“Let’s go one step further. Let’s say that our unnameable Senator finds out about this here… treatment. Let’s say he doesn’t like it one bit. Let’s say he calls up the unnameable head of the unnameable foundation and tells him precisely where he can stuff his unnameable treatment. Let’s say our Senator tells him he’s gonna oppose his own bill, blow the whistle on our hypothetical foundation on the floor of the Senate. That means our hypothetical foundation head’s gonna be tried for murder, unless… unless something happens to close our Senator’s mouth. Tell us, Mr Howards—just hypothetically, of course—if you were the head of our hypothetical foundation and this Senator’s big mouth was your ticket to the electric chair, what would you do?”
“—sue you!” Howards’ voice shouted as Vince switched the images and cut in his audio. “Sue you for libel! I’ll get you, Barron! Send you to the chair! I’ll—”
Gelardi hustled him back into the lower-left quadrant hotseat like a sergeant-at-arms, and Barron felt the moment hang in the air. Nitty-gritty time, he thought. All I gotta do is spring it; I’ve got him set up for the kill. Kill myself with him maybe, with that contract as a signed confession, me and Sara—Sara! SaraSaraSara… No more Sara… He felt slug-green things drip-dripping the stolen life-juices of broken babies within him, and in a flash of pure, blessed berserker rage knew that it had to be get Bennie first, and try to save himself later.
“Now let’s get back to what’s laughingly known as the real world,” Barron said. “Fact: Senator Theodore Hennering was killed in a mid-air plane explosion which conveniently destroyed any evidence that might be of murder, hypothetical or otherwise. Fact: A few weeks later, Hennering’s widow just happens to get herself run over by a hit-and-run rented truck. What do you say to that, Mr Howards?”
Vince flashed Howards to three-quarters screen just long enough for him to mutter, “How should I know? Coincidence—” before he was cut off again, and Barron was back at three-quarters screen.
Here comes a tricky part, Barron thought. If I can get him to admit it, at least I’m off the libel hook.
“And another fact that nobody knows: Madge Hennering called me before she was killed, told me that Benedict Howards had threatened to kill her husband shortly before he died, just before he died, because Hennering had found out something about the Foundation that was terrible enough to make him switch sides. And that’s not libel either, friends,” Barron lied, “because I can prove it. I have the whole conversation on tape.”
“It’s a lie!” Howards screamed, as Vince flashed him on, then off. “Lie! Goddamn fading black circle lie! Lie!”
“Watch that, Bennie,” Barron said, giving his puppet-mask on the screen an ironic smile, “you’re calling me a liar, and that’s libel, and I can prove it with the tape.”
Barron paused, knowing what the next link in the chain had to be. Gotta come right out and accuse him of murdering Hennering, and that is libel any way you slice it without legal evidence which I ain’t got unless he gives it to me—and he won’t unless I climb out on that limb. Okay, smart-ass, this is the real nitty-gritty, the razor inside—go! go! go!
“Last week I flew down to Mississippi to talk to a man who claimed—you saw it here folks—that someone had bought his daughter for $50,000,” Barron said, still playing footsie with the libel laws. “Now, if some foundation needed children for an immortality transplant operation… get the picture, folks? Three people, and only three people knew I was going down there: Governor Lukas Greene, a very old friend; the woman I loved, and—Mr Benedict Howards. Someone shot the man I went down there to talk to, a real pro job, and he almost got me too. One of those three people had Henry George Franklin killed and tried to kill me. Who do you think it was, my friend, my wife, or…?”
Barron paused again, half for the effect, half hesitating at the bank of an abysmal Rubicon, knowing the total mortal danger his next words had to bring. Howards’ inset face on the monitor screen was ashen but strangely calm, knowing what was coming, knowing he couldn’t save himself, but also knowing that the power to destroy was mutual, was also his. Fuck you, Bennie! Barron thought. Banzai for the Emperor, live a thousand years! Yeah, a thousand years…
“Or Benedict Howards, who bought that man’s child to cold-bloodedly vivisect in his Colorado labs, Benedict Howards, who is immortal with the glands of a murdered child sewn into his rotten hide, Benedict Howards, who murdered Theodore Hennering and his wife and Henry George Franklin, Benedict Howards, who tried to kill me. After all, Mr Howards, murder’s cheaper by the dozen, isn’t it? You can only fry once.”
And he foot-signaled Vince to cut in Howards’ audio and give him the full screen treatment. Moment of truth, Barron thought as the image of Benedict Howards ballooned on the screen like a bloated bladder. I’m wide open for a libel suit unless Bennie’s far gone enough to cover my bet. He let Howards’ silent face eat up three or four seconds of dead airtime, and behind his eyes Barron could sense a straining interface between blind paranoid rage and shrewd vestiges of the amoral coldness that had built the Foundation, had made this ruthless fucker immortal, let him gut children on a goddamn assembly-line and then bitch about the cost.
Two sides of the same coin, Barron realized. Paranoia either way, is all. A cool paranoiac uses his head coldly and ruthlessly to do in everyone in sight ’cause he knows everyone’s out to get him, and when a cat like that finally freaks out, he’s gonna be shrieking and screaming at everything in sight. Gotta push him over that line!
“How does it feel, Howards?” he said, speaking from his own gut, slashing the words over Howards’ full screen image like the black-wash-over-moire-patterns behind his own head. “How’s it feel to have the stolen glands of some dead kid inside you, crawling around under your skin like spastic slugs oozing slime all over your body twitching and itching—feel ’em?—like they were slowly eating you alive always eating eating eating but never finished eating you up inside for a million.”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Howards screamed, his face filling the screen with a mask of feral terror, his eyes rolling like dervishes, his mouth slack and wet like that of a man in a trance. “Don’t let them kill me! Fading black circle of eviscerated niggers tubes of slime up my nose down my throat choking me… Don’t let them kill me! Nobody kills Benedict Howards! Buy ’em own ’em kill ’em Senators, President, fading black circle… I don’t want to die: Please! Please! Don’t let them…”
Zingo! Vince chickened out finally; Howards’ face was off screen, his audio dead, and Barren’s face filled the entire screen.
Fuck! Barron almost muttered aloud. What a time to get squeamish! What—Suddenly, came a gut-flash that nearly knocked Barron out of his chair! Bennie’s totally freaked out! Doesn’t know what he’s saying. Maybe I can do more than get him to admit he killed Hennering, get him to admit on the air he conned me, I didn’t know about the treatment beforehand. The truth! Maybe he’s crazy enough so I can get him to tell the truth. But I gotta lay it all on the line, take away even his doomsday machine weapon, pull out all the stops, throw it all in their fat little laps out there, my life, everything. How’s that for a television first—the fucking truth?
“Tell them, Howards,” he said, “tell the whole damn country what you’re putting over on them. Tell them about Teddy Hennering, tell them about the Foundation for Human Immortality, tell them about immortality from the inside. Tell ’em what it feels like to be a murderer.”