Bug Jack Barron

20

*

Sara

No! it can’t have happened. Sara you’re not

Sara dead no! not dead

not down there on the sidewalk

in a puddle of—Sara! Sara! no no no,

You can’t be dead! Can’t be dead! No! No! Sara!

Sara you crazy bitch, how could you do a thing like this to me!

How could you do a thing like this to me… The foulness, the utter selfish foulness brought Jack Barren’s mind back into reality from the point of anesthetic blackout into which it had retreated like a whipped dog howling.

The vidphone screen before him showed a crazy slash of black sky over a section of the concrete parapet off which—

He reached out, snapped off the vidphone, and in the same motion fumbled an Acapulco Gold out of the pack on his desk. He jammed it into his mouth, lit it with the table-lighter, and sucked the smoke in-out-in-out-in-out in savage compulsive pants.

How could you do a thing like this to me—oh, Barren, you shit you! How could you do it to her? You bastard! You heartless motherfucker! Sara! Sara! You… you…

He flagellated himself with images of her eyes: pool-deep eyes before she blew him wide and shiny my hero little girl eyes naked beside him in Berkeley attic cold eyes boring through him shouting cop-out! the day they broke up eyes glazing and opaqueing to stainless steel mirrors as their flesh crawled from each other the last night (last night! last night there ever was between them and a night spent as strangers!) poor lost phosphor-dot eyes like windows into gray blind acid jungle inside naked and writhing, and I could see it building and building like runaway cancer, and all I could do was gibber into the fucking phone while her eyes grew crazier and crazier as she was sucked deeper and deeper into the acid freakout nightmare, eyes from the nowhere nonreality of LSD insanity, and all I could do was watch on the phone while she jumped; poor crazy lost eyes, and I couldn’t do a fucking thing but watch her jump!

SaraSaraSara… No Sara any more, never, no Sara Sara Sara Sara Sara-shaped hole against the sky of his night that would never be filled, not in a million years, and he had a million years, dammit, a million years to be without her, a million years to watch her jump, million years to know he killed her—

Bullshit, man! he thought. Stop trying to con yourself… Guilty, maybe you should feel, but you don’t. You didn’t kill her, damn it, it was the acid, was nothing you did or could’ve done, was Sara freaking out into her own crazy bag again, doing it to save me, make me free; to be the fucking Baby Bolshevik hero I never was… to save me… From what, from living? From caring? From giving a shit about what happens next? Sara… Sara . I didn’t kill you, you killed me!… killed the best things inside me, is all. Tore out my flesh-and-blood guts, replaced with electronic circuitry, can’t even make myself cry knowing you’re dead. Was nothing I did that killed you, Sara, was what I was. Murderer… vampire off babies… not even that, was it Sara?

Was fucking cop-out, is all! Was seeing my bod owned by that fucker Howards, body not even my own, with slug-green pieces of immortality-slime drip-dripping inside me, was seeing me selling out to Bennie… You didn’t kill me, and I didn’t kill you, we were both dead already, died when we couldn’t stand to touch each other last night, that motherfucker Howards killed us both. Killed us both by making us immortal, now ain’t that a pisser?

Sara… I can’t cry for you Sara, don’t have any tears left in me. But… I can kill for you, baby, kill that fucker Howards! Oh, yeah, I can kill for you, all right! Can hate, all right! Maybe you were right in your own dumb way, ’cause you’re gonna get what you wanted, you and those hundred million dumb bastards out there.

Yeah, I’ll do a show like no-one’s ever seen! They want their fucking hero, I’ll give him to them on a silver platter, see how they like it! Let the stupid bastards out there see where it’s really at for once in their lives… How’s that for a television first?

The vidphone began to chime. Barron made the connection, and Vince Gelardi’s face appeared on the screen, ashen, stunned, and Barron knew that he knew even before Vince muttered: “Jack… the police just called… Sara…”

“I saw it all happen, Vince,” he said quickly, determined to spare Vince the agony of telling him. “Don’t say anything. Don’t even tell me how sorry you are. I know… I know…”

“Jack… I hate to have to bring it up but we go on the air in nine minutes. I’m trying to get through to the network brass so we can run an old tape, so you don’t have to…”

“Forget it!” Barron snapped. “I’m gonna do the show tonight, gonna do it for Sara! Show biz, baby… the show must go on, and words from the same picture…”

“Jack you don’t have to—”

“But I do, man! More than any show in the history of this whole dumb business, this one’s gotta go on! See you in the studio, Vince—but thanks anyway.”

“Jack,” Vince Gelardi said over the intercom circuit, his face gray and lifeless, all too real to come off real in the network-reality world behind the control booth glass, “look, you don’t have to go on the air. I checked with the powers that be, and I got the okay to run one of last month’s tapes if you… I mean…”

Jack Barren sat down in the white chair behind the black-wash-over-kinesthop background, clocked the cameraman (cameraman he never noticed during the show) staring ashen-faced at him, saw that the promptboard was live and showed “3 Minutes,” and somehow he could sense the disaster-aura reaching all the way to the monkey block behind the control room.

