Bug Jack Barron

by Norman Spinrad

  They all look like they just fell down a rabbit hole, Barron thought, not even bothering to hide his smug bad-boy satisfaction. One thing’ll always knock power-junkies back on their asses—talk straight to the monkey and avoid the middle men, among themselves they don’t dare admit what they are, so they’re out of their class when they come up against someone who’s got no reason to pretend the Emperor isn’t swishing around in the altogether.

  And that, he suddenly realized, is why a lox like Howards, who really isn’t very big in the smarts department, can buy and sell them like used cars. He’s not smarter than they are, he’s just a bigger swine but with no front to worry about. He’s a power-junkie too, but he’s also the biggest dealer in town. And every junkie knows he had better bark when his Man says dog. Which is also why I drive Bennie up walls: he knows I’m one cat not hooked on the shit he peddles.

  “All right,” Morris finally said. “I think you’re nuts, but why not? If you do run, we’ve got to keep you on the air anyway—and you’ve got to sink your fangs into Howards. You’ve got a deal, Barron.”

  Beside him, Barron felt Luke sigh with triumphant relief. Sorry about that, chief, he thought, and said, “No deal yet. You guys got some mighty fancy competition—like Benedict Howards. I know where you stand now, but before I jump I want to see what Bennie thinks he has to offer.”

  “What can Howards possibly offer you that’s bigger than the Presidency?” Morris said.

  Barron laughed. “Believe me,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I’m not so sure I believe it myself. Tune in next Wednesday, though, and you’ll find out. I guarantee that if I decide to play your game all your questions will be answered. You’ll see the hottest live TV show since Ruby shot Oswald.”

  16

  “And tell us in twenty-five words or less what you did on your vacation, Miss Westerfeld,” Jack Barron said, peeling off his sportjac and shirt, kicking off his shoes, and punching a stud on the nearest wall console which slid the glass patio doors open. The chill New York morning air, clean and clear at twenty-three stories up (at least at this hour) began to wake him out of his plane ride semi-sleep stupor, and he walked barechested out on the patio, with Sara in a bleary interrupted-sleep bathrobe following him outside, shivering.

  “All I asked is what happened in Evers,” she complained in not-unjustified wounded tones.

  Barron shrugged, grimaced, hugged her to him as much to warm himself as her. “The whole scam would make about three one-hour specials,” he said, “but at least I’ll give you the flash. I land at the airport. Luke has a whole fucking circus set up for my benefit, Ye-Olde-Presidential-Trial-Balloon schtick, as much to work on my head as on the press. After I shake that, I talk to this Franklin, find out someone really did buy his kid, find at least four other kids were probably bought by the same someone, put one and one together and come up with Bennie Howards, then back to Luke’s plantation where he’s got Morris, Woody Kaplan, and Deke Masterson all lined up to play the Smoke-Filled-Room number. I messed with their minds for a while, hopped a plane, and here I am, live in person. Satisfied?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said firmly. “You look like…like something terrible has happened. Like…Jack, for chrissakes, tell me the truth!”

  Barron looked out over the morning-clear East River-Brooklyn skyline, like a goddamn postcard-picture against the technicolor blue sky. And in about two hours, he thought, the air’ll be filled with about a trillion tons of muck and filth, the river’ll stink like a sewer, all those smokestacks already starting to stoke up—wonder what they make in all those goddamn factories over there, shit, probably, is all. And what did that cat say? “It is perfectly obvious why Man was created. Human beings are the most efficient organisms in all of Earth’s evolutionary history for converting food into shit.” And, man, am I on a bummer! So tell the little lady, man, they try again, she may be in the line of fire.

  “Benedict Howards tried to have me killed,” he said quietly. He felt the muscles of her arms tighten around him, and she pressed her cheek against his naked goosefleshed chest. “Didn’t come very close, though,” he lied. “I dunno, maybe he was just trying to scare me off. Gunzel in the street, strictly Dodge City. Got that poor bastard Franklin, though. Howards really wanted to shut him up.”

  “But why?” Sara said. “After all the trouble he went to to get you on his side?”

