as though trying to avoid the probe of the other's words. "I suppose so."

  "That's vuh-very interesting, Mr. Deckard." With a forefinger Isidore tapped one lens of his glasses. "You know, I see pruh-pretty well -- at least, with these I do -- but that's wuh-wuh-one thing I've never seen. This difference between human and not. Between the ruh-real and the fuh-fake. I don't think I could, even if I had one of your fuh-fuh-fancy Voigt-kuh-Kampff machines." He gave a tilt of his head toward the office's door. "It comes with the territory, I guh-guess. My territory, that is. Like out there with the animals. You said the fuh-phony ones gave you the creeps . . . the ones you could tell were phony, because they were broken or something. And for a minute there, I couldn't even tell what the huh-huh-hell you were talking about." He still looked perplexed. "I mean, I understand -- I can tell the difference between one and the other -- up here . . ." A finger tapped the side of his head. "But I can't tell the difference down here." The same finger prodded at the chest beneath the white lab coat. "But I guess that's fairly common, huh? Otherwise we wouldn't have Voigt-Kampff machines. Or blade runners."

  The guy had started getting on Deckard's nerves. The soft sarcasm ignited a defensive spark inside his own chest. "You're forgetting something. The Voigt-Kampff machines, the tests, those blade runner skills . . . they all detect and measure something that actually exists. That's empathy. You know what that is?"

  "I got an idea."

  Deckard leaned forward, drilling his hard level gaze into Isidore's, "It's the ability to feel. To feel what another living creature feels. Humans have it. Replicants don't. Not to the same degree; not enough. That's what makes them dangerous."

  One of Isidore's eyebrows lifted. "This empathy . . . Rachael duh-doesn't have it?"

  The spark burned hotter inside him; he could've killed the man on the other side of the desk. "Mayb
e not," he said finally. "Or she wouldn't have let me fall in love with her. She'd have known better."

  A sigh, a shake of the head. "See how much you complicate things? With all this buh-business about what's fake and what's real. Your big-duh-deal Voigt-Kampff machines . . . what do they measure? Really measure. A millisecond's difference in pupil dilation times; a blush response that's one shade less puh-pink than the prescribed norm. You know what you were like, when you were running around being such a buh-bad-ass blade runner? Like a Rassenprüfer; something else right out of the Third Reich." The stammer evaporated as Isidore's ire rose. "Remember what those were? Racial examiners. Going around Berlin with calipers and measuring people's noses, right out on the street. A millimeter too big, not quite the correct shape, and boom, you weren't defined as human anymore. Your ass was off to Auschwitz. At least the Nazis preferred doing their killing somewhere out of sight -- guess that makes them a class act compared to you guys."

  Deckard stayed silent, letting the other's words hit him in the face and drop away like the sharp crystals of an ice storm. He knew all this shit. It was in the books. He'd even thought about it, in those long night hours, shirt bloodied and bottle at hand. Until it couldn't be thought about anymore, not without falling off the Curve. And landing somewhere at the bottom, with his hand resting on the gun above his heart. thinking over and time for action. The last one possible . . .

  "Look. I told you already." He felt a thin sheen of sweat on his palms, a nervous response to the other's threat. "I quit the job. Bryant -- my old boss -- he put the screws on me to go back and do it again. Maybe I should've told him to go fuck himself . . . but I didn't. I didn't have the guts. So sue me." He pushed himself back in the chair, his palms hard against the chair's arms. "But nobody ever heard me say that being a blade runner was a good job."

  "It wasn't a good job, Deckard, because it was buh-buh-bullshit." Isidore wasn't letting him off the hook. "The empathy tests, the Voigt-Kampff machines . . . they're all crap. They don't even wuh-work. Have there ever been any false puh-positives? Subjects who had the tests run on them, who were identified as being replicants, only they weren't?"

  He hesitated a second before answering. The same question, in different words, had been asked of him once before. He shook his head. "No."

  "As I said, buh-buh-bullshit. What about the St. Paul incident?"

  Gears meshed inside Deckard's head, trying to grind out an analysis of what this little man was up to. He knows too much -- the St. Paul incident was more than top secret. After that mess had been cleaned up, the details hadn't even been recorded, so there would be no files to purge. Just the memories that the blade runners themselves carried around, locked behind their foreheads.

  "St. Paul . . ." The words came slow out of his mouth. "St. Paul was an accident."

  "I duh-don't think that's what they'd call it. If they could call it anything."

  Those dead, or their ashes at any rate, were buried somewhere in Minnesota. Bad luck was as much a death-penalty crime as being an escaped replicant. During the peak of the winter flu season, a pharmacist in central St. Paul had handed out his remaining stock of an upper-respiratory humectant, once popular but pulled off the market by the Food and Drug Administration, to his family and friends. A member of the LAPD blade runner unit goes back to visit his folks for Christmas, gets drunk with an old high school girlfriend, runs the Voigt-Kampff tests on her for a joke. The over-the-counter flu medicine contains a mild CNS depressant, just enough to tweak down her iris fluctuations and blush response. The blade runner on vacation takes out his gun and blows her away. On a roll: he runs the Voigt-Kampff tests on everybody around him, including his aging Norman Rockwell -- type parents, determines that he's surrounded by a nest of escaped replicants passing as human. In the next twelve hours, the only thing he stops for is to reload.

  Bad luck, real bad shit. One of Deckard's old partners in the blade runner unit, the coldest of the bunch, had to go back there and pull the plug on the guy, who by that point was completely nuts and seeing escaped replicants everywhere. Extremely terminated; the loose-cannon blade runner's body was flown back to Los Angeles and buried with honors, without details. The lid was clamped down in St. Paul, with judicious application of the slush fund that Bryant administered out of the bottom drawer of his desk. Silence on the matter . . . at least until this Isidore character opened his mouth.

