Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

And without Jack, we’d still be nowhere. Whatever Jack gets, he deserves it, he paid his dues, the poor fucker, with him immortal, and Sara dead, the only immortal except for Howards squirreled away in some loony-bin somewhere. Don’t envy Jack Barron, man! Maybe now he is like a black shade in the way that counts, like black is being a stranger in someone else’s land… Like alone… And who’s more alone now than Jack?

Greene shivered at the thought of the man who was his friend, who might still be alive when he was dust a million years, unless they found a new way to immortality in time. But until then, who can be as alone as Jack, who can see what he sees, feel what he feels…?

Look him in the eye and call him friend…!

Jack Barron fingered the Acapulco Gold, hesitating at the door of his outer office. Come on, man, you gotta stop brooding and play ’em one day at a time already. Can’t keep playing this Weltschmertz schtick for the next ten thousand years…

But so many things I want to forget that never should be forgotten. Sara… won’t forget Sara ever…

Oh yeah? Ever… The word had a whole new meaning, like everything else when you looked at it through new eyes. Eyes that would always be new, young eyes going through changes every morning like a kid who knows he’s got his whole life ahead of him, always ahead of him, and what will I be like in a thousand years? A thousand years alone…

No, that’s old-style thinking, just the short view. Someday they’ll lick immortality for everyone without murdering, now that the slobs can taste it coming, with a Public Freezer Bill already on the President’s desk and hara-kiri for him not to sign it, and with all that public pressure… In the long run, everyone’ll make it to where I stand, and in the meantime I can sit it out alone, got all the time in the world. In the meantime…

In the meantime, looks like I’m stuck in the politics bag till after the election—had to play along with Morris to keep the show. And anyway, admit it, man, it’s kinda fun.

Forty-seven different Presidential candidates all running around like chickens with their heads cut off, sure to shake things up, just what the country needs. And who knows, I might even win—and then the good old US of A is really gonna get a boot in the ass. But not the one Luke and his boys are figuring on…

What a joke on Luke, he thought, he’ll piss in his pants! “Social Justice”—hope I do win just so that dumb fucker Morris can clock what Jack Barron’s brand of Social Justice is. Nitty-gritty Social Justice, is all, once we get a Negro in the White House, even by the back door, nothing’ll ever be the same.

Politics! Politicians! Such schmucks, they got no sense of humor at all. Think they got themselves an image that can win, and a puppet they think they can screw around behind the scenes with after the election.

Boy, if I do win, is everyone gonna shit bricks after the Inauguration! When good old Jack Barron resigns the Presidency in favor of Vice-President Lukas Greene. Black Vice-President Lukas Greene!

That’d teach the pricks to play the image game with the world’s champ. A nice juicy custard pie in the face of the whole country, just what it needs, four years of a black President, and who knows, they might end up liking it enough to make it eight the hard way.

In the meantime…

He opened the door, stepped into the outer office, and stood by Carrie Donaldson’s desk. Carrie looked up at him with guarded eyes. “Mr Barron?” she said.

Well, why not? thought Jack Barron. You got wounds, but they’ll heal, and anyway, you owe this chick something. And she’s a mighty fine lay, remember?

“Let’s go have some lunch, Carrie,” he said. “I’m gonna take the afternoon off, so you’re off duty too. Want to take it off with me?”

“Does that sound the way I think it sounds… Jack?”

Barron laughed. It felt good. “It does, so long as you keep calling me Jack,” he said.

“ Jack… ” she said, taking his hand. And they left the office together.

Just another chick? Barron wondered. Or something more? Well, who cares how it’ll turn out, a one-night stand or a week or a year or a hundred years, wliat’s it matter how long?

Suddenly it didn’t seem very important to know just how anything would turn out, or what would happen in the next minute, or the next year, or the next century. It wasn’t even such a hang-up anymore that he hadn’t learned how to remember Sara without hurting. It had finally gotten through to him that he had plenty of time to heal even the deepest of his wounds, play any game he wanted to any number of times, become anything he wanted to be and then change his mind. Time enough for anything…

Like all the time in the world.