Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  Oh, what a shuck! he thought as the promptboard flashed “On the Air,” and he stared at his own electric face, the eyes sinister pits of power, strictly from holding his head slightly downturned to catch kinesthop flashes from the backdrop behind him. I can do anything on that fucking screen, anything—no one’s in my league in this brand of reality, no matter who the hell they are in the flesh-and-blood private-reality that nobody sees. What happens on the screen is just my word made flesh, I make all the rules, control every damn phosphor-dot the whole country sees. Why couldn’t it make me President, or anything else—shit, they haven’t elected a man President since Truman, they elect an image, is all, and who’s bigger league in the image-racket than me?

  And the unreal black and white face of Benedict Howards in the lower-left quadrant was nothing less than pathetic; Howards didn’t even have the beginnings of a chance, because what the whole country was seeing wasn’t Bennie’s Howards, but Benedict Howards as edited and rewritten by Jack Barron.

  “All right,” said Barron, feeling unfairly, obscenely confident, “let’s get back to our fairy story and see just how hypothetical it really is. A while back on this show we discussed immortality research, didn’t we, Mr. Howards? (Howards began to shout something soundlessly on the screen, and Barron thought of Sara, felt a savage elation at the total paranoid frustration Howards must be going through, knowing it was his life going down the drain and not a damn thing he could do about it, not even scream.) You said then you didn’t have an immortality treatment…What if I say you have? What if I say I have proof? (Watch those libel laws, man!) What do you say to that, Benedict Howards? Go ahead, I dare you, deny you have an immortality treatment, right here, right now, in front of a hundred million witnesses!”

  Barron’s face was a triple-size full-color monster surrounding the mute image of Benedict Howards. As the images inverted, Barron realized what was about to happen even as—

  Howards’ eyes glazed over, and crazy tension-lines from every coarse, open, black-and-white-exaggerated pore seemed to radiate paranoid fury as the devil-mask of his face filled three-quarters of the screen, and as Vince cut in his audio, he was screaming:

  “…you, Barron! I’ll kill you! You—” Howards suddenly blanched as the fact that he was on the air penetrated the red mist.

  “It’s a lie!” he managed to shout somewhat less shrilly, “it’s a goddamn lie!” But every fear-line in his face shouted that it wasn’t. “There’s no immortality treatment, I swear there isn’t, only the fading black circle, against it, we’re against it on the side of life, we don’t eviscerate picka—” Howards’ whole face shook as he realized what he had started to say, and he cut himself off even as Gelardi killed his audio and gave Barron back three-quarters screen.

  Jeez, doesn’t matter what he says, Barron realized. All I gotta do is blow my own riff and just let ’em see it bounce off his face…

  “Stop gibbering, Howards!” he said coldly. “Makes you feel any better, why, then, we’ll talk about the other end of our little hypothesis. Let’s just suppose, hypothetically, if you insist, that there is an immortality treatment that involves, oh, say a gland-transplant operation that requires the glands of young children, that involves cutting them apart, murdering them for their glands…” He paused. Howards was screaming mutely again on his quarter of the screen like an impotent bug impaled on a pin. Squirm, you bastard, squirm! Had any brains, you’d hang up the phone, but you can’t, can you? I got you in too deep now.

  “Dig?” Barron said. “If there was such a treatment, and it did involve murder, that would sure explain a lot of funny things, wouldn’t it folks? Would explain why Mr. Howards is so hot to get his Freezer Utility Bill passed, get himself a nice commission, with his Foundation answerable only to that commission, and the commission controlled completely by the President…Especially if the President we elect is answerable only to him. What about it, Mr. Howards, doesn’t that make sense?”

  Gelardi inverted the images, and Howards’ stricken face once more dominated the screen. “You—” he began to shout. And then Barron could all but see a shade pulling down behind his desperate eyes, a shade of silence, his only possible retreat.

