Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  “Somewhere between three and four billion dollars,” Howards said. Barron foot-signaled Gelardi to give him a half-screen, ease him out of the hotseat.

  “That’s a far cry from fifty billion dollars, isn’t it?” Barron said, but with the cutting edge eased out of his voice (come on schmuck, he telepathed, pick up on it, don’t expect me to make your points for you). “What’s the story on that fifty billion?”

  Howards seemed to relax a bit, catching on that the lead was being passed over to him. “You’ve been tossing that figure around pretty freely,” he said, “but you obviously don’t understand what it represents. If you’d studied a Freeze Contract you’d know that the $50,000 per client is not a fee turned over free and clear to the Foundation. Upon clinical death, the total assets of the client go into a trust-fund administered by the Foundation for as long as the client is biologically and legally dead. But on revival all assets originally placed in the trust fund revert to the client, and only the interest and capital appreciation during the time the client is in the Freezer actually become the property of the Foundation. So you see, that fifty billion dollars is simply not ours to spend. It certainly is an enormous amount of money, but the fact is that we must maintain all of it as a reserve against the day when we can revive our clients and return it to them. The fund works essentially the way a bank works—a bank can’t go around spending its deposits, and we can’t spend that fifty billion dollars. It’s not really ours.”

  Can’t make me look bad, Barron thought. Can’t make it too easy; gotta back off slow. “But a chunk of capital that big grows awfully fast unless you’re some kind of idiot or you’re blowing it on the horses,” he said. “And you’ve just admitted that all increases in the original capital do belong to the Foundation, so you’ve gotta have billions in assets that are yours free and clear. What about that?”

  Howards pounced quickly. (Now he sees daylight! Barron thought.) “Quite true. But our expenses are enormous…something like five billion a year for maintenance, and that eats up all the interest on the original capital. So the four billion for research must come from profits on the investment on our own capital. After all, if we started spending capital on research we’d quickly go bankrupt.”

  Suddenly, almost unwillingly, Barron realized that Howards had handed him a weapon that could make the rest of the show look like a love-pat. Shit, he thought, Bennie’s got a vested interest in keeping all those quick-Frozen stiffs dead! The day he can thaw ’em out and revive ’em he loses that fifty-billion-dollar trust fund. Hit him with that baby, and you’ll stomp him into the ground! Why—Cool it! Cool it! he reminded himself. You’re supposed to be pulling the lox out of the hole, not digging it deeper!

  “So it all comes down to research,” Barron said, reluctantly leading away from the jugular. “Four billion bucks is still one hell of a research budget, more than enough to hide…all kinds of interesting things. Suppose you explain what kind of research you’re spending all that bread on?”

  Howards shot him a dirty look.

  Jeez, what you expect, Bennie? Barron thought. I still gotta look like kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron, don’t I?

  “First off, you’ve got to understand that all those people in our Freezers are dead. Dead as anyone in a cemetery. All cryogenic freezing does is preserve the bodies from decay—those bodies are simply corpses. The problem of bringing a corpse back to life is enormous. I’m no scientist and neither are you, Barron, but you can imagine how much research and experimentation must be done before we can actually bring a dead man back to life—and it’s all very expensive. And even then, cures must be developed for whatever killed the clients in the first place—and most of the time, it’s old age. And that’s the toughest nut of all to crack, a cure for aging. I mean, so you revive a ninety-year-old client, but if you haven’t licked aging, he dies again almost immediately. See what we’re up against? All this will cost billions a year for decades, maybe centuries. Man in my position’s gotta take the long view, the real long view…” And for a moment, Howards’ eyes seemed to be staring off into some unimaginable future.

  And Barron got a flash: Could it be that the whole Freezer schtick’s a shuck? Way to raise money for something else? Pie in the sky in the great bye and bye? The whole Freezer Program’s useless unless they lick aging. (And how much is that free freeze really worth? Maybe I’m selling myself awful cheap…) But the way Bennie babbled in my office about living forever, that was no shuck, he was really zonked on it! Yeah, it all adds up—he doesn’t want to lick the revival problem ’cause that’d cost him that fifty billion. But he’s sure hot to live forever. Five’ll get you ten the Foundation scientists are just pissing around with revival research, big bread’s gotta be behind immortality research. And if that gets out, how many more suckers gonna spring for that fifty thou? Bennie-baby, we gonna have a long long talk. Let’s see if we can hit a little nerve, he thought, what they call an exploratory operation, as the promptboard flashed “3 Minutes.”

