Уильям Берроуз - Nova Express

"Second exposure — Time three point five," said the guard –

K9 walked out into The Brass and Copper Streets — A slum area of vending booths and smouldering slag heaps crossed by paths worn deep in phosphorescent metal — In a square littered with black bones he encountered a group of five scorpion men — Faces of transparent pink cartilage burning inside — stinger dripping the oven poison — Their eyes flared with electric hate and they slithered forward to surround him but drew back at sight of the guard –

They walked on into an area of tattoo booths and sex parlors — A music like wind through fine metal wires bringing a measure of relief from the terrible dry heat — Black beetle musicians saw this music out of the air swept by continual hot winds from plains that surrounded the city — The plains are dotted with villages of conical paper-thin metal houses where a patient gentle crab people live unmolested in the hottest regions of the planet –

Controller of the Crab Nebula on a slag heap of smouldering metal under the white hot sky channels all his pain into control thinking — He is protected by heat and crab guards and the brains armed now with The Blazing Photo from Hiroshima and Nagasaki — The brains under his control are encased in a vast structure of steel and crystal spinning thought patterns that control whole galaxies thousand years ahead on the chessboard of virus screens and juxtaposition formulae –

So the Insect People of Minraud formed an alliance with the Virus Power of the Vegetable People to occupy planet earth — The gimmick is reverse photosynthesis — The Vegetable People such up oxygen and all equivalent sustenance of animal life — Always the colorless sheets between you and what you see taste smell eat — And these green vegetable junkies slowly using up your oxygen to stay on the nod in carbon dioxide –

When K9 entered the café he felt the colorless smell of the vegetable people closing round him taste and sharpness gone from the food people blurring in slow motion fade out — And there was a whole tank full of vegetable junkies breathing it all in — He clicked some reverse combos through the pinball machine and left the cafe — In the street citizens were yacking like supersonic dummies — The SOS addicts had sucked up all the silence in the area were now sitting around in blue blocks of heavy metal the earth's crust buckling ominously under the their weight — He shrugged: "who am I to be critical?"

He knew what it meant to kick an SOS habit: White hot agony of thawing metal — And the suffocating panic of carbon dioxide withdrawal –

Virus defined as three-dimensional coordinate point of a controller — Transparent sheets with virus perforations like punch cards passed through the host on the soft machine feeling for a point of intersection — The virus attack is primarily directed against affective animal life — Virus of rage hate fear ugliness swirling round you waiting for a point of intersection and once in immediately perpetrates in your name some ugly noxious or disgusting act sharply photographed and recorded becomes now part of the virus sheets constantly presented and represented before your mind screen to produce more virus word and image around and around it's all around you the invisible hail of bring down word and image –

What does virus do wherever it can dissolve a hole and find traction? — It starts eating — And what does it do with what it eats? — It makes exact copies of itself that start eating to make more copies that start easting to make more copies that start eating and so forth to the virus power the fear heat virus slowly replaces the host with virus copies — Program empty body — A vast tapeworm of bring down word and image moving through your mind screen always at the same speed on a slow hydraulic-spine axis like the cylinder gimmick in the adding machine — How do you make someone feel stupid? — You present to him all the times he talked and acted and felt stupid against and again any number of times fed into the combo of the soft calculating machine geared to find more and more punch cards and fed in more and more images of stupidity disgust propitiation grief apathy death — The recording leave electromagnetic patterns — That is any situation that causes rage will magnetize rage patterns and draw around the rage word and image recording — Or some disgusting sex practice once the connection is made in childhood whenever the patterns are magnetized by sex desire the same word and image will be presented — And so forth — The counter move is very simple — This is machine strategy and the machine can be redirected — Record for ten minutes on a tape recorder — Now run the tape back without playing and cut in other words at random — Where you have cut in and re-recorded words are wiped off the tape and new words in their place — You have turned time back ten minutes and wiped electromagnetic word patterns off the tape and substituted other patterns — You can do the same with mind tape after working with the tape recorder — (this takes some experimentation) — The old mind tapes can be wiped clean — Magnetic word dust falling from old patterns — Word falling — Photo falling Palomar Observatories reported some answers to the riddle of exploding stars — Invariably he found the exploding star was locked by gravity to a nearby star — The two stars are in a strange symbiotic relationship — One is a small hot blue star — (Mr. Bradly) Its companion is a larger red star — (Mr. Martin) — Because the stellar twins are so close together the blue star continually pulls fuel in the form of hydrogen into an incandescent figure eight — One circle of the eight encloses one start — The other circle encloses the other — supplied with new fuel the blue star ignites." — Quote, Newseek , Feb. 12, 1962 –

The Crab Nebula observed by the Chinese in 1054 A.D. is the result of a supernova or exploding star — Situated approximately three thousand light years from the earth — (Like three thousand years in hot claws at the window — You go it? — ) — Before they blow up a star they have a spot picked out as many light years away as possible — Then they start draining all the fuel and charge to the new pitch and siphon themselves there right after and on their way rejoicing — You notice we don't have as much time as people had say a hundred years ago? — Take your clothes to the laundry write a letter pick up your mail at American Express and the day is gone — They are short-timing us as many light years as they can take for the getaway — It seems that there were survivors on The Crab Pitch who are not in all respects reasonable men — And The Nova Law moving fast — So they start the same old lark sucking all the charge and air and color to a new location and then? — Sput — You notice something is sucking all the flavor out of food the pleasure out of sex the color out of everything in sight? — Precisely creating the low pressure area that leads to nova — So they move cross the wounded galaxies always a few light years ahead of the Nova Heat — That is they did — The earth was our set — And they walked right into the antibiotic handcuffs — IT will readily be seen that having created one nova they must make other or answer for the first — I mean three thousand years in hot claws at the window like a giant crab in slag heaps of smouldering metal — Also the more novas the less time between they are running out of pitches — So they bribe the natives with a promise of transportation and immortality –

"Yeah, man flesh and junk and charge stacked up bank vaults full of it — Three thousand years of flesh — So we leave the bloody apes behind and on our way rejoicing right? — It's the only way to live — "