  “Now there’s the $64,000 question. Think I figured out part of it. Howards killed Hennering because he found out something about the immortality schtick that scared him shitless enough to blow the whistle. Howards killed Franklin because he was afraid I’d find out the Foundation was buying children, and he tried to kill me, or at least scare me off, because he was afraid I’d put it on the air. Can only mean that Howards’ boys used those poor kids as human guinea pigs to develop the immortality treatment; and some of ’em must’ve died in the lab, ’cause the only thing that Bennie would risk being tried for murder for is covering up another murder, and the only thing he’d risk killing for in the first place is immortality.”

  “What do we do now?” she asked, and her eyes staring up at him were pool-deep tunnels into his own gut into angers from the past into hard metal bee passing his ear Franklin in a pool of blood stretching from Berkeley attic to Evers street to four (five) cop-outs in a nice air-conditioned room in Luke’s plantation house divvying up dreams of desperation and playing power-junkie games “No one crosses Benedict Howards” and the cool professional assassin rifle on the garbage can sharding behind him orange peels and muck flying like a smashed junkie’s skull and hard metal bee passing his ear “The Black Shade! The Black Shade!”—and you know damn well what you want to do, Barron!

  He smiled a bad-boy smile at her and asked, secretly rhetorical, knowing almost word for word what he would get back but wanting to hear his old close-to-the-blood self speak through Sara’s lips: “What do you want us to do?”

  “Isn’t that all you need?” she asked. “Howards a murderer, and even if you couldn’t prove it you could put the parents of those kids he bought on the air, and then get Howards…But that’s your line of evil, you know just how to destroy the Foundation, you almost did it twice. And we could be careful, not let anyone get at us to…to…I’m not afraid.”

  “I wonder if Madge Hennering said that too,” Barron said, but it was only a pro-forma cop-out and he knew it even as he said it. Got Bennie’s ass against the wall now for sure, he thought, and he’s not fucking around with Ted Hennering now, he’s playing chicken with Jack Barron, and I wrote that book. You set up your insurance already, didn’t you? What the fuck can Bennie do? Can’t get you off the air, not with that G.O.P. Fat Cat action from Morris…should be able to keep away from hit-men you know are there. The fucker tried to kill you, you gonna let him get away with that?

  “No, goddamnit, you’re right for once, Sara, Bennie’s not gonna get away with this. Not murder. Not sitting on top the whole country on a pile of dead bodies for the next million years, not a cat tries to kill Jack Barron and gets off whole! Yeah, no sweat to kill his Freezer Bill, and with the kind of stink I can hang on Howards, he’ll never be able to hold on to enough Democrats to block the Pretender…Sure I can do him in. And I will. Only…”

  Only maybe the stakes are just too big for you to afford revenge, he thought. Across the river, smoke reached into a blue sky that went up and up and up till it became a cold, clear, black nothingness that went on and on in all directions as far as…as far as forever. And that’s a big thing to blow, forever. That’s more hero than any sane man can be. Jesus H. himself’d have to think twice. Big deal, he died to save us, but he had an angle, he died knowing he had forever made (“but if you black, when you go, you don’t come back”). How big a Baby Bolshevik would he have been if he knew he was blowing the Big All, immortality, on that dirty old Cross?

  “Sure,” Barron said, “it sounds groovy when you riff it out like that. Ma
kes you forget the one thing Bennie does have going—I do him in, we kiss immortality good-bye. You really ready for that, Sara?”

  And this time her eyes were only a question; there was no answer anyone could give. But, he thought, there is that piece of paper.

  “Sara,” he said, “are you ready to play the big game for all the marbles, today, right now?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I call Bennie right now, tell him we’re on our way to Colorado, we want that immortality treatment now, and once we get it—then we’ve got it all! Yeah! That’s his only edge, and once he blows it, we’ve got him. You ready? You ready for immortality now?”

  “But…but how do you know he won’t just kill us?”

  “Wonders of Modern Science plus a little pure nastiness,” Barron said. “I’ll carry a miniphone and get him to spill the beans to me, fuck with his mind till he’s gibbering, and—”

  “What’s a…miniphone?”

