Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  “I’ve got something I’ve gotta tell you,” Barron said, crossing the terrace, leaning against the parapet close enough to taste her breath but unable to bring himself to touch her.

  “And I’ve got something I have to tell you,” she said, and he saw her jawline go white, a pulse twitch in her left temple.

  “Later, baby,” Barron said, knowing it was now or never. Whatever’s uptighting you can wait, Sara, he thought. Either you’ll forget all about it, or you’ll really be uptight after I lay it all on you.

  “It’s about me and Howards,” he began. “I suppose by now you know there’s some hanky-panky going on there, and I owe it to you to let you in on what’s shaking. And big things are shaking, bigger than you could ever imagine, bigger than all this President bullshit, bigger than…bigger than anything’s ever been, bigger than anything you can even think of. Bennie Howards is hot for my bod, Sara. He needs me. He needs Bug Jack Barron to push through his Freezer Bill, to…to put over something…well, something people just won’t stomach. He’s desperate, he’s hotter for my bod than Luke or Morris or—”

  “I know,” she said in a tiny voice all but drowned out by the rush-hour traffic-roar from the street below, and he sensed a huge electric-potential-tension charge building between them, reached out for her hand gripping the cement lip of the parapet to bleed off the electric hum in the air between them; and her skin was rubber, cold and dry, as if she were a thousand miles away talking through vidphone circuit-insulation, and he found with a kind of relief that he was slipping into the Bug Jack Barron cool Wednesday-night-feedback game, hating himself for doing it, hating himself worse for being thankful. And what the fuck does she mean she knows?

  “Yeah,” he said, “I suppose it’s been pretty obvious. (But has it, he wondered, feeling danger-signals of future-shock precognition surging down time lines toward him.) But before you do the whole cop-out number, you better hear the coin he’s paying. Immortality, Sara, immortality. Bennie’s boys have licked aging. He’s keeping it real quiet ’cause there’s a big catch—it’s real expensive, like he’s talking about a quarter of a million bucks per treatment, and even with that kind of bread, he claims he can only treat about a thousand people a year. But it’s no shuck; it’s the real thing. He says he’s had the treatment himself, and when you listen to him gibbering about it you know he’s not bullshitting. That’s where it’s at, immortality for maybe a thousand people a year, people who can get up a quarter million, people who Bennie chooses, and everyone else is stuck with three score and ten, is all. And that’s why he’s so hot for me—he wants me to help him shove that down the throat of the Great Unwashed: immortality for the few, and death for everyone else. A lot harder to peddle than Chevys or dope. But…”

  He stared into the unreadable vacuum of her eyes that seemed to mock him, accuse him, and he sensed his words going straight through her like a commercial out across the city to Brooklyn and beyond, and she seemed to be waiting for something, and he waited for her to speak, scream, yell, jump up and down, do something, anything, react. But she just stood there, and even the pressure of her hand in his didn’t change, and Barron felt cold and afraid and didn’t know why.

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “But for us, free. That’s the deal, Sara. I agree to play ball with Howards, and we both get ironclad contracts out in front. That’s the decision I’ve gotta make by tomorrow—sign the contracts, and we both have immortality, or tell Howards to fuck off and throw it all away. And not just immortality——he’ll cream me, try to cost me the show, and I’ll have to play games with Greg Morris & Co. just to keep our heads above water. Some choice! But it’s got to be our choice, not just mine.”

  “I know, Jack,” Sara said. “I know it all.”

  “Come on, will you?” Barron snapped, bugged at the deep unreadable pools behind her eyes (damn big soulful brown eyes, Christ knows what’s really behind them, Christ knows if anything’s behind ’em but Peter-Pan acid bullshit—where is your head at Sara?). “Okay, so it’s hard to get down, but don’t just stand there gaping at me. And what the hell you mean you know it all?”

  She pulled her hand away from his, touched his cheek, then let her hand fall to her side, and when she spoke, she looked away from him, down, down at the brawling honking streets of rush-hour Manhattan, and from the set of her jaw and the quaver in her voice, Barron knew she was staring down, deep down, into some private freak-out snakepit.

