On his way to work, Blaine Anderson, 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. The bird had a name that made Blaine smile – Pavarotti. It seemed like a sign that this ostrich should be his – he loved old music and often sang along while listening to this particular singer's greatest hits on his iPod. His smile faded as he stared grimly at the price tag. He then continued on to the Hall of Justice on Lombard Street and found himself fifteen minutes late to work.

As he unlocked his office door his superior Police Inspector Jake Puckerman, coffee-toned skin and hair shaved close to his head, sloppily dressed but wise-eyed and conscious of nearly everything of any importance, hailed him. “Meet me at nine-thirty in Shannon Beiste's office.” Inspector Puckerman, as he spoke, flicked briefly through a clipboard of typed sheets. “Beiste,” he continued, is in Mount Zion Hospital with a laser track through her spine. She'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?” Blaine asked, chilled. The department's chief bounty hunter had been all right yesterday. Shannon had been joking with him as usual, barking out her usual garbled cowboy-like sayings and laughing, slapping at her own leg jovially. She had eaten her usual half of an ersatz substitute chicken for lunch and told tales from her football coaching days before the war. And as usual, at the end of the day she had zipped off in her hovercar to her apartment in the crowded high-prestige Nob Hill area of the city.

Puckerman muttered over his shoulder something about nine-thirty in Shannon's office and departed, leaving Blaine standing alone.

As he entered his own office, Blaine heard the voice of his secretary, Kitty Wilde, behind him. “Mr. Anderson, you know what happened to Ms. Beiste? She got shot.” She followed 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 Sylvester-Hummel Association is turning out,” Miss Wilde said. “Did you read over the company's brochures 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.” Blaine ignored her, setting down his briefcase and starting up his computer with his back turned to the short, perky blonde. “You know, Blaine, sometimes I wonder how you even have this job.”

“I know you desperately want my job, Kitty. But I'm not going anywhere,” Blaine said flatly.

“But with Shannon Beiste out of commission and you possibly filling in for her, someone needs to do your job. Oh, never mind. I guess it's not really important enough to make sure that someone keeps that chair of yours warm. That is about all you do, isn't it Blaine?” Kitty says with false sweetness.

“You are such a bitch,” said Blaine, almost fondly.

“That's what I aspire to be,” Kitty replied, equally fondly. She lowered her voice. “You missed the video conference this morning. Chandler told me. It came through the switchboard exactly at nine.”

“A call in?” Blaine asked.

Kitty said, “A call out by Mr. Puckerman to the W.P.O. in Russia. Asking them if they would be willing to file a formal written complaint with the Sylvester-Hummel Association's factory representative East.”

“Jake still wants the Nexus-6 unit withdrawn from the market?” He felt no surprise. Since the initial release of its specifications and performance charts last August, most police agencies which dealt with escaped andys had been protesting. “The Russian 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 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 '79. Every p9olice 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 made their way by one means or another to Earth, and had not been detected for a period of time in some cases up to an entire year. But then the Voigt Empathy Test had been devised by the Cho Institute working in China. And no T-14 android – insofar, at least, as was known – had managed to pass that particular test.

“Want to know what the Russian police said?” Kitty asked, a wicked glint in her eye. “I know that, too.”

Blaine said, “I'll find out from Jake Puckerman.” He felt irritable. Office gossip annoyed him because it always proved better than the truth. And there was only so much of Kitty and her alternately cutesy and bitchy act that he could take. Seating himself at his desk he pointedly fished about in a drawer until Ms. Wilde, perceiving the hint, departed.

From the drawer he produced an ancient, creased manila envelope. Leaning back and tilting his chair up on the back two legs, he pulled out the contents of the envelope: the extant data on the Nexus-6.

A moment's reading vindicated Ms. Wilde'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 an andy. But then, intelligence tests hadn't trapped an andy in years, not since the primordial, crude varieties of the early 2070s.

The Nexus-6 android types, Blaine reflected, surpassed all classes of human specials, and some regulars, in terms of intelligence. It was a crude type of evolution. In some ways, the servant had 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 amoung the followers of Mercerism – an experience which he, and virtually everyone else – including subnormal chickenheads, managed with no difficulty.

He had wondered why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Intelligence, at least to some degree, could be found within every phylum and order including the arachnida. But the empathic faculty seemed to require an unimpaired group instinct. A solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it. In fact, it would impede a spider's ability to survive because it would make the spider conscious of the desire to live on the part of its prey. Hence all predators would starve.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or at omnivores who could depart from a meat diet, as humans had done after the war. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. As in the fusion experience, everyone ascended together and faced the rocks of the oppressors together. It was like a biological insurance, but a double-edged one. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all the other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, ten for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal like 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.

