“To sell immortality? You crazy? You need a salesman for immortality like you need a salesman for money.”
“That’s the point,” Howards said. “You see, we do have an immortality treatment, but it’s…it’s…very expensive. Maybe we can treat a thousand people a year at about a quarter million a throw, but that’s it, and it’ll be it for years, decades, maybe always. That’s what you’ve gotta sell, Barron—not immortality for everyone but immortality for a few, a select few—a few I select.”
Barron’s instant reaction was disgust, at Howards, at himself, even as he felt his second reaction—all questions now answered and the game was worth the candle. But his third reaction was caution—this was the biggest thing there ever was, and more dangerous than the H-bomb, get involved in that?
“This treatment,” he asked, “what is it?”
“That’s none of your business, and that’s final. It’s a Foundation secret, and it stays a Foundation secret no matter what,” Howards told him, and Barron was sure he had hit bottom, pushed Howards as far as he would ever go. “If…if that got out…” Howards mumbled, then caught Barron catching him and clamped his mouth tight shut.
But you don’t put one over on Jack Barron, Bennie! Shit, he’s willing to let out that immortality’s gonna be only for a few fat cats, and he thinks I can shove that down people’s throats, but he’s afraid to let anyone know what the treatment is. Must be some treatment! That’s what he’s scared of, and if it scares him…What the hell could it be…his immortals all end up as Transylvanian vampires? Hell…maybe that’s not so funny. Immortality, sure, but what the hell’s he getting me into? But…but is there anything so rank it isn’t worth doing if you have to do it to live forever?
“I need time, Howards,” he said. “You can see that…”
“Jack Barron turning chicken?” Howards sneered. “I’ll give you time, I’ll give you twenty-four hours, not a minute more. I’m tired of talking; the only words I’ll listen to from you from here on in are ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
And Jack Barron knew that the game was played out, the time for negotiation was over. And he had no idea of what his answer could possibly be.
10
The vidphone chime began to sound again. Sara Westerfeld walked barefooted over to the wall complex, reached for the phone, hesitated, then once again let it lapse into silence without answering it.
Still feels like this is strictly Jack’s pad, with me just hanging around, she thought, not our place, with me having as much right to move things around or answer the phone as he does. Phone keeps ringing, but would Jack want me to answer it? Who knows, might be more of this President thing…or even Howards. (No, Jack’s supposed to be seeing Howards himself now.)
Truth is, she thought, I still can’t start thinking again like Sara Barron. Sara Barron’d answer the phone if Jack wasn’t here, ’cause she’d know who she was, where she stood, where Jack stood, be able to react to anything. But Sara Westerfeld was still someone from the past, someone who didn’t know where she stood in Jack’s present world, didn’t even know the shape or limits of that world, and when she did, might or might not accept them, might or might not be able to make the quantum-jump back to being Sara Barron.
And might or might not be able to cut it with Jack, she knew. It was easy to let the lizardman bulldoze me into going back to a Jack I thought I hated—Howards’ high-paid whore was all I started out to be—had nothing to lose, either be able to bring back the Jack I once loved or walk away with no regrets from cop-out Bug Jack Barron Jack.
But how could I know I’d start seeing for real the Jack I thought I’d have to fake seeing? Is it real? Is the old Jack back already, my Jack Berkeley boy now a man playing real man-game to make the old boy-dreams real, destroy Howards, Social Justice President of the United States, attic dream becoming a reality in ways we never imagined? Wouldn’t that Jack hate me, knowing I thought so little of him that I could use him to get us Frozen, gamble like a cold-blooded windowless white lizard that I could shock him into becoming what he really was all along? And if Jack’s really involved in some dirty deal with Howards, wouldn’t it just help the lizardman get Jack for whatever filth he wants him for, if he knew that Howards was able to buy and use even me? Could…could that be what Howards was planning all along? Seeing through me seeing through him, letting me think I was putting one over, and that setting me up as his secret weapon against Jack…? Wanting me to tell Jack everything?
