Do androids dream of electric sheep?

"Can we let her out? Put her where the sheep is?"

"She ought to be tethered," he said. "For a few days at least."

Iran said in an odd little voice, "'My life is love and pleasure.' An old, old song by Josef Strauss. Remember? When we first met." She put her hand gently on his shoulder, leaned toward him, and kissed him. "Much love. And very much pleasure."

"Thanks," he said, and hugged her.

"Let's run downstairs and give thanks to Mercer. Then we can come up here again and right away name her; she needs a name. And maybe you can find some rope to tether her." She started off.

Standing by his horse Judy, grooming and currying her, their neighbor Bill Barbour called to them, "Hey, that's a nice-looking goat you have, Deckards. Congratulations. Evening, Mrs. Deckard. Maybe you'll have kids; I'll maybe trade you my colt for a couple of kids."

"Thanks," Rick said. He followed after Iran, in the direction of the elevator. "Does this cure your depression?" he asked her. "It cures mine."

Iran said, "It certainly does cure my depression. Now we can admit to everybody that the sheep's false."

"No need to do that," he said cautiously.

"But we can," Iran persisted. "See, now we have nothing to hide; what we've always wanted has come true. It's a dream!" Once more she stood on tiptoe, leaning and nimbly kissing him; her breath, eager and erratic, tickled his neck. She reached, then, to stab at the elevator button.

Something warned him. Something made him say, "Let's not go down to the apartment yet. Let's stay up here with the goat. Let's just sit and look at her and maybe feed the goat something. They gave me a bag of oats to start us out. And we can read the manual on goat maintenance; they included that, too, at no extra charge. We can call her Euphemia." The elevator, however, had come and already Iran was trotting inside. "Iran, wait," he said.

"It would be immoral not to fuse with Mercer in gratitude," Iran said. "I had hold of the handles of the box today and it overcame my depression a little — just a little, not like this. But anyhow I got hit by a rock, here." She held up her wrist; on it he made out a small dark bruise. "And I remember thinking how much better we are, how much better off, when we're with Mercer. Despite the pain. Physical pain but spiritually together; I felt everyone else, all over the world, all who had fused at the same time." She held the elevator door from sliding shut. "Get in, Rick. This'll be just for a moment. You hardly ever undergo fusion; I want you to transmit the mood you're in now to everyone else; you owe it to them. It would be immoral to keep it for ourselves."

She, was, of course, right. So he entered the elevator and once again descended.

In their living room, at the empathy box, Iran swiftly snapped the switch, her face animated with growing gladness; it lit her up like a rising new crescent of moon. "I want everyone to know," she told him. "Once that happened to me; I fused and picked up someone who had just acquired an animal. And then one day — " Her features momentarily darkened; the pleasure fled. "One day I found myself receiving from someone whose animal had died. But others of us shared our different joys with them — I didn't have any, as you might know — and that cheered the person up. We might even reach a potential suicide; what we have, what we're feeling, might — "

"They'll have our joy," Rick said, "but we'll lose. We'll exchange what we feel for what they feel. Our joy will be lost."

The screen of the empathy box now showed rushing streams of bright formless color; taking a breath his wife hung on tightly to the two handles. "We won't really lose what we feel, not if we keep it clearly in mind. You never really have gotten the hang of fusion, have you, Rick?"

"Guess not," he said. But now he had begun to sense, for the first time, the value that people such as Iran obtained from Mercerism. Possibly his experience with the bounty hunter Phil Resch had altered some minute synapsis in him, had closed one neurological switch and opened another. And this perhaps had started a chain reaction. "Iran," he said urgently; he drew her away from the empathy box. "Listen; I want to talk about what happened to me today." He led her over to the couch, sat her down facing him. "I met another bounty hunter," he said. "One I never saw before. A predatory one who seemed to like to destroy them. For the first time, after being with him, I looked at them differently. I mean, in my own way I had been viewing them as he did."

"Won't this wait?" Iran said.