“You know you’re right, Clyde. I always knowed I was a better man than you, never thought you’d finally up and admit it. (And Sara, through body-remembered senses knew the triple-level—reality-put-onreality—of Luke’s sarcasm.) But the hard fact is that you can do it and I can’t, because you’re a shade and I’m a nigger—it’s as simple as that, and I don’t hold it against you. But that’s why I have to do it through you, why we all have to do it through you. What’s the SJC but a collection of coons, Flower People, Baby Bolsheviks, and just plain losers, think I kid myself? You’re the only big-league shade we got going, only cat that can ring in that Republican bread and support. You could be a fucking chimpanzee and we’d have to go with—’cause you’re the only ape can win.”
Sara felt a pang of the old remembered thing for Luke with the balls to say the truth and the brains to say it right, and though, anyone paled beside Jack, for her, she felt a warm snug satisfaction at the memory of how once she had been able to give Lukas Greene some small balm for that ever-open black wound.
“Sorry Luke,” Jack said. “The answer’s still no. And you can tell Morris to forget it too. There’s no point in even thinking about it any more. N.O. No!”
“Okay, B’rer Rabbit, I won’t throw you into the briar patch,” said Luke. “Not today. But I’m telling you right now, I’m gonna stall Morris as long as I can till I can get you to change your mind.”
“You won’t,” Jack said flatly.
“Sara,” Luke said, “you tell this prick where it’s at. Maybe you can get through that concrete skull of his. I’m tired, chillun, gonna go lynch me a brace of rednecks or something, y’know, relax. You listen to that chick of yours, Jack. She knows you better than you know yourself, knows the best part of you, part you still seem to be stranger to. Listen to her, will you, stupid? Later.”
And he broke the connection, and Jack put away the vidphone, and they were staring at each other—the old contest of silence game; who would yell first?
“Jack I—”
“Do I have to hear it from you too, Sara? Does everyone have to tell me what a fucking cop-out I am? Goddamned broken record! You and Luke… you think Luke really knows what’s coming off? You so sure you do?”
“But, Jack, President. . .” The word was an enormity in her mouth, choking off the impossible thoughts of what it implied.
“President, horseshit! A fucking pipe dream! You saw the show. Howards got a fifty-billion-dollar slush fund, and whether he can legally spend it or not the muscle’s still there. Bennie Howards is gonna pick the next President, and you better believe it. I let them talk me into that crap, and I have the privilege of losing—not only the Presidency, but the show too… and maybe a whole lot more. For what, a chance to shoot my mouth off? They pay me to do that every week as it is.”
“But, Jack (Can’t he see himself as I see him?), you could do it. You’re—”
“It’s groovy to know your chick thinks you’re a little tin god. That, and fifteen hundred bucks’ll pay the rent for a month on this pad. What’ll we do if I blow everything by kamikazeing into Howards, open a cathouse, with you as door prize?”
“But—”
Again the vidphone chime interrupted. “If this is Morris, I’m gonna tell him to go—”
She saw his face change abruptly to a mask of cold calculation, and a cold chill came over her as she looked at the vidphone screen over his shoulder and found herself staring at the gray lizardman deathmask, fear-mask of life-and-death power of the man who had brought them together again for reasons of his own, the terrible windowless white face of Benedict Howards.
“You imbecile! You double-crossing smart ass—” Howards was screaming; Sara could feel hot-leather reptile-stench emotions of fear, rage, hate, carrion teeth all but reaching out of the screen, windowless white teeth around a forked rattlesnake tongue spitting venom at Jack’s throat. The sight of a man of such hideous power, a man who held the secret that could destroy her, destroy Jack and Sara Barron again and forever, in such a black mindless rage, terrified her and she felt like a bird before a cobra indeed.
But the moment Jack spoke, the spell was broken. “Look Bennie,” he said in what Sara recognized as his put-on lazy-indifferent style, calculated to infuriate and intimidate those with actual power by an illusion of cooler-than-thou calm, “I’ve had a rough day and I’m in no mood to listen to you gibber. This is an unlisted number for obvious reasons, and I didn’t let Vince give it to you so you could scream at me like a red-assed baboon with bleeding piles. You got something to say to me, you take a deep breath, count to ten, light up an Acapulco Gold, and come on real cool-like, or I’m gonna hang right up on you and put my vidphone on ‘reject,’ dig?”
And in the long moment of silence that followed Sara felt the weight of it heavy upon her. Bennie? Jack called him Bennie! Double-cross? Howards had said “double-cross”! She sensed the electric conflict of wills humming in the silence between Jack and Benedict Howards across the vidphone circuit; sensed that silence operating on multiple levels of power-guile combat; could read from the tiny image of Howards—reptile rage seeming to contract in on itself into a patchwork facade of iron-control—that Jack was somehow the stronger, and that both of them knew it.
“All right, Barron,” Howards finally said in a voice like steel, “I’ll assume that I’m talking to a rational human being and not a raving lunatic. A rational human being should know what happens when you double-cross Benedict Howards. I thought we had reached an understanding. You were going to get me off the hook, and then you turn around and—”
“Hey, what’s all this double-cross scam?” Jack said (And Sara sensed this was no put-on. But what’s going on between Jack and Howards?). “I wasn’t gonna get you off anything. I just wasn’t gonna ram the knife home in the last segment, way I could’ve. I gave you the chance to talk about research and make points, didn’t I? Not my fault if you’re not a pro like me. I gave you the perfect lead-in to tell the world how great your immortality research is going, and you blew your big chance to make good in show biz. Come to think of it, you acted pretty funny—almost as if you had something to hide…”
“Never mind all that,” Howards said coldly. “We’ve got some business to transact, remember? You’ve already cost me Christ knows how many votes in Congress with this last disaster, and it’s about time—”
“Not on the phone,” Jack broke in. “My office. Two o’clock tomorrow.”
“Look, Barron, you’ve mickey moused me long enough. No one plays games with Benedict How—”
Jack laughed what Sara recognized as a calculated laugh. “If you insist, Bennie. Of course I better tell you I’m not alone.”
Jack stared at her; she could sense worlds behind those eyes, alien worlds of guile and power, Jack-Howards clandestine-combat worlds. And with a pang of fear she wondered if Jack saw the worlds behind her eyes—Howards working on her, twisting her, sending her to him for reasons of his own (Was that the business they were talking about? Sell-out to Benedict Howards? Am I just a piece of lizardman sure-thing insurance?), and her own plan within Howards’ plan…