Max Polokov was a Nexus-6 android in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, an escaped Rosen Association model who hid in San Francisco as a badly deteriorated trash collector. He lasered the senior bounty hunter Dave Holden in the middle of a Voigt-Kampff test and left Holden in Mount Zion Hospital with a laser track through his spine. When Rick Deckard took over the list, Polokov came straight to him as Sandor Kadalyi, a Soviet police observer carrying a trick laser tube. Deckard saw through the disguise and killed him with a .38 magnum slug inside his own hovercar.
Biography
Earlier Life
Max Polokov was one of the Nexus-6 androids that escaped the Mars colonies for Earth, where illegal androids were hunted and retired for a bounty. The name was only what the android called itself, as Inspector Harry Bryant put it when he read out the case. Dave Holden's list held eight escaped androids, and Holden gave the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale to only three of them before he was shot. Polokov was the third, after the two that Holden had already retired. His sheet carried his description, his address in the Tenderloin, and his place of business on Geary Street.
Garland, the android who ran the false police station on Mission Street, later said that Polokov had reached Earth earlier, in another group entirely, with no contact with his own. By the time Garland arrived, Polokov was already established inside the W.P.O., the Soviet police organization. Garland also judged that Polokov could not have had the same brain unit as the rest of them, and that his structure must have been souped up or altered. Even so, Pris named Max Polokov first among the friends she feared the bounty hunters had killed, so the other escaped androids knew him well.
Posing As An Anthead
Max Polokov took a job with the city as a trash collector at the Bay Area Scavengers Company, work usually left to specials. The firm kept large modern offices on Geary, because hauling away junk had become one of Earth's important industries since the war, with the planet sinking under kipple. Polokov was supposed to be at its Daly City plant, flattening hovercars and dumping them into the Bay. He played an anthead, a badly deteriorated special, and he looked and acted so much like one that Holden forgot what he was facing.
Harry Bryant saw the anthead act as the reason Holden had been caught off guard. Specials were humans damaged by the radioactive dust and barred from emigrating, and an anthead was among the most deteriorated of them. Before sending Deckard out, Bryant asked whether he was now absolutely certain of the Voigt-Kampff scale after the tests in Seattle, and warned that there could not be even one slip-up. Deckard answered that there never could be in android hunting, and Bryant replied that the Nexus-6 was different.
Lasering Dave Holden
Dave Holden was the senior bounty hunter of the San Francisco Police Department, and Polokov was on his schedule of escaped Nexus-6 androids. Holden retired the first two, then gave Polokov the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale. In the middle of the test, Polokov lasered him and escaped. Holden ended up in Mount Zion Hospital with a laser track through his spine, and Polokov walked away knowing that his name was on the police list. Deckard later took the shooting as proof that Holden had been right, since Polokov would have had no motive to shoot a man who had judged him human.
The attack left six androids still at large, and Bryant handed the list to Rick Deckard, who was acting as senior bounty hunter for the first time. Bryant first sent Deckard to Seattle to check the Voigt-Kampff scale on the Rosen Association's new androids. Deckard later thought that this was the mistake, and that he should have been sent after Polokov the night Holden was shot. Irmgard Baty told the story from the androids' side, saying Polokov had almost got Holden and then almost got the second hunter too.
Rick Deckard Takes The Case
Back at the Hall of Justice on Lombard Street, Bryant told Deckard to try for Polokov first, even before visiting Holden, since the android knew he was listed. He handed over a blurred onionskin carbon, the poop sheet with the android's description, address and workplace. Bryant also announced that a Soviet officer from the W.P.O., Sandor Kadalyi, was arriving on an Aeroflot rocket within the hour to observe the Nexus-6 hunt. Kadalyi already had permission to tag along, though Bryant left it to Deckard to decide whether he could be of any use.