  “Okay,” said Barron as the images reverted, “so Mr. Howards doesn’t care for…hypothetical situations. So let’s talk about hard facts. Let’s talk about Presidential candidates. (Watch them libel laws!) Now I’m only repeating what I read in the papers—but a lot of people thought that the late Senator Theodore Hennering had the inside track to the Democratic nomination, and things being what they are, that meant the inside track to the Presidency. Before his…unfortunate accident. Tell us, Mr. Howards, were you a Hennering man—or was Hennering a Foundation man?”

  Howards came out fighting this time as his audio came on and the images on the screen inverted: “That’s libel, Barron, and you know it!” But before he could get in another word, Vince flashed him back into the silent Coventry of the lower-left quadrant hotseat.

  “Libeling who? Now there’s a good question,” Barron said. “You or Hennering? Anyway, I’m not libeling anyone, just asking a question. Fact: Hennering was a sponsor and the Senate floor leader for the Freezer Utility Bill. Fact: Hennering’s Presidential balloon had mighty big bread behind it. I gotta watch those libel laws, folks, so you’ll have to add it up all by yourselves—one and one makes…Got it, folks? ’Cause here comes some more hypothetical stuff.

  “Let’s say that a Foundation which the libel laws prevent me from naming has bought itself a Presidential candidate who the libel laws prevent me from naming got a lot of muscle behind a certain bill—which the libel laws prevent me from naming because they’ve got a beep! beep! treatment that amounts to murder, and let’s say that our unnameable Senator from Illinois doesn’t know about this treatment. Are you with me so far, out there? Ain’t it wonderful, living in a free country where you can…hypothesize anything you want so long as you don’t name names? Even when you all know what names to put into the blank spaces.”

  He paused and clocked how Howards’ face had become a pasty mask, how he didn’t even seem to be paying attention, knowing for sure it was all over now.

  “Let’s go one step further. Let’s say that our unnameable Senator finds out about this here…treatment. Let’s say he doesn’t like it one bit. Let’s say he calls up the unnameable head of the unnameable foundation and tells him precisely where he can stuff his unnameable treatment. Let’s say our Senator tells him he’s gonna oppose his own bill, blow the whistle on our hypothetical foundation on the floor of the Senate. That means our hypothetical foundation head’s gonna be tried for murder, unless…unless something happens to close our Senator’s mouth. Tell us, Mr. Howards—just hypothetically, of course—if you were the head of our hypothetical foundation and this Senator’s big mouth was your ticket to the electric chair, what would you do?”

  “—sue you!” Howards’ voice shouted as Vince switched the images and cut in his audio. “Sue you for libel! I’ll get you, Barron! Send you to the chair! I’ll—”

  Gelardi hustled him back into the lower-left quadrant hotseat like a sergeant-at-arms, and Barron felt the moment hang in the air. Nitty-gritty time, he thought. All I gotta do is spring it; I’ve got him set up for the kill. Kill myself with him maybe, with that contract as a signed confession, me and Sara—Sara! SaraSaraSara…No more Sara…He felt slug-green things drip-dripping the stolen life-juices of broken babies within him, and in a flash of pure, blessed berserker rage knew that it had to be get Bennie first, and try to save himself later.

  “Now let’s get back to what’s laughingly known as the real world,” Barron said. “Fact: Senator Theodore Hennering was killed in a mid-air plane explosion which conveniently destroyed any evidence there might be of murder, hypothetical or otherwise. Fact: A few weeks later, Hennering’s widow just happens to get herself run over by a hit-and-run rented truck. What do you say to that, Mr. Howards?”

  Vince flashed How
ards to three-quarters screen just long enough for him to mutter, “How should I know? Coincidence—” before he was cut off again, and Barron was back at three-quarters screen.

  Here comes a tricky part, Barron thought. If I can get him to admit it, at least I’m off the libel hook.

  “And another fact that nobody knows: Madge Hennering called me before she was killed, told me that Benedict Howards had threatened to kill her husband shortly before he died, just before he died, because Hennering had found out something about the Foundation that was terrible enough to make him switch sides. And that’s not libel either, friends,” Barron lied, “because I can prove it. I have the whole conversation on tape.”

  “It’s a lie!” Howards screamed, as Vince flashed him on, then off. “Lie! Goddamn fading black circle lie! Lie!”

