Phil Resch and Luba Luft

Phil Resch and Luba Luft meet only once, in the elevator of the San Francisco Museum of Art, but that brief encounter serves as the novel's most concentrated moral detonation. Resch, a bounty hunter attached to the Mission Street Hall of Justice, has just helped Rick Deckard escape from an android-infested police station. Luba Luft, a soprano with the San Francisco Opera Company, is the third Nexus-6 android on Deckard's list. The three ride down together after Deckard and Resch find her studying Edvard Munch's Puberty at the museum. What happens in that elevator transforms Deckard's understanding of his work and of himself.

The Killing in the Elevator

Luba Luft, cornered, does not resist physically. Instead she speaks. She tells Resch directly, "You're not human. No more than I am: you're an android, too." The accusation lands. Resch, who has just learned from Deckard that his own superior, Inspector Garland, was an android, is already raw. Luba presses further, describing her own life as "imitating the human" and adding, with deliberate cruelty, "I really don't like androids." She turns to Resch: "Isn't that how it's been with you, Resch? Trying to be —" Resch cannot take it. He reaches for his laser tube. Deckard grabs at his hand, pleading, "The Boneli test." But Resch fires. The beam misses Luba's torso on the first shot, then burrows a narrow hole into her stomach. She begins to scream, crouched against the elevator wall, screaming like the figure in the Munch painting she had been studying. Deckard, with his own laser tube, kills her. Her body falls forward, face down, in a heap. It does not even tremble.

The Destruction of the Book

Immediately after the killing, Deckard takes the book of Munch reproductions he had just bought for Luba—a handsome glossy volume of the artist's collected work, priced at twenty-five dollars—and with his laser tube systematically burns it into blurred ash. Resch watches without understanding. "You could have kept the book yourself," he says. Deckard does not explain. The gesture is not rational; it is an act of mourning, of obliterating the evidence of a moment in which he had treated an android as a person worthy of a gift. Resch cannot follow the reasoning. "It isn't rational, that's why," he says.

The Moral Chasm

The killing exposes the fundamental difference between the two bounty hunters. Resch kills without hesitation and without regret; he enjoys it. Deckard sees in Resch's method a pattern he cannot accept. "You don't kill the way I do," he tells Resch afterward. "You don't try to — Hell, I know what it is. You like to kill. All you need is a pretext." Resch does not deny it. He admits that if he had a pretext he would kill Deckard too. When Deckard asks whether androids have souls, Resch cocks his head in puzzlement. The question is meaningless to him. Later, when Resch passes the Voigt-Kampff test and is confirmed human, Deckard identifies the defect: "There is a defect in your empathic, role-taking ability. One which we don't test for. Your feelings toward androids." Resch's lack of empathy for androids is not a flaw the system measures, but it is a flaw Deckard can no longer ignore.

The Reversal

Deckard, testing himself on the same empathy scale, discovers that he registers a strong empathic response when he imagines a female android being killed without warning. The needles hit 4.0 and 6.0—about what a human subject shows for most questions. "I'm capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids," he realizes. "Not for all of them but — one or two." For Luba Luft, in particular. He had admired her voice, bought her a book, and then watched her die. Resch, observing Deckard's distress, offers a cynical diagnosis: "It's sex." He tells Deckard that the proper order is to go to bed with the android first, then kill it. Deckard stares at him. "You're a good bounty hunter," he says. "Your attitude proves it. But am I?" For the first time in his life, he has begun to wonder.

Aftermath

Resch claims the kill for himself—"I got her"—but cannot collect the bounty from either his own department or Deckard's. Deckard, his hands shaking, tells Resch he is getting out of the business. "Someone has to do this," Resch points out. "They can use androids," Deckard replies. "Much better if andys do it. I can't any more; I've had enough. She was a wonderful singer. The planet could have used her. This is insane." The encounter with Resch and Luba has shattered Deckard's professional identity. He has seen what he might become—a killer who enjoys the killing—and he has seen what he kills—a singer whose voice moved him. The two sights together make his work untenable.