As the last seconds of the Chevy commercial rolled on the monitor screen, Jack Barron got another flash of the total power he wielded over that screen, the power of an artificial phosphor-dot pattern that went straight from his mind through the satellite-network circuit to a hundred million brains, the power of a reality-illusion that wasn’t even real. Life and death, he thought, just Bennie and me, and the poor bastard doesn’t have a prayer. No matter how high the cards he holds in reality are, he still wouldn’t have a chance on my turf, ’cause on those hundred million screens, he says only what I let him say, he is only what I let him be, it’s my reality, it’s like he was stuck inside my head.
And he finally understood fully where Luke and Morris were at. It didn’t matter that he would be a joke as President, what the flesh and blood man in the studio is doesn’t matter at all—the only thing that matters is what a hundred million schmucks see on the screen, that’s what’s really real, image is all, because when it comes to what’s happening in That Big World Out There, image is all the poor fuckers ever get to see.
Oh, what a shuck! he thought as the promptboard flashed “On the Air,” and he stared at his own electric face, the eyes sinister pits of power, strictly from holding his head slightly downturned to catch kinesthop flashes from the backdrop behind him. I can do anything on that fucking screen, anything—no one’s in my league in this brand of reality, no matter who the hell they are in the flesh-and-blood private-reality that nobody sees. What happens on the screen is just my word made flesh, I make all the rules, control every damn phosphor-dot the whole country sees. Why couldn’t it make me President, or anything else—shit, they haven’t elected a man President since Truman, they elect an image, is all, and who’s bigger league in the image-racket than me?
And the unreal black and white face of Benedict Howards in the lower-left quadrant was nothing less than pathetic; Howards didn’t even have the beginnings of a chance, because what the whole country was seeing wasn’t Bennie’s Howards, but Benedict Howards as edited and rewritten by Jack Barron.
“All right,” said Barron, feeling unfairly, obscenely confident, “let’s get back to our fairy story and see just how hypothetical it really is. A while back on this show we discussed immortality research, didn’t we, Mr Howards? (Howards began to shout something soundlessly on the screen, and Barron thought of Sara, felt a savage elation at the total paranoid frustration Howards must be going through, knowing it was his life going down the drain and not a damn thing he could do about it, not even scream.) You said then you didn’t have an immortality treatment… What if I say you have? What if I say I have proof? (Watch those libel laws, man!) What do you say to that, Benedict Howards? Go ahead, I dare you, deny you have an immortality treatment, right here, right now, in front of a hundred million witnesses!”
Barren’s face was a triple-size full-color monster sur-ounding the mute image of Benedict Howards. As the images inverted, Barron realized what was about to happen even as—
Howards’ eyes glazed over, and crazy tension-lines from every coarse, open, black-and-white exaggerated pore seemed to radiate paranoid fury as the devil-mask of his face filled three-quarters of the screen, and as Vince cut in his audio, he was screaming:
“… you, Barron! I’ll kill you! You—” Howards suddenly blanched as the fact that he was on the air penetrated the red mist. “It’s a lie!” he managed to shout somewhat less shrilly, it’s a goddamn lie!” But every fear-line in his face shouted that it wasn’t. “There’s no immortality treatment, I swear there isn’t, only the fading black circle, against it, we’re against it on the side of life, we don’t eviscerate picka—” Howards’ whole face shook as he realized what he had started to say, and he cut himself off even as Gelardi killed his audio and gave Barron back three-quarters screen.
Jeez, doesn’t matter what he says, Barron realized. All I gotta do is blow my own riff and just let ’em see it bounce off his face…
“Stop gibbering, Howards!” he said coldly. “Makes you feel any better, why, then, we’ll talk about the other end of our little hypothesis. Let’s just suppose, hypothetically, if you insist, that there is an immortality treatment that involves, oh, say a gland-transplant operation that requires the glands of young children, that involves cutting them apart, murdering them for their glands…” He paused. Howards was screaming mutely again on his quarter of the screen like an impotent bug impaled on a pin. Squirm, you bastard, squirm! Had any brains, you’d hang up the phone, but you can’t, can you? I got you in too deep now.
“Dig?” Barron said. “If there was such a treatment, and it did involve murder, that would sure explain a lot of funny things, wouldn’t it folks? Would explain why Mr Howards is so hot to get his Freezer Utility Bill passed, get himself a nice commission, with his Foundation answerable only to that commission, and the commission controlled completely by the President… Especially if the President we elect is answerable only to him. What about it, Mr Howards, doesn’t that make sense?”
Gelardi inverted the images, and Howards’ stricken face once more dominated the screen. “You—” he began to shout. And then Barron could all but see a shade pulling down behind his desperate eyes, a shade of silence, his only possible retreat.
“Okay,” said Barron as the images reverted, “so Mr Howards doesn’t care for… hypothetical situations. So let’s talk about hard facts. Let’s talk about Presidential candidates. (Watch them libel laws!) Now I’m only repeating what I read in the papers—but a lot of people thought that the late Senator Theodore Hennering had the inside track to the Democratic nomination, and things being what they are, that meant the inside track to the Presidency. Before his… unfortunate accident. Tell us, Mr Howards, were you a Hennering man—or was Hennering a Foundation man?”
Howards came out fighting this time as his audio came on and the images on the screen inverted: “That’s libel, Barron, and you know it!” But before he could get in another word, Vince flashed him back into the silent Coventry of the lower-left quadrant hotseat.
“Libeling who? Now there’s a good question,” Barron said. “You or Hennering? Anyway, I’m not libeling anyone, just asking a question. Fact: Hennering was a sponsor and the Senate floor leader for the Freezer Utility Bill. Fact: Hennering’s Presidential balloon had mighty big bread behind it. I gotta watch those libel laws, folks, so you’ll have to add it up all by yourselves—one and one makes… Got it, folks? Cause here comes some more hypothetical stuff.
“Let’s say that a Foundation which the libel laws prevent me from naming has bought itself a Presidential candidate who the libel laws prevent me from naming got a lot of muscle behind a certain bill—which the libel laws prevent me from naming because they’ve got a beep! beep! treatment that amounts to murder, and let’s say that our unnameable Senator from Illinois doesn’t know about this treatment. Are you with me so far, out there? Ain’t it wonderful, living in a free country where you can . . . hypothesize anything you want so long as you don’t name names? Even when you all know what names to put into the blank spaces.”
He paused and clocked how Howards’ face had become a pasty mask, how he didn’t even seem to be paying attention, knowing for sure it was all over now.