  “Watch that Bennie,” Barron said, giving his puppetmask on the screen an ironic smile, “you’re calling me a liar, and that’s libel, and I can prove it with the tape.”

  Barron paused, knowing what the next link in the chain had to be. Gotta come right out and accuse him of murdering Hennering, and that is libel any way you slice it without legal evidence which I ain’t got unless he gives it to me—and he won’t unless I climb out on that limb. Okay, smart-ass, this is the real nitty gritty, the razor inside—go! go! go!

  “Last week I flew down to Mississippi to talk to a man who claimed—you saw it here folks—that someone had bought his daughter for $50,000,” Barron said, still playing footsie with the libel laws. “Now, if some foundation needed children for an immortality transplant operation…get the picture, folks? Three people, and only three people knew I was going down there: Governor Lukas Greene, a very old friend; the woman I loved, and—Mr. Benedict Howards. Someone shot the man I went down there to talk to, a real pro job, and he almost got me too. One of those three people had Henry George Franklin killed and tried to kill me. Who do you think it was, my friend, my wife, or…?”

  Barron paused again, half for the effect, half hesitating at the bank of an abysmal Rubicon, knowing the total mortal danger his next words had to bring. Howards’ inset face on the monitor screen was ashen but strangely calm, knowing what was coming, knowing he couldn’t save himself, but also knowing that the power to destroy was mutual, was also his. Fuck you, Bennie! Barron thought. Banzai for the Emperor, live a thousand years! Yeah, a thousand years…

  “Or Benedict Howards, who bought that man’s child to cold-bloodedly vivisect in his Colorado labs, Benedict Howards, who is immortal with the glands of a murdered child sewn into his rotten hide, Benedict Howards, who murdered Theodore Hennering and his wife and Henry George Franklin, Benedict Howards, who tried to kill me. After all, Mr. Howards, murder’s cheaper by the dozen, isn’t it? You can only fry once.”

  And he foot-signaled Vince to cut in Howards’ audio and give him the full screen treatment. Moment of truth, Barron thought as the image of Benedict Howards ballooned on the screen like a bloated bladder. I’m wide open for a libel suit unless Bennie’s far gone enough to cover my bet. He let Howards’ silent face eat up three or four seconds of dead airtime, and behind his eyes Barron could sense a straining interface between blind paranoid rage and shrewd vestiges of the amoral coldness that had built the Foundation, had made this ruthless fucker immortal, let him gut children on a goddamn assembly-line and then bitch about the cost.

  Two sides of the same coin, Barron realized. Paranoia either way, is all. A cool paranoiac uses his head coldly and ruthlessly to do in everyone in sight ’cause he knows everyone’s out to get him, and when a cat like that finally freaks out, he’s gonna be shrieking and screaming at everything in sight. Gotta push him over that line!

  “How does it feel, Howards?” he said, speaking from his own gut, washing the words over Howards’ full screen image like the black-wash-over-moire-patterns behind his own head. “How’s it feel to have the stolen glands of some dead kid inside you, crawling around under your skin like spastic slugs oozing slime all over your body twitching and itching—feel ’em?—like they were slowly eating you alive always eating eating eating but never finished eating you up inside for a million—”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Howards screamed, his face filling the screen with a mask of feral terror, his eyes rolling like dervishes, his mouth slack and wet like that of a man in a trance. “Don’t let them kill me! Fading black circle of eviscerated niggers tubes of slime up my nose down my throat choking me…Don’t let them kill me! Nobody kills Benedict Howards! Buy ’em own ’em kill ’em Senators, President, fading black circle…I don’t want to die! Please! Please! Don’t let them—”

  Zingo! Vince chickened out finally; Howards’ face was off screen, his audio dead, and Barron’s face filled the entire screen.

  Fuck! Barron almost muttered aloud. What a time to get squeamish! What—Suddenly, came a gut-flash that nearly knocked Barron out of his chair! Bennie’s totally freaked out! Doesn’t know what he’s saying. Maybe I can do more than get him to admit he killed Hennering, get him to admit on the air he conned me, I didn’t know about the treatment beforehand. The truth! Maybe he’s crazy enough so I can get him to tell the truth. But I gotta lay it all on the line, take away even his doomsday machine weapon, pull out all the stops, throw it all in their fat little laps out there, my life, everything. How’s that for a television first—the fucking truth!

