Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

In a mindless spasm-reaction, he pushed her mouth away as the retch wracked through him in a mercifully-dampening anti-climax, and she lay inert atop him, confused eyes bleeding as he stared at her like a cornered animal, trapped and panting.

“Jack…? Wha…? You…”

She stared down at him with wounded, stunned eyes as he felt the membranes of his cheeks singe-contract like an alum wither-reaction, his tongue a lump of dead shoe-leather in his own mouth.

I just can’t cut it, he realized. Can’t live with the taste of my woman the taste of slug-green glands, tasting the stolen life-juices inside her every time I touch her. I gotta tell her, or we’ll be lumps of dirty meat to each other forever, living a lie forever, lost to each other forever. Gotta tell her, is all, no matter what happens.

“Truth between us, Sara,” he said. “I… there’s something I’ve just gotta tell you.”

She stretched against him, cupped his cheeks in hands that felt like damp leather. “What’s with you? I’ve never seen you like this… When I kissed you it was like kissing a… (Her body twitched against him.) And you got… sick, didn’t you? I felt it.”

“It’s not you, Sara. I swear it’s not you, baby. It’s me, the whole fucking world, Benedict Howards…”

“Benedict Howards? What in hell does making love to me have to do with Benedict Howards?”

Barron grimaced. How the fuck do I say it: see, it’s like this, baby, you’re a murderer, dig? Got stolen glands inside you, just like me, life-juices of broken babies oozing so bloody thick I taste it when I kiss you?

“Sara—oh, what the fuck!” he snarled, feeling a hopeless spasm of futility, a get-it-over-with, riff-it-out, retch-reaction. “There just isn’t any easy way to tell you. We’re murderers, Sara, we’re both murderers. Yeah, we got immortality inside us—but you know what it looks like? Looks like slimy green glands—ever see a gland?—all green and wet and dripping ugly slimy stuff, but it keeps you alive, and us it keeps alive forever, glands is all, and you live forever. But they’re not our glands, Sara, we stole ’em. Stole ’em from children, dead, broken children…”

And his body writhed in a gooseflesh spasm.

Her eyes seemed to draw back light-years distant; he felt her body go limp, her hands fall like dead flounders to his chest as she muttered, “What are you talking about?”

“What Howards did to us,” he said, “the immortality treatment. It’s a gland-transplant, is all. They irradiate glands to keep ’em in perfect balance, and then they keep your body from aging, forever, something they call Homeostatic Endocrine Balance. But not our glands, dig? Children’s glands. It only works on children’s glands. That’s why Howards killed Hennering—he found out the Foundation is buying the children, soaking them in hard radiation to balance their endocrine system, then transplanting their glands to make adults immortal.”

“But… but the children, what does… losing their glands do to the children?”

“What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Barron shouted, the vibration bouncing her bare breasts against him. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? It kills them, Sara, it kills them! If the radiation hasn’t killed them first, the transplant operation kills them, and they just throw away the bodies like so much garbage. Because you and I are alive and immortal, two kids Howards bought for the purpose are dead. It’s murder, I’m trying to tell you, pure, simple murder!”

He felt-saw her cringe in a fetal-spasm, shoulders hunching away from his chest knees upward along his thighs, like paper wilting in a fire. Her jaw went slack, the depths of her eyes seemed to take a discontinuous jump backward like a quick-cut reverse-zoom camera image. “Murder… murder… murder…” She mouthed the word over and over, chewing it to two meaningless gibberish syllables.

Barron grabbed her cheeks in both hands, shook her. Her body relaxed, but her eyes were still way out there, light-years away, buried in electric-circuit insulation, and when she spoke it was like a message from a spacecraft commander, cold and detached, from somewhere north of Pluto.

“Inside of us? Children’s glands? Children? Cutting apart children? Cutting open living children, tearing out pieces of living flesh and sewing them inside of me? Children?”

“Please, Sara, for chrissakes, don’t freak out now,” Barron said stridently, feeling strident as he said it, but not knowing what to say, what to do. “Imagine how I feel—knowing Bennie tricked me, outsmarted me, made me ask to be made immortal, made me fight for it, connive for it, go through a million changes, and then I finally get it, win it, for you and me, and when I wake up, I find out… find out inside of me—”

“You didn’t know?” she said, pouncing like a cornered cat. “He tricked you into it? You didn’t know what it was, and you woke up, and then he told you?”

“What the fuck do you think I am?” Barron shouted. “You think I’d let him do a thing like that if I knew? Think I’d let them cut apart some poor kid so I could live forever? What do you think I am, a goddamn monster?”

“ He did it to us,” Sara whispered shrilly, eyes filming to a blank flatness. “ He did it, that monster Howards, with his money and his frozen bodies and his murderers and his dirty lizard eyes seeing right through you, measuring your price like a piece of meat… . We never had a chance, no one has a chance, Howards can make anyone do anything, trick him or kill him or force him or buy him. No one can stop him. He’ll go on and on and on forever, buying children, chopping them up, owning them, owning us, everybody, forever, always that lizard and his cold white…”

“Sara! Sara! For chrissakes!”

Suddenly she grabbed the flesh of his chest, fingers convulsed into talons, digging in, bruising cruelly. “You’ve got to stop him, Jack! You’ve got to stop him! We can’t live with ourselves, we can’t live with each other, can’t stand being alive with murdered things in our bodies till you stop him. You’ve got to be able to stop him!”

Wanting to shout yes! yes! yes!, Barron instead found himself confronting the same cold reality. Kamikaze’s the only way to stop Bennie, take us down to the electric chair with him… To die, to be dead rotting in maggots, tasting nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing… throw away being young and together for a million years. A million years of broken babies’ slug-green glands drip-dripping stolen life-juices inside us…

“I can’t! I can’t!” he cried. “Bennie was too smart for me. Those contracts we signed prove us accessories to murder, evidence that’ll stand up in any court. You understand what that means? It means we’re murderers, is all. I blow the whistle on Bennie, he blows it on us, and we all waltz to the electric chair together. Dead. I knife Bennie, we die. You know what dead means? Know what we’d be throwing away?”

“It’s not fair!” she shouted. “We haven’t done anything! We’re not really murderers, we’re victims, just like the children. We didn’t know.”

“Nazis?” Barron said in a bitter mock-Prussian accent. “Ve vasn’t Nazis, ve vas all in der Resistance, all of us, all eighty million of us Chermans. Ve didn’t know, ve vas chust following orders. Jawohl, Mein Herr, chust following orders! Yeah, baby, go tell it to the judge—see how far you get when Bennie trots out twenty paid witnesses say we knew exactly what the treatment was when we got into it. He’s got us, Sara, there’s not a thing we can do and live to tell about it.”