  “You’re not the only person Benedict Howards’ used,” she said, “that…that monster can buy anyone—anyone, Jack. He’s the most thoroughly evil man in the world, and now he can go on buying people and using people and holding life-and-death power over people forever…He’s evil, and clever, and totally amoral, and he can give anyone anything they want. Everyone’s got his price, and Howards can afford anyone he needs to buy, that’s what he told me, and I didn’t believe it. But now…now…oh, Jack, is it wrong to want to live forever? Everyone wants to live forever, and I want you to live forever, does that make me so rotten, so…? Jack!”

  And she whirled, flung herself into his arms, not sobbing but clutching him to her with manic strength. But even as his reflexes passed soothing hands over her back, Barron went steel-cold as he struggled with her words, rejected them, felt them stinging back like dry-ice bees.

  He pushed her away, holding her shoulders at arms’ length, stared into her stricken face, muttered: “You…? Howards…?”

  “You’ve got to, Jack…” she said. (Her lips began to quiver, her eyes were wet, she was shaking in his rough hands.) “Don’t you see? If you sign the contracts, then we’re immortal, we’ve got all that Howards can give and no one can take it away from us. Don’t you see? You’re the only man in the world can stop him, destroy him. You’re the only man big enough to stand up to Benedict Howards and his loathsome Foundation. You’ve got to! There’s no one else! But I don’t want to die, I don’t want you to die…Sign the contracts, and then…then we can fight him together, and he can’t do anything to hurt us…”

  Barron shook her, shaking himself. “What the fuck is this? Stop gibbering, damn you, Sara, and tell me what all this is about!” But he knew with dread certainty what it was all about. Bennie got to her, he thought. Somehow, somewhen, the slimy motherfucker got to her, found the handle…The—

  “I love you,” she sobbed. “You’ve gotta believe I love you. I did it because I love you. I love you, Jack, I’ve always loved you, I’ll always—”

  Barron slammed her body up against the parapet. “Cut the shit,” he said cruelly, feeling the cruelty cut into her, cut into him, grim razor of reality; and way down below he heard the sounds of metal and rubber and concrete abrading synthetic world of steel cutting edges way down there below him. “In words of one syllable—what’s the scam with you and Benedict Howards?” And he felt himself coming on like living-color Jack Barron backing a vip into a corner. And knew no other way to react.

  He saw Sara stare blankly into his eyes with numb wet eyes like those of a mindless parrot as she spat it out, spat it all out like pieces of rotten meat.

  “He…he had me dragged to his Long Island Freezer. He promised me a free Freeze Contract if I got you to sign one. I told him to go to hell. But…but that man sees right into your guts, sees what he wants to see, and he knows how to use it, knows more about the dirty places inside you than you do yourself. He knew…knew deep down that I still loved you…before I knew it myself, and when he offered me a chance to live forever, and all I had to do to get it was go back to you…Don’t you see? I wanted you, I never stopped wanting you, just stopped knowing it, and when Howards gave me an excuse to go back to you, a good excuse…He conned me into conning myself into thinking I could con you. I thought I hated you, but I thought maybe I could change you back to the Jack you were meant to be if I went back to you and got you to sign the contracts, and then…then did just what I’m doing now, tell you everything, show you what a swine Howards
is, kind of man you’re involved with stops at nothing, and how a man like that can make anyone climb right down there in his sewer with him…Oh, Jack, how you must hate me now!”

  Barron let her go, smiled crookedly as he saw her crying big wet tears like a cocker spaniel just shit on the rug waiting to be kicked. Hate you? he thought. Hate you for playing games with Howards, where does that leave me? Don’t have enough hate for you, too much hate for that cocksucker Howards playing with my silly chick’s head—chick with no defenses at all against big-league Foundation action—shit, who wouldn’t play footside for a free Freeze chance to live forever, wouldn’t you? Didn’t you? Aren’t you? Where it’s at, is all.

