EdgeOfHuman by Unknown Page B

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- bull shit." 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