Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

But then why’s he so fucking sure he’s got me where he wants me?

All this screwing around… Then it flashed like cold fire through him: Howards’ been dying to make me immortal all along. And now I’ve been had? But how? He can’t touch me now, and I can walk all over him. The treatment… yeah, he got uptight every time I tried to find out what the fuck it was, and now he’s telling me and I’m not listening! And whatever it is, pretty safe bet it’s really been done to me. Listen, you prick, for chrissakes listen, isn’t this what you played all those games to hear?

“Man’s as old as his glands,” Howards was saying. “You could keep the hormone balance you had as a kid, you’d never stop growing… No, that’s wrong, I think… or… but that’s not important. Point is, you’re no older than your glands. Up to a point, a kid’s glands keep his body from aging, something about anabolism exceeding catabolism, whatever that means. Anyway, whatever it means, the moment it reverses you start to age, start dying, fading black… Way they explained it, normally a human being’s either growing or aging, never inbetween, depending on the balance of his glands. It’s like a clock at midnight—between one tick and the next it’s a different day, one tick you’re growing, next tick you’re aging. You keep growing, sooner or later it kills you, they told me, but I don’t really understand why… . But anyway, the moment your glands pass over that line, sometime in your teens, they say, you start to die. You see, Barron? You see? Immortality’s all in the tick.”

“Tick, schmick,” Barron finally said. “What’re you gibbering about?”

“You’re pretty dumb, Barron, can’t you see it? If it’s exactly twelve o’clock Tuesday night and you stop the clock right on the moment it stops being Tuesday, and before it can start being Wednesday you’re caught inbetween. Not growing, not aging. That smart-ass Palacci calls it ‘Homeostatic Endocrine Balance.’ Stop that gland ‘clock’ right between ticks and keep it there, balanced between growing and aging, and that’s immortality. That’s what we’ve got, way to take all the glands and keep ’em balanced what they call homeostatically forever. Forever! We got glands that’ll stay young forever, Barron. That’s why we’ll never die.”

Makes a kind of screwy sense, Barron admitted, fishing in his memory for two terms of Berkeley biology. “Anabolism and catabolism equal metabolism,” the meaningless phrase from some old gypsheet popped into his mind. But what the fuck did it mean? Lessee, metabolism’s like a biological checking account: anabolism is growth, catabolism’s decay—or the other way around? Anyway, in a kid, growth exceeds decay, so the account’s solvent. And in an adult it’s vice versa and you’re overdrawn, so you start to die. Yeah, but if you were just even, and could keep it that way, like Howards says, you’d be immortal! That all immortality is, tuning up the old glands in the shop the way they tune the Jag’s engine? But how do they do it?

“I think I dig now, Bennie,” he said. “Just out of curiosity, how do your boys do it—I mean, tinker with all those glands?”

Howards leered at him, and the cold words he spoke were somehow totally obscene: “Hard radiation and lots of it. An overload of radiation kept up for two days.”

Barron went cold. Radiation—a witch-word, like cancer. Overload of radiation for two days! But that means—

Howards laughed. “Take it easy, Barron, you’re not gonna die. I’m not dead, am I, and we’ve both had the same treatment. My boys found out something about some special kind of radiation—in big killing doses, it freezes the balance of the glands in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance thing, if you catch ’em young enough…”

“But all that radiation, what’s it do to your body?”

Howards grimaced, his eyes seemed to glaze over as if he were running some dirty movie on the screen in his head; he muttered something crazy about niggers, then seemed to snap out of it as the guards halted outside a plain steel door.

“I never seen it, but they say it’s pretty awful,” Howards said. “Flesh starts to rot and fall off and the whole body breaks out in a million little cancers… but the glands are okay, if the quacks time it right. Better than—”

“You crazy fucker!” Barron howled, half-lunged at Howards, then stopped as the guards whipped out their pistols.

“Don’t foam at the mouth, Barron, no one said you were irradiated,” Howards said, caressing the knob of the steel door. He laughed. “I’ll show you why we’re both all right, be all right forever, and why I’ve got you right where I want you. I said you had glands that’ll stay young, keep you young forever…” Howards’ eyes were black pits of feral paranoid madness as he turned the doorknob and said, “… but when did I ever say they were yours?” And opened the door.

Beyond the door was what at first glance looked to be a pretty ordinary hospital ward: A long, narrow room, with a central aisle dividing two rows of about a dozen beds each, headboards set flush against either wall. At the far end of the room was a large complex of consoles facing a small desk behind which a white-smocked man sat, apparently monitoring them. To the right of the desk was another door.

But it was the occupants of the beds that made the room a chamber of grotesquerie, filling Barron with a disbelieving nauseous dread.

Two dozen beds, in each of them a young child, none younger than six, none older than about ten, and more than half of them black. All were being fed intravenously, but the tubes feeding the needles taped in their armpits led not to drip-bottles but to a master-tube that ran along each wall and back to the complex of consoles at the rear of the room. A similar arrangement emptied the catheters that snaked out from under each set of bedclothes. Each child had electrodes taped to head and chest, the wires converging in trunk-line cables that ran along either wall to the monitor consoles. There was no sound as they entered the ward, not a head turned, not a muscle moved; the kids were all in deep comas.

The ages… the preponderance of Negroes… Christ on a Harley! Barron thought. These gotta be the poor kids the Foundation bought!

“Neat, eh?” Howards said. “I mean, when you think what a mess it could be, a whole roomful of squalling brats, and the personnel it’d take to take care of ’em… In the short run, all this equipment’s real expensive, but when you think of what it saves on food and salaries and trouble and amortize it out… well, even in the medium run it saves an awful lot of money.”

“What the fuck are you doing to these poor kids?” Barron said. “What’s wrong with ’em, why are they all out cold?”

“Wrong with ’em?” Howards said neutrally, but with some kind of terrible mania leaking out of his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong with ’em, they’re all perfect physical specimens, or you can bet your ass we wouldn’t be blowing the money it takes to keep ’em here. We don’t do anything to them here, this is just our nursery. The whole process is perfectly painless for the kids. From beginning to end they don’t feel a thing. What do you think I am, some kind of sadist? We just keep ’em out and quiet and feed ’em on glucose till they’re ready for processing. Saves time and mess and money this way—one man at the instruments there can run the whole show.”

Can’t be happening, Barron told himself as Howards led him and the guards down the aisle. But he knew damn well it was. A death-stench of madness so thick you could cut it as they walked past the rows of sleeping children plugged into tubes and wires like some hideous circuitry—and that’s all he sees, fucking production line, is all. Production of what? Bennie’s gone totally ’round the bend, and when I get him on the show I’ll tear him to pieces, then tear the pieces to pieces… He’s stark staring mad!