Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Five points for you, Bennie, Barron conceded. Thing is that the fucker’s essentially right. Letting the few that are Frozen now feed the worms won’t get anyone else into a Freezer, and if you got a thousand people dying for every slot open, well baby, that’s where life’s always been at—the winners win, and the losers lose. But you’re too right for your own good, Bennie, muscle talks, and muscle’s what you’ll get from good old Jack Barron.

“Of course I understand the hard economic realities,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “2 Minutes.” “I mean, sitting here, fat and healthy and thirty-eight years old. Dollars and sense and all that crap, on paper your Foundation looks real good. Yeah, I understand, Mr Howards. But I wonder if I’d feel so damn philosophical if I were dying. Would you, Mr Howards? How’d you like to die like Harold Lopat—broke, and the life leaking out of you drop by drop, while some cat in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit explains real logical-like how it’s economically impractical to give you the chance to live again some day?”

To Barren’s surprise, Howards seemed genuinely stricken: a mist of what seemed like sheer madness drifted behind his eyes, his jaw trembling. Howards muttered something unintelligible and then froze entirely. The basilisk himself turned to stone? Bennie Howards with an attack of conscience? Barron wondered. More likely something he ate. Well, it’s an ill wind, he thought as the prompboard flashed “90 Seconds.”

“What’s the matter, Mr Howards,” Barron asked, “can’t you identify with the situation? Okay, Mrs Pulaski, let’s give Mr Howards some help. Please turn the camera of your vidphone on your father and hold it there.”

Vince’s right on the ball, Barron thought as Vince blew up Dolores Pulaski’s small inset to virtually fill the entire monitor screen as the image danced fragments of walls, vase, ceiling, then became a huge close-up black and white newspaper photo-image of the wasted old man’s face, a long rubber tube trailing from one nostril and taped to his forehead; the gray deathbed photo tilted at a crazy home-videotape angle, and made the closed blind eyes of Harold Lopat seem to stare down at the image of Benedict Howards in the lower left-quadrant like an avenging ghost of death looking down at a scuttling insect after kicking over a wet rock, as the prompboard flashed “60 Seconds.”

And Jack Barron, in a once-in-a-blue-moon off-camera spectral-voice gambit, etched Howards’ face into a mask of terror and fury with precise scalpel-words: “Look, Howards, you’re looking at death. That’s not $50,000 on your balance sheet, that’s a human being, and he’s dying. Go ahead, look at that face, look at the pain, look at the disease eating it up behind the mask. Only it’s not a mask, Howards, it’s a human being—a human life in the process of being snuffed out forever. We all come down to that in the end, don’t we, Mr Howards? You, and me, and Harold Lopat, all of us, sooner or later, fighting for just another breath, another moment of life before the Big Nothing closes in. And there, but for $50,000 go you or I. What’s so holy about fifty grand that it buys a man’s life? How much is $50,000 in pieces of silver, Mr Howards? A thousand? Two thousand? Once a man’s life was sold for thirty pieces of silver, Mr Howards, just thirty, and he was Jesus Christ. How many lives you got in your Freezers worth more than His? You think any man’s life is worth more money than was the life of Jesus Christ?”

And Gelardi filled the screen with the face of Benedict Howards, ghost-white in an extreme close-up that showed every razor nick, every pimple, network of coarse open pores, the eyes of a maddened trapped carnivore as Jack Barren’s voice said, “And maybe we’ll have some answers from Benedict Howards after this word from our sponsor.” Jesus H. himself on a bicycle! Barron thought gleefully as they rolled the commercial. Days like this, I scare myself.

“Oooh, does he want to talk to you! ” Vince Gelardi’s voice said over the intercom circuit the moment the commercial was rolling. “Sounds like he’s down with hydrophobia.” Barron saw Gelardi grin, give him the highsign, start the count with “90 Seconds” on the promptboard as Benedict Howards’ face appeared on the tiny number two vidphone screen and his voice came on in the middle of a tirade:

“… to the fucking fishes! No one plays games like that with Benedict Howards. You lay off me, you crazy bastard, or I’ll have you off the air and in jail for libel before—”

“Fuck off, Howards!” Barron said. “And before you shoot your big mouth off again, just remember that this call goes through the control booth, it’s not a private line. (He shot Howards a cool-it, we’re-still-fencing, don’t-spill-the-beans look.) You know where all this is at, and you’ve got about sixty seconds before we go on the air again to give me a reason to lay off—and I don’t mean a lot of dumb threats. I don’t like threats. Tell you just what’s gonna happen in the next segment. I’m gonna tear you to pieces, is all, but I’m gonna leave just enough left so you can throw in the towel during the next commercial and save what’s left of your ass. Unless you wanna be smart, meet my terms now— and we both know what those terms are.”

“Don’t threaten me, you goddamned clown!” Howards roared. “You lay off, or I’ll just hang up, and when I get through with you, you won’t be able to get a job cleaning cesspools in—”

“Go ahead, hang up,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.” “I’ve got five calls just like the first one—only seedier—lined up to fill the rest of the show. I don’t need you on the air to do you in. One way or the other you’re gonna learn it doesn’t pay to screw around with me, ’cause unless you come around by the next commercial your Freezer Bill has had it, and your whole fucking Foundation will stink so bad you’ll think Judas Iscariot was your press agent. How’s that grab you, bigshot?”

“You filthy fuck—” and Gelardi cut Howards off just in time as the promptboard flashed “On the Air”.

Jack Barron grinned at his own image filling the monitor—flesh-eyes digging phosphor-dot-eyes in adrenalin-feedback reaction—and he felt a strange lightheaded exhilaration, a psychic erection. More than anticipation of the coming catbird-seat five-aces-in-the-hole poker game for the bit chips with Howards blood humming behind his ears, Barron felt the primal sap rising, the hot berserker joy ghost of Berkeley Baby Bolshevik jugular thrill of the hunt, amplified by electronic satellite network hundred million Brackett Count living-color image-power shooting sparks out of his phosphor-dot eyes, and for the first time felt himself giving the show over to the gyroscope of his endocrine system and didn’t know what would happen next. And didn’t care.

Gelardi gave Howards a lower left-quadrant inquisition dock inset—Dolores Pulaski having finished her schtick—as Barron said: “Okay, we’re back on the air, Mr Howards, and we’re gonna talk about your favorite subject for a change. Let’s talk about money. How many… er, clients you figure you got in your Freezers?”

“There are over a million people already in Foundation Freezers,” Howards answered (and Barron could sense him fighting for purchase, trying to anticipate the line of the jugular thrust he knew was coming). “So you see, Freezing is not really just for the few at all. A million human beings with hope for eternal life someday is quite a large—”

“You ain’t just whistling Dixie,” Barron interrupted. “A million’s a nice round number. Let’s continue with our little arithmetic lesson, shall we? How much would you say it costs to maintain one body in a cryogenic Freezer for one year?”