  “Someday all men will live forever through the Foundation for Human Immortality,” said Barron.

  “What?” Howards grunted, his eyes snapping back into sharp focus like a man called back from a trance.

  “Just quoting a Foundation slogan,” Barron said. “Isn’t that where it’s really at? I mean all that bread spent on Freezing is money down a rathole unless it really leads to immortality, right? Some old coot signs over fifty thou so you can revive him a hundred years later so he can die again of old age in a year or two, that doesn’t make much sense to me. The Freezer Program is a way to preserve a few people who die now so they can have immortality in the future, whenever you lick that one. I mean young cats like me, the country in general, main stake we’ve got in letting the Foundation do business is like that slogan of yours about all people living forever someday through the Foundation for Human Immortality, right? So either you’re going hot-and-heavy on immortality research, or the whole thing’s just a con. You follow me, Mr. Howards?”

  “Wh…wh…why, of course we are!” Howards stammered, and his eyes went reptile-uptight cold. “It’s called ‘The Foundation for Human Immortality,’ not ‘The Freezing Foundation,’ after all. Immortality is our goal and we’re spending billions on it, and in fact…”

  Howards hesitated as the promptboard flashed “2 Minutes.” That hit a nerve, all right, Barron thought, but which nerve? Seemed like he was on the edge of blowing something he didn’t want to…120 seconds to try to find out what.

  “Well, it seems to me,” said Barron, “that with you having tax-exempt status and by your own admission spending billions on immortality research and some of that bread being indirectly public money, you owe the American people a progress report. Just how is all this expensive research going?”

  Howards shot him a look of pure poison. Lay off! his eyes screamed. “Foundation scientists are following many paths to immortality,” Howards said slowly. (He must be watching the clock too, Barron realized.) “Some, of course, are more promising than others…Nevertheless, we feel that all possibilities should be explored…”

  Barron tapped his left foot-button three times, and Vince gave him three-quarters of the screen, with Howards in the inquisition slot again, as the promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.” “How about some specifics?” he asked. “Tell us what the most promising line of research seems to be, and how far along you are.”

  “I don’t think it would be right to raise any false hopes this early,” Howards said blandly, but Barron’s teeth sensed something tense?—fearful?—threatening?—behind it. “Discussing specifics would be a mistake at this time…” But false hopes are your stock in trade, Barron thought. Why don’t you want to give a nice sales spiel, Bennie…? Unless…

  “You mean to tell me you’ve spent all those billions and you’re right back where you started?” Barron snapped in a tone of cynical disbelief. “That can only mean one of two things: the so-called scientists you’ve got working for you are all q
uacks or idiots, or…or the money you’ve got budgeted for immortality research is going for something else—like pushing your Freezer Bill through Congress, like backing political campaigns…”

  “That’s a lie!” Howards shrieked, and suddenly he seemed back in that strange trance state. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! (The promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.”) Progress is being made. More progress than anyone drea—” Howards shuddered, as if he had suddenly found himself blowing his cool, caught himself short.

  Barron foot-signaled Gelardi to give him the full screen windup. Something’s going on here, he thought. Something bigger than…bigger than…? Anyway, too big to thrash out on the air. Good timing, as usual.

  “Well that’s about it, folks,” he said, “we’re out of time. Been quite an hour, eh? And if this whole thing’s still bugging you, then next Wednesday night you just pick up that vidphone and dial Area Code 212, 969-6969, and we’ll be off to the races again with another hour of Bug Jack Barron.”

  And they were rolling the wrap-up commercial, and he was off the air.

  “He wants to—”

  “No!” Jack Barron said even as Gelardi’s voice spoke over the intercom circuit. “I don’t talk to Howards now for no reasons under no conditions.”