Rick Deckard bristled at the idea of help, since he had always worked alone, and he had no intention of sharing his bounty with a W.P.O. officer. Bryant assured him that he would not have to split it. When Bryant asked whether he wanted to wait for Kadalyi before going after Polokov, Deckard said he would rather tackle the android at once. Bryant agreed and told him to bring in Kadalyi on the next case, the opera singer Luba Luft, whose sheet was in the same briefcase.
The Empty Apartment
Rick Deckard went first to the offices of the Bay Area Scavengers Company, where the personnel manager, Ackers, checked his records. Polokov should have been at the Daly City plant, but an inside call showed that he had not come to work that day and had given no explanation. Deckard told Ackers not to mention the visit if Polokov turned up, then flew the department's hovercar to the android's apartment building in the Tenderloin. The roof held abandoned animal pens crusted with months of dust, and in one cage a false chicken that no longer worked.
In the dim hallway, Deckard switched on a Penfield wave transmitter set to catalepsy, freezing everyone nearby, human and android alike, while a counterwave protected him. He opened the door with an infinity key and went in with his laser drawn, but Polokov was gone. The apartment held only semi-ruined furniture and kipple inherited from an earlier tenant, with no personal belongings at all. Deckard guessed that the android had fled as far as the Antarctic Circle, out of his jurisdiction, and reported to Bryant that Polokov had probably left right after lasering Holden.
Arriving As Sandor Kadalyi
While Deckard waited on the roof of the apartment building, Bryant told him that Kadalyi was already at the Hall of Justice, his Aeroflot ship having landed early, as usual by his own account. After a short conference off screen, Bryant said the Soviet officer would fly over and meet Deckard there. Deckard used the wait to study Luba Luft's sheet and to take a call from Rachael Rosen, who warned that one of the androids would get him before he could get it. He turned down her help and told the police operator to block further calls from Seattle.
A hovercar taxi then landed a few yards away, and a red-faced, cherubic man in his mid-fifties stepped out in a heavy Russian-style greatcoat. Smiling, with his hand extended, he asked with a Slavic accent whether this was Mr. Deckard, the bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department. He watched the empty taxi rise, introduced himself as Sandor Kadalyi, and opened the car door to squeeze in beside Deckard. The man was Max Polokov, who had come directly to the hunter holding his name, wearing the identity of a police observer.
The Trick Laser Tube
As they shook hands, Deckard noticed that Kadalyi carried a laser tube of a type he had never seen. Kadalyi tugged it from his belt holster and said he had got it on Mars. Deckard, who thought he knew every handgun made, even those built for use in the colonies, was puzzled, and Kadalyi beamed like a Slavic Santa and said that they had made it themselves. He passed the weapon over and invited Deckard to press the trigger, and when Deckard aimed out of the window and squeezed, no beam came out.
Kadalyi explained cheerfully that the triggering circuit was not attached and stayed with him, then opened his hand to show a tiny unit. He added that he could also direct the beam within certain limits, no matter where the tube was aimed. The weapon let Max Polokov fire on a man while that man held the tube in his own hands. Deckard answered at once, telling Kadalyi that he was not Kadalyi at all but Polokov, the android, and not from the Soviet police.
Polokov's Cover Is Blown
Kadalyi tried to brush off the accusation, asking whether Deckard meant it the other way around and saying he was a bit confused. Rick Deckard repeated that he meant it, and with his toe he pressed the emergency button on the floor of his car. Polokov worked the miniature triggering and aiming device in his palm, switching it on and off, and demanded to know why his laser tube would not fire. Deckard told him it was a sine wave, which phased out the laser emanation and spread the beam into ordinary light.
Polokov dropped the device and, with a snarl, said that he would have to break Deckard's pencil neck. He grabbed for the hunter's throat with both hands. Deckard later thought that he had overreacted to Rachael's warning and gone the other way, and that the meeting had almost finished him. He judged that he was faster to react than Holden, though he admitted that Holden's experience had warned him, while Holden himself had been given no such warning.