  “Huh…? Oh, that’s a new Bell Labs gizmo, personal portable phone not on the general market yet, strictly for vips. Transmits directly into the phone system’s satellite-ground-relay circuit, so you can use it from anywhere, just like making a call from an ordinary vidphone.

  “I can set up a conference vidphone hookup, one or two phones here, couple at the office, and have the miniphone feed into the circuit with recorders on all the phones to get everything Bennie and I say on tape thousands of miles away, with instructions to Vince to mail copies to Luke, the F.B.I., Morris, maybe the A.P., if anything happens to me. All I gotta do is get Bennie to incriminate himself when he thinks we’re alone, and he won’t be able to touch us no matter what.”

  “You really mean it this time, don’t you?” she said. “I can hear the real Jack Barron talking now…” And her arms around him, her lips half-open, eyes that reflected bottomless depths of naked pleasure were eating him up in Berkeley sheets Meridian streets Acapulco-tropical-night-sounds bottomless feral worshipping hunger sucking him to her flashing images of Berkeley S.J.C. attic streets-of-danger the feel of his own blood surging hot through his arteries with Sara beside him, always beside him with that manic turn-on hunger screaming “Go! Go! Go!”

  Yeah, a free hard-on in every bag of power-junk, and a free bag with every hard-on, Baby Bolshevik bullshit and you know it, but man, oh, man, feel that dirty old surge! Yeah, we felt everything all over in those days, it was just us kids against all the crap in the world, and wasn’t that groovy, and shit we were more or less right. And then along came magic age thirty and we all got hungry for a piece of the action, and before we knew it, it was all just use me and I’ll use you politics, and them that stayed had the monkey on their backs. Like Luke…didn’t want the monkey, just didn’t dig power-junk hooks everyone who makes that scene, sooner or later, like it or not. And that’s what I saw when I got out. I wasn’t the cop-out, they were, or as much as me anyway, and show biz was the only thing could keep the monkey off my back. Yeah, everyone sells everyone else down the river sooner or later, was luck, is all, I found show biz or I’d still be doing it too. And letting Bennie cool things’d be selling everyone down the river in one big forever lump, biggest cop-out of all time…

  “Seems like I don’t have much choice,” Jack Barron said.

  Like cherries coming up on a slot machine, he saw that old familiar delicious Pavlovian reflex-arc close behind the windows of her eyes in a sizzle of hero-worshipping sparks, and she moved her mouth down his chest, licking and biting, leaving a trail of sweet juices, as her hands undid and dropped his pants with that old weirdly-masculine efficiency. She dropped to her knees, free hair bobbing, hands undulating over him, mouth moving against then around him in one sinuous fluid movement as her rolling tongue and warm pulsing lips sucked him in…

  She paused in mid-beat, stared wide-eyed up at him across the flesh of his stomach as if it were the marble of some heroic statue; then her eyes mercifully closed as her nails bit the roundnesses of his ass, hands stuffing him into her mouth like a big bite of sweet melon. She grunted once softly as she picked up on the beat, faster and faster and faster in an asymptotic rhythm, kneading and clawing and sucking faster and faster and faster…

  Faster, faster-faster-faster-faster fasterfasterfaster—and he slumped forward, half-limp over her as pleasure-waves inside him crested and crested-crested-crested-crested-crested-crested crestedcrestedcrested in on-rushing rhythmic explosive series till they dopplered merged peak-to-peak in a continuous timeless flash…and he sighed a great air-release groan and exploded through her tension released in a synapse white-out reversal, paused, then cupped her face in his hands, lifted her up to him and kissed her softly on her moist, love-bruised lips.