  Gelardi made hair-pulling motions behind the glass wall of the control booth. “I’ve never heard any of your victims this pissed,” he said. “You’ve gotta get this fruitcake off the line before he melts every circuit in the joint. Such language!”

  Barron felt the old talked-out satisfying fatigue come over him as he got up out of the hotseat and thought, as usual, about going somewhere and picking up a chick and fucking her brains—and then, like a new burst of energy, he remembered. Them days is gone forever! Home to Sara, and Sara there! Changes, changes, and good ones for a change this time round.

  “Come on, Jack, for chrissakes, cool Howards already!” Gelardi whined.

  Who the fuck wants him cooled? Barron thought. Something happened during those last few minutes, I hit something real tender, and he almost spilled some mighty important beans—and not because he kept his cool. Let him stew a while. I want him hot and raving when we get down to nitty-gritty—and no witnesses, Vince, baby.

  “Give him my home phone number,” Barron said. “If that doesn’t cool him, tell him to fuck off. In fact why don’t you give him my number and tell him to fuck off anyway? Tell him…tell him Mohammed can damn well come to the mountain.”

  “But man, all we need is Howards—”

  “Let me do the worrying, Vince. Boy Wonder Jack Barron’s still in the catbird-seat.”

  As vip Bennie Howards will soon find out.

  9

  Jack…Jack, maybe I never understood, Sara Westerfeld thought as she stood on the breakfast deck overlooking the penthouse living room, listening to the May shower rattle against the skylight facets and to the faint hum of the elevator rising to the entrance foyer. How long’s it been like this, she wondered. This sure wasn’t what he was doing with Bug Jack Barron when he threw me out…or when I left him. Maybe he’s been right all along, maybe I did leave him by copping-out, refusing to dig where his head was really at?

  As she heard the elevator door open, his footsteps down the hall, the pressure of his being moving like a shock wave down the narrow passage impinging on unknown kinesthetic senses, Sara felt on the edge of a new-style awareness of man-woman contrast that cut far deeper than what was revealed when pants came down.

  Power’s a man’s bag, she realized. Any chick that digs power, really feels where it’s at, almost always turns out to be some kind of dyke in the end. Power’s somehow cock-connected; woman’s hung-up on power, she’s hung-up on not having a cock, understands power only if she’s thinking like someone who does. Power’s even got its own man-style time-sense: man can wait, scheme, plan years-ahead-guile-waiting games, accumulate power on the sly, then use it for good—if the man’s good deep inside like Jack—like a good fuck good cat can bring a frigid chick along, cooling himself, holding back when he has to, until he’s finally got her ready to come. Man kind of love, man kind of delayed-timing thinking, calculated quanta of emotion and only when the time’s right, and not like woman needs to feel everything totally the moment it happens—good, evil, love, hate, prick inside her. Like a man digs fucking a woman, woman digs being fucked. Is that all that came between us, Jack? Me thinking like an always-now woman, you thinking future time man-thoughts?

  And then he was standing before her, wet curls framing eyes glistening with afterglow-fatigue of a hundred remembered battles in Berkeley, Los Angeles, now at last New York, the lines in his face like time-lines from past dreams to present-planned reality, mosaic of love in four-dimensional space-time man-flesh, she saw the boy still living behind the face of the man, saw in memory’s eye the man that had grown behind the soft-flesh shining armor of the boy she had tasted in action-swirling streets and bedrooms, loved the boy and his dream, and the man and his past, and the JACK BARRON (in flaming capital letters) of past-present-future mortal lovers-against-the-night combats—oh, this is a man!

  She kissed him quick but deep with her tongue; bubbling over, she pulled away from his mouth, still in an arm-on-shoulders mutual embrace, said: “Jack, Jack I watched you on television, I mean really watched you, really saw for the very first time what you were doing. You were magnificent, you were everything I always knew you would be the first day I met you in Berkeley, but better—better than anything I could’ve imagined—because then I was a girl, and you were a boy, and today you were a man, and I…Well, maybe at the advanced age of thirty-five I’m leaving adolescence and I’m ready to try loving you the way a woman should love a man.”

