Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Howards smiled as he pressed home the button. So that’s it, he knows about eviscerated fading black nigger children from black scum would sell their own flesh got no right to live, and he thinks we just used ’em for expensive guinea pigs. No sense in telling him now he’s wrong. Wait till after the operation. Let him feel how he’s hooked when he wakes up immortal. Won’t have to tell him who’s boss then, he’ll tell himself.

“Don’t worry, Barron,” he said, “you’ll have your answer soon enough. But not until you can understand what it really means.”

“I warn you, Howards, you’ll tell me everything now or—”

And then two uniformed guards, pistols drawn, burst in.

Barron got to his feet wheeling, blanched for a moment as he stared into the barrels of the guns. But by the time he had turned his back on the guards to leer at Howards, that fucking smart-ass smirk was back. But the joke was on him!

“Won’t work, Bennie. I know you’re bluffing. Go ahead, have your shaved apes shoot me right now, I dare you. And those tapes go straight to—”

“Shoot you, Barron?” Benedict Howards smiled triumphantly. “Why would I do that? You’re much too valuable alive and immortal. These gentlemen will simply escort you to the hospital, wouldn’t want you to get lost. You guys pick up that woman in the outer office too, on the way outside. You’ll both have the operation and be back safe and sound in New York on Tuesday, just as you planned, but with one minor modification—you’ll be more than ready to take orders from me.”

“You’re crazy,” Barron said. “But who cares, I’ve still got you where I want you, no matter what you think. So we play your game till I leave here. Why not, I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. But why the guns? You can tell your creeps to put ’em away, they don’t need ’em.”

“Just a precaution,” Howards said. “When you’re guarding a million years it pays to take precautions. But don’t worry, when you wake up immortal you’ll know just what I mean.”

Know what it means to wake up each morning, breathe the air, know it’s forever so long as you own ten thousand acres safe from assassins, Congressmen, President, Freezer Utility Bill holding back the fading black circle, safe, safe behind impregnable walls of power, safe forever in cool closed rooms in impassable mountains, know what’s to lose when you’re immortal, know that you lose what I lose if you don’t play ball…

Know what it means to be my flunky all the way, Barron: power of my word eternal life or death eternal in six feet of maggots eviscerated niggers with plastic beaks up nose down throat laughing for a million lost years just my shut mouth between you and the fading black circle, way it’s your shut mouth between death and me and it’ll be shut forever, those tapes both our electric chair dead flesh shriveled balls death sentence, in it together for the next million years—just you and me.

And the fading black circle of maggots arms holding us together, always there to hold back with ten thousand acres of impassable mountains, Congress, President, silence… But always there waiting with plastic tubes maggot-filled bedpans of life’s fluids leaking away… But you’ll never get me, none of you—not Benedict Howards, not fading black circle electric-chair assassins eviscerated rolling-eyed niggers you’ll never be strong enough to take it away, not ever, never… never… Never! Never! Hold back the fading black circle with life-against-death power! Never! Never! Never let them take Forever away!

He saw that Barron was looking at him in bewilderment, and behind it there was confusion, fear, and disgust. Christ, what do I look like? I’ve gotta control it, take it easy, the long view, million-year insurance amortization! Yeah, yeah, get hold of yourself, it’s all right, no fading black circle of cancerous picaninnies electric-chair death sentence ever’s gonna be able to take it away…

But he heard his own voice sound like an alien thing, pale and croaking, as he shrieked: “Get him over to the hospital! Take him away! Take him away!”

Never! Never! They’ll never make me die! Fading black circle… you always lose never win… I’ll kill you! Kill you! I’ll never die!

Guns and a long white corridor… green mountains looming over ether-smelling sheets… lemon-colored ceiling… soft sunlight shadows becoming bright-blue fluorescent operating-theater glare lying warm and weak on a soft pillow… the guns of the guards lifting him on to the stretcher-table… pentathol-needle of drowsy indifference… wheeling the table past looming cool mountains… cold white robes of the cold white doctors… nurses burbling machines… impersonal steel of scalpels blued by harsh fluorescent lighting… cotton swab in the warm comfortable bed with the shadowed mountains on the ceiling… smell of hospital mingling with the smell of fir trees… the needle dripping sleep in the pit of his arm… And behind him he sensed another table’s vibrations, wheeling into the blue-white operating theater behind him (Sara?) on the shore of the consciousnessless sea unable-not-wanting to move… the white robes… blue-scalpel machinery of the operating theater blurring to white sheets, lemon-colored ceiling, cool green mountains… anesthesia-euphoria of awakening-weakness… smell of ether to pine needles, lemon-colored doctors…

Then (when?) the blurring became a memory of a moment past—and Jack Barron was awake, fully conscious, aware in retrospect of an interminable sojourn on the interface between sleep and wakefulness, images of the preoperative past molding with the postoperative indefinite present as if that unrememberable moment of crossover had been prolonged ten thousand years. But now he was finally awake all the way, and he was:

Lying in bed, his head on a warm white pillow, his unfocused eyes staring up at a lemon-yellow ceiling, and to his left was a full-length door-window looking out past buildings on the Rocky Mountains, and the smell of pine drifted in past the heat-curtain shimmer that kept out the cool mountain breeze.

Jeez, he thought, what day is it? How long have I been out? No calendar in the plain white-walled room, only the bed and a small hospital table, not even a clock. And if they used Deep Sleep recovery, which they probably did, no way of telling how long I’ve been out.

Confused memories swam into focus. Those cats with the guns took me to the operating… No wait, they took me to this room, put me on a stretcher-table, gave me a needle, and I was already half out when they wheeled me into the operating room, and then they wheeled someone else in after me—must’ve been Sara—last thing I remember. Sara must be immortal now too.

Immortal…? Don’t feel any different, at least I don’t think I do. Tuning in on his body Barren felt a slight soreness in the muscles of his stomach, a barely noticeable kink in his back, felt kind of comfortably weak and drowsy, like lying in bed the morning after a hard night. Nothing different, really, I still feel like me, is all.

Is anything different?

Barren strained his mind trying to remember just exactly how his body had always felt, not something you’re really aware of unless you’re real tired or sick. My imagination, just looking for it, or do I feel just a little different? Hard to tell. I don’t feel sick. A little weak from the operation, maybe, that’s for sure. Weak, yeah, but it’s a funny kind of weak, feels almost too good, like when I get up I could go run a mile… or is thinking maybe I’m immortal just playing games with my head?

Immortal… Shit, how do you know you’re immortal till you’ve lived a couple hundred years? No reason to suddenly feel different. Thing is, I suppose, you just keep feeling the same, young and healthy and strong the way you started, when you turn forty, fifty, seventy, a hundred… What feels different, I guess, is you don’t ever feel different, forty, a hundred, two hundred years, and you still feel the same, and that can’t feel different till after it hasn’t happened.