Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Just enough time to set Bennie up, Barron thought as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.” He let a ray of the hate he felt inside him play on his image, a flash to a hundred-million Brackett Count slobs that maybe it all wasn’t just hot air.

“Now see where that’s at? Just a hypothetical situation, folks,” he said, sneering his image-lips slightly, giving the word “hypothetical” a sardonic intonation. “But hypothetically, if the Freezer Bill is passed as it stands, if the Foundation for Human Immortality can elect itself a President, and if they had a hypothetical immortality treatment that involved murder, then hypothetically the Foundation for Human Immortality could damn well commit murder and get away with it…”

He paused, filled three full seconds of air time with dead silence, till he was damn sure all of ’em would know exactly what he was saying (and a special dig for Bennie Howards):

“Hypothetically . . .” he drawled, and the word was just a shade off being a bald accusation. “Of course, the Foundation’s so hot to get the bill passed, and that’s not hypothetical, and a lot of people who should know say there was hanky-panky between the Foundation and a certain potential Presidential candidate who died under… questionable circumstances, and that’s not hypothetical, and one and one have been known to add up to two. And we’ll see just how hypothetical the rest of it is—if Mr Benedict Howards has the guts to stay on the line—after this word from our unquestionably non-hypothetical sponsor.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Vince Gelardi said over the intercom circuit the moment they had the commercial rolling, his face tense and drawn, but a kind of manic elation that Barron could sense peeked through it. “The phones are going crazy, and Howards is gibbering, I mean literally gibbering, man! Stuff about killing you, and eviscerated niggers, and black circles… makes no sense. He’s flipped, he’s all the way ’round the bend, Jack. Christ knows what he’ll say if we put him back on the air.”

Caught up in the smell of combat, Barron found himself saying, with the old Bug Jack Barron relish: “This is not Bug Jesus H., Vince, it’s Bug Jack Barron, and Christ doesn’t have to know what Howards is gonna say so long as I do, dig? Keep him on the line, and feed him right to me as soon as we’re back on the air.”

Vince winced through the control-booth glass as the promptboard flashed “60 Seconds,” said nervously: “You’re right on the edge as it is. You let a lunatic babble on the air, a lunatic like Bennie Howards, who knows where half the bodies in the country are buried, and we could have a lawsuit that—”

“It’s my show,” Barron said sharply. “But… maybe you got a point. (Can I keep Howards from doing me in, really pull it off?) Tell you what, when I’m talking, give me three-quarters screen and kill Howards’ audio. When I throw the ball to Bennie, give him three-quarters, let him rave for a couple seconds, then quick-cut back to me at three-quarters and kill his audio again. We play it back and forth like that, and he won’t be able to get more than a couple words in edgewise, dig?”

“Ah, that’s the dirty old Jack Barron we all know and love,” Gelardi said as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.”

As the last seconds of the Chevy commercial rolled on the monitor screen, Jack Barron got another flash of the total power he wielded over that screen, the power of an artificial phosphor-dot pattern that went straight from his mind through the satellite-network circuit to a hundred million brains, the power of a reality-illusion that wasn’t even real. Life and death, he thought, just Bennie and me, and the poor bastard doesn’t have a prayer. No matter how high the cards he holds in reality are, he still wouldn’t have a chance on my turf, ’cause on those hundred million screens, he says only what I let him say, he is only what I let him be, it’s my reality, it’s like he was stuck inside my head.

And he finally understood fully where Luke and Morris were at. It didn’t matter that he would be a joke as President, what the flesh and blood man in the studio is doesn’t matter at all—the only thing that matters is what a hundred million schmucks see on the screen, that’s what’s really real, image is all, because when it comes to what’s happening in That Big World Out There, image is all the poor fuckers ever get to see.

Oh, what a shuck! he thought as the promptboard flashed “On the Air,” and he stared at his own electric face, the eyes sinister pits of power, strictly from holding his head slightly downturned to catch kinesthop flashes from the backdrop behind him. I can do anything on that fucking screen, anything—no one’s in my league in this brand of reality, no matter who the hell they are in the flesh-and-blood private-reality that nobody sees. What happens on the screen is just my word made flesh, I make all the rules, control every damn phosphor-dot the whole country sees. Why couldn’t it make me President, or anything else—shit, they haven’t elected a man President since Truman, they elect an image, is all, and who’s bigger league in the image-racket than me?

And the unreal black and white face of Benedict Howards in the lower-left quadrant was nothing less than pathetic; Howards didn’t even have the beginnings of a chance, because what the whole country was seeing wasn’t Bennie’s Howards, but Benedict Howards as edited and rewritten by Jack Barron.

“All right,” said Barron, feeling unfairly, obscenely confident, “let’s get back to our fairy story and see just how hypothetical it really is. A while back on this show we discussed immortality research, didn’t we, Mr Howards? (Howards began to shout something soundlessly on the screen, and Barron thought of Sara, felt a savage elation at the total paranoid frustration Howards must be going through, knowing it was his life going down the drain and not a damn thing he could do about it, not even scream.) You said then you didn’t have an immortality treatment… What if I say you have? What if I say I have proof? (Watch those libel laws, man!) What do you say to that, Benedict Howards? Go ahead, I dare you, deny you have an immortality treatment, right here, right now, in front of a hundred million witnesses!”

Barren’s face was a triple-size full-color monster sur-ounding the mute image of Benedict Howards. As the images inverted, Barron realized what was about to happen even as—

Howards’ eyes glazed over, and crazy tension-lines from every coarse, open, black-and-white exaggerated pore seemed to radiate paranoid fury as the devil-mask of his face filled three-quarters of the screen, and as Vince cut in his audio, he was screaming:

“… you, Barron! I’ll kill you! You—” Howards suddenly blanched as the fact that he was on the air penetrated the red mist. “It’s a lie!” he managed to shout somewhat less shrilly, it’s a goddamn lie!” But every fear-line in his face shouted that it wasn’t. “There’s no immortality treatment, I swear there isn’t, only the fading black circle, against it, we’re against it on the side of life, we don’t eviscerate picka—” Howards’ whole face shook as he realized what he had started to say, and he cut himself off even as Gelardi killed his audio and gave Barron back three-quarters screen.

Jeez, doesn’t matter what he says, Barron realized. All I gotta do is blow my own riff and just let ’em see it bounce off his face…

“Stop gibbering, Howards!” he said coldly. “Makes you feel any better, why, then, we’ll talk about the other end of our little hypothesis. Let’s just suppose, hypothetically, if you insist, that there is an immortality treatment that involves, oh, say a gland-transplant operation that requires the glands of young children, that involves cutting them apart, murdering them for their glands…” He paused. Howards was screaming mutely again on his quarter of the screen like an impotent bug impaled on a pin. Squirm, you bastard, squirm! Had any brains, you’d hang up the phone, but you can’t, can you? I got you in too deep now.