“Please, Sara, for chrissakes, don’t freak out now,” Barron said stridently, feeling strident as he said it, but not knowing what to say, what to do. “Imagine how I feel—knowing Bennie tricked me, outsmarted me, made me ask to be made immortal, made me fight for it, connive for it, go through a million changes, and then I finally get it, win it, for you and me, and when I wake up, I find out… find out inside of me—”
“You didn’t know?” she said, pouncing like a cornered cat. “He tricked you into it? You didn’t know what it was, and you woke up, and then he told you?”
“What the fuck do you think I am?” Barron shouted. “You think I’d let him do a thing like that if I knew? Think I’d let them cut apart some poor kid so I could live forever? What do you think I am, a goddamn monster?”
“He did it to us,” Sara whispered shrilly, eyes filming to a blank flatness. “He did it, that monster Howards, with his money and his frozen bodies and his murderers and his dirty lizard eyes seeing right through you, measuring your price like a piece of meat… . We never had a chance, no one has a chance, Howards can make anyone do anything, trick him or kill him or force him or buy him. No one can stop him. He’ll go on and on and on forever, buying children, chopping them up, owning them, owning us, everybody, forever, always that lizard and his cold white…”
“Sara! Sara! For chrissakes!”
Suddenly she grabbed the flesh of his chest, fingers convulsed into talons, digging in, bruising cruelly. “You’ve got to stop him, Jack! You’ve got to stop him! We can’t live with ourselves, we can’t live with each other, can’t stand being alive with murdered things in our bodies till you stop him. You’ve got to be able to stop him!”
Wanting to shout yes! yes! yes!, Barron instead found himself confronting the same cold reality. Kamikaze’s the only way to stop Bennie, take us down to the electric chair with him… To die, to be dead rotting in maggots, tasting nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing… throw away being young and together for a million years. A million years of broken babies’ slug-green glands drip-dripping stolen life-juices inside us…
“I can’t! I can’t!” he cried. “Bennie was too smart for me. Those contracts we signed prove us accessories to murder, evidence that’ll stand up in any court. You understand what that means? It means we’re murderers, is all. I blow the whistle on Bennie, he blows it on us, and we all waltz to the electric chair together. Dead. I knife Bennie, we die. You know what dead means? Know what we’d be throwing away?”
“It’s not fair!” she shouted. “We haven’t done anything! We’re not really murderers, we’re victims, just like the children. We didn’t know.”
“Nazis?” Barron said in a bitter mock-Prussian accent. “Ve vasn’t Nazis, ve vas all in der Resistance, all of us, all eighty million of us Chermans. Ve didn’t know, ve vas chust following orders. Jawohl, Mein Herr, chust following orders! Yeah, baby, go tell it to the judge—see how far you get when Bennie trots out twenty paid witnesses say we knew exactly what the treatment was when we got into it. He’s got us, Sara, there’s not a thing we can do and live to tell about it.”
“But you’ve got to do something. We can’t let him go on like this! There’s gotta be a way to stop him!”
“Only one way to stop him,” Barron said, “and that’s the old kamikaze schtick. You ready for that? You ready to die—now, when we can stay alive for the next millon years? You got the balls to make yourself die?”
“No,” she said simply, but there were volumes of torture in her eyes.
“Well, neither have I,” he said, and felt his consciousness withdrawing to the safety of electric-circuit phosphor-dot ersatz reality.
“It’s just not right… it’s just not fair…” she muttered, and he felt her skin shrinking away, and her eyes were as opaque and unreadable as stainless-steel mirrors.
“Right, schmight,” he said, her body now a dead weight of cold, unreal flesh pressing obscenely against him. “It’s where it’s at, is all. And we’re stuck with it.”
And suddenly the air in the room was cold gooseflesh on his naked skin. And they got up and dressed without saying a word to each other. Like strangers.
19
Sara Westerfeld dropped the cap, then sat down on the couch facing the dusk lights of Brooklyn to wait for the acid to hit. Supposed to be seven hundred mikes, she thought, but it’s been laying around since I moved in with Jack, never even thought about taking it until… until…
Her body shivered, even though it was June-evening warm. Too warm, in fact, sticky-warm like heavy flowing molasses under her skin, like crawling wetness-things inside her body…
She got up, went to the nearest wall console, threw a switch, and the glass patio-doors glided shut. She turned the thermostat to 70’, the humidity control to “medium dry,” and the air-conditioning unit began pumping in cool dry air through the circular series of vents around the base of the domed ceiling.
She walked to the communications-complex wall, put the surfsound tape on continuous replay cycle, keyed the color organ down toward blues and greens, sat down on the couch again, and stared out at the duskscape across the river. It was like a painted mural now, the glass interface of the patio-doors separating it from the swirling blue-and-green surfsound. Big Sur-pine reality within.
Sara strained against her own mind, testing the swirl of colors and surfsounding melding, trying to feel it, trying to make the LSD hit. A good way to have a bummer, she cautioned herself, so uptight trying to make it hit… Why’d I drop acid in the first place, now, with Jack going on the air soon, with lizardman Howards safe in his bone-white lair of power and bleeding things inside me cut from dead children…
A black chill went through her (the acid starting to hit?) as she remembered how mindlessly she had turned to the LSD, almost as if the acid were taking her instead of she the acid, like a thing waiting to be born or to die within her, a thing with which her conscious mind had no contact at all reaching out through the reflex-arc of her arm, directly, bypassing conscious volition, reaching out to grasp the acid key to its release, a thing with reasons and shapes of its own that might or might not be those of what she thought of as Sara, a blind captain leading the ship of self on an unknown voyage into the dark sea within, and she knew that the acid was hitting.
A visceral fear began to grip her as the Sara within mocked her, reminded her that there were reasons and compulsions to take acid at any given time and some of them could be evil.
Evil… the word had an archaic medieval sound-shape to it, black bishop’s robes swirling, Marquis De Sade dark things from murky European history books… Evil… something ominous and serpent-edged in the knife-shape of the word, dreadful and slimy, but somehow outdated… Evil… a word with bone-white crocodile-teeth, like the smile of Benedict Howards from his bone-white temple of death-god power… Evil… wet green things under moist rocks in blue-green moonlight, sucking life-juices from corpses… corpses of babies bleeding and broken… . Evil…
Evil… The blues and greens swirled reptilian-fashion across the snake-house glass of the domed ceiling like octopus tentacles, and the sound of the surf was a sea-thing sigh from the bowels of a bottomless black ocean, and across the sky outside the dark closed in… Evil… It was cool and dry in the room, like a lizard’s skin… Evil…