“Seems to be a bug in Mrs Pulaski’s connection,” Barron said as Vince rearranged the images, giving Howards’ naked discomfort half the screen alongside him, Dolores Pulaski reduced to a tiny inset-creature looking on. “But I think she’s made her point. Fifty thousand dollars is a hell of a lot of bread to hold on to, taxes and cost of living being what they are. You know, I knock down a pretty nice piece of change for this show, I probably make more money than ninety per cent of the people in the country, and even I can’t squirrel that kind of bread away. So when you set the price of a Freeze at fifty big ones you’re really saying that ninety per cent of all living Americans gonna be food for the worms when they die, while a few million fat cats get the chance to live forever. Hardly seems right that money can buy life. Maybe the people who’re yelling for Public Freezers—”
“Commies!” shouted Howards. “Can’t you see that? They’re all Communists or dupes of the Reds. Look at the Soviet Union, look at Red China—they got any Freezer Programs at all? Of course not, because a Freezer Program can only be supported by a healthy free enterprise system. Socialized Freezing means no Freezing at all. The Commies would love—”
“But aren’t you the best friend the Communists have in America?” Barron cut in, signaling for a commercial in three minutes.
“You calling me a Communist!” Howards said, forcing his face into a soundless parody of a laugh. “That’s good, Barron, the whole country knows the kind of people you’ve been involved with.”
“Let’s skip the name-calling, shall we? I didn’t call you a Communist… just, shall we say, an unwitting dupe of the Reds? I mean, the fact that less than ten per cent of the population—shall we say, the exploiters of the working class, as they put it—has a chance to live forever, while everyone else has to die and like it… is there a better argument against a pure capitalistic system that the Reds can dream up? Isn’t your Foundation the best piece of propaganda the Reds have?”
“I’m sure your audience isn’t swallowing that crap,” Howards said (knowing it damn well is, Barron thought smugly). “Nevertheless, I’ll try to explain it so that even you can understand it, Mr Barron. Maintaining Freezers costs lots of money, and so does research on restoring and extending life. It costs billions each year, so much money that, for instance, the Soviet government simply can’t afford it—and neither can the government of the United States. But an effort like ours must be financed somehow, and the only way is for the people who are Frozen to pay their own way. If the government tried to Freeze everyone who died, it’d go bankrupt, it’d cost tens of billions a year. The Foundation, by seeing to it that those who are Frozen pay for it, and pay for the research, at least keeps the dream of human immortality alive. It may not be perfect, but it’s the only thing that can work. Surely a man of your… vast intelligence should be able to see that.”
Five points for you, Bennie, Barron conceded. Thing is that the fucker’s essentially right. Letting the few that are Frozen now feed the worms won’t get anyone else into a Freezer, and if you got a thousand people dying for every slot open, well baby, that’s where life’s always been at—the winners win, and the losers lose. But you’re too right for your own good, Bennie, muscle talks, and muscle’s what you’ll get from good old Jack Barron.
“Of course I understand the hard economic realities,” Barron said as the promptboard flashed “2 Minutes.” “I mean, sitting here, fat and healthy and thirty-eight years old. Dollars and sense and all that crap, on paper your Foundation looks real good. Yeah, I understand, Mr Howards. But I wonder if I’d feel so damn philosophical if I were dying. Would you, Mr Howards? How’d you like to die like Harold Lopat—broke, and the life leaking out of you drop by drop, while some cat in a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit explains real logical-like how it’s economically impractical to give you the chance to live again some day?”
To Barren’s surprise, Howards seemed genuinely stricken: a mist of what seemed like sheer madness drifted behind his eyes, his jaw trembling. Howards muttered something unintelligible and then froze entirely. The basilisk himself turned to stone? Bennie Howards with an attack of conscience? Barron wondered. More likely something he ate. Well, it’s an ill wind, he thought as the prompboard flashed “90 Seconds.”
“What’s the matter, Mr Howards,” Barron asked, “can’t you identify with the situation? Okay, Mrs Pulaski, let’s give Mr Howards some help. Please turn the camera of your vidphone on your father and hold it there.”
Vince’s right on the ball, Barron thought as Vince blew up Dolores Pulaski’s small inset to virtually fill the entire monitor screen as the image danced fragments of walls, vase, ceiling, then became a huge close-up black and white newspaper photo-image of the wasted old man’s face, a long rubber tube trailing from one nostril and taped to his forehead; the gray deathbed photo tilted at a crazy home-videotape angle, and made the closed blind eyes of Harold Lopat seem to stare down at the image of Benedict Howards in the lower left-quadrant like an avenging ghost of death looking down at a scuttling insect after kicking over a wet rock, as the prompboard flashed “60 Seconds.”
And Jack Barron, in a once-in-a-blue-moon off-camera spectral-voice gambit, etched Howards’ face into a mask of terror and fury with precise scalpel-words: “Look, Howards, you’re looking at death. That’s not $50,000 on your balance sheet, that’s a human being, and he’s dying. Go ahead, look at that face, look at the pain, look at the disease eating it up behind the mask. Only it’s not a mask, Howards, it’s a human being—a human life in the process of being snuffed out forever. We all come down to that in the end, don’t we, Mr Howards? You, and me, and Harold Lopat, all of us, sooner or later, fighting for just another breath, another moment of life before the Big Nothing closes in. And there, but for $50,000 go you or I. What’s so holy about fifty grand that it buys a man’s life? How much is $50,000 in pieces of silver, Mr Howards? A thousand? Two thousand? Once a man’s life was sold for thirty pieces of silver, Mr Howards, just thirty, and he was Jesus Christ. How many lives you got in your Freezers worth more than His? You think any man’s life is worth more money than was the life of Jesus Christ?”
And Gelardi filled the screen with the face of Benedict Howards, ghost-white in an extreme close-up that showed every razor nick, every pimple, network of coarse open pores, the eyes of a maddened trapped carnivore as Jack Barren’s voice said, “And maybe we’ll have some answers from Benedict Howards after this word from our sponsor.” Jesus H. himself on a bicycle! Barron thought gleefully as they rolled the commercial. Days like this, I scare myself.
“Oooh, does he want to talk to you!” Vince Gelardi’s voice said over the intercom circuit the moment the commercial was rolling. “Sounds like he’s down with hydrophobia.” Barron saw Gelardi grin, give him the highsign, start the count with “90 Seconds” on the promptboard as Benedict Howards’ face appeared on the tiny number two vidphone screen and his voice came on in the middle of a tirade: