Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (37 page)

It was very quiet alone. Alan wandered around the little cottage, picking things up and setting them down, hardly noticing what he did. His mind spun. He had plans within plans within plans. First and foremost, he needed to make physical contact with the Project Utopia V-bomb.

Ulam had said he himself wouldn’t be going down there today, because it would be too dangerous, now that the countdown had begun. But Alan was heedless of the danger. He was driven by his skug, and by his secretive longing to save the world.

Thinking of death, Alan remembered his vision of Chris Morcom last night. Perhaps it was really true that he might find his loved one in heaven. How strange if the most treacly and conventional notions of the afterlife turned out to be true.

What time was it? 9:10 am. And the V-bomb was due to go off at 10:00. How was he to get at it? Well—it wouldn’t do to phone Ulam for help. Ulam wouldn’t want an interloper fiddling with his baby.

Could Alan simply push his way into the site? Perhaps he could form his body into the shape of a giant bird, swoop down upon Project Utopia, skug the guards, and begin his work? But, no, the guards would have received the antiskug vaccine. And if Alan came on too forcefully, the flame throwers and helicopters would come.

Thinking about LANL’s defenses against skuggers, Alan suddenly realized that he had the perfect method for breaking in. He’d go the Project Utopia site as
Dick Hosty
. Ulam had said that Hosty was the only one besides himself with the clearance for access to the V-bomb. And Hosty was right here. On ice.

Not wasting any more time, Alan hurried out to the barn behind the cottage. Hosty lay frozen on the front seat. Presumably the sad contents of the skugsniffer tank were frozen solid as well. No scent of decay.

Alan managed to start the engine, then turned on the heater. Working from his memories of Hosty, as well as from the figure beside him, he shapeshifted himself into a perfect replica of the man.

And now for the hard part. Making the most of his skuggy fingers, Alan worked Hosty’s clothes off the stiff corpse—and donned them himself. And he made damned sure that he could find Hosty’s ID in his pockets. He dragged the naked corpse to a corner of the barn, piled tarps on it, and got the ambulance on the road.

Bandelier and Frijoles Canyon were only fifteen minutes further than LANL The road had been plowed all the way there, and the ambulance’s tire-chains were holding up well. The landscape gleamed in the mild sun. Alan’s skug hummed with joy at the prospect of making the V-bomb into a skugging ray.

Alan had no problem at all with the Project Utopia security—the guards leaned over, recognized the features of Hosty, scanned his ID, and waved him through. They didn’t even ask what he was doing. Dick Hosty was the top cop. And the guards were eager to get back into the shelter of their block house.

The road zigged and zagged a few times. So far, the ambulance’s chains were holding traction. And there at the bottom of the canyon was a little tin shed, all alone. Alan glanced at his watch. 9:45. Fifteen minutes till detonation.

The snow was very deep by the shed. The ambulance slewed to a stop, axle-deep in a drift. Alan walked the last bit of the way, then used his shapeshifting fingers to pick the lock on the shed’s door.

And now he was inside. The V-bomb was no torpedo-shaped cartoon bomb with fins. It was a roughly spherical casing the height of a man, with a maze of heavy wires snaking around the case, prepared to deliver the sparks of ignition that would ignite the dynamite that would propel the nuclear material into a critical mass that would unleash the mighty avalanche of V-rays.

The V-bomb had a small round door in its side, like the hatch on a one-man submarine. Hanging in the hut near the bomb was a white radiation suit of rubberized canvas, with an air filter, a view plate, and a watch on its wrist. Alan shed his Hosty clothes, feeling the bite of the frigid air.

He slipped on the radiation suit, half-wondering why he bothered. It was 9:52, and the bomb was programmed to detonate at 10:00. He’d soon be past the point where radiation sickness mattered.

Alan opened the door in the side of the V-bomb and peered in. Tarnished puzzle-pieces of plutonium lined the inner shell, looking a bit like lead. Resting on the bottom of the tight chamber was a cushion with a flashlight and hammer beside it. Ulam’s workbench.

