frequency. “That was my job . . . for a long time. I know what a dead body looks like.”
“Hip to death. That’s a good one.” Urbenton nodded in a show of appreciation.
“I like that. Maybe I underestimated your potential; you might have a real talent for this sort of thing. I think you’re down for getting some kind of screen credit out of this gig; maybe you could parlay that into some kind of scripting gig. Additional dialogue, that sort of thing.”
“You’re not answering my question. I want to know how that Kowalski replicant got killed. If you didn’t plan on it happening, who did?”
“I’m beginning to think . . . you’re not kidding about this.” From the corner of his eye, Urbenton studied him uneasily. “It happened just now? On the set?”
The pink flesh turned pale. “A real bullet, and everything?”
Deckard made no reply. He didn’t have to.
“That’s weird.” Urbenton slowly shook his head. “Because that’d be real bad news. Not just for that poor bastard replicant His voice spookily softened as his gaze shifted away from Deckard. “But for all of us .
By the time he got past the doors through which Deckard had vanished, there was no sound of the others’ footsteps. Or of any voices; the area was acoustically sealed off from the soundstages out in the station’s main area.
Holden could detect the faint buzzing of the fluorescent panels lining the narrow corridors, and nothing else.
“Well, he’s gotta be around somewhere.” Holden looked down the double row of featureless doorways. A fine layer of dust had drifted onto their sills. He tilted back his head, trying to catch a scent trace of his quarry; he’d quit the department, but still prided himself on keeping his quasi-extrasensory cop skills.
The briefcase had its own version of them. “There’s somebody coming,” it announced. “I can feel them. But it’s not—” The briefcase suddenly clammed up.
“What’re you doing here?” Another voice, not Deckard’s.
Warning from the briefcase had given Holden the quarter second he needed to assemble a front. He glanced over his shoulder at the figure standing in the just-opened doorway behind him. A big sonuvabitch, possibly security; he had on an ID badge with a name he didn’t bother to read. “I got called over to the set—” Holden kept his voice modulated down to a level of disarming self-assurance. “Beats me, what for.”
The other man stepped forward and peered more closely at him. “Okay The man gave a slow nod. “They must be talking about the office setup. The interview scene—it’s not on the list for today, but what the hell A disgusted shrug. “This whole shoot’s so screwed up.” He clamped a hand on Holden’s shoulder—the guy was at least a head taller—and steered him down the hallway. “Man, I don’t even know if they’re trying to make a movie here.” His glance went down to the briefcase dangling from Holden’s grip. “Is that supposed to be it? The whatchacallit . . . the Vogue-Kafka. Or whatever.”
“Voigt-Kampff.” It didn’t take even a split second for him to respond. “Sure,” lied Holden. You got it—the other man was obviously operating on the assumption that Holden was connected to the video production in some way. One of the actors? He wondered if there was supposed to be a Holden as well as a Deckard in this thing. Whatever. He wasn’t about to contradict the guy and get his cover blown. “That’s what it is, all right.”
“Doesn’t look the way I thought it would.” The other man frowned at the briefcase in Holden’s hand. “But it’d be typical of them to tell the props people to just throw something together on the cheap.”
He’s buying it, thought Holden. All that was necessary now was to keep the guy bulishitted, then find a way of giving him the slip and continuing to search for Deckard. This was the security that he’d been so worried about running into? The briefcase’s voice could’ve skipped all the dire forebodings.
“In here.” The other man pushed open one of the hallway’s doors and walked Holden through it. “This is the set you’re down for—they wouldn’t need you out on the big one.”
As his eyes adjusted to the dim space, Holden found himself standing in the middle of what looked like a small office, with a couple of high-backed chairs facing each other across a table. Something fluttered above his head; he looked up and saw the blades of a ceiling fan turning lazily in the room’s air. Beyond the fan and the narrow plank on which it was fastened was nothing but the studio’s empty reaches, studded with gantrys and walkways, lights extinguished as blind eyes.
“Stay put.” The other man turned back toward the door. “I’ll go get the rest of the crew.”
“Maybe I should go along.” Holden lifted the briefcase with both hands against his chest. “Instead of just waiting here.” A sudden, irrational panic had sped up the bio-mech heart in his chest; he could feel his pulse bouncing off the briefcase’s leatherette flank. “Maybe—”
“Forget that.” The other man’s voice turned harsher. “I don’t want you wandering off while I’m trying to round up everybody else. Just sit down and relax. Won’t be a minute.”
When the other man had left, the briefcase spoke up. “Way to go.” The voice was tinged with a familiar sarcasm. “Door’s locked, isn’t it?”
Holden gave the knob a futile twist, but didn’t bother to give an answer.
Hefting the briefcase onto the table, he pulled back one of the chairs and lowered himself into it. From the corner of his eye, he saw letters imprinted on the headrest; his vision had adjusted well enough that he could also see them on the empty chair. They spelled out TYRELL CORP.
A memory stirred uneasily in the darker space inside his head. From a long time ago, back when he’d had a real fleshand-blood heart and lungs ticking and sighing under his breastbone. The room, even with its nonexistent ceiling and switched-off video-cams peering in, seemed familiar to him, in a way that made the machine-pumped blood crawl in his veins. He drew a blank on it, but knew that it wasn’t because he was unable to remember. More likely, he didn’t want to.
The memory sat obstinately at the back of his skull, refusing to show itself in even the room’s partial light.
Two chairs that said TYRELL CORP on them . . . and a slowly revolving ceiling fan. There was smoke, Holden remembered. Cigarette smoke, drifting blue, hanging like some semitransparent snakeskin in the air; from the cigarette that’d been in his own hand. He’d still been smoking then; he’d given it up some time after he’d gotten the new heart and lungs. The doctors had told him that his system had reached its limit—if anything happened to this set, there’d be no chance of putting another one inside him. And there had been something sitting on the table in front of him not a briefcase, but an actual Voigt-Kampff machine, regulation LAPD issue, just like the big black guns that blade runners carried around with them. The Voigt-Kampff had been opened and activated, its batwing bellows compressing and expanding, breathing in microscopic traces of sweat and fear; the tracking lens on its antennalike metal stalk ready to focus on the dilating pupil of anyone who’d been dropped down in the chair opposite him .
Where am I? The incomplete, unwilled memory had claimed him so hard that for a moment he had lost track of his location, whether Earth or the Outer Hollywood orbital studios. The bio-mech heart stumbled in sudden panic. What place, what time . . . Holden gripped the edges of the table with fear-rigid hands.
“All right—” The claustrophobic set’s door had swung open again, admitting a voice louder than the ones inside Holden’s skull. The man who’d led him into the room had another, even taller figure in tow. “The director asked me to get your blocking down before we tried running tape.”
Holden looked up and saw the face behind the other man’s, and recognized it.
Another piece from the memory that had wrapped around him.
“So what is it you want me to do?” From the chinless, brutal face of a Leon Kowalski replicant-another from the same batch as the dead one that Holden had glimpsed lying on the L.A. street set-small eyes peered with apprehensive suspicion. All the Leon Kowalskis were just bright enough to be mistrustful of humans . . . but not bright enough to do anything about it.
So then, how’d you wind up getting iced by one of them? Holden’s unspoken voice chided him. The rest of the memory regarding the room with two Tyrell Corporation chairs was starting to come clear, whether he wanted it to or not.
“You know your lines?” The other man glanced sharply at the burly replicant.
“Yeah . . . kind of.”
“Sit over here.” The man pointed to the empty chair at the table. “How about you?” He glanced over toward Holden.
The apprehension transmuted to certainty. “Of course—“It took a couple of seconds for Holden to find his
