Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

“Hey, man…” Vince crooned in a wounded tone of voice as the promptboard flashed “2 Minutes.” It’s your show, Jack…”

“Sorry, Vince, I didn’t mean to threaten you, I just gotta be sure you’re on my side and I stay on the air no matter what, and to hell with the network and the FCC,” Barron said. “There’s a thing I gotta do that’s bigger than the show, and I have to know you won’t try to stop me. It’s nitty-gritty time, buddy: who you working for, the network or me?”

“Where was I eight years go?” Gelardi said, still hurting. “You’re the best in the business, you are this show. It’s your baby, not the network’s and not mine. You didn’t have to ask—you know I work for you.”

“Okay, then hang on to your hat. Get me Bennie Howards on the line—and don’t worry, I guarantee he’ll go on,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.”

“Calling out first?”

“That’s the way we play it tonight. A television first—I Bug me.”

Gelardi shrugged, and a ghost of the old crazy-wop smile came back. “Who you want in back-up and safety?” the old Gelardi said. Good old one-track Vince!

“No back-up or safety tonight, just me and Howards— mano a mano.”

Gelardi shot him a funny, scared look, then a wan grin, and went to the phones as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.”

As he waited, Barren stared at the gray-green face of the monitor. With his guts so damn empty—a musty cavern haunted by unreal ghosts—there was something hypnotic about it; he felt the vacuum within reach out for the waiting vacuum in the cathode-ray tube, meet, merge, form a reality-to-reality tunnel across the nonspace of the studio, as if there were nothing real in the whole Universe but himself and that screen and the circuit connecting them. Even the network that logic said connected him with a hundred million other screen-realities didn’t seem to exist. Just him and the tube.

The monitor screen came to living-color life, a phosphor-dot image straight to the backs of his eyes: his own name “BUG JACK BARRON” in red Yankee-go-home letters, with the barroom voice behind it.

“Bugged?”

Then the montage of anger-sounds, and the voice again:

“Then go bug Jack Barron!”

And then he was staring at his own face, a living-color mirror-reality that moved when he moved, the eyes shadowed, the mouth grim and heavy. He backed off a bit from what he felt, saw the face on the screen become less tense, less savage, responding to his mind like a remote-controlled puppet.

As they rolled the first Acapulco Golds commercial he pulled himself away from that vertiginous rapport with the screen, saw that the promptboard said “Howards on Line”—and it was like a nerve in his own body reporting back on the readiness of his fist. Indeed, it was hard for him to feel the interface of his own body—his consciousness seemed as much in the promptboard and the monitor as in his own flesh. He was the room, was the studio setup, the monkey block-controlled-booth-studio gestalt. It was part of him, and he of it.

And everything else—memories of Sara, slug-things inside him, all he had ever been—was locked away, reflex-encapsulated, unreal. Though he felt the mechanism activating and knew it for what it was—electric-circuit-anesthesia—he was grateful for it, knowing that his gut wouldn’t have to feel what was going to happen, living-color kick-’em-in-the-ass image-Jack Barron was back in the catbird-seat and knew what to do.

His face was back on the monitor screen. “This is Bug Jack Barron,” he said, feeling the flesh of his mouth move, seeing it duplicated in the image before him, cell by phosphor-dot image cell, “and tonight we’re gonna do a show that’s a little different. You’ve been bugging me out there for years, folks, using me as your voice to get to the vips. Well this is worm-turning night, folks, tonight we play the old switcheroo. Tonight I’m bugged, tonight it’s my gripe, tonight I’m out for blood on my own.”

And in a weird leap of perspective, he seemed to be moving the image-lips on the screen directly, a brain-to-phosphor-dot electronic-flash reflex-arc circuit, as he said: “Tonight Jack Baron Bugs himself.”

He made the face on the screen an unreadable devil-mask (let Bennie sweat, don’t tip him off till he’s too far in, blow his mind naked on camera!), said: “Tonight we’re gonna find out a few things about cryogenic Freezing that nobody knows. Seems like we haven’t been able to do two shows in a row without mentioning the Foundation of Human Immortality lately, and those of you out there who think it’s just a coincidence got a few shocks coming. Lot of people got a few shocks coming. So stick around for the fun and games—you’re gonna see how the old fur flies when Jack Barron bugs himself.”

Lowering his head to shadow his eyes, he caught kinesthop flashes off the backdrop, turning the image on the screen sly and threatening as he said: “And we won’t wait to get down to the nitty-gritty either, friends. I’ve got Mr Benedict Howards right on the line.”

Signaling Vince to give him three-quarters screen, he made the connection on the number one vidphone and Benedict Howards’ face appeared in the lower lefthand corner of the monitor screen, a pale gray on gray vidphone phantom, enveloped by Barren’s living-color hyperreal image. You’re on my turf tonight, Bennie, he thought, and so am I, all the way this time, and you’re gonna get a flash of what paranoia can really be…

“This is Bug Jack Barron, Mr Howards, and tonight we’re going all the way for the straight poop on… (he purposefully paused, smirked a private, threatening smile, watched Howards freeze in terror, then threw him the change-up, fat, hanging curve)… the Freezer Utility Bill.”

And watched Howards’ face melt to jello, every tense muscle relaxing in flaccid momentary relief, leaving Bennie wide-open for the primrose path schtick, he’ll think I’m playing ball till I pull the reversal, and he’ll be stuck before he can hang up the phone.

“Good,” Howards said awkwardly. “It’s about time all this crap about the Foundation for Human Immortality was cleared up.”

Barron smiled, tapped his left foot-button twice, and Vince gave Howards half screen. “Don’t worry about that, Mr Howards,” he said. “By the end of the show it’ll all be… cleared up.” And again Howards tensed as he picked up on the emphasis of the last words. Sweat, you bastard, sweat, Barron thought. And it’s only beginning…

“So let’s talk about this Freezer Utility Bill,” Barron said, saw that once again he was putting Howards through changes—tension-release-tension-release, bounce him back and forth like a ping pong ball. “Now basically, this bill would grant the Foundation for Human Immortality a Freezing Monopoly, right? No other outfit could legally Freeze corpses, the Foundation would have the whole field to itself… a law unto itself…”

“Hardly,” Howards said, picking up on the cue they had arranged in Colorado. “Cryogenic Freezing would become a public utility like the phone system or electric power—a monopoly, sure, because some services just have to be monopolies to function, but a monopoly strictly regulated by the Federal Government in the public interest.” Beautiful, just like you think we arranged, Bennie—but now it’s time for another change of pace.

“Well now that sounds pretty reasonable to me, don’t you think so out there?” Barron said, and Howards’ image on the screen smiled an inside I-got-you-bought smile across at his image. Barron made the electronic puppet-mask smile an earnest-flunky smile back, and for a weird moment he felt his consciousness slur over to the screen, and it was almost as if he were facing Howards flesh-to-flesh.