  "How do you know about St. Paul?"

  A smug expression settled on Isidore's face. "Mr. Deckard, it's my business to know about things like that. It's the buh-business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. The real business."

  "Yeah? And what's that?"

  Isidore glanced at the pictures tacked to the wall. "I didn't even ruh-really know, until old Mr. suh-Sloat died. I'd just worked for him before that, duh-doing what he told me to do, fixing up those busted animals -- the fake ones, as yuh-you'd kuh-call them. But then when he was gone, and he'd left me everything . . ." He brought his gaze back around to Deckard.

  "When he left me . . . the great task. The responsibility. What he had done, and what I had to do. That was when I found out the truth." Behind the round lenses, his eyes looked both wise and pitying. "You're a failure, Deckard. You were a failure before you quit being a blade runner. The whole blade runner shtick is a failure. You're suh-supposed to be keeping escaped replicants from running around on Earth, being 'dangerous,' as you like to think they are. Well, you buh-buh-blew it. You and all the rest of the blade runners. You didn't accomplish jack about tracking down replicants. And you know why? Because you can't do anything about it. You never could. Blade runners -- shuh-shuh-sheesh. Buncha frauds, wasting taxpayers' muh-money. The LAPD should've pensioned you off, or put you back in uniform, made tuh-ruh-rub-traffic cops outta you. Something useful, at least. Because something like the St. Paul incident -- and there've been others, ones you don't even know about -- you know wuh-what something like that shows?"

  He slouched down in the chair, hating the guy. "You're gonna tell me."

  "That's why you're huh-here, Deckard. It's not just that there can be false positives on the Voigt-Kampff test. That blade runners have been icing humans -- ruh-real humans -- that flunked the test for one reason or another. It's also that wuh-once you admit that fallibility of the empathy-testing methodology, you admit the possibility of false negatives. Replicants who pass the test, who walk right by you because your big deal Voigt-Kampff machines tuh-tuh-told you they were human."

  "A possibility." A shrug. "Big deal. Anything's possible. Doesn't mean it ever happened."

  "Buh-but you see . . ." Isidore folded his hands together in his lap. "I can prove it's happened. That replicants can get past the empathy tests, your fancy-shuh-shmancy Voigt-Kampff machines. Even before the Nexus-6 models came on-line, they were getting puh-past. For years now -- muh-maybe decades -- there've been escaped replicants walking around on Earth. Right here in L.A., even. And there's nothing that you or any of the other blade runners can do about it. Because you can't find them."

  "Metaphysics." He glared back at the other man. "Bullshit. You're talking religion.Articles of faith. Postulating an invisible entity -- it exists but you can't see it. Nobody can. Replicants passing as human -- they exist because you think they have to exist. Good luck proving that one."

  "Nuh-nuh-not faith, Deckard. But reality. I've seen them, talked to them, wuh-watched them come and go . . ." Isidore's gaze shifted away, refocusing on the radiance of an inner vision. "Oh, much more than that. I know everything about them. Isn't that fuh-fuh-funny?" An expression of amazement. "I'm the person who couldn't ever see the difference, between human and not, between the fuh-fake and the real -- you could see those things, but I couldn't. I was blind to them. And I won. The way I see things . . . it became real. From in here . . ." He tapped the side of his head again. "To everywhere." The fingertip moved away from the skull. "I made it real."

  He stayed silent, watching. A few minutes before he'd been sure that the other
man was insane. Now he wasn't sure. Of anything.

  The gaze of the enlightened, of those who know the truth, turned upon him once more.

  "Don't you see, Deckard?" The voice soft and gentle, stammer evaporated. "That's what the business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital was all along -- or at least that's what it had become before old Mr. Sloat left it to me. His legacy. When I found out what he'd been doing -- what we'd all been doing -- I didn't have any choice. I had to go on with it."

  He peered closer at the man. "With what?"

  "Turning fakes -- what you'd call fakes -- into the real. That's what we'd started out doing, with the animals -- building and repairing them so they couldn't be distinguished from the ones that'd been born that way. Doing it with animals is legal; Hannibal Sloat just took it the next logical step. The necessary step. The Van Nuys Pet Hospital is the last station on the underground railway for escaped replicants: when they get out of the off-world colonies and reach Earth, they come straight here. Right under the noses of the blade runners and all the rest of the LAPD; who'd ever think of raiding a pet hospital? Hm? And then when the escaped replicants get here . . . I fix them. And when I get done fixing them . . . they can pass an empathy test. I tweak their involuntary reaction times, their blush responses, their pupil fluctuations, so they can sail right past a Voigt-Kampff machine. And they do pass; they always pass." Isidore nodded slowly, as if he'd just thought of something. "So given that there've been some real humans who've flunked the empathy tests . . . I guess that makes my fixed-up replicants realer than real, huh?"

  "If they exist at all." The other man's words had stung him, needled him back into a way of thinking, a way of being that he'd thought he'd given up completely. "If they existed . . . we would've caught them eventually. At least some of them." Deckard could hear an old brutality setting steel in his voice. "And it's got nothing to do with being a blade runner. It's about being a cop. And what cops know. You're talking conspiracy, buddy. Anytime you got that many in on something, some of them are gonna crack. They're not as strong as the others, they're not as good at hiding, at sweating it out when they know they're being hunted. All it takes is one, and then the whole game's up. And that's how we would've caught your fixed-up replicants. If they existed."