Blaine liked to think of them that way. It made his job palatable. In retiring – killing – 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. As Mercerism grew into a full theology, the concept of the killers grew with it. Rocks were thrown by unknown assailants, so it was never clear who or what the evil presence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Therefore a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of the killers wherever he saw fit. For Blaine Anderson, an escaped humanoid robot, which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligence greater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals, which possessed no ability to feel empathic joy for another life form's success or grief at its defeat – that, for him, epitomized the killers.

Thinking about animals reminded him of the ostrich he had seen in the pet store. Seeing that he had time, he grabbed his phone and scrolled to the number for the Happy Dog Pet Shop. They can't really want that much for the ostrich, Blaine told himself. They expect you to haggle.

“Happy Dog Pet Shop,” a man's voice declared. Animals bawled in the background.

“That ostrich you have in your display window,” Blaine said, toying with the stapler on his desk. “What sort of a down payment would you need for that?”

“Let's see,” the animal salesman said, groping for a pen and pad of paper. “One-third down,” he figured. “May I ask, sir, if you're going to trade something in?”

Guardedly, Blaine said, “I – I haven't decided.”

“Let's say we put the ostrich on a thirty-month contract,” the salesman said. “At a low, low interest rate of six percent a month. That would make your monthly payment, after a reasonable down – ”

“You'll have to lower the price you're asking,” Blaine said. “Knock off two thousand and I won't trade anything in; I'll come up with cash.” Shannon Beiste, he reflected, is out of commission. That could mean a great deal, depending on how many assignments show up during the coming month.

“Sir,” the animal salesman said, “our asking price is already a thousand dollars under book. Check Sidney's. I'll hang on. I want you to see for yourself sir, that our price is fair.”

Crap, Blaine thought. They're standing firm. However, just for the heck of it, he pulled up the Sidney's app and toggled through it to find ostrich comma male-female, old-young, sick-well, mint-used, and inspected the prices.

“Mint, male, young, well,” the salesman informed him. “Thirty thousand dollars. We're exactly one thousand under book. Now, your down payment  – ”

“I'll think it over,” Blaine said, “and call you back.” He started to hang up.

“Your name, sir?” the salesman asked alertly.

“Frank Merriwell,” Blaine said.

“And your email address, Mr. Merriwell? In case I'm not here when you call back?”

He made up an email address and ended the call. All that money, he thought. And yet, people buy them. Some people have that kind of money. Opening the office door a crack he makes sure that Kitty is busy at her desk and that no one is lurking in the hallway who might overhear his next call. He scrolled through his contacts again and dialed the number of the false animal shop at which he had gotten his ersatz sheep. On the screen, a man dressed like a vet appeared. “Dr. Schuester,” the man declared.

“This is Blaine Anderson. How much is an electric ostrich?”

“Oh, I'd say we could fix you up for about eight hundred dollars. How soon did you want that delivery? We would have to make that for you from scratch. There's not that much call for – ”

“I'm so sorry, but I have to go. I'll talk to you later,” Blaine interrupted; nine-thirty had arrived. “Good by.” He ended the call as he rose and headed toward Inspector Puckerman's door. Opening it, he nodded to his boss, who was on the phone. Seating himself he flipped through the specs on the Nexus-6, which he had brought with him, reading them over as Inspector Puckerman continued to talk on the phone.

Blaine felt depressed. And yet logically, because of Shannon's sudden disappearance from the workforce, he should be at least guardedly pleased.

Maybe I'm worried, Blaine thought, that what happened to Shannon will happen to me. An andy smart enough to laser an experienced veteran like her could probably take me, too. He examined this idea in his head, moving it around and peering at it from different angles, but that didn't seem to be it.

“I see you brought the info sheet on that new brain unit,” Inspector Puckerman said, ending his call.

“Yes,” Blaine said. “I heard about it on the grapevine. How many andys are involved and how far did Shannon get?”

“Eight to start with,” Puckerman said, consulting his clipboard. “Shannon got the first two.”

“And the remaining six are here in northern California?”

“As far as we know. Shannon thinks so. That was her that I was talking to. I have her notes; they were in her desk. She says all she knows is here.” Puckerman tapped the bundle of paper. So far he did not seem inclined to pass the notes on to Blaine. For some reason, he continued to leaf through them himself, frowning and working his tongue in and out around the fringes of his mouth.

“I have nothing on my agenda,” Blaine offered. “I'm ready to take over in Shannon's place.”