  “That’s…uh…groovy,” he said, and now she thrilled even at the way he was preoccupied, the old Berkeley distant-focus preoccupation, thinking through her, above her, warm exciting man-thoughts enveloping her in him were the moments she had always loved him most.

  “Groovy, and I dig what you’re saying—I mean about us. But the show…look, Sara, there are things I’ve got to tell you. I mean, don’t think I’m back in the silly old Baby Bolshevik bag. I suppose it looked that way to a lot of people, and there were moments when I…but I don’t do things without a reason, and there are things going on that—”

  “I know, Jack,” she said. “You don’t even have to tell me. It stands out all over you. You’re involved in something big, something important, the kind of thing you were always meant to do. Something real like you used to—”

  “It’s not what you think, not what anyone thinks,” he muttered, brows furrowed at some hidden contrapuntal train of thought. “I don’t even know the whole story myself. But I feel something, can smell it…something so big, so…I’m afraid to even think about it until I—”

  The vidphone chime interrupted. “Already…?” Jack muttered, and he bolted down the stairs, across the carpet to the wall consoles, made the vidphone connection, and sprawled on the floor, as she followed a few steps behind.

  “What’s shaking with you, Rastus?” he was saying as she sat down beside him, saw that the face on the vidphone screen was good old Luke Greene, and remembered good days screwing around with Luke before she met Jack.

  “Never mind me, Huey,” Luke said. “What’s shaking with you, lot of people are asking?”

  Jack picked up the vidphone, pointed the camera at Sara. “Hello, Luke,” she said, “it’s been a long time.”

  He smiled back at her, long-gone, no-hang-ups, ancient-history-lover pure friendship smile. “Well, hello, Sara,” he said, “you and Jack…?”

  “You know it, Kingfish,” Jack said, turning the vidphone camera back on himself. “We’re back together, and this time it’s for keeps.”

  The thrill of being owned by her fated man went through Sara as he goosed her off-camera.

  “Well, congratulations, mah chillun,” Luke said. “Sara, maybe you can keep this schmuck off the streets, give him
some of dat ole time religion, good for old Jack Barron, and good for the S.J.C.”

  Sara saw a flicker of annoyance cross Jack’s face, wondered why as Jack said, “I get the ugly feeling that that plug for Baby Bolsheviks, Inc. is what the nitty-gritty of this call’s about, Luke. Or are you just using the tax money of the good people of Mississippi to make long-distance vidphone calls strictly for kicks? What’s going on in that twisted excuse for a mind of yours?”

  “It’s your head that seems to be going through changes,” said Luke. “You’re back with Sara…and after tonight it looks mighty like you’re back with us. Welcome back to the human race, Jack.”

  “Uh…what race you say that was?” Jack said archly. “Rat race, you say, Lothar? Race from nowhere straight to oblivion? Race, shit—you don’t even catch me near that track.”

  “Cut the crap, you shade mother you,” Luke said, “you’re not bullshitting with Bennie Howards now. You got the bug, Claude, knew you would. Could taste it, couldn’t you, and when you got on the air with Bennie, you just couldn’t help it…Well, you made your point, Jack. You made it with me, and with a whole lot of others, including those fat-cat Republican dinosaurs.”

  “What in hell are you babbling about?” Jack asked and Sara sensed he meant it, was as confused about what Luke was saying as she was about Jack, and wondered if he too felt the shadow of something big and important about to come on.

  “I’m talking about the show you just did, what else?” Luke said. “I never saw any vip that cut up; Bennie must be leaving a trail of blood from here to his digs in Colorado. Shit, man, you know what I’m talking about, you said it all, and you said it perfect. Something for everyone. Morris flipped over the economic angle; it’s a tie-in to their whole damn Adam Smith Platform—fat cats who want a piece of the Freezer action for themselves are ready to shell out big. Oh, man, like I always say, a man that’s got the instinct for politics just can’t shake it! You let Bennie off a little too easy at the end maybe, but you know, I begin to think that was the right come-on too. Like Morris says, we gotta develop your position slow and easy before you come out into the open next year.”