Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  “You see, Barron, what they tell me, it’s all in the glands,” Benedict Howards said as the elevator finally stopped, down in what Jack Barron figured had to be a deep subcellar of the hospital.

  Wouldn’t be surprised to see a Frankenstein Monster slimy-stone passageway, he thought, as the elevator door slid open and anticlimactically revealed an ordinary white-walled, windowless, fluorescent-lit hospital corridor.

  “Endocrine balance, that’s what they call it, endocrine balance…” Howards continued babbling as the two guards, with their pistols conspicuous but holstered, led them out of the elevator and down the hall. Apparently the guards already had their orders, since Howards hadn’t spoken a word to them after they had left the hospital room, just kept babbling a lot of stuff about hormones and glands.

  Barron was hardly listening. Howards’ abstracted, glazed eyes, the way he kept talking a blue streak, turning his head here, there, here, like a frightened bird, convinced him that Bennie was way ’round the bend. And, he thought, all this fucking medical jargon he obviously only half understands…

  But that, Barron suddenly realized, that’s the kicker. If it were all a shuck, he wouldn’t know all this stuff unless he had memorized a whole set-spiel just to put me on, and then he’d be way smoother, Bennie’s not show biz enough to pull a con this subtle off. Which means…

  It’s for real; at least it’s possible. Immortality. Maybe I really got it, he’s not putting me on? Immortal! I don’t feel any different, but why should I, I’m young and I’m healthy, and if it’s true, I’ll never feel different, not now, not in half a million years…

  Or will I? he wondered. Bennie’s sure different, more paranoid by the minute since this whole thing started. But maybe the whole Foundation schtick was a paranoid bag for openers, and the more money Bennie’s got, the longer he’s got to live, the more he’s got to be scared shitless to lose. Which puts him exactly where I want him.

  But then why’s he so fucking sure he’s got me where he wants me?

  All this screwing around…Then it flashed like cold fire through him: Howards’ been dying to make me immortal all along. And now I’ve been had? But how? He can’t touch me now, and I can walk all over him. The treatment…yeah, he got uptight every time I tried to find out what the fuck it was, and now he’s telling me and I’m not listening! And whatever it is, pretty safe bet it’s really been done to me. Listen, you prick, for chrissakes listen, isn’t this what you played all those games to hear?

  “Man’s as old as his glands,” Howards was saying. “You could keep the hormone balance you had as a kid, you’d never stop growing…No, that’s wrong, I think…or…but that’s not important. Point is, you’re no older than your glands. Up to a point, a kid’s glands keep his body from aging, something about anabolism exceeding catabolism, whatever that means. Anyway, whatever it means, the moment it reverses you start to age, start dying, fading black…Way they explained it, normally a human being’s either growing or aging, never inbetween, depending on the balance of his glands. It’s like a clock at midnight—between one tick and the next it’s a different day, one tick you’re growing, next tick you’re aging. You keep growing, sooner or later it kills you, they told me, but I don’t really understand why…But anyway, the moment your glands pass over that line, sometime in your teens, they say, you start to die. You see, Barron? You see? Immortality’s all in the tick.”

  “Tick, schmick,” Barron finally said. “What’re you gibbering about?”

  “You’re pretty dumb, Barron, can’t you see it? If it’s exactly twelve o’clock Tuesday night and you stop the clock right on the moment it stops being Tuesday, and before it can start being Wednesday you’re caught inbetween. Not growing, not aging. That smart-ass Palacci calls it ‘Homeostatic Endocrine Balance.’ Stop that gland ‘clock’ right between ticks and keep it there, balanced between growing and aging, and that’s immortality. That’s what we’ve got, way to take all the glands and keep ’em balanced what they call homeostatically forever. Forever! We got glands that’ll stay young forever, Barron. That’s why we’ll never die.”