  And the breeze from the river was warm and soothing, filling him with a calm as wide as it was deep. Ah, it’s all such a shuck, the whole damn hurricane, when you stand at the center, none of it’s real. And anyone’s at the center if he sits up and looks. Got as much going for us as the next cat, just gotta be me. Peel the biggest vip going down till he’s mother-naked, and all you get is a man who deep inside, won’t believe what he is. Mano a mano, you got enough going for you to stand up to anyone, you’re looking down from where all those big-league politician cats look, and no wonder they don’t talk about it, it’s all just a shuck, none of those pricks got any more business telling the whole fucking country what to do than you have. You know it, and they don’t, is all. That’s where show biz is at—the only way to get that old surge without getting hooked on the junk, and without doing anyone in along the way. Politics! Statecraft! Horseshit! All you need to get into the big game is a little bit of muscle and a lot of bluff.

  And one hell of a strong stomach.

  No, no, too easy, thought Benedict Howards, too easy a victory over forces of the fading-black-circle Jack Barron smart-ass up-nose down-throat servant-of-death.

  Howards whirled his swivel chair around like a spastic marionette, and like a Hollywood backdrop wilderness the mountains facing the northwest quadrant of the Rocky Mountain Freezer Complex Administration Building spread themselves out before him, a view carefully unspoiled by buildings. But it was no backdrop, it was ten thousand acres of the Rocky Mountains, an amoeboid estate rippling across uninhabited, impassable mountains. And next week, when all the sales were final, the few roads leading in from the outside world would be cut, and I’ll be safe in the middle of ten thousand acres of impassable wilderness, the only airport on it mine, he thought, no way for anyone to get within fifty miles of the Complex unless I say so. I’ll be safe in here, safe for the next million years.

  Twenty million dollars. That prick Yarborough thinks I’m crazy, paying twenty million dollars for ten thousand acres in the ass-end of nowhere. Three-score-and-ten fool! Amortized over the next million years, that’s just twenty bucks a year, and that’s mighty cheap life insurance, when you can afford to take that real long view.

  Nothing looks the same when you can figure on a million years. Fifty million getting the Freezer Bill through Congress, a hundred million to buy a President every four years, and, if you can’t buy him, for ten million you can hire a pro to kill anyone…Teddy Hennering, and, yes, Teddy the Pretender too, it ever comes down to it.

  You can do literally anything if you’ve got working capital and can amortize the cost over a million years. Save money too on all those smart-ass tax lawyers; cheaper to buy a new law when you got what it takes to make it stand a million years.

  So screw you, Jack Barron, whatever bush-league crap you’re up to, coming out here like this, walking right in for the treatment after I been chasing you for a month, after you gotta know I hired that dumb prick who missed you. Don’t matter what you think you’re up to, what counts is you’re here. Yeah, smart-ass, you and your woman are right here where I want you, and until I say so, there’s no way you can get out. And you don’t leave here till you have the treatment, and once you do, you’re in it with me—in it in ways you can’t even dream of no
w…More than your life on the line, it’s the next million years.

  Yeah, no way you could ever trust three-score-and-ten Jack Barron, but immortal Jack Barron’ll be in the bag for certain. For dead certain, dead like rotting in six feet of maggots fading black vultures laughing over your flesh for ten thousand years of tube up nose down throat life leaking away in plastic vulturebeak bottles simpering nurses bedpans of maggots clashes of metal drooling in mud laughing images of eviscerated niggers picaninny eyes rolling in cancerous bloody cotton fading fading fading in ruined balls shriveling rotting…

  “Mr. Barron is here,” the plastic-secretary-voice of the intercom said.

  Howards whirled the chair around, blinked his eyes once, and was back. Watch that stuff, he told himself. Couple days, it’ll all be over, Barron in the bag, and everything safe from fading black faces of eviscerated picaninny eyes rolling in—

  The door opened, and into the room walked Jack Barron. There was something hard and round and black behind his big, electric-dangerous eyes, like a fading black circle vortex reaching out as he stepped across the room. His eyes never leaving Howards, he sat down in the chair by the desk, stuck his feet up on it, lit up one of those damn Acapulco Golds dope-fiend cigarettes, and said: “Save the heart-attack, Bennie, this is the straight schmear, just between you and me. I know everything, Bennie, everything. I got you pinned to the wall, and I got a mighty good reason to nail you, best reason in the world, and we both know what it is.”