Jake said thoughtfully, “Shannon used the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale in testing out the individuals she suspected. You realize – you ought to anyhow – that this test isn't specific for the new brain unit. No test is. The Voigt scale, altered three years ago by Kampff, is all we have.” He paused, pondering. “Shannon considered it accurate. Maybe it is. But I would suggest this, before you take off after these six.” Again he tapped the pile of notes. “Fly to Seattle and talk with the Sylvester-Hummel Association people. Have them supply you with a representative sampling of types employing the new Nexus-6 unit.”

“And put them through the Voigt-Kampff,” Blaine said.

“It sounds so easy,” Jake Puckerman said, half to himself.

“Pardon?”

Jake said, “I think I'll talk to the Sylvester-Hummel organization myself, while you're on your way.” He eyed Blaine silently. Finally he grunted, gnawed on a fingernail and eventually decided on what he wanted to say. “I'm going to discuss with them the possibility of including several humans, as well as their new androids. But you won't know. It'll be my decision, in conjunction with the manufacturers. It should be set up by the time you get there.” He abruptly pointed at Blaine, his face severe. “This is the first time you'll be acting as senior bounty hunter. Shannon knows a lot; she's got years of experience behind her.”

“So do I,” Blaine said tensely.

“You've only been with the department five years. Shannon has been working these cases twice as long. You've handled only the assignments that Shannon herself decided you could handle. But now you have six that she planned to retire herself. One of them managed to get her first. This one.” Puckerman turned the notes around so that Blaine could see. “Azimio Adams,” Puckerman said. “That's what it calls itself, anyhow. Assuming Shannon was right. Everything is based on that assumption, this entire list. And yet the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale has only been administered to the first three, the two Shannon retired and then Adams. It was while Shannon was administering the test; that's when Adams lasered him.”

“Which proves that she was right,” Blaine said. Otherwise she would not have been lasered; Adams would have no motive.

“You get started for Seattle,” Puckerman said. “Don't call them first. I'll handle it. Listen.” He rose to his feet and soberly confronted Blaine. “When you run the Voigt-Kampff scale up there, if one of the humans fails to pass it – “

“That can't happen,” Blaine says.

“One day, a few weeks ago, I talked with Shannon about exactly that. She had been thinking along the same lines. I had a memo from the Japanese police, circulated throughout Earth plus the colonies. A group of psychiatrists in Tokyo have approached W.P.O. with the following proposition. They want the latest and most accurate personality profile analytical tools used in determining the presence of an android – in other words the Voigt-Kampff scale – applied to a carefully selected group of schizophrenic human patients. Those, specifically, which reveal what's called a ‘flattening of affect.' You've heard of that.”

“That's specifically what the scale measures,” said Blaine.

“Then you understand what they're worried about.”

“This problem has always existed. Since we first encountered androids posing as humans. The consensus of police opinion is known to you in Lurie Kampff's article that compared the diminished emphatic faculty found in human mental patients and a superficially similar but basically – ”

“The Tokyo psychiatrists,” Jake broke in brusquely, “think that a small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work you'd assess them as humanoid robots. You'd be wrong, but by then they'd be dead.” He was silent now, waiting for Blaine's response.

“But these individuals,” Blaine said, “would all be – ”

“In institutions,” Jake agreed. “They couldn't conceivably function in the outside world. They certainly couldn't go around undetected as advanced psychotics – unless of course their breakdown had come suddenly and no one had gotten around to noticing. But this could happen.”

“A million to one odds,” Blaine said confidently. But he saw the point.

“What worried Shannon,” Jake continued, “is the appearance of this new Nexus-6 advanced unit. The Sylvester-Hummel Association assured us, as you know, that a Nexus-6 could be delineated by standard profile tests. We took their word for it. Now we're forced, as we knew we would be, to determine it on our own. That's what you'll be doing in Seattle. You understand, don't you, that this could go wrong either way If you can't pick out all the humanoid robots, then we have no reliable analytical tool and we'll never find the ones who're already escaping. If your scale factors out a human subject – identifies him as android – ” Puckerman beamed at him icily. “It would be awkward, although no one, certainly not the Sylvester-Hummel people, will make the news public. Actually, we'll be able to sit on it indefinitely. Of course, we'll have to inform the W.P.O. and they in turn will notify Tokyo and all the other capitols. Eventually it will show up on Twitter. But by then we may have developed a better scale.” He picked up his phone. “You want to get started? Use a department car and fuel yourself at our pumps.”

Standing, Blaine asked, “Can I take Shannon Beiste's notes with me? I want to read them along the way.”

Puckerman smiled wryly and said, “Let's wait until you've tried out your scale in Seattle.” His tone was interestingly merciless, and Blaine Anderson noticed it.