Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“Wouldn’t have signed the contract if I didn’t, now, would I?” Barron said. (Howards sensed the shrewd, electric danger in his sly voice. Watch it! Watch it! He’s playing that Bug Jack Barron game again.) “Question is, why are you so hot to make me immortal so damn quick?”

Benedict Howards felt the scalpel in the question probing for what the bastard’s been probing for all along—the secret of the treatment. And you’re not gonna find that out nohow, Barron, not till it’s too late. Can’t push him now, gotta back off, damn it, or… Can’t let him get suspicious about the treatment!

“Tell you the truth, Barron,” he said, “I get carried away. Just thinking about it reminds me I’m immortal, really immortal, and I just can’t see why anyone would wait five minutes longer than they had to. But I suppose you can’t feel that now—just wait till you stand where I stand, you’ll understand then. But you do what you want. I don’t give a damn. It’s your life, Barron, your immortal life; I’ve got mine, and that’s all I really care about.”

“Never figured you for a True Believer, Bennie,” said Barron, smiling. (But the smile was guarded, a put-on?) “Don’t worry, I’ll be there to collect when I’m good and ready.”

And I’ll be there to collect you, you smart-ass bastard, Howards thought as he turned to leave. Save your bullshit tricks for Wednesday nights, Barron, we’re both gonna need ’em. You’ll go to Colorado, and you’ll do it soon, or else. No flunky holds out on Benedict Howards!

“For the last time, Sara, we play this my way—not yours,” Jack Barron said, seeing her naked body stiff, half fetaled, and about as sexy as an old inner tube, lying uptight and pale in the sickly city moonlight that filtered through the bedroom skylight, framing them both, curled face to face untouching like bleached tadpoles on the electrically-warmed bed, like the spotlight of some cheapjack off-off-Broadway two-hundred-seat playhouse.

“But what the hell is your way?” she said, that old six-year-dead whine creeping back into her voice, ghost of breaking-up days, and her eyes were glassy mirrors in the darkness, mirroring depths beyond depths—or just an illusion about as deep as a phosphor-dot pattern on a TV

Half the time I think I know this chick through to where she lives, he thought, and the rest of the time I wonder if she lives anywhere or do I just see illusions of depths, my self-projected Sara of the mind on the vidphone screen of her face? And his naked body next to hers felt at this moment like a piece of meat connected to his mind only by the most novocained of sensory circuits.

“Why didn’t we go to Colorado with Howards?” she was saying. “Why don’t we take the treatment right away? Then that slimy Howards’d have nothing left to hold over our heads, and you could start right in on him again next Wednesday. And why did you want to play that stupid game with him, leave him guessing whether I told you everything or not? Why…?”

Why? Why? Why? thought Jack Barron. Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle! Go explain to her; you can’t even explain it to yourself—belly-message is all, smell of danger behind everything, reality behind reality behind reality slippery feel of uncertainty like driving through traffic in rain fogged wind-shield stoned on acid; impossible to know where objective stone-wall reality’s at, but knowing for sure you don’t see it yet, gotta inch along real slow by the seat of your pants or get run over by Howards’ Mack Truck Chinese box lie within lie within lie puzzle…

“Because it’s just what Bennie wants me to do,” he said, if only to cut off the nagging sound of her voice with his own. “He wanted us to have the treatment now, he wanted it real bad, so bad that when I let him know that I knew how hot he was for us to do it, he backed off. And that’s just not Bennie’s pattern, that cat’s gotta be real uptight about blowing something to back water…”

Just don’t add up, Barron thought. Bennie’s too paranoid, and not dumb enough to trust me. Makes no sense, one thing he really has on me now is immortality, I was him. I’d withhold the treatment until I delivered the goods, got the Freezer Bill through at least, only real insurance Bennie’s got. And that he’s hot to throw away! Stick the ace he holds right up my sleeve, put me in the catbird-seat. So, somehow, that immortality treatment’s gotta be his real insurance— his ace in the hole, not mine. But how? It just doesn’t add up. And until it does, Jack Barron doesn’t come within a thousand miles of that damned Rocky Mountain Freezer. Sara reached out, touched the inner curve of his upper thigh. But it felt mechanical and far away; he just wasn’t in the mood, didn’t think she really was either. “What’re you thinking about?” she asked. “You’re a million miles away.”

“I wish to hell I knew,” Barron said. “I just got the feeling I’m in over my head, is why I don’t want to take that treatment now, got the feeling it’d get me in too deep in something I don’t dig. Everything that’s happened since I got involved in this daisy-chain with Howards seems unreal—this President bullshit… immortality… they’re just words, Sara, words out of some comic book or science fiction magazine, can’t taste ’em, feel ’em, smell ’em, make ’em add up to anything that feels real. But that fucker Howards, he’s real, no doubt about it, he smells real. And there’s something oozing out of him that’s real too, something big and scary, and I’m in it up to the eyeballs and I just don’t know what it is…”

“I think I understand,” Sara said, and her hand tightened on his thigh; she inched closer to him on the bed and he began, almost against his will, to pick up on the warmth of her beside him.

“But isn’t it just because you’re letting things happen, not making them happen? You’re looking at it backwards—you should say to yourself, I’ve gotta stop Benedict Howards, and I’ve gotta keep immortality, and I’ve gotta do whatever I have to to do it. You can’t wait for Howards to give you an opening, and you can’t wait for someone else to do it, and you shouldn’t worry about what Howards can do to us. Believe in yourself, Jack. Believe you can beat Howards no matter what he does; I believe it, and it’s my life too. Oh, Jack, it’s just too big… immortality for the whole world, or that lizard Howards going on and on and on… You can’t cop-out now!”

“Cop-out?” Barron snarled in an instant lash-out defensive reaction. “Who the fuck are you to give me lectures about copping out, after what you’ve done, after the game you played with my head and Benedict Howards?” And immediately he was sorry.

“Cause she’s right, in her own dumb way, he thought. That cocksucker Howards! Sara never was in his league, who is, he uses people, and then tosses ’em away like a snotty Kleenex; did it to Sara, do it to me I give him the chance, do it to the whole fucking country. That’s where it’s at, all right, Howards dealing a bummer to the whole dumb country, and old Jack Barron dealing his power-junk for him on living-color junior high school street corners. That’s exactly where it’s at, Barron, and you can’t con yourself otherwise.

“I deserved—”

“No you didn’t Sara,” Barron said, and drew her asexually to him, hugged her tight, sucking up her plain human warmth, hoping she was getting the same off him ’cause God knows she needs it I need it we all need it, need a little human warmth, little flesh-reality, with a freakout monster like Benedict Howards running amok, shooting up the world with his lousy paranoid junk. “You hit me a little too close to home, is all. Bravery, you’re talking about, courage is all, and right now that’s just a word, too…”