But if it’s half one thing, half the other, plans in conflict, neither Jack nor Howards in control, and Jack on the knife-edge between being the old Berkeley Jack or taking the biggest cop-out of all, then I’ve got to tell him. It’s all up to me…
The unbearable choice weighed heavy on her; existential choice holding past and future time-lines in mortal balance, a woman-choice, she knew, and it was still hard not to think of herself as a girl, helpless in a larger-than-life man’s world.
The vidphone began chiming again.
Maybe it’s Jack? Maybe that’s why it keeps ringing, anyone else’d figure no one’s here, but Jack knows I’m here, knows I might not answer till I knew it was him ringing again and again…
Pissed at herself for being unable to make even such a piddling decision, she forced herself to the vidphone and made the connection.
And felt abysmal regret, cold numb terror clean through her, as the windowless white face of Benedict Howards stared out at her with knowing rodent eyes from the vidphone screen.
“It’s about time you decided to answer the phone,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get you for half an hour. What’s the matter with you?”
“You…you were calling me?” Sara stammered, feeling serpent-coils winding themselves around her.
“I wouldn’t be calling Barron, would I? Not since I just spoke to him in the flesh. Of course I’m calling you. We’re…business associates. Remember?” and Howards smiled an awful I-own-you crocodile smile.
“Now you listen, and you listen good,” he said. “Barron is on his way home, far as I know. I’ve made my final offer to him, and he’s got about twenty-three hours to accept. Which means you’ve got about twenty-three hours to complete your end of our little bargain—or no Freeze for either of you. So you start working on him the moment he gets there, and you better make it good.”
From the greater fear of losing the Jack she had found again, Sara mustered the courage to face the lesser fear, held up her head in her mind’s eye, said: “I don’t care about that anymore. I’ve got Jack now, and nothing’s as important to me as that. You brought us together for your own dirty reasons, but you didn’t understand that we love each other, always have, always will. And that’s all that matters now.”
“Have it your way,” Howards said. “But just remember, all I have to do is tell Barron what you are, my whore, Miss Westerfeld, and where’s your great love then?”
“Jack will understand…”
“Will he? Will he want to? Will he believe you or me? He’ll believe me because he’ll want to, after what I’ve offered him.”
“You think you’re so smart,” Sara said, “but you’re a fool. You don’t understand what love is, stronger than anything you can use to buy people…”
Howards leered at her, and she realized he had anticipated her every action in the serpent-lair of his mind. “You think so?” he said. “But there’s something stronger than any…mortal love—immortal love. Barron loves you, eh? Would a man who loves you be willing to let you die, when instead he could give you the greatest gift a man can give a woman? Greatest gift a man can give himself?”
Sara felt something foul and gigantic in Howards’ voice that spoke of things she didn’t want to know, things that might really be stronger than love, monstrous jungle truths with great gleaming fangs of bone leering from lipless reptile mouths; but she felt herself fascinated, drawn on by the primal dawn-marsh stink that seemed to hover over Howards’ image on the vidphone screen.
; “What…what could be stronger than love?” she asked.
“Life,” said Benedict Howards. “Without life, you got nothing—no love, no taste of good food in your mouth, no nothing. Whatever anyone wants the most, he loses it all when he’s dead. And that’s what I’m buying Barron with, life itself.”
“You call that life—a body lying stiff and cold in a Freezer? You think Jack’d give up what really mattered to him for that, thirty or forty years from now?”
“He might,” said Howards. “He just might. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the real thing, Miss Westerfeld, immortality. Look at me! I’m immortal now, my scientists have made the breakthrough. Immortal! I’ll never get older, I’ll never die. Words, just words to you, what else can they be? But there are no words for what it’s really like to wake up in the morning knowing you’re gonna live for centuries—forever.
“That’s what I’m offering Barron, the next million years, immortality. Think he’d rather have you? Would you rather have him if the choice were yours? Immortality, Miss Westerfeld. Can you imagine what it’s like to know you’re not like ordinary men—don’t have to die? Can you imagine anyone turning his back on it? Can you imagine anything Barron wouldn’t do to live forever? Can you imagine anything you wouldn’t do? Love? How much is love worth when you’re dead?”
