Rifle fire behind him—he glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright muzzle flashes, the crouching figures of an LAPD security team, more of them darting from the bank of elevators as the doors slid open, the dark-uniformed men running head down and with guns in hand, taking up positions around the ward’s narrow entrance. A bullet clanged and ricocheted from one of the bed’s curved metal bars; others slammed into the surrounding walls. The ruptured floor, with the entry device’s battering ram still rearing up into the space, and the knocked-aside medical equipment formed a partial barricade between the man and the new arrivals on the scene, momentarily shielding him from a direct line of attack.
He reached to the small of his back for his own gun, found nothing, remembered that he had left it sitting on top of the main respiratory-assist machine, at the edge of the nest of tubes and hoses from which he’d yanked the bed. He could see the gun now, a small black shape on top of shiny chrome. Too far away to reach, especially with a sharp horizontal rain of hollow points lacing the room—he swung back toward the shattered windows, watching across the prostrate form of the heart-and-lung patient as the freight spinner outside rotated, bringing its open cargo-bay door toward the jagged teeth of glass. The glaring sunlight hit his face like a furnace’s hot flood.
One of the spinner’s flanged air intakes caught on a bent, broken section of the windows’ steel frame. The thrust engines whined higher in pitch, as the autopilot program shoved the vehicle against the obstruction. The cargo-bay opening stayed where it was, nearly two meters away from the ripped edge of the hospital building.
Through the echoing clamor of the rifle fire, he could hear the security team shifting position, moving closer into the ward. He took a few steps backward, drawing the hospital bed with him, then bracing his hands against the lowest rail on one side.
“No . . .” The heart-and-lung patient had seen what the other man was getting ready to do. “You can’t . . . im . . . possible . . .”
“Shut up.” He pushed the bed full force, digging in and picking up speed, head lowered bull-like and muscles straining beneath the green scrubs. A second later the rolling bed had hit the rim of the floor-level window frame; momentum tilted the bed over and sent it flying toward the spinner outside, the cargo bay as the exact center of the target. His own momentum and a final diving launch carried him after.
He landed on the patient, who moaned and tried to push him away with weak, narcotized arms. One of the hospital bed’s wheels had caught against the sill of the bay door; the chrome frame and mattress fell outside the spinner, scraping against the hospital exterior as it spiraled down toward the city streets below.
Bullets hit and bounced inside the bare-ribbed cargo space. Inside the hospital, the security team had come out to the open, sprinting across the ward’s broken field, firing as they ran.
He scrambled off the heart-and-lung patient; still on his knees, he lunged past the cockpit’s empty seats and hit the autopilot’s override button on the control panel. A slap of his hand against the thrust levers—the spinner surged forward, a forearm slung around the pilot seat’s headrest keeping him from being flung back into the cargo space.
Through the cockpit’s glass curve, he spotted the steel hook of the broken window frame digging farther into the engine’s air scoop. Enough to tilt the spinner at a forty-five-degree angle as it fought against the crude grapple. A metal hail hammered small dents into the side panels.
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 attach‚ 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 attach‚ 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.”