Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

And he foot-signaled Vince to cut in Howards’ audio and give him the full screen treatment. Moment of truth, Barron thought as the image of Benedict Howards ballooned on the screen like a bloated bladder. I’m wide open for a libel suit unless Bennie’s far gone enough to cover my bet. He let Howards’ silent face eat up three or four seconds of dead airtime, and behind his eyes Barron could sense a straining interface between blind paranoid rage and shrewd vestiges of the amoral coldness that had built the Foundation, had made this ruthless fucker immortal, let him gut children on a goddamn assembly-line and then bitch about the cost.

Two sides of the same coin, Barron realized. Paranoia either way, is all. A cool paranoiac uses his head coldly and ruthlessly to do in everyone in sight ’cause he knows everyone’s out to get him, and when a cat like that finally freaks out, he’s gonna be shrieking and screaming at everything in sight. Gotta push him over that line!

“How does it feel, Howards?” he said, speaking from his own gut, slashing the words over Howards’ full screen image like the black-wash-over-moire-patterns behind his own head. “How’s it feel to have the stolen glands of some dead kid inside you, crawling around under your skin like spastic slugs oozing slime all over your body twitching and itching—feel ’em?—like they were slowly eating you alive always eating eating eating but never finished eating you up inside for a million.”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Howards screamed, his face filling the screen with a mask of feral terror, his eyes rolling like dervishes, his mouth slack and wet like that of a man in a trance. “Don’t let them kill me! Fading black circle of eviscerated niggers tubes of slime up my nose down my throat choking me… Don’t let them kill me! Nobody kills Benedict Howards! Buy ’em own ’em kill ’em Senators, President, fading black circle… I don’t want to die: Please! Please! Don’t let them…”

Zingo! Vince chickened out finally; Howards’ face was off screen, his audio dead, and Barren’s face filled the entire screen.

Fuck! Barron almost muttered aloud. What a time to get squeamish! What—Suddenly, came a gut-flash that nearly knocked Barron out of his chair! Bennie’s totally freaked out! Doesn’t know what he’s saying. Maybe I can do more than get him to admit he killed Hennering, get him to admit on the air he conned me, I didn’t know about the treatment beforehand. The truth! Maybe he’s crazy enough so I can get him to tell the truth. But I gotta lay it all on the line, take away even his doomsday machine weapon, pull out all the stops, throw it all in their fat little laps out there, my life, everything. How’s that for a television first—the fucking truth?

“Tell them, Howards,” he said, “tell the whole damn country what you’re putting over on them. Tell them about Teddy Hennering, tell them about the Foundation for Human Immortality, tell them about immortality from the inside. Tell ’em what it feels like to be a murderer.”

He paused, tapped his left foot-button once—and nothing happened. Behind the control booth glass, Gelardi shook his head “no”. Barron tapped the foot-button again; again Gelardi shook his head. Barron slammed his foot against the floor. Vince groaned silently then capitulated, and Howards’ face filled three-quarters of the screen.

“You tell ’em, or I’ll tell ’em,” Barron said, tapping his right foot-button twice for a commercial in two minutes, almost grinned as Vince brought his hands together in a mock prayer of thanks.

“Barron, listen, it’s not too late, Barron,” Howards whined, and the rage was gone from his face, whited-out by a craven feral fear. “Not too late to stop the fading black circle closing in closing in.… I won’t tell, I swear I won’t tell. We can live forever, Barron, you and me, never have to die, young and strong, smell the air in the morning, it’s not too late, I swear it, you and me and your wife…”

Barron signaled to keep the screen split as is, said softly, measuredly, letting something harder than sorrow and colder than anger gleam in his image’s eyes: “My wife is dead, Howards. She jumped twenty-three stories, twenty-three stories. Suicide… but not from where I sit. From where I sit, you killed her sure as if you pushed her. Afraid now, Bennie? Can you guess where my head is at?”

Incredibly, the total fear on Benedict Howards’ face took a quantum jump, it was more than terror now, it was abysmal paranoid despair. And all he could do was mutter, “No… no… no… no… no…” like some obscene million-year-old infant, trembling wet lips of incredible age forming a baby’s drool. He knew.

Barron signaled for and got full screen and solo audio as the promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.” “Let’s talk about why my wife died,” he said, his voice and face purposely composed into an artfully-ill-concealed ersatz calm that was far more wrenching than any histrionics could ever be.

“My wife died because Benedict Howards made her immortal,” he said. “He made her immortal, and it killed her, now ain’t that a bitch? She couldn’t live with herself after she found out… Sara wasn’t the only one her immortality killed. There was someone else she never saw who died so she could be immortal—a poor kid whose body was irradiated by the Foundation till it was one living cancer, so they could cut out his very special glands and sew them into my wife. And make her live forever.

“But she won’t live forever, she’s dead; she killed herself because she couldn’t stand living knowing what had been done to her. I loved that woman, so you’ll pardon my thinking it wasn’t just guilt. She told me why, just before she jumped. She knew that he would get away with it, live forever, kill forever, buy or kill anyone that stood in his way unless… unless someone was desperate enough or dumb enough or didn’t care enough about living to scream from the mountaintops what he was doing. Sara Westerfeld died to make me do just what I’m doing now. She died for you ! How does that grab you, suckers?”

Barron felt himself cloaked in the crystal mist of legend: the studio, the monitor, the figures behind the control booth glass were things that couldn’t possibly exist. The things he had said were things that were never said in public, not in front of a hundred million people. What was happening did not ever happen in front of cameras, you could watch the glass tit forever and not see anything like this.

But it was happening, he was making it happen, and it was the easiest thing in the world. History, he thought, I’m making fucking history—and it’s nothing but show biz, is all. Moving images around and making myth…

He foot-signaled and got Howards back at one-quarter screen, with his audio back on. But Bennie was as stiff and mute as a still photo.

“Go ahead, Howards,” he said, “now’s your big chance, tell ’em the rest. Tell ’em why you made Sara Westerfeld immortal, tell ’em who else you made immortal. Go ahead, time to hit back, isn’t it?”

Howards remained silent, didn’t even seem to hear, as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds.” His empty eyes looked off into the dreadful landscape within. Barron knew he had him sick and bleeding—set him up right, and after the commercial, he’d start to shriek.

“All right,” Barron said with razors in his voice, “I’ll tell ’em!” He reached into a pocket, pulled out the same blank papers he had used before.

“See this, folks? This is a Freeze Contract, a very special Freeze Contract. It entitles the client to have the Foundation for Human Immortality make him immortal…”