And it bugged him. Fucking network brass coming on like they really care how I feel with Sara Sara… Yeah, sure, all they want to know is does it mean a fiasco if I go on the air with her body not yet cold, where’s that crazy Barren’s head at now, Gelardi, think he can go on the air? Jeez, if we do a rerun unannounced now, after the stuff he’s been rapping out these past few weeks… Oh, my aching Brackett Count!

But that, Barren thought, is show biz. The show must go on, there’s no business like show business, and like that. But why must the show go on? No big secret, it don’t go on, that audience out there might get the idea that there was only a human being like them behind the image, and that would screw up the ratings. Which is enough reason in this business to do anything.

Yet Barren felt pissed that the whole damn crew was preparing its ulcers for a massive disaster. The show must go on—bullshit, sure, just a dumb ass-game, but what the hell isn’t? This show’s gonna go on, all right, and the brass won’t believe the ratings ’cause this is kamikaze night, and they’re gonna get the Big All, the topper to end all toppers, the greatest show on earth: Two living-color stars of stage, screen, and gutter politics going at each other for blood.

“Snap out of it, Vince!” Barron said, cracking his voice like a whip for control. “I’m going on the air, and this is gonna be a show like no one’s ever seen. Stick with me, baby, keep me on the air no matter what I do, believe me, I know what I’m doing, and if you cut me off, and the network doesn’t back you up, you’re fired.”

“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.

“Don’t see how anyone could object to that,” Barron said. “But it seems to me you could say that real simple-like. So why’s your bill in so much trouble, Mr Howards, why all the static in Congress? Know what I think your trouble, is Mr Howards?”

“Suppose you tell me, Barren,” Howards said guardedly. Yeah, that seemed like a harmless lead-in, Bennie, but you know it wasn’t in your little script. And he foot-signaled Vince to give him a commercial in five minutes. Timing here had to be just right.

“Why, I think it’s just screwed-up semantics, is all,” Barron said, so sweetly innocent that Howards knew he was being sarcastic, and fear crept into his image-eyes, but it was all too subtle, inside stuff, for the audience to pick up on it yet, Barron knew. Which abruptly reminded him that there was a hundred-million Brackett Count audience digging the whole scene, out there on the other side of the screen.

“What do you mean by that?” Howards snapped, and Barron recognized it as a slipping of control.

He smiled blandly. “Your bill’s in trouble ’cause it’s badly written, is all. So long and complicated for something that’s supposed to be so straightforward and simple… all those funny little clauses, twisty and turny like a snake. Pretty hard to figure out what it all means.”

He pulled a blank sheaf of papers out of a pocket. (The old Joe McCarthy schtick.) “Tell you what,” he said, waving the papers across the monitor screen at Howards’ now-uptight image, “why don’t we clear it all up right now, straight from the horse’s mouth, you can explain the confusing parts to a hundred million Americans, right now, Mr Howards, and who knows, then maybe your simple little bill’ll go right through. Soon as we hack away all the confusing underbrush, dig?”

He put a razor in the last word, signaled to Vince to give him three-quarters screen, and zingo, Howards was a scared little twerp cowering below him in the hotseat. He suddenly realized that to the hundred million people on the other side of the screen, what they saw there was reality, reality that was realer than real because a whole country was sharing the direct sensory experience; it was history taking place right before their eyes, albeit non-event history that existed only on the screen. A strange chill went through him as for the first time he got a full gut-reality flash of the unprecedented power wielded by his image on the screen.

And like an internal neural time-sense circuit, the promptboard told him: “4 Minutes.”

He hardened that image to a mask of inquisitor-iron, yet spoke blandly, innocently, creating a gestalt of impending dread in the contrast. “Now lessee… this bill would set up a five-member regulating commission, appointed and holding office at ‘the pleasure of the President’. That’s a funny set-up, isn’t it? Seems like the commission would be totally controlled by the President if he could hire and fire commissioners whenever he pleased…”

“Freezing’s a very delicate problem,” Howards said defensively, like a boy caught with his hand in the old cookie jar. “If the commissioners had fixed terms, they might make mistakes that couldn’t be corrected for years. And in this case, time means human life.”

“And, of course, the Foundation for Human Immortality is very concerned with… human life,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “3 Minutes.” “Now there’s another bit of funny language in here. The part that gives the Freezing Commission full power to ‘regulate, oversee, and pass on the appropriateness of all current operations of the Foundation for Human Immortality and any further operations in the area of life-extension as the Foundation may in the future undertake.’ If you translate that into English, it seems to mean that the commission would operate independent of Congress, in effect making its own law in the area of… life-extension.”

“Well… ah, doesn’t that answer your first question?” Howards said shrewdly, trying to tread water. “Congress just moves too slowly. Say… say we developed an immortality treatment; it could be years before Congress approved it, and in the meantime people would be dying who didn’t have to die. A commission could act at once. Sure, that’s a lot of power to entrust to appointed officials—and that’s why the President must be able to hire and fire commissioners at will, to keep the commission responsive to… public opinion. It may seem complicated, but it’s all very necessary.”

