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 Harley 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. Every time 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’ traumatic material which they call ‘engrams’ until it loses 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’?”
“Boots 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 — The guard 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 neuro-contact 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 WC1 . .
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 metal taste in his mouth — His lips and tongue swelled perforated by erogenous silver sores — The skin glowed phosphorescent pink purple suffused by a cold menthol burn so sensitive he went into orgasm at a current of air while uncontrolled diarrhea exploded down his thighs — The guard collected all his sperm in a pulsing neon cylinder — Through transparent walls he could see hundreds of other prisoners in cubicles of a vast hive milked for semen by the white-coated guards — The sperm collected was passed to central bank — Sometimes the prisoners were allowed contact and stuck together melting and welding in sex positions of soft rubber — At the center of this pulsing translucent hive was a gallows where the prisoners were hanged after being milked for three weeks — He could see the terminal cases carried to the gallows, bodies wasted to transparent mummy flesh over soft phosphorescent bones — Necks broken by the weight of suspension and the soft bones spurted out in orgasm leaving a deflated skin collected by the guards to be used on the next shift of prisoners — Mind and body blurred with pleasure some part of his being was still talking to the switchblade concealed under his mattress, feeling for it with numb erogenous fingers — One night he slipped into a forgotten nightmare of his childhood — A large black poodle was standing by his bed — The dog dissolved in smoke and out of the smoke arose a dummy being five feet tall — The dummy had a thin delicate face of green wax and long yellow fingernails —
“Poo