Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“But you’ve got to do something. We can’t let him go on like this! There’s gotta be a way to stop him!”

“Only one way to stop him,” Barron said, “and that’s the old kamikaze schtick. You ready for that? You ready to die—now, when we can stay alive for the next millon years? You got the balls to make yourself die?”

“No,” she said simply, but there were volumes of torture in her eyes.

“Well, neither have I,” he said, and felt his consciousness withdrawing to the safety of electric-circuit phosphor-dot ersatz reality.

“It’s just not right… it’s just not fair…” she muttered, and he felt her skin shrinking away, and her eyes were as opaque and unreadable as stainless-steel mirrors.

“Right, schmight,” he said, her body now a dead weight of cold, unreal flesh pressing obscenely against him. “It’s where it’s at, is all. And we’re stuck with it.”

And suddenly the air in the room was cold gooseflesh on his naked skin. And they got up and dressed without saying a word to each other. Like strangers.

Sara Westerfeld dropped the cap, then sat down on the couch facing the dusk lights of Brooklyn to wait for the acid to hit. Supposed to be seven hundred mikes, she thought, but it’s been laying around since I moved in with Jack, never even thought about taking it until… until…

Her body shivered, even though it was June-evening warm. Too warm, in fact, sticky-warm like heavy flowing molasses under her skin, like crawling wetness-things inside her body…

She got up, went to the nearest wall console, threw a switch, and the glass patio-doors glided shut. She turned the thermostat to 70’, the humidity control to “medium dry,” and the air-conditioning unit began pumping in cool dry air through the circular series of vents around the base of the domed ceiling.

She walked to the communications-complex wall, put the surfsound tape on continuous replay cycle, keyed the color organ down toward blues and greens, sat down on the couch again, and stared out at the duskscape across the river. It was like a painted mural now, the glass interface of the patio-doors separating it from the swirling blue-and-green surfsound. Big Sur-pine reality within.

Sara strained against her own mind, testing the swirl of colors and surfsounding melding, trying to feel it, trying to make the LSD hit. A good way to have a bummer, she cautioned herself, so uptight trying to make it hit… Why’d I drop acid in the first place, now, with Jack going on the air soon, with lizardman Howards safe in his bone-white lair of power and bleeding things inside me cut from dead children…

A black chill went through her (the acid starting to hit?) as she remembered how mindlessly she had turned to the LSD, almost as if the acid were taking her instead of she the acid, like a thing waiting to be born or to die within her, a thing with which her conscious mind had no contact at all reaching out through the reflex-arc of her arm, directly, bypassing conscious volition, reaching out to grasp the acid key to its release, a thing with reasons and shapes of its own that might or might not be those of what she thought of as Sara, a blind captain leading the ship of self on an unknown voyage into the dark sea within, and she knew that the acid was hitting.

A visceral fear began to grip her as the Sara within mocked her, reminded her that there were reasons and compulsions to take acid at any given time and some of them could be evil.

Evil… the word had an archaic medieval sound-shape to it, black bishop’s robes swirling, Marquis De Sade dark things from murky European history books… Evil… something ominous and serpent-edged in the knife-shape of the word, dreadful and slimy, but somehow outdated… Evil… a word with bone-white crocodile-teeth, like the smile of Benedict Howards from his bone-white temple of death-god power… Evil… wet green things under moist rocks in blue-green moonlight, sucking life-juices from corpses… corpses of babies bleeding and broken… . Evil…

Evil… The blues and greens swirled reptilian-fashion across the snake-house glass of the domed ceiling like octopus tentacles, and the sound of the surf was a sea-thing sigh from the bowels of a bottomless black ocean, and across the sky outside the dark closed in… Evil… It was cool and dry in the room, like a lizard’s skin… Evil…

Evil… there was a primeval oldness in the word, inevitable and eternal like the dawn-musk of swamps… Evil…

And there’s an oldness in Benedict Howards, she thought, a sick evil oldness as if he’s living his life backward, as if the shadow of a million-year future of power-fear-sweat-stinking madness has already made him something not-human, dead in ways no man’s ever been dead before, dead from a million years of hoarded, fermented oldness, a withered vampire living on blood like a frightened cancer, dead but undying.

Immortality.

“Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.” A grotesque vision of green plastic swam before her eyes, a kit-model she had seen in some Berkeley apartment geological ages ago—a comic-hideous, slime-dripping, cross-eyed disaster of a green plastic giant frog, sitting on a green plastic lily-pad from a Walt Disney swamp with tiny dwarf-frogs beside it leaping like frantic tadpoles at the placard the frog-monster held aloft, proclaiming: “Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.”

And the frog-face began to change as the surf sounds poured over it like a great black tide of evil. The comic cross-eyes became lizard-eyes, cold, black and reptilian, the eyes of Benedict Howards; and the goofy grin became a crocodile-leer, a sharp, bone-white lizardman smile, hungry, totally ruthless and totally knowing. The figures leaping up in worship at the placard were green plastic human beings in a great thronging crowd, a pile of live writhing bodies pillaring to the sky, fighting each other to leap eagerly through the great crocodile-jaws that chewed them to green plastic frog-flesh pieces, green slime fluid drooling past the bone-white teeth, and, above it all, way above it all, holding his placard like a scepter against the shattered sky, black lizard-eyes gaping like holes into the final darkness, Benedict Howards, his crocodile-mouth a vast cavern, and a river of human beings pouring down it, leaping like flames at the sly, knowing sign they worshipped: “Kiss me, and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a frog, but you’ll live forever.”

The sign of immortality.

That, she thought, that’s Howards’ immortality. And oh, oh, have we kissed the frog, with his wet green lips like pulsing gland tissue; lizard-lips running all over our bodies like a dirty old pervert; inside, outside, kissing, sucking, drooling baby-blood spit, green monster-slime of immortality…

She shuddered, trying to throw off the vision, stared through the glass doors at the darkening sky over the city as the surfsounds flowed around her like the eternal moaning of everything everywhere struggling in grim mortal anguish as blue and green sinuous color organ shadows played at the corners of her vision like a sea of frog-green tentacles—and abruptly the interface between the green swamp-reality of miasmic evil engulfing her and the flat mural-reality of the cityscape beyond the glass doors inverted, and she was no longer on the inside looking out but on the outside looking in.

The undulating blue-green light writhing behind her like a forest of tentacles the roar of the surf like the sigh of some great beached and expiring sea animal, seemed to press against the glass reality-interface like a bubble being forced up by decay-gas pressure from the depths of an oily green swamp pool. She felt the weight, the pressure of the whole room pushing behind her as if the blind green monsters that lurked in the most unknowable pits in the ass-end of her mind were bubbling up from the depths and elbowing her consciousness out of her skull.