Van Ness Pet Hospital

The Van Ness Pet Hospital is a small, carefully misnamed repair enterprise in San Francisco that services false animals—the electric sheep, cats, and other mechanical creatures that stand in for the real animals nearly wiped out by World War Terminus. It is owned by Hannibal Sloat, an old man too eroded by radioactive dust to emigrate, who sees the world through glasses literally dense with dust and who has given up cleaning them. The shop barely exists in the tough, competitive field of false-animal repair, and its name is a deliberate deception: the truck is marked like a veterinary ambulance, the driver dresses in white, and the pretense is maintained so that neighbors never learn that a family's beloved pet is actually a machine.

Workplace and Staff

The hospital employs two people besides Sloat: the repairman Milt Borogrove, a burly, pebble-skinned man whose own skin has turned the color of dog manure from the dust, and John Isidore, a chickenhead—a special who failed the minimum mental faculties test and is treated with contempt by the regular population. Isidore drives the pickup and delivery truck, and his inability to tell the difference between a real animal and a false one is a running liability. Sloat occasionally calls him "chickenhead" to his face, a term he had never used before, and Isidore stammers and feels the room turn dark maroon when he is humiliated. Yet Sloat also recognizes that Isidore has a certain usefulness: after the cat incident, Sloat admits that Isidore handled the vidphone call to the owner's wife "reasonably well," even though Milt had to take over.

The Death of Horace

The central crisis at the hospital occurs when Isidore picks up a cat that he believes is a malfunctioning electric animal. He tries to recharge its battery and locate a short, but the cat is actually a real animal, dying of pneumonitis. Sloat discovers the truth when he examines the corpse and curses for a full minute. The loss of one more living creature enrages him, and he forces Isidore to make the vidphone call to the owner's wife, Mrs. Pilsen—a task Isidore finds virtually impossible because of his phobia about the vidphone and his self-image as "hairy, ugly, dirty, stooped, snaggled-toothed, and gray." Isidore stammers through the call, blurting out that the cat died and that the shop will replace it, and then, in a panic, suggests an exact electric duplicate. Mrs. Pilsen, after initial horror, agrees to the deception, commissioning a handcrafted replica from Wheelright & Carpenter so that her husband Ed, who loved Horace too much to get close to him, will never know the truth. Milt Borogrove takes over the call to smooth things over, and Sloat decides that Isidore should handle the dealings with Wheelright & Carpenter, since he got the situation started.

Narrative Significance

The Van Ness Pet Hospital is the only place on Earth where John Isidore is accepted as human, and its gothic, dust-choked atmosphere mirrors the decay of the world outside. The shop's business—repairing the lies people tell themselves about their animals—exposes the central tension of the novel: the desperate need to believe in life, even when it is mechanical. The death of Horace forces Isidore to confront the difference between real and fake, a distinction he cannot reliably make, and it foreshadows the later scene in which the androids Pris Stratton and Irmgard Baty mutilate a living spider while Isidore watches helplessly. The hospital is also the place where Isidore first hears Buster Friendly's exposé of Mercerism, and where Sloat tells him that Buster is immortal, like Mercer—a remark that blurs the line between truth and fraud that the novel keeps probing.