Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

And it brought Barron down like a bucket of ice water smack in the face. Sure, I can finish the hatchet-job, he thought, but goodbye Bug Jack Barron, and goodbye free Freeze, and Christ knows what else the bastard can do to me—kamikaze’s the name of that game. An old Dylan lyric ran through his head:

Yeah, I can do him in and he can do me in if we both want to do that Samson schtick. Bluff’s the name of the real game.

And the promptboard told him he had sixty seconds to play his hands.

Look, Howards,” he said, “we can do each other in, or play ball and cool it. Your choice, Bennie-baby. You know what I want, the straight poop plus that other thing. I don’t change my mind—matter of principle. So maybe I’m bluffing, so call me on it, I dare you. But before you do, ask yourself what you’ve got to gain by calling me that’s worth the risk of losing what you’ve got to lose. I’m a dangerous lunatic, Howards, I’m not afraid of you. You that sure you’re not afraid of me?”

Howards was silent for a long moment, bit his lip, then said, “All right, you win. It’s all negotiable. You get me out of this, and we’ll talk turkey on your terms. Good enough?”

The promptboard flashed “30 Seconds” for instant decision on the course of the rest of the show and all that was riding on it. As close to “Uncle” as you’ll hear from Bennie, Barron knew. He’ll say anything now to get off the hook, thinks he can maybe welch later, those fifty-billion-bucks Foundation aces, but he doesn’t know all the aces I got—Luke and Morris’ fun and games up my sleeve, enough to bluff him out for good, comes nitty-gritty time, no matter what he’s holding. So okay Bennie, you get off the hook or anyway I don’t give the descabello, leave your bod bleeding but alive.

“All right, Howards, things don’t get any worse tonight, but don’t expect to make any big points in the next ten minutes either. All I’m gonna do is make things kinda fuzzy in all those heads out there.”

“But you’ve got me backed into a corner,” Howards whined. “How you gonna get me out of this with a whole skin?”

“That’s my line of evil, Bennie,” Barron said. He flashed Howards an ironic man-in-control smirk. “What’s the matter, Bennie, don’t you trust me?”

And the promptboard flashed “On the Air,” and Gelardi gave Howards the same lower left-quadrant inquisition seat as before.

“Now what were we talking about?” Barron said. (Gotta back off real gradual-like, and not too far.) “Ah, yes, research. Fifty billion dollars’ worth of research. Since by some fancy sleight of hand the Foundation is tax-exempt, I think that the American people have the right to know just what kind of… research that money is being spent on. Now, we can always check this with the tax boys, Mr Howards, so let’s have the straight poop—just what is your annual research budget?”

“Somewhere between three and four billion dollars,” Howards said. Barron foot-signaled Gelardi to give him a half-screen, ease him out of the hotseat.

“That’s a far cry from fifty billion dollars, isn’t it?” Barron said, but with the cutting edge eased out of his voice (come on schmuck, he telepathed, pick up on it, don’t expect me to make your points for you). “What’s the story on that fifty billion?”

Howards seemed to relax a bit, catching on that the lead was being passed over to him. “You’ve been tossing that figure around pretty freely,” he said, “but you obviously don’t understand what it represents. If you’d studied a Freeze Contract you’d know that the $50,000 per client is not a fee turned over free and clear to the Foundation. Upon clinical death, the total assets of the client go into a trust-fund administered by the Foundation for as long as the client is biologically and legally dead. But on revival all assets originally placed in the trust fund revert to the client, and only the interest and capital appreciation during the time the client is in the Freezer actually become the property of the Foundation. So you see, that fifty billion dollars is simply not ours to spend. It certainly is an enormous amount of money, but the fact is that we must maintain all of it as a reserve against the day when we can revive our clients and return it to them. The fund works essentially the way a bank works—a bank can’t go around spending its deposits, and we can’t spend that fifty billion dollars. It’s not really ours.”

Can’t make me look bad, Barron thought. Can’t make it too easy; gotta back off slow. “But a chunk of capital that big grows awfully fast unless you’re some kind of idiot or you’re blowing it on the horses,” he said. “And you’ve just admitted that all increases in the original capital do belong to the Foundation, so you’ve gotta have billions in assets that are yours free and clear. What about that?”

Howards pounced quickly. (Now he sees daylight! Barron thought.) “Quite true. But our expenses are enormous… something like five billion a year for maintenance, and that eats up all the interest on the original capital. So the four billion for research must come from profits on the investment of our own capital. After all, if we start spending capital on research we’d quickly go bankrupt.”

Suddenly, almost unwillingly, Barron realized that Howards had handed him a weapon that could make the rest of the show look like a love-pat. Shit, he thought, Bennie’s got a vested interest in keeping all those quick-Frozen stiffs dead! The day he can thaw ’em out and revive ’em he loses that fifty-billion-dollar trust fund. Hit him with that baby, and you’ll stomp him into the ground! Why—Cool it! Cool it! he reminded himself. You’re supposed to be pulling the lox out of the hole, not digging it deeper!

“So it all comes down to research,” Barron said, reluctantly leading away from the jugular. “Four billion bucks is still one hell of a research budget, more than enough to hide… all kinds of interesting things. Suppose you explain what kind of research you’re spending all that bread on?”

Howards shot him a dirty look.

Jeez, what you expect, Bennie? Barron thought. I still gotta look like kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron, don’t I?

“First off, you’ve got to understand that all those people in our Freezers are dead. Dead as anyone in a cemetery. All cryogenic freezing does is preserve the bodies from decay—those bodies are simply corpses. The problem of bringing a corpse back to life is enormous. I’m no scientist and neither are you, Barron, but you can imagine how much research and experimentation must be done before we can actually bring a dead man back to life—and it’s all very expensive. And even then, cures must be developed for whatever killed the clients in the first place—and most of the time, it’s old age. And that’s the toughest nut of all to crack, a cure for aging. I mean, so you revive a ninety-year-old client, but if you haven’t licked aging, he dies again almost immediately. See what we’re up against? All this will cost billions a year for decades, maybe centuries. Man in my position’s gotta take the long view, the real long view…” And for a moment, Howards’ eyes seemed to be staring off into some unimaginable future.

And Barron got a flash: Could it be that the whole Freezer schtick’s a shuck? Way to raise money for something else? Pie in the sky in the great bye and bye? The whole Freezer Program’s useless unless they lick aging. (And how much is that free Freeze really worth? Maybe I’m selling myself awfully cheap…) But the way Bennie babbled in my office about living forever, that was no shuck, he was really zonked on it! Yeah, it all adds up—he doesn’t want to lick the revival problem ’cause that’d cost him that fifty billion. But he’s sure hot to live forever. Five’ll get you ten the Foundation scientists are just pissing around with revival research, big bread’s gotta be behind immortality research. And if that gets out, how many more suckers gonna spring for that fifty thou? Bennie-baby, we gonna have a long long talk. Let’s see if we can hit a little nerve, he thought, what they call an exploratory operation, as the promptboard flashed “3 Minutes.”