“It’s not true!” she cried. “You can’t be able to do it, not you…” Not you, you bloodless reptile, not with your plastic frozen money, not buying it like you buy everyone and everything, not Benedict Howards with power over death forever, on and on and on, webs of hate and power spinning on and on, forever, from your bone-white lizard-lair, it just isn’t right.
But Howards’ cold eyes stared straight through her, his lips parted in a thin smile, and she felt him digging her thoughts, sucking up her hate, fear, sense of wrongness, letting her know he knew the loathing she felt. And letting her know he found it amusing.
“It is true, isn’t it?” she said quietly. “You really can make Jack immortal…?” And she imagined Jack, knowing what could be his, loving her, being Jack Barron and…and what? Can he love me enough to die with me in forty or fifty years, when he can have forever? And I thought I had an impossible decision to make! But Jack…to choose between love and immortality…And it struck her like a sledgehammer: Howards has to be working on me because he knows Jack hasn’t decided. He wants me to make Jack choose immortality. And…and maybe he’s right, how can I want anything less than immortality for Jack, sell him on…on death, even though I die and Jack has to go on alone forever…? Oh, you miserable shit, Howards! Why is a bastard like you so damn clever?
“Not only Barron,” Howards said. “Anyone I choose. You, for instance. You’re right about one thing: Barron loves you. First thing he asked when I made the offer was for immortality for you too. And…”
The cruelty in Howards’ eyes raped her as he smirked, waited for her to ask the question, sucking pleasure like a junkie from watching her squirm.
“And?”
Howards laughed. “Why not?” he said. “I can afford it. It’s a nice little daisy-chain this way—I buy Barron with immortality for the both of you, and I buy you with the same thing, and I buy your help in making sure he sells. Three for the price of one. You can have love and life, both forever. Think about that, you and Barron, forever. And if you don’t deliver, I tell Barron everything and you’ve blown it all—him and immortality. That’s not such a hard choice, is it, Miss Westerfeld? You’ve got twenty-three hours. I won’t be talking to you again. I don’t really have to, do I?”
And he broke the connection.
Sara knew how right he was, how right he had been every step of the way. Eternal life with Jack or…nothing. She thought of Jack, young and strong beside her, together for a million years, growing and growing together in the innocent strength of adolescence—the strength that comes from not really believing you’ll ever have to die—but based now on truth, not self-delusion, giving the courage to do anything, dare anything, soft-flesh knight in the armor of immortality, and the world what they could make it forever and ever…Growing without growing older, like that ocean sunfish that keeps getting bigger and bigger, never ages, never dies…Jack like that, and me with him forever!
And Benedict Howards forever, a small sly voice reminded her. Feeding forever on power and fear and death and Jack…Jack his flunky, keeping him there in his bone-white temple of death while aeons and billions of people are born and die and are gone forever like smoke, while Howards and those who fawn on him like on some awful death-god live forever at the price of their souls…With a pang of despair she realized that this was the world that was coming, Jack or no Jack, with his help or despite him, inexorable as Judgment Day, and no one could stand against it, against Foundation power of money and life eternal against death. Benedict Howards was right. He was almost a god, god of life and death. God on the side of evil and nothingness; the Black Christ, and no one his size to stand against him.
No one but…but Jack Barron! she thought. Oh, yes! yes! Jack’s smarter than Howards, stronger than me. If Howards makes us immortal, what hold can he have over Jack then? If Jack’s already gotten all that Howards has to give, and if he hates Howards the way I hate him…Not even Benedict Howards could stand Jack Barron then—the full, true Jack Barron, fighting for me and for himself and for hate and for everything we ever believed in, armored in immortality!
She felt both proud and afraid, realizing what lay in her hands, and hers alone. Billions of immortal lives, and hers, and Jack’s. Jack was strong, clever; he would know how to keep immortality, and destroy Howards too, bring immortality to the whole world. President, maybe…? Luke thinks so…What could Howards do then? Yes! Yes! It was all in her hands, she could make Jack immortal, make him hate, wake him up to what he was always meant to be. She could do it; she only had to be brave alone for one moment in a life that could be endless.