It sure as shit is, Barron thought. That’s where the whole schmear’s at—the bill’s a license for the Foundation to do anything, so long as the President plays ball. And Bennie figures on owning the next President, and he can do it too, and if not this time, then the next time round. One thing he’s got plenty of is time. Gets his bill through, and his flunky in the White House, he can have… killing children made legal somehow, or have his tame commission insist he’s not doing it. Time to show the fucker the razor inside.

“In other words, Howards, you and the President’ll run the whole show. The Foundation will control all freezing and… life extension, and only the President, comes nitty-gritty, can tell you what you can and can’t do.”

Howards’ image glared at him like a rat in a trap, and the paranoia within began to leak out through his eyes.

“The President…” Howards practically gibbered, “what’s wrong with that? Don’t you—”

“I wonder if it’s smart to trust all that to one man, even the President,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “2 Minutes.” “I mean, one man, even a President, could be bought. With all your money, and maybe… something more?”

“You’re crazy, Barron!” Howards shrieked, blowing all cool, his eyes becoming really rabid. “You’re slandering the President of the United States!”

“Who, me?” said Barron, signaling Vince to cut Howards’ audio, and give Howards three-quarters screen. “Why, I’m a regular pussycat, I wouldn’t slander anyone. I’m talking about a hypothetical President in a hypothetical situation, so all I gotta worry about is a hypothetical lawsuit, right?” Howards’ face was a mute backdrop of paranoia surrounding his on the monitor screen.

“So let’s just take a farfetched blue-sky hypothetical situation,” he said, foot-signaling to Vince to give Howards full screen. “Let’s say the Foundation for Human Immortality finally develops an immortality treatment…”

A feral twitch of pure terror spasmed Howards’ face for the hundred-million Brackett Count audience to see, as Barron called for full screen for himself and the promptboard flashed “90 Seconds.”

“Let’s say our little story takes place after the next Presidential election, and let’s just say the President is the Foundation’s man, without naming names. That sound so impossible to you out there, I mean, the Foundation has only fifty billion bucks to work with, and if they have immortality to peddle… well, that’d make a mighty fancy bribe…”

His face on the screen burned dots of living-color phosphor into him in a feedback of power; he felt the direct satellite-network connection with the backs of a hundred million brains, all of them hanging on his words, sucking up image from that glass tit, and knowing that he was about to say something dangerously big. Yessiree, folks, step right up and see the Greatest Show on Earth, see the peep-show of history in the making, live, no time-delay, and how’s that for show biz?

“Let’s say… purely for the sake of argument, of course,” Barron said slowly as the promptboard flashed “60 Seconds,” “that our hypothetical immortality treatment involves a little kicker, though. Let’s say… well, everyone knows what a dirty mind I have, so let’s just say it involves some kind of organ transplant technique which makes the recipient immortal, but, unfortunately, kills the donor. Very tricky and expensive, dig, because somehow they gotta get victims. In other words, to make one winner immortal, the Foundation’s gotta kill one loser. I believe the legal profession has a technical term for that… I think they call it murder.”

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.

“Dig?” Barron said. “If there was such a treatment, and it did involve murder, that would sure explain a lot of funny things, wouldn’t it folks? Would explain why Mr Howards is so hot to get his Freezer Utility Bill passed, get himself a nice commission, with his Foundation answerable only to that commission, and the commission controlled completely by the President… Especially if the President we elect is answerable only to him. What about it, Mr Howards, doesn’t that make sense?”

Gelardi inverted the images, and Howards’ stricken face once more dominated the screen. “You—” he began to shout. And then Barron could all but see a shade pulling down behind his desperate eyes, a shade of silence, his only possible retreat.

“Okay,” said Barron as the images reverted, “so Mr Howards doesn’t care for… hypothetical situations. So let’s talk about hard facts. Let’s talk about Presidential candidates. (Watch them libel laws!) Now I’m only repeating what I read in the papers—but a lot of people thought that the late Senator Theodore Hennering had the inside track to the Democratic nomination, and things being what they are, that meant the inside track to the Presidency. Before his… unfortunate accident. Tell us, Mr Howards, were you a Hennering man—or was Hennering a Foundation man?”

Howards came out fighting this time as his audio came on and the images on the screen inverted: “That’s libel, Barron, and you know it!” But before he could get in another word, Vince flashed him back into the silent Coventry of the lower-left quadrant hotseat.

“Libeling who? Now there’s a good question,” Barron said. “You or Hennering? Anyway, I’m not libeling anyone, just asking a question. Fact: Hennering was a sponsor and the Senate floor leader for the Freezer Utility Bill. Fact: Hennering’s Presidential balloon had mighty big bread behind it. I gotta watch those libel laws, folks, so you’ll have to add it up all by yourselves—one and one makes… Got it, folks? Cause here comes some more hypothetical stuff.

