Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Yet he found himself listening in dread fascination, unable to think past Howards’ words as Bennie babbled on like some damn production manager conducting a guided tour of a refrigerator factory:

“Of course this is just a pilot plant… If we could solve the problem of safe revival from the Freezers we wouldn’t need all this crap—just irradiate ’em as soon as we get ’em and drop ’em in Freezers, then thaw ’em out when we need ’em, save a lot of money. We’re working on it, but they tell me that’s still years away, so we gotta make do. Keeping ’em alive after the radiation’s the real bind. What with the radiation disease and cancer, none of ’em last more than a couple of weeks. So the timing’s real tricky, keeping a dozen or so always ready. Damn, if they’d only figure out how to keep glands viable in the Freezers we could get rid of all this mess.”

As they reached the door at the far end of the ward, the man behind the desk looked away from his dials briefly as Howards said: “Don’t pay any attention to us. I’m just giving the guided tour to our very first client.”

Then he turned to Barron, his eyes unreadable beacons of madness, and said, “Still, a pretty neat set-up for a pilot plant, eh, Barron?”

Barron felt the flood of unbearable sensory data finally getting through to where he lived. Murder. Some kind of crazy mass-murder! He’s killing these kids, killing ’em slow, gotta be totally nuts to show me all this. What’s he think I am… gotta know I’m gonna nail him to the wall…

“What the fuck is this?” Barron shouted. (And seeing a window in the door before him opaqued with ripples like a toilet window, he moved toward it.) “And what the hell’s behind this door?”

Swift as a cat Howards was between him and the door, his eyes wide with terror. “You don’t want to look in there,” he said, his voice frenzied and shrill. “Take my word, you don’t want to see. That’s the post-radiation ward… cancer… rotten flesh… falling apart… It’s ugly, Barron, they tell me it’s real ugly. I’ve never been in there, I don’t want to see. Doctors, they’re used to that kind of stuff… But we’d both be sick if you opened that door.”

“What are you doing? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

“Stop raving, Barron, haven’t you guessed? With enough of the right radiation, kids’ glands can be retarded just enough so they stay in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance, keep the body the way it is, never aging, forever. Immortality, but with two big catches. First, it only works with children under twelve, so that’d mean no immortality for grown men—for us. And it wouldn’t work anyway, ’cause the radiation we gotta use to balance the glands is a fatal dose. Big joke, eh? Got a way to make kids immortal, only the treatment kills ’em—the operation was successful but the patient died.

“But the glands don’t die, Barron. After they’re irradiated they’re still perfect and balanced to keep a man alive forever. The radiation doesn’t kill the glands at all, all they need is a healthy new body to keep ’em alive, and they’ll keep that body young and alive forever. Just a simple transplant operation, and with the stuff they got today, transplants almost always take. They don’t even have to put the glands where they’d be in a normal body, just a package in the gut and another in the back, not even a major operation—duck soup for my quacks. See what I mean? We got glands that’ll keep us alive forever now, but that doesn’t mean they gotta be ours.”

Snakes undulating slug-slime oozing all over his skin, Barron felt mindless urge to tear it all away, rip himself apart with his fingernails, tear out the soft green pulsing globs of flesh dripping stolen life-juices of Forever, death-junk, drip-dripping eternally into his veins… Images of sleeping faces of mountains of Evers’ slum children Franklin’s smashed face hard metal bee by his ear gutted bodies exploding garbage can slime rivers of blood thick like slime in which he was drowning! drowning! in slime in bodies of niggers crawling all over him maggots inside him—all burned unforgettable tracers of anguish through the quivering meat of his brain.

“You fucking crazy ax-murderer!” he screamed. “You monster! You got no right to be alive! And you won’t be, Bennie, I swear, one way or another I’ll kill you! Got those tapes… I’ll get you even if you kill me right here right now! Go ahead, have your apes shoot me right now! You better! Kill me! Kill me! Either way, I’ll kill you! You fucking—”

And with an animal growl, he lunged at Howards, felt the tips of his fingers just touch the scaly dry skin of Howards’ throat—and the guards grabbed him, one to each arm, snapped his arms behind his shoulder blades in a vicious double hammerlock.

“Murder?” Howards whined. “What do you mean, murder? So the two of us are alive, and two of them are dead… How long would they have lived, at most a century, and then, either way, those kids’d be the same place—dead. So it costs two lifetimes to give us two million lifetimes, don’t you see, life comes out ahead on the deal a million to one. That’s not murder, that’s the opposite, pushing back the fading black circle, pushing it back, back, back, opening, not closing fading black circle of death, pushing it back a million years! What do you mean, murder, it’s life, man, it’s life. Not to do it, that’s murder… murdering yourself, throwing yourself to the fading black circle, six feet of eviscerated nigger maggots ten million years of vultures laughing with plastic beaks up nose down throat fading black circle of death and murder…”

As Howards screamed at him, eyes rolling in pure terror inches away, face to face, hate to hate, Barron felt himself turning cold—the cold logic of light years of electric-circuit-insulation distance, the kinesthetic horror of the things sewn into his body becoming phosphor-dot images of death on the screen of his mind. He scrabbled for purchase and found it in the reflexive satellite-network interface forming between his consciousness and the phosphor-dot mosaic-image of madness in Benedict Howards’ eyes.

Cool it, he told himself, you’re kick-’em-in-the-ass Jack Barron, and you’re alive. And knowingly, he conned himself, sucking up the vidphone-TV-screen-interface anesthetic reality, forced himself cold.

Gotta stop him, kill him, finish him, is all. Got the muscle to do it, got murder tapes, Bug Jack Barron hundred million Brackett Count pipeline, GOP insurance; you got him cold.

But glands in your body like green slime crocodiles dripping blood of murdered babies to keep you alive…

He saw that Howards too had retreated to a more bearable level of reality. “So you see, I got you right where I want you after all. Murder, yeah, legally it’s murder, and it’s gonna take some doing before I can change the law. Before we change the law—’cause you’re in just as deep as I am, Barron. Your contract… I’ll bet you didn’t read all the fine print, the part where you agree to accept full liability for any results of the treatment. Thought that was just to cover us in case you died?

“That contract was drawn up by some mighty high-priced lawyers. It’s ironclad, and it’s a signed legal admission to accessory to murder in any court in the country. It’s a confession, and if you blow the whistle on me, I’ll buy twenty witnesses who’ll swear you knew all about the treatment when you signed it. We’re in this together, Barron. You want to stay alive, you take your orders from me.”

A blind berserker flash erupted through Barron: Ruined bodies soft slimy gland-slugs drip-dripping their eternal vampire-slime filling his veins with the blood of broken babies crocodile mouth of Howards’ madness chewing gobbets of cancer forever, so long as he was alive, so long as Howards was surrounded by guns by fifty billion dollars by Freezer Bill by bought President (bought with what?), Congress, safe forever, immortal vampire monster going on and on and on…