  “Tell them, Howards,” he said, “tell the whole damn country what you’re putting over on them. Tell them about Teddy Hennering, tell them about the Foundation for Human Immortality, tell them about immortality from the inside. Tell ’em what it feels like to be a murderer.”

  He paused, tapped his left foot-button once—and nothing happened. Behind the control booth glass, Gelardi shook his head “no”. Barron tapped the foot-button again; again Gelardi shook his head. Barron slammed his foot against the floor. Vince groaned silently then capitulated, and Howards’ face filled three-quarters of the screen.

  “You tell ’em, or I’ll tell ’em,” Barron said, tapping his right foot-button twice for a commercial in two minutes, almost grinned as Vince brought his hands together in a mock prayer of thanks.

  “Barron, listen, it’s not too late, Barron,” Howards whined, and the rage was gone from his face, whited-out by a craven feral fear. “Not too late to stop the fading black circle closing in closing in…I won’t tell, I swear I won’t tell. We can live forever, Barron, you and me, never have to die, young and strong, smell the air in the morning, it’s not too late, I swear it, you and me and your wife…”

  Barron signaled to keep the screen split as is, said softly, measuredly, letting something harder than sorrow and colder than anger gleam in his image’s eyes: “My wife is dead, Howards. She jumped twenty-three stories, twenty-three stories. Suicide…but not from where I sit. From where I sit, you killed her sure as if you pushed her. Afraid now, Bennie? Can you guess where my head is at?”

  Incredibly, the total fear on Benedict Howards’s face took a quantum jump, it was more than terror now, it was abysmal paranoid despair. And all he could do was mutter, “No…no…no…no…no…” like some obscene million-year-old infant, trembling wet lips of incredible age forming a baby’s drool. He knew.

  Barron signaled for and got full screen and solo audio as the promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.” “Let’s talk about why my wife died,” he said, his voice and face purposely composed into an artfully-ill-concealed ersatz calm that was far more wrenching than any histrionics could ever be.

  “My wife died because Benedict Howards made her immortal,” he said. “He made her immortal, and it killed her, now ain’t that a bitch? She couldn’t live with herself after she found out…Sara wasn’t the only one her immortality killed. There was someone else she never saw who died so she could be immortal—a poor kid whose body was irradiated by the Foundation till it was one living cancer, so they could cut out his very special glands and sew them into my wife. And make her live forever.

  “But she won
’t live forever, she’s dead; she killed herself because she couldn’t stand living knowing what had been done to her. I loved that woman, so you’ll pardon my thinking it wasn’t just guilt. She told me why, just before she jumped. She knew that he would get away with it, live forever, kill forever, buy or kill anyone that stood in his way unless…unless someone was desperate enough or dumb enough or didn’t care enough about living to scream from the mountaintops what he was doing. Sara Westerfeld died to make me do just what I’m doing now. She died for you! How does that grab you, suckers?”

  Barron felt himself cloaked in the crystal mist of legend: the studio, the monitor, the figures behind the control booth glass were things that couldn’t possibly exist. The things he had said were things that were never said in public, not in front of a hundred million people. What was happening did not ever happen in front of cameras, you could watch the glass tit forever and not see anything like this.

  But it was happening, he was making it happen, and it was the easiest thing in the world. History, he thought, I’m making fucking history—and it’s nothing but show biz, is all. Moving images around and making myth…

  He foot-signaled and got Howards back at one-quarter screen, with his audio back on. But Bennie was as stiff and mute as a still photo.

  “Go ahead, Howards,” he said, “now’s your big chance, tell ’em the rest. Tell ’em why you made Sara Westerfeld immortal, tell ’em who else you made immortal. Go ahead, time to hit back, isn’t it?”

  Howards remained silent, didn’t even seem to hear, as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.” His empty eyes looked off into the dreadful landscape within. Barron knew he had him sick and bleeding—set him up right, and after the commercial, he’d start to shriek.