Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Nothing looks the same when you can figure on a million years. Fifty million getting the Freezer Bill through Congress, a hundred million to buy a President every four years, and, if you can’t buy him, for ten million you can hire a pro to kill anyone… Teddy Hennering, and, yes, Teddy the Pretender too, it ever comes down to it.

You can do literally anything if you’ve got working capital and can amortize the cost over a million years. Save money too on all those smart-ass tax lawyers; cheaper to buy a new law when you got what it takes to make it stand a million years.

So screw you, Jack Barron, whatever bush-league crap you’re up to, coming out here like this, walking right in for the treatment after I been chasing you for a month, after you gotta know I hired that dumb prick who missed you. Don’t matter what you think you’re up to, what counts is you’re here. Yeah, smart-ass, you and your woman are right here where I want you, and until I say so, there’s no way you can get out. And you don’t leave here till you have the treatment, and once you do, you’re in it with me—in it in ways you can’t even dream of now… More than your life on the line, it’s the next million years.

Yeah, no way you could ever trust three-score-and-ten Jack Barron, but immortal Jack Barron’ll be in the bag for certain. For dead certain, dead like rotting in six feet of maggots fading black vultures laughing over your flesh for ten thousand years of tube up nose down throat life leaking away in plastic vulturebeak bottles simpering nurses bedpans of maggots clashes of metal drooling in mud laughing images of eviscerated niggers pickaninny eyes rolling in cancerous bloody cotton fading fading fading in ruined balls shriveling rotting…

“Mr Barron is here,” the plastic-secretary-voice of the intercom said.

Howards whirled the chair around, blinked his eyes once, and was back. Watch that stuff, he told himself. Couple days, it’ll all be over, Barron in the bag, and everything safe from fading black faces of eviscerated pickaninny eyes rolling in—

The door opened, and into the room walked Jack Barron. There was something hard and round and black behind his big, electric-dangerous eyes, like a fading black circle vortex reaching out as he stepped across the room. His eyes never leaving Howards, he sat down in the chair by the desk, stuck his feet up on it, lit up one of those damn Acapulco Golds dope-fiend cigarettes, and said: “Save the heart-attack, Bennie, this is the straight schmear, just between you and me. I know everything, Bennie, everything. I got you pinned to the wall, and I got a mighty good reason to nail you, best reason in the world, and we both know what it is.”

He knows! thought Howards. He knows fading black circle of eviscerated—no, no, he can’t know that. It’s gotta be another smart-ass bluff.

“I don’t know what game you’re playing now, Barron,” he said, “but whatever it is, and whatever you want, it won’t work. You’re on my ground now, and this’ll be the last time you’ll dare to forget it.”

“You wouldn’t be threatening me, would you?” Barron asked, with that snotty phony innocence. “It doesn’t pay to threaten me. Haven’t you learned that? Apparently not. Thought you could handle me the same way you did Hennering, didn’t you? But you can see it didn’t work.”

So he found out about that coward Hennering, and he knows it was me bought that dumb Mississippi hit—and he thinks he can use it! Could that be all it is, not fading cancerous balls of bloody cotton pickaninny circle of assassins plastic vulture beaks up nose, down—Get hold of yourself, man! There’s no way he can know. And even if he does, he’s here, and you’ve got him. And he soothed himself by stroking the guard-call button hidden under the lip of the desk.

“What did you come here for anyway?” Howards said.

“Just what I said on the phone, Sara’s in your outer office, and we both want the immortality treatment. We’re exercising our legal option under the contract, and we want the treatment now. Any objections?”

Howards found himself almost laughing. The idiot’s here to somehow force me into doing exactly what I want him to—and after he kept refusing to do it. But that doesn’t make sense!

“No objections,” Howards said a bit uncertainly. “You play ball with Benedict Howards, you’ll see a deal’s a deal.”

“Groovy. I’ve got no objections now because I know the big secret, found it out in Mississippi. Five kids bought for about a quarter million dollars, and then someone tries to kill me to keep me from finding out, and there’s only one logical conclusion since you’re the only man knew I was going to be there long enough in advance to contract out a hit.”

He knows! He knows! Someone talked! Palacci? One of the doctors? Yarborough, Bruce, Hennering (no, Hennering’s dead!)? Some son of a bitch talked, sold out to the fading black circle of eviscerated death maggots up nose down throat, some cocksucker sold out a million years… or is he just bluffing again? Does he know it all, or just faking? Got to find out…

“You can’t be this stupid, Barron,” Howards said. “You said yourself you knew I killed Hennering. (Give it away, admit it, see if he twitches… No! No! Howards thought as Barron smiled placidly, not moving a muscle, that much he really did know.) So why did you come here? You know I’d have the balls to kill you if I killed Hennering, a goddamn Senator. What makes you think I’ll make you immortal now, when I could kill you a lot easier than I killed that prick Hennering, and a lot cheaper too?” And under the desk, he touched his thumb to the guard-call button.

Barron reached into his sportjac pocket (a gun? Howards thought wildly in a moment of pure panic), and put what looked like a small transistor radio with two speaker-grids down on the desk. One of those new Bell miniphones, Howards thought.

“That’s why,” said Jack Barron. “Recognize it, don’t you? It’s one of those new miniphones that feed directly into the phone-satellite circuit, and it’s been picking up every word you said, feeding it directly back to New York to three separate vidphone recorders. And before you can even think about making a move, there’ll be five separate copies of the tape sent to five different mailing services with orders to send ’em to Luke Greene, Gregory Morris, the FBI, the AP, and the Colorado fuzz—unless I’m back in New York on Tuesday to stop ’em. Murder, Howards, you’ve admitted to murder, and it’s all on tape to be shouted from the rooftops by your own voice, if anything happens to me… or even if I don’t like the way you smile.”

Benedict Howards sighed a sigh of naked relief. You prick, you’ve trapped yourself, he thought, thinking anything could matter once you came here. Murder! What a joke, murder. Thinking to threaten me with electric chair death sentence your own funeral, Barron! He doesn’t know, doesn’t know the only thing that matters. By tomorrow I’ll have the same weapon, electric chair death sentence to use on immortal Jack Barron any time he thinks of crossing me. Murder! You’re too much, Barron, and to think you had me going, fading black circle of eviscerated niggers trap you too, and tie you to me, immortal murderers both of us, with a million years to lose… and he walked right into it. All that smart-ass conniving led him right here to me.

“Well, Howards, the game’s over, give!” Barron said. “Let’s hear all the nice juicy details on your immortality treatment, and don’t bother to tell me what lab techniques you used to develop it, that I already know.”