  He looked past her at the dusk-lights of Brooklyn, past the East River murk, over the roaring, cursing New York traffic, steel-jungle-carnivore noises clashing twenty-four hours a day, and even in his little California twenty-three stories above it all, he knew there was no escaping the gutter-reality, daisy-chain power-reality that made the world go round chasing its tail up its asshole—not for Sara or Luke or Brackett Audience Count estimated hundred million people.

  Or Jack Barron.

  Either you grow teeth, or you end up fed to the fishes.

  “I’m too pissed to hate you,” he said. “Maybe I even owe Bennie a favor for growing you up, way I never could. Maybe you won’t yell cop-out so loud now, ’cause Bennie’s right, we all got a price. Cat thinks he don’t, just hasn’t been offered his price yet. Hate you, I gotta hate myself, and you came back to me, did it to have a chance to live forever, play Baby Bolshevik games with my head on the side. In a funny way, I respect that—what I would’ve done in your place, after all. Question is, do you really love me now?”

  “I’ve never loved you more in my whole life,” she said, and he saw the funky worship-look in her eyes, and warmth went through him from the tip of his toes, curled around his ears as he clocked the hot hungry love for him, not for living-color image-Jack-Barron, not Baby Bolshevik Galahad cheap-talk bullshit hero…Me, he thought. Maybe she finally digs me, where I’m really at—wherever the fuck that is!

  “Likewise,” he said, and he kissed her a soft and tender first-kiss type kiss, mouths open tasting each other like for the first time, but tongues apart, love-kiss without passion, and he never remembered kissing her quite like this before.

  “You’ll do it?” she asked, arms around his waist, face inches from his, earnest little-girl conspiracy face, playing games even now, and how can I put it down when it’s so like me?

  “Do what?” he said, smiling a vidphone gambit put-on smile.

  “Sign the contracts.”

  “I’d be a schmuck not to, wouldn’t I?” Jack Barron said. And that’s where it is at, isn’t it? he thought. Who’s a big enough schmuck to choose death? You know that real good, don’t you Bennie?

  “But you won’t…you won’t play that horrible reptile’s game…?” she said (and he saw that damned old Berkeley look creep back into her eyes, Jack and Sara versus the Forces of Evil, won’t she ever grow up all the way? Do you really want her to?). “All those people out there who trust you, whether you like it or not…You can’t sell out all those people who believe in you, let them die just because we’ve got ours. I mean, once we’ve got immortality for ourselves you’ve gotta fight Howards. You’re the only man can stop him, the man a hundred million people believe in, the only man Howards is afraid of, you’re…you’re Jack Barron, and sometimes I think you’re the only one doesn’t know what Jack Barron is. You can’t be Howards’ flunky, a stooge, a…You’re Jack Barron.”

  Barron hugged her to him, looked out over the teeming streets, the lights of Brooklyn stretching from coast to coast, as she buried her face in his neck, a hundred million TV-antenna Wednesday-night-eyes all on him and what would they say, those image-vampires, if they knew it all?

  Play our game, is what they’d say, he knew. Lay your ass on the line for us, boy, you owe it to us. No different from Luke or Morris or Bennie, all thinking they own my bod—except they don’t have the stake to play the game.

  Yeah, just like Bennie. Everybody wants to own poor old Jack Barron, and nobody’s got the word that Jack Barron owns himself, is all.

  Jack Barron pulled the warmth of his woman to him. “Don’t worry Sara,” he said, “I don’t play Howards’ game.” (Or anyone else’s.)

  Fuck you, Bennie, he thought. Fuck you all! None of you, not Bennie, not Luke, not the Great Unwashed losers down there, not even you, Sara—is gonna own Jack Barron!

  11

  Better be it, or I feed you right to the fishes, enough crapping around Barron, and I gotta come to this crazy joint too? Benedict Howards thought as he sat down on some screwy iron-and-leather kite of a chair, stared across at Jack Barron perched like some oily Arab oil trader on a silly-ass camel saddle, framed by the open terrace behind him palm trees or whatever you call the dumb things look like cheaphotel phony rubberplants hot and cold running whores in Tulsa or San Jose or some other nowhere boom town with plenty of money and no class—yeah, it figures Jack Barron would go for that kind of California horseshit.