Holding the flashlight, Alan wriggled inside the V-bomb, seated himself cross-legged, and closed the bomb’s door. He felt himself at the still center of the world.

He hefted the hammer, tapping at the soft gray metal of the bomb fuel, making the first of the adjustments that might make the V-bomb irradiate the planet with skugging rays.

Although his skug was in an ecstasy of approval, it harbored a trace of concern that Alan’s physical presence might somehow hamper the smooth detonation of the device. The skug was urging him to hurry.

Alan sighed and set down the hammer. “I can’t possibly do this if you’re jabbering at me,” he teeped to his skug. “Rest assured that you’re getting everything that you want. Do back off now and let me concentrate. I’m sure you understand that I have limited time.” Alan glanced at his watch. “It’s 9:56. I have four minutes to make the adjustments, to get out of the casing and, perhaps, to grow wings and fly away.”

On figurative tiptoes, giggling like an excited child on Christmas Eve, the symbiotic mind crept down into the recesses of Alan’s subconscious. Alan was, after all, the skug’s maker, and he still held, to some extent, the status of a father figure.

Finally alone, Alan unpacked the encrypted file that Burroughs had bequeathed him. The decryption key was of course
Xanadu
.

And what was in the file? A complex wave form—Bill’s precise memories of the overlaid sounds of Susan’s tape of nonlinear feedback, Ginsberg’s chant, Neal’s tootling, and Bill’s own cracked voice—and something else. The resulting pattern was a wave whose shape was the precise opposite of the organic vibrations within a skug. Scaled to suitable speeds, the two patterns could cancel each other out.

9:59.

How might Alan code Bill’s wave into the V-rays? As a start, he filled his chest with air and chanted the intricate sound aloud. With superhuman flexibility, he chirped the same sequence faster and faster—until it locked in on the vibrations of the skug within him—and melted the thing away. One less skug.

A molting raven seemed to be here inside the bomb casing with Alan. It was Vassar’s friend Xurt, the ancient ghost of a Tewa Indian, cocking his head and making a friendly caw. Xurt was instilling Alan with shamanic powers.

With a single gesture of his will, Alan dematerialized. That is, he unlocked his body and became an intricate matter wave, dancing out a sped-up version of Bill’s sound sample. Alan was resonating within the V-bomb’s cavity—like a fat note in an organ pipe, or, more accurately, like a light wave within a hall of mirrors. He was poised to modulate the V-rays when they emerged.

The last thing that Alan sensed before the blast was the smile of Christopher Morcom, beckoning from the beyond.

Chapter 18: Last Words

[This section transcribes the soundtrack of a videotape by William Burroughs. A label on the tape reads “WSB. Last Words on Turing. Jan 13, 1997.” Only Burroughs appears in the tape. It seems likely that he recorded it himself, aged eighty-two, in his house in Lawrence, Kansas, eight months before his death.]

My regrets besides Joan? I wish I’d been a better father to Billy. A better son to my parents. I failed everyone in my family. The price of making my literary career. I’ve been over this a million times.

Something new today. Professor Alan Turing. I’ve left some papers regarding our adventures together. Long story short, Turing’s suicide in June, 1954, was a fake, a botched assassination.

Having escaped murder at the hands of his nation’s security forces, Turing invented a contagious parasite called a skug. On Christmas Day, 1954, he infected me with a skug in Tangier. I rather enjoyed it. Alan and I became lovers.

How to describe the man? Reckless, youthful, carefree, mathematical, sweet, unconventional, eager, intimate, awkward and utterly devoted to the life of the mind. I never met his like again. Perhaps I was foolish to let him go.

I miss him.

But it’s too stultifying telling my feelings to a glass eye. With my voice echoing in this empty room. I’ll cut to the climax.

