Deckard's abortive attempt to kill Rachael Rosen
After retiring the last of the six Nexus-6 androids in a single day, Rick Deckard returns to his apartment building to find that his newly purchased black Nubian goat has been killed. His wife Iran tells him that a small young-looking girl with dark hair, large black eyes, and a long fish-scale coat—Rachael Rosen—dragged the goat from its cage and pushed it off the roof. Deckard understands the act as android vengeance: "She had what seemed to her a reason." He gets back into his hovercar and flies north, into the uninhabited desolation beyond San Francisco, toward a place where no living thing would go unless it felt that the end had come.
The Solitary Ascent
Landing on a barren, rubble-strewn hillside near the Oregon border, Deckard steps out into a landscape of gray dust and scattered rocks. He begins to walk uphill, and with each step the weight on him grows. He feels an overwhelming fatigue, a sense that he has been defeated in some obscure way. As he climbs, a rock—not rubber or soft foam plastic—strikes him in the inguinal region, and the pain brings an absolute isolation and suffering. He sees a shadowy figure ahead and calls out "Mercer," only to realize it is his own shadow. He scrambles back down to his car, trembling, and takes a pinch of snuff. The experience is unlike any fusion he has known through the empathy box: "I did it alone." He tells his secretary Ann Marsten on the vidphone that he has permanently fused with Mercer and cannot unfuse. "I'm Wilbur Mercer," he says. "I'm sitting here waiting to unfuse."
The Discovery of the Toad
Still sitting in the car, Deckard notices a bulge in the ground among the stones. He recognizes it from old nature films: a toad. He frantically checks his Sidney's catalogue and finds that all varieties of toad are listed as extinct. He takes a cardboard box from the trunk, dumps out a spare fuel pump, and approaches the creature. The toad blends perfectly with the dust, its metabolism slowed almost to a halt. He lifts it, feeling its peculiar coolness and dry, wrinkled skin. It squirms weakly. He ties the box shut and thinks, "This is what Mercer sees… Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world." All the weight leaves him. He decides to surprise Iran and flies back to San Francisco.
The Revelation and Its Aftermath
At home, Deckard presents the box to Iran with a round-eyed wonder she has never seen before. He announces he has taken the day off and will sleep. When she asks what is in the box, he says, "A toad." She picks it up, turns it over, and with her nail locates the tiny control panel. She flips it open. The toad is electric. Deckard's face falls; he gazes mutely at the false animal, then carefully replaces it in its box. He wonders aloud how it got out into the desert, and concludes that someone must have put it there. Iran feels guilty for telling him. Deckard shakes his head, still bewildered, and says, "The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are." He goes to bed, dust sifting from his clothes onto the white sheets. Iran stays behind, looks up "animal accessories, electric" in the phone book, and orders a pound of artificial flies for the toad. She decides that the toad "eats" artificial flies, and that she wants it to work perfectly because her husband is devoted to it.
Thematic Significance
The abortive attempt to kill Rachael Rosen—which never actually becomes an attempt, only a threat that Deckard cannot carry out—is the pivot on which the entire final movement of the novel turns. It is the moment Deckard proves to himself that he cannot kill an android he has come to know intimately, and it is the moment that seals the goat's death and drives him into the desert. The solitary ascent that follows is the novel's most direct dramatization of Mercerism as a lived, solitary ordeal rather than a communal fusion. The toad, electric yet cherished, becomes the final emblem of the book's central paradox: that the distinction between real and artificial life may matter less than the capacity to care for whatever life—or near-life—one finds. Deckard's acceptance of the electric toad, and Iran's practical decision to maintain it, suggest a tentative peace with the ersatz, a willingness to tend the paltry lives that remain.