  Howards opened his attaché case, took out two contracts in triplicate, handed them across to Barron along with his old-fashioned 14-carat-gold felt-tip pen. “There they are, Barron,” he said. “Contract for you, contract for Sara Westerfeld or Barron or whatever her last name is—made out to Sara Westerfeld, since that’s her legal name at the moment. All signed by me, paid up by ‘anonymous donor,’ and standard Freeze Contracts except for the immortality option clause. Just sign all the copies, and we can get down to your end of the bargain.”

  Barron leafed through one of the copies, looked up, measured Howards with those goddamned smirking eyes of his, said: “Let’s get this straight, Bennie, once I sign these contracts, you can’t welch, I send one of my copies to a very safe place, with instructions to release it to the press with the whole scam on your having an immortality treatment, in case anything should happen to me, dig?”

  Howards smiled. You’re so smart, Barron, think you’re two steps ahead of Benedict Howards, think I don’t know what you’re thinking—Jack Barron’s got his insurance, where’s yours, Howards, smells too easy? Chase your own tail, Barron, never figure out your insurance is really my insurance till it’s way too late and I own you down to the soles of your feet, and you’re too far in to ever back out till it’s your immortal life million years strong young cool-skinned women, air-conditioned arenas of power forever to lose same as mine, and then you’re my man all the way, like Senators, Governors, and, goddamn it, President too, Mr. Howards, despite goddamn idiot Hennering.

  “You don’t even have to trust me that far,” Howards said with carefully-guarded casualness. “You and your wife can exercise the immortality option the moment you sign, if you want to. In fact you can fly back to Colorado with me tonight, have the treatment, and be back better than new in time for your next show. With Deep Sleep recovery, it’s all over in two days. You don’t have to trust me at all; you can collect your payoff before you have to deliver anything.”

  Barron’s eyes narrowed even as Howards anticipated his suspicion. “That smells like a dead flounder to me. I don’t figure you for the trusting type, Bennie, and it looks like you’re trusting me, and that, baby, I don’t trust at all.”

  Keep on thinking that way sucker, Howards thought. Go home in a barrel thinking you can out-con Benedict Howards.

  “Who trusts you?” Howards replied smoothly. “I got it set up so neither of us has to trust the other, and you better believe it. I can play the press-release game too, and where would that leave you, Mr. Champion of the Underdog? On public record, selling out to the Foundation. How long you think you keep your show then? You may be a lot of things, but I don’t think you’re stupid enough to blow everything just to double-cross me. We both got our names on dangerous paper, and neither of us can afford to make it public. It’s a double insurance policy, Barron.” And once you have the tre
atment, it’ll be more than your silly career, it’ll be your life, your million-year-life in my hands, if you think about pulling a fast one.

  Howards felt Barron measuring him, trying to think holes in his position, knew that he wouldn’t find any because there’s only one hole, and it gives me the big edge, Barron, and you’ll never find that one till you’re in way over your head. Go ahead, smart-ass, try and out-think Benedict Howards won’t be the first man’s tried, won’t be the last to go home in a barrel oil leases Lyndon, Senators Governors doctors nurses tube up nose down throat fading black circle all thought they could get Benedict Howards, and I beat ’em all, conned ’em, bought ’em, destroyed ’em, owned ’em, really think you can get the best of the only man bigger than death, winner over all forces of the fading black circle?

  Barron looked at him blankly for a long moment; not an inch of flesh moved, but something changed behind his eyes that Howards could sense from long experience with big men in air-cooled vaults of power to surrender, flunky, Mr. Howards, and Howards knew he had him bought even before Barron said: “Okay, Howards. Deal.” And signed his contract in triplicate.

  “That’s real smart,” Howards said. “Now you get a hold of Sara Westerfeld by tonight, get her signature, and I’ll fly you both to Colorado in my plane for the treatment, save you the air fare, show you even little things go better when you play ball with Benedict Howards.”

  Barron smiled a nasty Bug-Jack-Barron smile Howards couldn’t read, and he felt a small pang of uneasiness, still playing games, what now, Barron? Take it easy, he told himself, once you get him to take the treatment, you got him hogtied same as any other beef.