“Let’s say that a Foundation which the libel laws prevent me from naming has bought itself a Presidential candidate who the libel laws prevent me from naming got a lot of muscle behind a certain bill—which the libel laws prevent me from naming because they’ve got a beep! beep! treatment that amounts to murder, and let’s say that our unnameable Senator from Illinois doesn’t know about this treatment. Are you with me so far, out there? Ain’t it wonderful, living in a free country where you can . . . hypothesize anything you want so long as you don’t name names? Even when you all know what names to put into the blank spaces.”

He paused and clocked how Howards’ face had become a pasty mask, how he didn’t even seem to be paying attention, knowing for sure it was all over now.

“Let’s go one step further. Let’s say that our unnameable Senator finds out about this here… treatment. Let’s say he doesn’t like it one bit. Let’s say he calls up the unnameable head of the unnameable foundation and tells him precisely where he can stuff his unnameable treatment. Let’s say our Senator tells him he’s gonna oppose his own bill, blow the whistle on our hypothetical foundation on the floor of the Senate. That means our hypothetical foundation head’s gonna be tried for murder, unless… unless something happens to close our Senator’s mouth. Tell us, Mr Howards—just hypothetically, of course—if you were the head of our hypothetical foundation and this Senator’s big mouth was your ticket to the electric chair, what would you do?”

“—sue you!” Howards’ voice shouted as Vince switched the images and cut in his audio. “Sue you for libel! I’ll get you, Barron! Send you to the chair! I’ll—”

Gelardi hustled him back into the lower-left quadrant hotseat like a sergeant-at-arms, and Barron felt the moment hang in the air. Nitty-gritty time, he thought. All I gotta do is spring it; I’ve got him set up for the kill. Kill myself with him maybe, with that contract as a signed confession, me and Sara—Sara! SaraSaraSara… No more Sara… He felt slug-green things drip-dripping the stolen life-juices of broken babies within him, and in a flash of pure, blessed berserker rage knew that it had to be get Bennie first, and try to save himself later.

“Now let’s get back to what’s laughingly known as the real world,” Barron said. “Fact: Senator Theodore Hennering was killed in a mid-air plane explosion which conveniently destroyed any evidence that might be of murder, hypothetical or otherwise. Fact: A few weeks later, Hennering’s widow just happens to get herself run over by a hit-and-run rented truck. What do you say to that, Mr Howards?”

Vince flashed Howards to three-quarters screen just long enough for him to mutter, “How should I know? Coincidence—” before he was cut off again, and Barron was back at three-quarters screen.

Here comes a tricky part, Barron thought. If I can get him to admit it, at least I’m off the libel hook.

“And another fact that nobody knows: Madge Hennering called me before she was killed, told me that Benedict Howards had threatened to kill her husband shortly before he died, just before he died, because Hennering had found out something about the Foundation that was terrible enough to make him switch sides. And that’s not libel either, friends,” Barron lied, “because I can prove it. I have the whole conversation on tape.”

“It’s a lie!” Howards screamed, as Vince flashed him on, then off. “Lie! Goddamn fading black circle lie! Lie!”

“Watch that, Bennie,” Barron said, giving his puppet-mask on the screen an ironic smile, “you’re calling me a liar, and that’s libel, and I can prove it with the tape.”

Barron paused, knowing what the next link in the chain had to be. Gotta come right out and accuse him of murdering Hennering, and that is libel any way you slice it without legal evidence which I ain’t got unless he gives it to me—and he won’t unless I climb out on that limb. Okay, smart-ass, this is the real nitty-gritty, the razor inside—go! go! go!

“Last week I flew down to Mississippi to talk to a man who claimed—you saw it here folks—that someone had bought his daughter for $50,000,” Barron said, still playing footsie with the libel laws. “Now, if some foundation needed children for an immortality transplant operation… get the picture, folks? Three people, and only three people knew I was going down there: Governor Lukas Greene, a very old friend; the woman I loved, and—Mr Benedict Howards. Someone shot the man I went down there to talk to, a real pro job, and he almost got me too. One of those three people had Henry George Franklin killed and tried to kill me. Who do you think it was, my friend, my wife, or…?”

Barron paused again, half for the effect, half hesitating at the bank of an abysmal Rubicon, knowing the total mortal danger his next words had to bring. Howards’ inset face on the monitor screen was ashen but strangely calm, knowing what was coming, knowing he couldn’t save himself, but also knowing that the power to destroy was mutual, was also his. Fuck you, Bennie! Barron thought. Banzai for the Emperor, live a thousand years! Yeah, a thousand years…

“Or Benedict Howards, who bought that man’s child to cold-bloodedly vivisect in his Colorado labs, Benedict Howards, who is immortal with the glands of a murdered child sewn into his rotten hide, Benedict Howards, who murdered Theodore Hennering and his wife and Henry George Franklin, Benedict Howards, who tried to kill me. After all, Mr Howards, murder’s cheaper by the dozen, isn’t it? You can only fry once.”

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…”

He paused, waved the paper at the camera like a bloody shirt.

“This is my contract,” he said.

And the promptboard flashed “Off the Air.”

