Two dozen beds, in each of them a young child, none younger than six, none older than about ten, and more than half of them black. All were being fed intravenously, but the tubes feeding the needles taped in their armpits led not to drip-bottles but to a master-tube that ran along each wall and back to the complex of consoles at the rear of the room. A similar arrangement emptied the catheters that snaked out from under each set of bedclothes. Each child had electrodes taped to head and chest, the wires converging in trunk-line cables that ran along either wall to the monitor consoles. There was no sound as they entered the ward, not a head turned, not a muscle moved; the kids were all in deep comas.
The ages… the preponderance of Negroes… Christ on a Harley! Barron thought. These gotta be the poor kids the Foundation bought!
“Neat, eh?” Howards said. “I mean, when you think what a mess it could be, a whole roomful of squalling brats, and the personnel it’d take to take care of ’em… In the short run, all this equipment’s real expensive, but when you think of what it saves on food and salaries and trouble and amortize it out… well, even in the medium run it saves an awful lot of money.”
“What the fuck are you doing to these poor kids?” Barron said. “What’s wrong with ’em, why are they all out cold?”
“Wrong with ’em?” Howards said neutrally, but with some kind of terrible mania leaking out of his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong with ’em, they’re all perfect physical specimens, or you can bet your ass we wouldn’t be blowing the money it takes to keep ’em here. We don’t do anything to them here, this is just our nursery. The whole process is perfectly painless for the kids. From beginning to end they don’t feel a thing. What do you think I am, some kind of sadist? We just keep ’em out and quiet and feed ’em on glucose till they’re ready for processing. Saves time and mess and money this way—one man at the instruments there can run the whole show.”
Can’t be happening, Barron told himself as Howards led him and the guards down the aisle. But he knew damn well it was. A death-stench of madness so thick you could cut it as they walked past the rows of sleeping children plugged into tubes and wires like some hideous circuitry—and that’s all he sees, fucking production line, is all. Production of what? Bennie’s gone totally ’round the bend, and when I get him on the show I’ll tear him to pieces, then tear the pieces to pieces… He’s stark staring mad!
Yet he found himself listening in dread fascination, unable to think past Howards’ words as Bennie babbled on like some damn production manager conducting a guided tour of a refrigerator factory:
“Of course this is just a pilot plant… If we could solve the problem of safe revival from the Freezers we wouldn’t need all this crap—just irradiate ’em as soon as we get ’em and drop ’em in Freezers, then thaw ’em out when we need ’em, save a lot of money. We’re working on it, but they tell me that’s still years away, so we gotta make do. Keeping ’em alive after the radiation’s the real bind. What with the radiation disease and cancer, none of ’em last more than a couple of weeks. So the timing’s real tricky, keeping a dozen or so always ready. Damn, if they’d only figure out how to keep glands viable in the Freezers we could get rid of all this mess.”
As they reached the door at the far end of the ward, the man behind the desk looked away from his dials briefly as Howards said: “Don’t pay any attention to us. I’m just giving the guided tour to our very first client.”
Then he turned to Barron, his eyes unreadable beacons of madness, and said, “Still, a pretty neat set-up for a pilot plant, eh, Barron?”
Barron felt the flood of unbearable sensory data finally getting through to where he lived. Murder. Some kind of crazy mass-murder! He’s killing these kids, killing ’em slow, gotta be totally nuts to show me all this. What’s he think I am… gotta know I’m gonna nail him to the wall…
“What the fuck is this?” Barron shouted. (And seeing a window in the door before him opaqued with ripples like a toilet window, he moved toward it.) “And what the hell’s behind this door?”
Swift as a cat Howards was between him and the door, his eyes wide with terror. “You don’t want to look in there,” he said, his voice frenzied and shrill. “Take my word, you don’t want to see. That’s the post-radiation ward… cancer… rotten flesh… falling apart… It’s ugly, Barron, they tell me it’s real ugly. I’ve never been in there, I don’t want to see. Doctors, they’re used to that kind of stuff… But we’d both be sick if you opened that door.”
“What are you doing? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”
“Stop raving, Barron, haven’t you guessed? With enough of the right radiation, kids’ glands can be retarded just enough so they stay in this Homeostatic Endocrine Balance, keep the body the way it is, never aging, forever. Immortality, but with two big catches. First, it only works with children under twelve, so that’d mean no immortality for grown men—for us. And it wouldn’t work anyway, ’cause the radiation we gotta use to balance the glands is a fatal dose. Big joke, eh? Got a way to make kids immortal, only the treatment kills ’em—the operation was successful but the patient died.
“But the glands don’t die, Barron. After they’re irradiated they’re still perfect and balanced to keep a man alive forever. The radiation doesn’t kill the glands at all, all they need is a healthy new body to keep ’em alive, and they’ll keep that body young and alive forever. Just a simple transplant operation, and with the stuff they got today, transplants almost always take. They don’t even have to put the glands where they’d be in a normal body, just a package in the gut and another in the back, not even a major operation—duck soup for my quacks. See what I mean? We got glands that’ll keep us alive forever now, but that doesn’t mean they gotta be ours.”
Snakes undulating slug-slime oozing all over his skin, Barron felt mindless urge to tear it all away, rip himself apart with his fingernails, tear out the soft green pulsing globs of flesh dripping stolen life-juices of Forever, death-junk, drip-dripping eternally into his veins… Images of sleeping faces of mountains of Evers’ slum children Franklin’s smashed face hard metal bee by his ear gutted bodies exploding garbage can slime rivers of blood thick like slime in which he was drowning! drowning! in slime in bodies of niggers crawling all over him maggots inside him—all burned unforgettable tracers of anguish through the quivering meat of his brain.
“You fucking crazy ax-murderer!” he screamed. “You monster! You got no right to be alive! And you won’t be, Bennie, I swear, one way or another I’ll kill you! Got those tapes… I’ll get you even if you kill me right here right now! Go ahead, have your apes shoot me right now! You better! Kill me! Kill me! Either way, I’ll kill you! You fucking—”
And with an animal growl, he lunged at Howards, felt the tips of his fingers just touch the scaly dry skin of Howards’ throat—and the guards grabbed him, one to each arm, snapped his arms behind his shoulder blades in a vicious double hammerlock.
“Murder?” Howards whined. “What do you mean, murder? So the two of us are alive, and two of them are dead… How long would they have lived, at most a century, and then, either way, those kids’d be the same place—dead. So it costs two lifetimes to give us two million lifetimes, don’t you see, life comes out ahead on the deal a million to one. That’s not murder, that’s the opposite, pushing back the fading black circle, pushing it back, back, back, opening, not closing fading black circle of death, pushing it back a million years! What do you mean, murder, it’s life, man, it’s life. Not to do it, that’s murder… murdering yourself, throwing yourself to the fading black circle, six feet of eviscerated nigger maggots ten million years of vultures laughing with plastic beaks up nose down throat fading black circle of death and murder…”