The Ticket That Exploded (Burroughs, William S.) Read Online Free

“Inched tape . . the same recording you just heard pulled back and forth across the head .. You can get the same effect by switching a recording on and off at very short intervals. Listen carefully and you will hear words that were not in the original text: ‘do it-do it-do it . . yes I will will will do it do it do it . . really really really do it do it do it. . neck neck neck . . oh yes oh yes oh yes . .’
    “You heard?”
    “Oh yes oh yes oh yes” (I reflected it would be interesting to inch a speech in the U.N., Congress, Parliament, orwherever and play back a few seconds later. You can run a government without police if your conditioning program is tight enough but you can’t run a government without bull shit.) “Yes I heard.”
    Here’s another one from the same original tape alternating Harrison and ‘Genial’ 24 times per second. I suspect this was the tape that dropped Harrison.”
    A familiar sound I had heard it for years barely audible . . loud and clear now a muttering hypnotic cadence. He shut the machine off.
    “The sound track
illuminates
the image . . ‘Genial’s’ image in this case . . almost tactile . . Well there it is . . biologists talk about creating life in a test tube . . all they need is a few tape recorders: ‘Genial 23’ at your service sir . . a virus of course . . The sound track is the only existence it has no one hears him he is not there except as a potential like the spheres and crystals that show up under an electron microscope: Cold Sore . . Rabies . . Yellow Fever . . St. Louis Encephalitis . . just spheres and crystals until they find another host . . just an arrangement of iron molecules on a tape until ‘Genial 23’ takes another queen . . . of course parasitic life is the easiest form to create . . . I wonder if . . .”
    “If one could make a good ‘Genial’? I don’t know. Experiments along this line are indicated ...”
    (‘You see the angle, B.J.? a
nice
virus . . beautiful symptoms . . a long trip combining the best features of junk hash LSD yage . . those who return have gained a radiant superhuman beauty . . !)
    “Was ‘Genial’ staying in the Paddington flat at the time of Harrison’s suicide?”
    “No. He left Harrison a month before Harrison’s death. Apparently Harrison offered him all the money he could raise to come back and live with him but ‘Genial’ refused. He was living with a young man. name was Cunningham . . Robert Cunningham . . splicing themselves in together . . so long as the spliced tape finds an outlet in actual sex contact it acts as an aphrodisiac . . nothing more . . But when a susceptible subject is spliced in with someone
who is not there
then it acts as a destructive virus . . the perfect murder weapon with a built-in alibi. ‘Genial’ was not there at the time. He never is.”
    “‘Genial’ didn’t work this out for himself.”
    “Hardly . . This is obviously one aspect of a big picture . . what looks like a carefully worked out blueprint for invasion of the planet . . Anyone who keeps his bloody eyes open doesn’t need a Harly St psychiatrist to tell him that destructive elements enter into so-called normal sex relations: the desire to dominate, to kill, to take over and eat the partner . . these impulses are normally held in check by counter impulses . . what the virus puts out of action is the
regulatory centers in the nervous system
. . We know now how it is done at least this particular operation . . We don’t know who is doing it or how to stop them. Everytime we catch up with someone like ‘Genial’ we capture a tape recorder . . usually with the tapes already wiped off...”
    “You must have some idea.”
    “We do . . You know about the Logos group?? . . claim to have reduced human behavior to a predictable science controlled by the appropriate word combos. They have a system of therapy they call ‘clearing.’ You ‘run’ traumaticmaterial which they call ‘engrams’ until it loses