The commercial rolled, and behind the glass of the control booth Barron could see the confusion, the deathwatch smell, and Vince’s face seemed ten years older as he stared through the glass and then spoke into the intercom circuit:

“Jack what are you—”

“Keep me on the air, Vince,” Barron said.

“What in hell is going on? Do you realize what you’re doing?”

Do I realize what I’m doing! Barron thought. Did I ever realize what I was doing before tonight?

“Just keep me on the air, Vince,” Barron said, “and make damn sure Howards stays on the phone.”

Gelardi hesitated, and Barron could read the pain on his face as he said: “The network brass is screaming. You’ve laid them open to the biggest libel suit in history. They’re ordering me to keep you off the air. I’m sorry…”

“This is my show, Vince,” Barron shouted, “and you can tell those fuckers to get stuffed! You can also tell them that every word I’ve said is true, and the only way they can avoid a libel suit is to keep me on the air and let me prove it.”

“That’s pretty dirty pool,” Gelardi said as the promptboard flashed “60 Seconds.”

“It’s a pretty dirty world, Vince,” Barron said, and he broke the intercom connection.

How’s this for the old power-junk, Barron thought. Benedict Howards totally raving out of his mind, and I’ve got him trapped on my turf where I make all the rules, can change ’em anytime I want. Howards, with all his power, with his dirty fingers in every Democratic pie, I can do more than save myself—that’s no real sweat now—I can kick the whole cabal that runs the country to pieces, throw the next election so wide open anyone might win. Right here, right now, live!

A dream, yeah, a Jack-and-Sara dream, just me standing at the focus of everything and kicking the whole rotten schmear apart. Dream made reality—I got the monster that knows where all the bodies are buried (shit, who you think buried them in the first place!) right where I want him, ready to pick him apart…

Sara! Sara! If only you were here to see the show now, baby! Bug Jack Barron goes down, it’ll go down with a bang that’ll take the whole sorry mess with it. Sara… Sara… it’s the only way I know how to cry for you.

He stared at the meaningless commercial on the monitor as the promptboard flashed “30 Seconds,” and knew that in half a minute his image, a reality that was realer than real, would burn into a hundred million eyes as if they were in the room with him.

No, they would be sucked in deeper than that, they would be in his head, behind his eyes, seeing and hearing only what he wanted them to, nothing more and not a phosphor-dot less.

And in a strange reversal of perspective, he saw that if they all were a part of him, the image-Jack Barron was also a part of them. What he had always avoided had come at him from where he least expected it—Bug Jack Barron, like it or not, was power, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.

And as the promptboard flashed “On the Air’, Jack Barron knew there was only one way he could play it. Been called a lot of things, he thought, but humble was never one of them!

On the screen, the pack of Acapulco Golds fades out and is replaced by a face, an expanded vidphone image, gray, fuzzy, somehow bloated. There is something inhuman about the eyes, a too-bright rodent emptiness and the mouth is trembling, the lips beaded with spittle.

Over this close-up of Benedict Howards, a voice, controlled, unwavering, yet with an undertone of suppressed agony that gives it total conviction, the voice of Jack Barron:

“Surprise! Surprise! We’re back on the air, and in case you tuned in late, the man you’re looking at is Benedict Howards. The man you’re looking at thought he could buy anyone in the United States, me included, and you know something—he was right.”

The black and white face on the screen seems to shout something soundlessly at this, as if the words will not come, and then suddenly it is gone and the face of Jack Barron, in close-up, fills the screen. His sandy hair is a tangle as if the pregnancy of the moment has forbidden him to comb it; his eyes seem huge, leaping out of the screen from deeply-shadowed pits, and somehow he looks older and younger all at once.

“Think you couldn’t be bought, out there?” he says, and the words are bitter, knowing, yet also somehow ironically forgiving. “Pretty sure of that, aren’t you? So was I, baby, so was I. But what if the man that was buying was Benedict Howards, and the coin he was paying for your bod was eternal life? You so sure now? Really? Then think about what it’s like to be dead. You say you can’t? Of course you can’t, ’cause you can’t nothing when you’re dead. Think about that, because you’re all going to die, gonna be nothing—dead. Unless Benedict Howards thinks he has a good reason to give you eternal life. And he thought he had a good reason to buy me—so he bought, and I sold. No excuses, friends, I just didn’t want to die. Would you? So now I’m immortal, with the glands of a dead child sewn inside my hide. How’s that grab you? You hate me—or is that twinge in your gut just envy? But before you make up your mind…”

Now the left half of the screen is filled with the face of Benedict Howards, a gray specter of menacing madness that Jack Barron pins with his big green eyes as he says: “Go ahead, Howards, tell them the rest.”

“Rest…?” Benedict Howards mumbles like a lost little boy. “What rest? Isn’t any rest, just facing black circle life leaking away in plastic tubes eviscerated niggers… you’re killing me, Barron, throwing me to the black circle of death closing in choking me choking me… you’re killing me! Rest…? Rest…?”

Jack Barron’s sky-blue sportjac and yellow shirt, his sandy hair and wounded eyes, seem like an oasis of embattled humanity beside the gray gray madness that radiates from the left half of the screen, as unreal and preternatural as a grainy newsreel of Adolph Hitler.