  Makes a kind of screwy sense, Barron admitted, fishing in his memory for two terms of Berkeley biology. “Anabolism and catabolism equal metabolism,” the meaningless phrase from some old gypsheet popped into his mind. But what the fuck did it mean? Lessee, metabolism’s like a biological checking account: anabolism is growth, catabolism’s decay—or the other way around? Anyway, in a kid, growth exceeds decay, so the account’s solvent. And in an adult it’s vice versa and you’re overdrawn, so you start to die. Yeah, but if you were just even, and could keep it that way, like Howards says, you’d be immortal! That all immortality is, tuning up the old glands in the shop the way they tune the Jag’s engine? But how do they do it?

  “I think I dig now, Bennie,” he said. “Just out of curiosity, how do your boys do it—I mean, tinker with all those glands?”

  Howards leered at him, and the cold words he spoke were somehow totally obscene: “Hard radiation and lots of it. An overload of radiation kept up for two days.”

  Barron went cold. Radiation—a witch-word, like cancer. Overload of radiation for two days! But that means—

  Howards laughed. “Take it easy, Barron, you’re not gonna die. I’m not dead, am I, and we’ve both had the same treatment. My boys found out something about some special kind of radiation—in big killing doses, it freezes the balance of the glands in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance thing, if you catch ’em young enough…”

  “But all that radiation, what’s it do to your body?”

  Howards grimaced, his eyes seemed to glaze over as if he were running some dirty movie on the screen in his head; he muttered something crazy about niggers, then seemed to snap out of it as the guards halted outside a plain steel door.

  “I never seen it, but they say it’s pretty awful,” Howards said. “Flesh starts to rot and fall off and the whole body breaks out in a million little cancers…but the glands are okay, if the quacks time it right. Better than—”

  “You crazy fucker!” Barron howled, half-lunged at Howards, then stopped as the guards whipped out their pistols.

  “Don’t foam at the mouth, Barron, no one said you were irradiated,” Howards said, caressing the knob of the steel door. He laughed. “I’ll show you why we’re both all right, be all right forever, and why I’ve got you right where I want you. I said you had glands that’ll stay young, keep you young forever…” Howards’ eyes were black pits of feral paranoid madness as he turned the doorknob and said, “…but when did I ever say they were yours?” And opened the door.

  Beyond the door was what at first glance looked to be a pretty ordinary hospital ward: A long, narrow room, with a central aisle dividing two rows of about a dozen beds each, headboards set flush against either wall. At the far end of the room was a large complex of consoles facing a small desk behind which a white-smocked man sat, apparently monitoring them. To the right of the desk was another door.

  But it was the occupants of the beds that made the room a chamber of grotesquerie, filling Barron with a disbelieving nauseous dread.

  Two dozen beds, in each of them a young child, none younger than six, none older than about ten, and more than half of them black. All were being fed intravenously, but the tubes feeding the needles taped in their armpits led not to drip-bottles but to a master-tube that ran along each wall and back to the complex of consoles at the rear of the room. A similar arrangement emptied the catheters that snaked out from under each set of bedclothes. Each child had electrodes taped to head and chest, the wires converging in trunk-line cables that ran along either wall to the monitor consoles. There was no sound as they entered the ward, not a head turned, not a muscle moved; the kids were all in deep comas.

  The ages…the preponderance of Negroes…Christ on a Harley! Barron thought. These gotta be the poor kids the Foundation bought!

  “Neat, eh?” Howards said. “I mean, when you think what a mess
it could be, a whole roomful of squalling brats, and the personnel it’d take to take care of ’em…In the short run, all this equipment’s real expensive, but when you think of what it saves on food and salaries and trouble and amortize it out…well, even in the medium run it saves an awful lot of money.”

  “What the fuck are you doing to these poor kids?” Barron said. “What’s wrong with ’em, why are they all out cold?”

  “Wrong with ’em?” Howards said neutrally, but with some kind of terrible mania leaking out of his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong with ’em, they’re all perfect physical specimens, or you can bet your ass we wouldn’t be blowing the money it takes to keep ’em here. We don’t do anything to them here, this is just our nursery. The whole process is perfectly painless for the kids. From beginning to end they don’t feel a thing. What do you think I am, some kind of sadist? We just keep ’em out and quiet and feed ’em on glucose till they’re ready for processing. Saves time and mess and money this way—one man at the instruments there can run the whole show.”

