Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

She began sobbing; then her face went off-camera, and a huge pale hand obscured the vidphone image as she picked her vidphone up, turned its camera on the room. Trembling, disjointed, out of focus pieces of hospital room stumbled across the monitor screen: Walls, wilted flowers, transfusion stands, bed, blankets, the thousand deathhead’s wrinkled ether-smell shriveled face of a ruined old man, and her voice—“Look! Look! Look at him!”

Jeez, Barron thought, pumping his screen-control foot-button even as Vince changed the monitor-mix to three quarters Jack Barron, the lower lefthand quadrant still a jumble of sliding images, old man’s face fingers vased flowers trays of needles bedpan—hideous gray montage of death by inches now muted at least, surrounded by full-color embracing image of concerned Big Brother Jack Barren, and Dolores Pulaski’s screaming sobs were a faraway tinny unreality as Vince bled her audio and Barren’s voice reestablished control.

“Take it easy, Mrs Pulaski.” Barren stopped just short of harshness. “We’ll want to help you, but you’ll have to stay calm. Now put the vidphone down in front of you, and just try to remember you’ll have all the time you need to say what you want to. And if you can’t find the words, I’m here to help you. Try to relax. A hundred million Americans are on your side and want to understand.”

The woman’s face reappeared in the lower left quadrant, eyes dull, jaw slack, a spent, pale-flesh robot-image, and Barren knew he was back in control. After a little hair-tearing, she’s got nothing left in her, you can make her say anything, she won’t make more waves. And he foot-signaled Vince to give her three-quarters screen, her schtick to the next commercial, as long as she stayed tame.

“I’m sorry I had to be so short with you, Mrs Pulaski,” Barren said softly. “Believe me, we all understand how you must feel.”

“I’m sorry too, Mr Barren,” she said in a loud stage whisper. (Vince, Barren thought, on the ball as usual, turning up her volume.) “It’s just that I feel so… you know, helpless, and now when I can finally do something about it, it all just came out, everything I’ve been holding in… I don’t know what to do, what to say, but I’ve got to make everyone understand…”

Here it comes, Barren thought. Sitting on the edge of your sweaty little seat, Bennie? Not yet, eh? Keep cool, Bennie-baby, ’cause now you get yours!

“Of course we all sympathize, Mrs Pulaski, but I’m not quite sure what anyone can do. If the doctors say…” Give, baby! Shit, don’t make me fish for it.

“The doctors say… they say there’s no hope for my father. Surgery, radiation, drugs—nothing can save him. My father’s dying, Mr Barron. They give him only weeks. Within a month… within a month he’ll be dead.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Dead!” she whispered. “In a few weeks, my father will be dead forever. Oh, he’s a good man, Mr Barron! He’s got children and grandchildren who love him, and he’s worked hard for us all his life, and he loves us. He’s as good a man as anyone who ever lived! Why, why should he be dead and gone forever while other men, bad men, Mr Barron, men who’ve gotten rich on good men’s sweat, they can live forever just by buying their way into a Freezer with the money they’ve stolen and cheated people like us to get? It’s not fair, it’s… evil. A man, like my father, an honest, kind man, works all his life for his family, and when he dies he’s buried and gone like he had never existed, while a man like Benedict Howards holds… holds immortal lives in his filthy hands like he was God…”

Dolores Pulaski blanched at the weight of the word that hung from her lips. “I didn’t mean…” she stammered. “I mean, forgive me, to mention a man like that in the same sentence with God…”

Jeez, spare me the Hail Marys! Barron thought. “Of course you didn’t,” he said, picturing Howards sweating somewhere in the bowels of his Colorado Freezer with no place to hide. He tapped his right boot-button twice, signaling Vince to give him a two-minute count to the next commercial as he paused, casually kind, before continuing. “But tell me, Mrs Pulaski, what are you asking me to do?” he said, all earnest choir-boy innocence.

“Get my father a place in a freezer!” Dolores Pulaski shot back. (Beautiful, thought Barron. Couldn’t be better if we were working from a script; you’re show biz all the way, Dolores Pulaski.)

“I’m afraid I don’t swing much weight at the Foundation for Human Immortality,” Barron said archly as Vince now split the screen evenly between them, “as I’m sure you’ll remember if you saw the last show.” The promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.” (Don’t fail me now, Mrs Pulaski, come out with the right line and I make you a star.)

“I know that, Mr Barron. It’s that Benedict Howards… one man in the whole world who can save my father, and he sells immortality like the devil buys souls. God forgive me for saying it, but I mean it—like Satan! Who else but Satan and Benedict Howards are evil enough to put a price on a man’s immortal life? Talk to him, Mr Barron, show the world what he’s like. Make him explain to poor people dying everywhere without a hope of living again how he can set a price on human life. And if he can’t explain, I mean in front of millions of people, well, then he’ll have to do something about my father, won’t he? He can’t afford to look like a monster in public. I mean, an important man like that…?” The promptboard flashed “60 Seconds.”

“You’ve got a point, Mrs Pulaski,” Barron said, cutting her off quickly before too much more peasant shrewdness could come through. (Such a thing as too show biz, Dolores Pulaski—can’t stand a straight man steps on my lines.)

Vince expanded his image to three-quarters screen, cut Dolores Pulaski to a prefadeout inset, cut her audio too, and a good thing, the chick’s getting a wee bit naked, Barron thought as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.”

“Yeah, Mrs Pulaski sure has a point, doesn’t she?” Barron said, staring straight into the camera as his living-color image filled the monitor screen in extreme close-up, darkness-shadows, bruised sullen hollows framing his eyes. “If there’s a reason to set a dollar value on a man’s chance at immortality, there’s sure as hell a reason to hear what it is, with all America watching, with a bill pending in Congress to make this monopoly on freezing into Federal law. And we’ll get the answer from Mr Benedict Howards right after this word from our sponsor—or a hundred million Americans will know the reason why.”

What a lead-in! Barron thought as they rolled the commercial. Dolores Pulaski, you’re beautiful, baby! So long as you don’t flip out again while I’m playing chicken with Bennie…

He punched the intercom button on his number one vidphone. “Hey Vince,” he said, “keep your finger on that audio dial. It’s me and Bennie all the way from here on in. I want Mrs Pulaski seen but not heard. Keep her audio down, unless I ask her a direct question. And if you gotta cut her off, then fade it—make it look like a bad vidphone connection not the old ax. Got Bennie on the line yet?”

Gelardi grinned from behind the control booth glass.

“Been on the line for the last three minutes, and by now he’s foaming at the mouth. Wants to talk to you right now, before you go back on the air. Still got 45 seconds…?”

“Tell him to get stuffed,” Barron answered. “He’ll have more time than he can handle to talk to me when he’s on the air. And, baby, when I get my hooks into him, he won’t be in any position to hang up.”