The authorities in Los Alamos, New Mexico, designed a doomsday device called a V-bomb. It was supposed to beam out V-rays that would kill not only the skugs, but also kill anyone who harbored a skug in his or her body. We called ourselves skuggers. For background details consult my unpublished memoir, “The Apocalypse According To Willy Lee.”

At the end, in January, 1955, Turing and I were holed up in a cottage in Los Alamos along with Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and an electronic composer named Susan Green. All of us but Ginsberg had turned skugger.

A local security asshole named Dick Hosty was on the point of busting us. Turing strangled Hosty and hid him in our garage. It was evening and we were celebrating, I suppose. Susan Green put on one of her peculiar sound tapes. Ginsberg began chanting, Cassady was making noise as well, and I began obliquely wondering if there might be a way to make the ambient mélange of noises into a deskugging song.

I couldn’t think about this explicitly, as the skug within me was opposed to such a line of thought. But I managed anyhow. I’m a devious man. And my skug wasn’t riding very close herd on me. It didn’t take my intellectual powers seriously.

It was of course Turing upon whom the skugs were fixated. He was a famous mathematician, he’d helped invent the electronic computer, and he’d made a high-level contact in the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Turing was looking for a way to protect us four from the V-bomb. Indeed, the skugs expected that Alan would in fact doctor the V-bomb so as to turn every human on Earth into a skugger.

Getting back to our celebration party, we were rollicking amid a storm of sound. On a vagrant impulse, I began singing in my rather poor voice, drunkenly braying some drivel that I remembered from my days at boarding school in Los Alamos. And here’s where magic comes in.

As skuggers, we’d become so sensitized that we were seeing ghosts. In particular, I was at this moment aware of a five hundred year old Tewa Indian ghost called Xurt. He resembled a tattered crow with mangy feathers, enveloped in a pale green glow. Xurt added a squawk to my song—and this was the final tweak of discord that my impromptu fugue required.

I felt the moorings of my skug loosen within me. And at this point—for reasons which I’ll explain momentarily—I chose to draw back. I piped down so quickly that my skug wasn’t aware of what I’d come across. I’d privily created—and opportunely memorized—a pattern that could function as a deskugging routine.

I could have deskugged all four of us then and there—Neal, Alan, Susan and me. But my vanity stopped me. How so? The key point is that, as a skugger, I’d been able to make myself appear twenty years younger. At this point, for once in my life, my twelve-years-younger friend Allen Ginsberg was interested in having sex with me. I’d always had an unrequited passion for Allen, you understand, but he’d demur.

During those wild days in Los Alamos things had been different. I felt myself the cynosure of every eye. I was having sexual relations with Ginsberg, and I had my affair with Turing as well. Although I disliked my skug, I wanted to harbor it just a bit longer, so as to make the most of an upcoming road trip to New York City with Allen and Neal Cassady.

But I didn’t want to waste my discovery. Having been Turing’s companion for a few weeks, I’d picked up a knowledge of cryptographic techniques. I encrypted the powerful pattern that I’d just memorized, and I sent the pattern to Alan Turing via skugger telepathy. The key for my encryption was taken from the first line of Coleridge’s mesmerizing, opiated verse.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

As it turned out, encrypting my spell was the correct thing to do. For Turing was thus free to unpack it at precisely the right time. The next day he went and crawled inside the V-bomb device, decrypted my message, and turned himself into a matter wave that pulsated in the magical, discordant rhythm that I’d unearthed. When the V-bomb was ignited, Alan overlaid the deskugging signal upon the V-rays—with socially beneficial results.

This really happened.

Why aren’t schoolchildren taught that William Burroughs and Alan Turing saved the world? There are several reasons.

First of all, we’re queer.

Second of all, due to Turing’s odd manipulations, the V-bomb
imploded
rather than exploding. It didn’t send out the customary annihilating and highly conspicuous fireball. Instead it shrank down to the subatomic level, tore a hole in space and, one assumes, burbled into the void. Like the river Alph, eh? Life is all of a piece.