Rick Deckard and Roy Baty

Rick Deckard and Roy Baty are the final hunter and the final hunted in the novel's central conflict, representing the ultimate confrontation between a human bounty hunter and the android leader of the escaped Nexus-6 group. Their relationship is defined by a single, decisive encounter in which Deckard, having already killed Baty's wife Irmgard, executes Baty himself, ending the android's ideological resistance and leaving Deckard psychologically shattered.

Identity and Background

Roy Baty is the organizer of the group of eight androids who fled Mars for Earth. According to Dave Holden's notes, which Deckard reads in his hotel room, Baty has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority and is given to mystical preoccupations. He proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction about the sacredness of so-called android "life." He also stole and experimented with various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that he hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to Mercerism, which remains unavailable to them. Deckard finds the account pathetic — a rough, cold android hoping to undergo an experience from which, due to a deliberately built-in defect, it remained excluded. Baty had tried to force the fusion experience into existence for itself, and when that fell through, he engineered the killing of a variety of human beings, followed by the flight to Earth.

The Confrontation

When Deckard arrives at the apartment building where the Batys and Pris Stratton are hiding, he encounters the special John Isidore outside. Isidore refuses to lead him to the apartment, so Deckard enters alone. Using detection gear, he locates the apartment and knocks, impersonating Isidore by stammering, "Let me in because I'm looking after you and t-t-two of you are women." The door opens. Inside, the smaller shape — Irmgard Baty — says, "You have to administer tests." Deckard replies, "It's too late." The taller figure, Roy Baty, tries to push the door shut and activate some electronic equipment. Deckard says, "No, I have to come in." He lets Roy Baty fire once, twisting out of the way as the laser beam passes him. "You've lost your legal basis," Deckard says, "by firing on me. You should have forced me to give you the Voigt-Kampff test. But now it doesn't matter." Roy Baty fires again, misses, drops the tube, and runs deeper into the apartment. Irmgard Baty, now holding the laser tube that Roy slipped to her, tries to shoot Deckard from behind, but he shoots her first.

The Killing and Its Aftermath

From the other room, Roy Baty lets out a cry of anguish. Deckard says, "Okay, you loved her. And I loved Rachael. And the special loved the other Rachael." He then shoots Roy Baty. The big man's corpse lashes about, topples like an overstacked collection of separate, brittle entities, and smashes into the kitchen table, carrying dishes and flatware down with it. Reflex circuits in the corpse make it twitch and flutter, but it has died. Deckard ignores it, not seeing it and not seeing that of Irmgard Baty by the front door. He sits down on the couch in the silence of the apartment, among the nonstirring objects. When the special Mr. Isidore appears at the door, Deckard tells him, "Better not look." Isidore is crying. Deckard gets dizzily to his feet, finds the phone, and dials Harry Bryant's office to report the retirements.

Thematic Significance

Deckard's killing of Roy Baty completes his day's work — six Nexus-6 androids retired in a single day, almost a record — but it leaves him hollow. He tells Isidore, "Androids are stupid. Roy Baty couldn't tell me from you; it thought you were at the door." After the call, he reflects, "What a job to have to do. I'm a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows." The encounter with Baty, the ideological leader who tried to create a Mercerism for androids, forces Deckard to confront the meaning of his own violence. Baty's death is not a triumph but a grim necessity that deepens Deckard's alienation, driving him to a solitary ascent of a hill where he experiences a fusion with Mercer that leaves him permanently changed.