“You forgot your little kicker, didn’t you Bennie?” Barron says. “Back in Colorado, folks, Bennie told me I’d never have the b—, ah, cojones to do what I’m doing now. Remember, Bennie? Remember the contract? Remember the special clause you wrote in just for this occasion? Remember what you said you’d do?”

Howards’ face seems to expand like a gray balloon, and it fills the entire screen and he begins to babble, his voice dopplering upward in pitch as the words pour out faster and faster: “I’ll get you, Barron, swear I’ll get you for this, you murderer you killer on the side of the fading black circle closing in, you killed me, Barron, get you kill you like you’re killing me…”

Jack Barren’s living-color image appears in the lower-lefthand quadrant, a frail, vivid splotch of fleshy humanity, threatened by yet somehow more cogent than the gay newsreel monster surrounding him, a contrast that makes you proud to be a man.

“Got your name on the contract in black and white,” Howards babbles shrilly, “a legal confession in any court in the country. Murder! Yeah, he’s a murderer, accessory to murder, I can prove it, got his name on the contract accepting legal liability for the results of the immortality treatment—if it’s murder, sends me to the chair, you fry with me, Barron; you’re a murderer too!” Coming from the gray unreal monster, the words are unreal, and there is a blessed relief of tension when the images reverse and Barren’s flesh-and-blood face fills three-quarters of the screen, and Howards’ black and white newspaper photo face appears tiny in the lower-left quarter of the screen, as if a more natural order has been restored.

“Too? I’m a murderer too?” Barron says, and every syllable seems to carry a total conviction, coming as it does from a man, not an image.

“You are! You know you are. I can prove it, you’re a murderer too!” the little newsreel figure says.

Jack Barron turns from the thing below him, stares out from the screen with pain and fury written in those huge green eyes. Those wounded human eyes.

“I’m a murderer too,” he says. “You heard the man, folks, too. I’m a murderer too. Didn’t I tell you I sold out to Howards? He made me immortal, and to get that I signed a contract that made me legally liable for every result of that treatment, including a charge of murder. Yeah, murder, because the Foundation’s been buying children, killing them and transplanting their glands, and I’ve got pieces of some poor dead kid sewn inside me. So I’m a murderer too.”

The image of Benedict Howards winks out, and the face of Jack Barron fills the entire screen. And as it does, something seems to happen to that hard-edged face. It goes soft, vulnerably soft, and the big eyes seem to become wet and shiny, guilty, self-accusing—a face that makes you want to comfort the hurt soul behind it, a face that in its pain bears the mark of unquestionable wrenching truth.

And when Barron speaks, his voice is quiet, subdued, without an iota of guile in it:

“I’m going to ask something of you out there that I’ve never asked before. I’ve got no right to do it, but I’m going to ask you to believe something just because I say it’s true. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know that my immortality meant killing a child until I woke up in a hospital bed and Benedict Howards told me.

“Look, I’m no little tin saint, and we all know it. I admit I wanted to live forever bad enough to sell out to Benedict Howards, and you’ve got every right to hate me for that. But murdering children is something I would never stomach under any circumstances for any reason, and that’s all I’m asking you to believe. Proof? Howards has all the proof on his side, the signed contract and the best witnesses money can buy to say that I knew what I was doing. And you’d better believe it, money can buy plenty. The only proof I’ve got that I’m telling the truth is that I’m right here in front of you, laying my life in your hands and saying it, telling you the whole truth because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise, and to hell with what happens to me. It’s all up to you out there. I ask you to believe that I’m telling the truth.”

Silence, three full seconds of dead silence that seem to crawl on forever, as the face of Jack Barron stares out from the screen, the eyes like a pair of open wounds, windows into the soul within, hurt eyes, strangely humble eyes, and yet with a certain open defiance, a guileless defiance with no defenses but the truth. And in that very open and defenseless defiance, the certainty of the truth behind.

An unbearable moment of human reality leaping out from the flat phosphor-dot pattern of the screen…

And then suddenly the moment passes, and a certain hardness returns to Barron’s face (but a hardness made poignant by the knowledge of the softness behind it), and purposefulness comes back into his eyes.

“Only one more thing to tell you, friends,” he says, “and then you’ll have the whole ugly truth. Now you know what Bennie did for me; the question is, what was I supposed to do for him?”

The grainy gray face of Benedict Howards appears in the lower-left quarter of the screen, and now Barron is not a victim but an inquisitor as he stares down at him.

“What about it, Howards?” Barron says. “Do you tell them or do I? Go ahead, tell them! Tell ’em how you’ve been buying up children, tell ’em how many Congressmen you got in your hip pocket, tell ’em your plans for the next Democratic convention. And tell ’em what you wanted me for, tell ’em what I was supposed to do for you.”

Howards’ face expands to fill three-quarters of the screen, with Barron in the upper righthand corner, his eyes flaying the gray image like whips.