  Can’t be happening, Barron told himself as Howards led him and the guards down the aisle. But he knew damn well it was. A death-stench of madness so thick you could cut it as they walked past the rows of sleeping children plugged into tubes and wires like some hideous circuitry—and that’s all he sees, fucking production line, is all. Production of what? Bennie’s gone totally ’round the bend, and when I get him on the show I’ll tear him to pieces, then tear the pieces to pieces…He’s stark staring mad!

  Yet he found himself listening in dread fascination, unable to think past Howards’ words as Bennie babbled on like some damn production manager conducting a guided tour of a refrigerator factory:

  “Of course this is just a pilot plant…If we could solve the problem of safe revival from the Freezers we wouldn’t need all this crap—just irradiate ’em as soon as we get ’em and drop ’em in Freezers, then thaw ’em out when we need ’em, save a lot of money. We’re working on it, but they tell me that’s still years away, so we gotta make do. Keeping ’em alive after the radiation’s the real bind. What with the radiation disease and cancer, none of ’em last more than a couple of weeks. So the timing’s real tricky, keeping a dozen or so always ready. Damn, if they’d only figure out how to keep glands viable in the Freezers we could get rid of all this mess.”

  As they reached the door at the far end of the ward, the man behind the desk looked away from his dials briefly as Howards said: “Don’t pay any attention to us. I’m just giving the guided tour to our very first client.”

  Then he turned to Barron, his eyes unreadable beacons of madness, and said, “Still, a pretty neat set-up for a pilot plant, eh, Barron?”

  Barron felt the flood of unbearable sensory data finally getting through to where he lived. Murder. Some kind of crazy mass-murder! He’s killing these kids, killing ’em slow, gotta be totally nuts to show me all this. What’s he think I am…gotta know I’m gonna nail him to the wall…

  “What the fuck is this?” Barron shouted. (And seeing the window in the door before him opaqued with ripples like a toilet window, he moved toward it.) “And what the hell’s behind this door?”

  Swift as a cat Howards was between him and the door, his eyes wide with terror. “You don’t want to look in there,” he said, his voice frenzied and shrill. “Take my word, you don’t want to see. That’s the post-radiation ward…cancer…rotten flesh…falling apart…It’s ugly, Barron, they tell me it’s real ugly. I’ve never been in there, I don’t want to see. Doctors, they’re used to that kind of stuff…But we’d both be sick if you opened that door.”

  “What are you doing? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

  “Stop raving, Barron, haven’t you guessed? With enough of the right radiation, kids’ glands can be retarded just enough so they stay in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance, keep the body the way it is, never aging, forever. Immortality, but with two big catches. First, it only works with children under twelve, so that’d mean no immortality for grown men—for us. And it wouldn’t work anyway, ’cause the radiation we gotta use to balance the glands is a fatal dose. Big joke, eh? Got a way to make kids immortal, only the treatment kills ’em—the operation was successful but the patient died.

  “But the glands don’t die, Barron. After they’re irradiated they’re still perfect and balanced to keep a man alive forever. The radiation doesn’t kill the glands at all, all they need is a healthy new body to keep ’em alive, and they’ll keep that body young and alive forever. Just a simple transplant operation, and with the stuff they got today, transplants almost always take. They don’t even have to put the glands where they’d be in a normal body, just a package in the gut and another in the back, not even a major operation—duck soup for my quacks. See what I meant? We got glands that’ll keep us alive forever now, but that doesn’t mean they gotta be ours.”

  Snakes undulating slug-slime oozing all over his skin, Barron felt mindless urge to tear it all away, rip himself apart with his fingernails, tear out the soft green pulsing globs of flesh dripping stolen life-juices of Forever, death-junk drip-dripping eternally into his veins…Images of sleeping faces of mountains of Evers’ slum children Franklin’s smashed face hard metal bee by his ear gutted bodies exploding garbage can slime rivers of blood thick like slime in which he was drowning! drowning! in slime in bodies of niggers crawling all over him maggots inside him—all burned unforgettable tracers of anguish through the quivering meat of his brain.