And I will, she vowed. And as she waited for Jack to arrive she savored what it was to at last think of herself as a woman—as Sara Barron.
Catching him preoccupied, the stomach-drop of the elevator was just one more jolt in a day of jolts for Jack Barron. He stubbed out the butt of his Acapulco Gold in the elevator ashtray, caught up with his belly tried to catch up with his head as the elevator sucked up the sealed shaft to his slice of California twenty-three stories away from New York’s stinking paranoid gutters. And he got a flash of what the penthouse playpen (with genuine authentic Sara Westerfeld at last installed) really meant to him.
Time machine is all, he thought. California science-fiction time machine to a past that never was, pot-dream California of the mind that never could be, big league action image through the eyes of Baby Bolshevik kid didn’t know where the big leagues were really at, dream made real by Bug Jack Barron bread—but making it real changed the dreamer. What Sara just can’t understand—got the balls to do it, sure you can make dreams real, but getting out in the nitty-gritty’s gotta change the dreamer, ’cause he ain’t dreaming anymore; he’s real, doing real things, fighting real enemies, and when he’s cut he bleeds real blood, not ectoplasm. Which is why I’m a winner, and all the old Baby Bolsheviks except maybe Luke are all losers. Too hung-up on big beautiful acidhead dreams to risk losing it, risk losing Peter-Pan selves by getting their hands dirty making it real. Stay a dreamer, and you’ll never have your dream; get down in the nitty-gritty, and when you get your dream you see what horseshit it was in the first place.
Game of life’s run by an ex-con cardshark, he thought morosely as the elevator came to a stop and the door opened. Deck’s marked, dice loaded, and the only way you don’t go home in a barrel is to play by the house rules, namely no holds barred.
He crossed the foyer, entered the dark hall, heard a Beatle album playing, picked up on the subliminal presence of Sara. And he remembered that he had to decide for her too; her immortality was in the big pot too. Feeling her presence filling the apartmen
t with Saraness, making the joint at last a home, it was impossible to believe that the gestalt that was the total Sara could ever cease to be, become nothing more than a random pattern of inert food for the worms.
But it can, he thought. Doesn’t have to now, but it can, and the cat who can do it is Jack Barron. Say “no” to Howards, and you’re not only coming on with the kamikaze schtick, you’re murdering the only woman you ever love, and so what if it’s forty years from now? So what if she never knows it? It’s still murder, is all. Ugliest word there is, murder. No holds barred is the name of the game, but don’t put yourself on, Barron, at murder even you draw the line. Only crime that’s always wrong no matter what the circumstances, murder. Blowing Bennie’s brains out’d just be killing, and that’s cool, but letting Sara die when you can save her just by signing your name, that’s murder.
Yeah, sure, but how do you know what you’re getting into if you do sign that contract? Could be things worse than murder. Like genocide—and isn’t that Bennie’s bag, save the winners and let the losers die, and wouldn’t Sara be a loser on her own if Howards didn’t want me, to the worm-ovens with the rest of the untermenschen losers…? Choose one from column A, or one from column B (eggroll and won-ton included in the dinner): genocide or murder.
He knew it was not a decision he had the right to make alone. Sara’s life too, not just mine. I’ve gotta tell her the whole thing, what a woman’s for, isn’t it, someone in the whole shit-eating world you can be up front with, take it or leave it? Got enough trouble playing footsie with Howards, at least I can have truth between me and Sara.
She was out on the patio, leaning against the parapet, staring out over the East River at Brooklyn, long dusk-shadows twilighting the rush-hour traffic in the street far below.
“Jack…” she said, turning as he stepped out on the patio; and he saw a strange manic desperation in her eyes, glazed over pool-deep darknesses, and something grim and fragile in the lines of her face, and she seemed to be looking into him and at the same time through him. In a weird way, he almost recognized that look…yes, look of some vip on the show about to parrot a memorized set-spiel.
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