“No! No!” Howards screams. “You got it all wrong, don’t understand, no one understands, gotta push the fading black circle back forever… Life is all I want; I’m on the side of life against death! Senators, Congressmen, Governors, President—gotta be on the side of life, not the side of the fading black circle closing in eviscerated niggers vultures’ beaks up nose down throat choking away life in tubes and bottles—”

Howards is suddenly compressed into the lower lefthand corner of the screen, screaming silently as Jack Barron ignores him, stares straight out from the screen, says:

“That’s where it’s at, folks. All I was supposed to do is lie to you. Tell enough lies to get that Freezer Bill passed, and then help Bennie elect his tame President—and guess which party he has bought? I may stink to high heaven with Foundation BO, but half the Democrats in Congress stink worse than I do. I can’t name names, but just maybe now some of ’em’ll have the guts poor Ted Hennering had and stand up and be counted. And if they don’t… well, just read a list of the Congressmen who support the Foundation Bill. Can’t sue the Congressional Record for libel!”

Now Howards’ face fills the entire screen, his eyes glazed and rolling, little flecks of spittle spraying from his trembling lips as Barron’s voice-over begins to almost chant: “You’re a dead man, Bennie. Dead… dead… dead. You’re gonna fry till you die. Till they kill you dead. Dead… dead… dead…”

“Nooooooo!” Howards screams. “I’ll get you get you all kill you buy you own you destroy you forces of the fading black circle nobody kills Benedict Howards, Senators, Governors, Congressmen, kill ’em all own ’em all kill… Nobody kills Benedict Howards! Nobody, never, young and strong and…”

Howards’ mad eyes stare straight out from the screen, and his screaming becomes harsh, clipped, savage.

“Barron! Barron! I’ll get you, Barron! Kill you! Kill you! Kill!”

From nowhere, a great gray fist suddenly fills the entire screen—and then the whole screen goes dead, a scintillating field of speckled gray and white static and over it an electric serpent hiss.

Just the dead screen and the hissing static for a beat, then the gray field of random electric impulses is pushed up into the upper-righthand corner as if by the hand of Jack Barron, who fills the rest of the screen in a head-and-shoulders shot, pointing to the square of hissing nothingness (like the random non-being of the grave) with his eyes.

“You, out there, you suckers, you!” he shouts. “Look at the thing you made! We all made Benedict Howards, we always make our Benedict Howards, because there’ll always be men who know the Big Secret: we can all be bought. Who wants to die? Who wants to live in a rat-trap? Who wants to eat garbage? They know it, and they suck on it—politicians! Power-junkies, giving you just enough to keep you bought with Welfare and Medicare and Niggercare and nice-sounding lies; crumbs from the table, is all! Just enough to cool it, and not a crumb more. Hold your noses and take a good look around you for a change—we’ve got a thousand little Benedict Howards calling themselves Governors, Congressmen, Senators, Presidents. And the only difference between them and Howards is that they’re not in his league, they’re pikers. What are you gonna do about it? Sit on your fat asses like you always have? Or maybe go out and get yours—anybody with a kid can get a piece of change for his bod. A lot more than thirty pieces of silver. Well, suckers, had enough? Or are you gonna let it go on and on and on till you die? Just remember, though, when you die now, baby, you die alone.”

Barron pauses, and almost laughs the old inside-joke laugh as he says the next words with the old endearing bad-boy shrug: “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to wait some more to get your licks folks—till after this word from our palpitating sponsor.”

Epilogue

Never… never… never kill me, Barren! No no no no one kills Benedict Howards, Your Honor! Buy you, Your Honor, kill you own you with the power of life against death, Your Honor… make you immortal, Your Honor… Barren’s on the side of the fading black circle, Your Honor… I’m innocent, on the side of life, Your Honor… No one kills Benedict Howards, Your Honor! No one! Young and strong and healthy soft-skinned women in air-cooled circles of power Los Angeles, Dallas, Vegas, New York, Washington, forever, Your Honor…

Benedict Howards paced the small room endlessly; planning, scheming, mumbling threats to himself. It was a pretty bare room, not quite what he was accustomed to, but not really very much like a prison cell either. Yeah, he thought, maybe those goddamn lawyers knew what they were doing after all.

“My client is obviously mentally incapable of standing trial at this time.”

See, Barren, even you couldn’t do it! Nobody can do it, nobody kills Benedict Howards! Young and strong and healthy for the next million years! Forever! No electric chair, no prison, just a nice public sanitarium commitment until those goddamn expensive lawyers figure out a way to get me off scott-free. And they will, they said they would, promised me they would! They got all the time in the world to get me off, got a million years (’… paranoid delusions…’), got enough time to breed me lawyers (’… semi-hallucinatory state…’), yeah, breed whole new races of the bastards (’… incapable of standing trial… is to be confined in a hospital for the criminally insane until such time as he may be deemed mentally competent to stand trial…’), controlled mutation whole new races of purebred lawyers can kill that murder indictment and then I can get out of here, when it’s safe.