  “You fucking crazy ax-murderer!” he screamed. “You monster! You got no right to be alive! And you won’t be, Bennie, I swear, one way or another I’ll kill you! Got those tapes…I’ll get you even if you kill me right here right now! Go ahead, have your apes shoot me right now! You better! Kill me! Kill me! Either way, I’ll kill you! You fucking—”

  And with an animal growl, he lunged at Howards, felt the tips of his fingers just touch the scaly dry skin of Howards’ throat—and the guards grabbed him, one to each arm, snapped his arms behind his shoulder blades in a vicious double hammerlock.

  “Murder?” Howards whined. “What do you mean, murder? So the two of us are alive, and two of them are dead…How long would they have lived, at most a century, and then, either way, those kids’d be the same place—dead. So it costs two lifetimes to give us two million lifetimes, don’t you see, life comes out ahead on the deal a million to one. That’s not murder, that’s the opposite, pushing back the fading black circle, pushing it back, back, back, opening, not closing the fading black circle of death, pushing it back a million years! What do you mean, murder, it’s life, man, it’s life. Not to do it, that’s murder…murdering yourself, throwing yourself to the fading black circle, six feet of eviscerated nigger maggots ten million years of vultures laughing with plastic beaks up nose down throat fading black circle of death and murder…”

  As Howards screamed at him, eyes rolling in pure terror inches away, face to face, hate to hate, Barron felt himself turning cold—the cold logic of light years of electric-circuit-insulation distance, the kinesthetic horror of the things sewn into his body becoming phosphor-dot images of death on the screen of his mind. He scrabbled for purchase and found it in the reflexive satellite-network interface forming between his consciousness and the phosphor-dot mosaic-image of madness in Benedict Howards’ eyes.

  Cool it, he told himself, you’re kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron, and you’re alive. And knowingly, he conned himself, sucking up the vidphone-TV-screen-interface anesthetic reality, forced himself cold.

  Gotta stop him, kill him, finish him, is all. Got the muscle to do it, got murder tapes, Bug Jack Barron hundred million Brackett Count pipeline, G.O.P. insurance; you got him cold.

  But glands in your body like green slime crocodiles dripping blood of murdered babies to keep you alive…

  He saw that Howards too had retreated to a more bearable level of reality. “So you see, I got you right where I want you after all. Murder, yeah, legally it’s murder, a
nd it’s gonna take some doing before I can change the law. Before we change the law—’cause you’re in just as deep as I am, Barron. Your contract…I’ll bet you didn’t read all the fine print, the part where you agree to accept full legal liability for any results of the treatment. Thought that was just to cover us in case you died?

  “That contract was drawn up by some mighty high-priced lawyers. It’s iron-clad, and it’s a signed legal admission to accessory to murder in any court in the country. It’s a confession, and if you blow the whistle on me, I’ll buy twenty witnesses who’ll swear you knew all about the treatment when you signed it. We’re in this together, Barron. You want to stay alive, you take your orders from me.”

  A blind berserker flash erupted through Barron: Ruined bodies soft slimy gland-slugs drip-dripping their eternal vampire-slime filling his veins with the blood of broken babies crocodile mouth of Howards’ madness chewing gobbets of cancer forever, so long as he was alive, so long as Howards was surrounded by guns by fifty billion dollars by Freezer Bill by bought President (bought with what?), Congress, safe forever, immortal vampire monster going on and on and on…

  “You really think that matters, Howards?” he howled. “Think that’ll save you? With…with…(scrunching his body in anguish) these things inside me, you so sure I want to live? I’ll get you, Howards, there’s not a thing you can do about it. I’ll get you even if it does cost me my life.”

  “Not just your life,” said Benedict Howards. “You don’t like immortality, okay, you got a right to be crazy. Who cares? You feel rotten, want to die, that’s your business. But if finding out did this to you, what’ll it do to your wife?”