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

emotional connotation through repetition and is then refiled as neutral memory. When all the ‘engrams’ have been run and deactivated the subject becomes a ‘clear’ . . It would seem that a technique a tool is good or bad according to who uses it and for what purposes. This tool is especially liable to abuse. In many cases they become ‘clear’ by unloading their ‘engram’ tapes on somebody else. These ‘engram’ tapes are living organisms viruses in fact . . This does give a certain position of advantage . . any opposition crippled by ‘engram’ tapes . . the ‘clears’ burning with a pure cold flame of self-interest a glittering image that lights up clearer and clearer as it fragments other image and ingests the dismembered fragments . . Yes we know the front men and women in this organization but they are no more than that. . a façade . . tape recorders . . the operators are
not there
..”
    “Program empty body what?” I got up to leave. “Where can I find ‘Genial’?”
    “Boot’s any midnight. You won’t get anything out of him. He doesn’t remember.”
    The guard was wearing a white life jacket — He led Bradly to a conical room with bare plaster walls — On the green mattress cover lay a human skin half inflated like a rubber toy with erect penis — There was a metal valve at base of the spine —
    “First we must write the ticket,” said the guard (Sound of liquid typewriters plopping into gelatine) —
    The guard was helping him into skin pants that burned like erogenous acid — His skin hairs slipped into the skin hairs of the sheath with little tingling shocks — Theguard molded the skin in place shaping thighs and back, tucking the skin along the divide line below his nose — He clicked the metal valve into Bradly’s spine — Exquisite toothache pain shot through nerves and bones — His body burned as if lashed with stinging sex nettles — The guard moved around him with little chirps and giggles — He goosed the rectum trailing like an empty condom deep into Bradly’s ass — The penis spurted again and again as the guard tucked the burning sex skin into the divide line and smoothed it down along the perineum, hairs crackling through erogenous purple flesh — His body glowed a translucent pink steaming off a musty smell —
    “Skin like that very hot for three weeks and then —” the guard snickered — ‘wearing the Happy Cloak . . Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It had been illegally developed after its potentialities were first realized. In its native state it got its prey by touching it. After that neurocontact had been established the prey was quite satisfied to be ingested you remember they make happy cloaks from a submarine thing that subdues its prey through a neuro-contact and eats it alive—only the victim doesn’t want to get away once it has sampled the pleasures of the cloak. It was a beautiful garment a living white like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible ecstatic movement of its own as the lethal symbiosis was established’ . . quoted from
Fury
by Henry Kuttner Mayflower Dell paperbacks, Kingsbourne House, 229231 High Holborn, London W.C.I. .
    Bradly was in a delirium where any sex thought immediately took three-dimensional form through a maze of Turkish baths and sex cubicles fitted with hammocks and swings and mattresses vibrating to a shrill insect frequency that danced in nerves and teeth and bones — “a thin singing shrillness that touched the nerves as well as the ears and made them vibrate ecstatically to the same beat” . . quote from
Fury
by Henry Kuttner page 143. The sex phantoms of all his wet dreams and masturbating afternoons surrounded him licking kissing feeling — From time to time he drank a heavy sweet translucent fluid brought by the guard — The liquid left a burning