Benedict Howards insane! What a joke! Joke on Jack Barren, Senators, Congressmen, President, Your Honor. You prick, Your Honor, I didn’t even have to buy you, Your Honor, you could’ve lived forever, Your Honor, but you cretin you, you did just what my lawyers wanted you to, put me here where the fading-black-circle electric chair can’t get at me, never get at me, while my lawyers hold it back, push it back, keep it back for a million years.

All they gotta do is quash that murder indictment, and the next day I walk right out of here, ’cause I’m not crazy, Benedict Howards is the sanest man in the world, saner than a man, better than a man, immortal like a god…

Howards paced the room, thinking: I paid good money for worse rooms than this in cold dry Panhandle days when I couldn’t afford better, not a bad deal, the dumb sap government pays the rent on this joint while I sit it out, while they quash the indictment… Then I can stop faking it and get myself declared sane again, easiest thing in the world, ’cause I’m the sanest man in the world… nobody’s ever been as sane as me…

Yeah, not such a bad room, pretty good view, the bed isn’t bad, and they even bring me my meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner in bed any time I want it. Even got… even got… even got…

Howards froze. Mustn’t think about it! Can’t think about it! Think about it, and it turns itself on! Barren! That fucker Barren, he can turn it on from the inside, the bastard! Any time he wants to he can turn it on from the inside, any time I forget not to think about it, he can turn it on… from in inside… don’t think about it… don’t…

But Benedict Howards knew that it was too late. He had thought about it, about the television set built into the wall, high up where he couldn’t get at it, couldn’t smash the leering smart-ass fading black circle of Jack Barren watching him, always watching him, immortal just like me, be there forever, always watching! Watching! Watching! Watching!

He found his eyes moving upward to watch the face on the television screen; he had to watch, had to stay on guard, that fucker Barron was always watching him! And Barren’s immortal, I made him immortal, can’t get rid of him, and he’s on the side of the fading black circle, gotta watch him, don’t dare turn my back…

Benedict Howards shook his fist at the television screen, the screen they had sworn they were cutting out of the hospital circuit the first time he had tried to climb the wall to smash it. But they lied! They lied!

“Damn you, Barron! I’ll get you, kill you, buy you! You hear that, Barron, I own you! Own you down to your toes!”

But the smirking phosphorescent face burning itself from the glass screen into the back of his eyes said nothing, just smiled that damn smart-ass smile, the deep, shadowed eye-hollows black, black, black, shimmering, circling, face of the fading black circle closing in, fading circle of death…

Howards staggered backward, felt the edge of the bed cut into the small of his back, fell backward on to it, feeling tube up nose down throat choking him his life leaking away in phosphor-dot plastic bottles, and Jack Barren’s face laughing smart-ass doctors nurses fading black circle life leaking away tube up nose down throat forever…

“Nooooooooo!” Howards screamed and screamed and screamed. “I’m dying I’m dying I’m dying…”

Footsteps outside, the man with the needle again, needle of sleep, of blackness, needle of dreams of the fading black circle closing in, darkness closing in, face of Jack Barron, life leaking away forever… forever…

“I’m not crazy!” Howards screamed. “I’m not! I’m not! I’m dying… I don’t wanna die, don’t wanna, don’t wanna… Don’t let it kill me! Don’t let him kill me!”

Lukas Greene pushed the vidphone across his desk, rubbed his eyes. Malcolm running too, he thought. What’s that make, four… or five? Everybody wants to get into the act! As the Chinese like to say when the shit hits the fan, “We are living in interesting times.”

Hard to figure what’s gonna spring next. When Jack torpedoed Howards all the shit in the country hit the fan. Teddy the Pretender locking up the “regular” Democratic nomination, if there is such a thing any more… And the old “Foundation Democrats” read out of the party and running their own candidate… Democrats jumping to the SJC… maverick Republicans bolting the coalition and running their independence candidate… now Malcolm Shabazz running, and even old Withers making noises again. Still, with Jack on an SJC-Republican coalition ticket we probably have the inside track.

But it’s sure become a bookie’s nightmare! Yeah, we’re living in interesting times. But at least we got as much chance as anyone to come out on top when the Great Unwashed finally puts Humpty-Dumpty together again.

Greene sighed. President Jack Barron, he thought, and Vice-President Lukas Greene… Well, stop crying, you nigger you, you knew that was the way it had to be. Jack up front, and you number two shit-color brown, black is more like it, maybe get to go as far as any nigger can.

The Black Shade, oh, what a laugh, you white nigger you, as if there could be a black shade any more than there could be a white nigger! Who knows, Greene thought, maybe that’s why I started that one in the first place. If there really could be a black shade, then maybe there could somehow be a white nigger… in a White House, someday, somehow… Can’t kid yourself now, baby, this is nitty-gritty time, and if the SJC finally gets its President, it’s gonna be Jack, not you, white, not black.

Come on, he told himself, snap out of it, man! Remember why you got into this racket in the first place, you felt it in your belly then. Remember how it was? Only lost that gut-feel when you got your little piece of the action. Well, that’s over now, it’s a whole new hand of cards, and who knows, maybe now we got some aces.

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.