And in a strange reversal of perspective, he saw that if they all were a part of him, the image-Jack Barron was also a part of them. What he had always avoided had come at him from where he least expected it—Bug Jack Barron, like it or not, was power, terrible, unprecedented power, and with it came the unavoidable choice that had faced every power-junkie since time began: to have the sheer gall to fake being something greater than a man, or cop-out on the millions who had poured a part of themselves into your image and be something less.
And as the promptboard flashed “On the Air’, Jack Barron knew there was only one way he could play it. Been called a lot of things, he thought, but humble was never one of them!
On the screen, the pack of Acapulco Golds fades out and is replaced by a face, an expanded vidphone image, gray, fuzzy, somehow bloated. There is something inhuman about the eyes, a too-bright rodent emptiness and the mouth is trembling, the lips beaded with spittle.
Over this close-up of Benedict Howards, a voice, controlled, unwavering, yet with an undertone of suppressed agony that gives it total conviction, the voice of Jack Barron:
“Surprise! Surprise! We’re back on the air, and in case you tuned in late, the man you’re looking at is Benedict Howards. The man you’re looking at thought he could buy anyone in the United States, me included, and you know something—he was right.”
The black and white face on the screen seems to shout something soundlessly at this, as if the words will not come, and then suddenly it is gone and the face of Jack Barron, in close-up, fills the screen. His sandy hair is a tangle as if the pregnancy of the moment has forbidden him to comb it; his eyes seem huge, leaping out of the screen from deeply-shadowed pits, and somehow he looks older and younger all at once.
“Think you couldn’t be bought, out there?” he says, and the words are bitter, knowing, yet also somehow ironically forgiving. “Pretty sure of that, aren’t you? So was I, baby, so was I. But what if the man that was buying was Benedict Howards, and the coin he was paying for your bod was eternal life? You so sure now? Really? Then think about what it’s like to be dead. You say you can’t? Of course you can’t, ’cause you can’t nothing when you’re dead. Think about that, because you’re all going to die, gonna be nothing—dead. Unless Benedict Howards thinks he has a good reason to give you eternal life. And he thought he had a good reason to buy me—so he bought, and I sold. No excuses, friends, I just didn’t want to die. Would you? So now I’m immortal, with the glands of a dead child sewn inside my hide. How’s that grab you? You hate me—or is that twinge in your gut just envy? But before you make up your mind…”
Now the left half of the screen is filled with the face of Benedict Howards, a gray specter of menacing madness that Jack Barron pins with his big green eyes as he says: “Go ahead, Howards, tell them the rest.”
“Rest…?” Benedict Howards mumbles like a lost little boy. “What rest? Isn’t any rest, just facing black circle life leaking away in plastic tubes eviscerated niggers… you’re killing me, Barron, throwing me to the black circle of death closing in choking me choking me… you’re killing me! Rest…? Rest…?”
Jack Barron’s sky-blue sportjac and yellow shirt, his sandy hair and wounded eyes, seem like an oasis of embattled humanity beside the gray gray madness that radiates from the left half of the screen, as unreal and preternatural as a grainy newsreel of Adolph Hitler.
“You forgot your little kicker, didn’t you Bennie?” Barron says. “Back in Colorado, folks, Bennie told me I’d never have the b—, ah, cojones to do what I’m doing now. Remember, Bennie? Remember the contract? Remember the special clause you wrote in just for this occasion? Remember what you said you’d do?”
Howards’ face seems to expand like a gray balloon, and it fills the entire screen and he begins to babble, his voice dopplering upward in pitch as the words pour out faster and faster: “I’ll get you, Barron, swear I’ll get you for this, you murderer you killer on the side of the fading black circle closing in, you killed me, Barron, get you kill you like you’re killing me…”
Jack Barren’s living-color image appears in the lower-lefthand quadrant, a frail, vivid splotch of fleshy humanity, threatened by yet somehow more cogent than the gay newsreel monster surrounding him, a contrast that makes you proud to be a man.
“Got your name on the contract in black and white,” Howards babbles shrilly, “a legal confession in any court in the country. Murder! Yeah, he’s a murderer, accessory to murder, I can prove it, got his name on the contract accepting legal liability for the results of the immortality treatment—if it’s murder, sends me to the chair, you fry with me, Barron; you’re a murderer too!” Coming from the gray unreal monster, the words are unreal, and there is a blessed relief of tension when the images reverse and Barren’s flesh-and-blood face fills three-quarters of the screen, and Howards’ black and white newspaper photo face appears tiny in the lower-left quarter of the screen, as if a more natural order has been restored.
“Too? I’m a murderer too?” Barron says, and every syllable seems to carry a total conviction, coming as it does from a man, not an image.
“You are! You know you are. I can prove it, you’re a murderer too!” the little newsreel figure says.
Jack Barron turns from the thing below him, stares out from the screen with pain and fury written in those huge green eyes. Those wounded human eyes.
“I’m a murderer too,” he says. “You heard the man, folks, too. I’m a murderer too. Didn’t I tell you I sold out to Howards? He made me immortal, and to get that I signed a contract that made me legally liable for every result of that treatment, including a charge of murder. Yeah, murder, because the Foundation’s been buying children, killing them and transplanting their glands, and I’ve got pieces of some poor dead kid sewn inside me. So I’m a murderer too.”
The image of Benedict Howards winks out, and the face of Jack Barron fills the entire screen. And as it does, something seems to happen to that hard-edged face. It goes soft, vulnerably soft, and the big eyes seem to become wet and shiny, guilty, self-accusing—a face that makes you want to comfort the hurt soul behind it, a face that in its pain bears the mark of unquestionable wrenching truth.
And when Barron speaks, his voice is quiet, subdued, without an iota of guile in it:
“I’m going to ask something of you out there that I’ve never asked before. I’ve got no right to do it, but I’m going to ask you to believe something just because I say it’s true. I didn’t know. I really didn’t know that my immortality meant killing a child until I woke up in a hospital bed and Benedict Howards told me.
“Look, I’m no little tin saint, and we all know it. I admit I wanted to live forever bad enough to sell out to Benedict Howards, and you’ve got every right to hate me for that. But murdering children is something I would never stomach under any circumstances for any reason, and that’s all I’m asking you to believe. Proof? Howards has all the proof on his side, the signed contract and the best witnesses money can buy to say that I knew what I was doing. And you’d better believe it, money can buy plenty. The only proof I’ve got that I’m telling the truth is that I’m right here in front of you, laying my life in your hands and saying it, telling you the whole truth because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise, and to hell with what happens to me. It’s all up to you out there. I ask you to believe that I’m telling the truth.”