Max Polokov's Death
As Polokov's hands sank into his throat, Deckard fired his regulation old-style pistol from its shoulder holster. The .38 magnum slug struck the android in the head, and the brain box burst. The Nexus-6 unit inside blew apart in a raging wind that filled the car, and bits of it whirled down on Deckard like radioactive dust. The remains rocked back, struck the car door, and fell heavily against him, and Deckard had to shove the twitching body away.
Still shaking, Rick Deckard called the Hall of Justice and told them to tell Harry Bryant that he had got Polokov. He lit a cigarette while his heart slowed, and decided that the thousand-dollar bounty had been worth the risk. He then called his wife, Iran, to share the news, but her depression left her unable to hear him. Polokov's body stayed in the hovercar while Deckard flew on to the War Memorial Opera House to find Luba Luft.
The Bone Marrow Test
At the opera house, Luba Luft had Deckard arrested, and Officer Crams took him up to the roof and inspected Polokov's body in Deckard's car. Crams radioed for someone to collect it and flew Deckard to the Mission Street station rather than the Hall of Justice. There, Garland had a bone marrow test run on the body, saying it would remove any legal basis for Deckard to claim he had only retired an android. The report came over the intercom, and it showed that Polokov had been a humanoid robot.
Phil Resch, one of Garland's bounty hunters, had talked to Polokov before and called him that big Santa Claus from the Soviet police. Resch found him cold, extremely cerebral, calculating and detached, and said he had wanted to test him ever since they first met but never found a pretext. He added that the best place for an android to hide would be inside a large police organization such as the W.P.O. The lab report turned that suspicion toward Garland, who was an android himself, and led to Resch killing his own inspector.
How The Other Androids Saw Him
Roy Baty brought Pris the news, almost with pleasure, that the hunters had got Polokov, along with Garland, Anders, Gitchel and Luba. Roy said he had told Polokov not to try to pass himself off as a W.P.O. man. He judged that Polokov had made a mistake by approaching the hunter instead of staying as far away as possible. Roy also believed that Polokov, Garland and Luba had all been so sure they could pass as human that it tripped them up.
Pris named Max Polokov first when she listed her friends to J. R. Isidore, fearing that the bounty hunters had got him along with Garland, Luba, Hasking and Roy Baty. Bryant later counted Polokov with Garland and Luft as the kills that had driven the remaining androids into unlawful flight. For Deckard, the memory stayed close, and he told Rachael that Polokov had come after him and that Garland virtually had too. Rachael answered that she had tried to warn him once more just before Polokov reached him.
Behind The Scenes
Philip K. Dick published Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968, and Max Polokov belongs to the novel rather than to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. The 1982 film reworked his role into Leon Kowalski, a Nexus-6 replicant working in waste disposal who shoots Holden during a Voight-Kampff test. Leon is partly based on Polokov, since both hide in rubbish work and both open their stories by shooting Holden in the middle of the test. The film drops the anthead act, the Soviet police disguise and the trick laser tube, and its Leon dies at the hand of Rachael rather than Deckard.
BOOM! Studios adapted the novel as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (BOOM! Comic), which sets Dick's own text beside new art. The comic shows Polokov first as a bearded scavenger during Bryant's briefing, then as the red-faced Kadalyi in his greatcoat, and follows the fight in the hovercar. It remains an adaptation of the book and does not place him in the films. Polokov stays a Nexus-6 android of the Rosen Association, not a Tyrell replicant.
Conclusion
Max Polokov was the rough one on Dave Holden's list, the android who shot Holden and very nearly killed Rick Deckard. His two covers, a deteriorated anthead hauling junk and a Soviet police observer, placed him at both ends of San Francisco society. Garland thought his brain unit had been altered, Phil Resch remembered him as cold and calculating, and Roy Baty blamed his death on overconfidence. For Deckard, Polokov was the first bounty of the day and a warning about how close the Nexus-6 could come.
Appearances
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (BOOM! Comic)
Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Characters | Replicant Characters
