William S. Burroughs (34 page)

And clothes
...
every
period, every material
...
electric eel skin,
gila monster, gorilla-skin overcoat, centipede-skin cape
...
clothes
designed to conceal and activate recorders and cameras...all manner
of trick pockets for drugs and weapons and petties
...
a
krait, a coral snake, a dozen black widows in a tube to be released
in Mrs. Worldly's John
...
metal jockstraps,
kneecaps, elbow spikes
...
sheathes and
holsters from head to foot...shoes with spring soles, with cushions
of air, oil, mercury
...
knives that spring
out from the toe when you press down on the heel
...
a
razor-sharp half-moon of steel that slides forward and locks
...
gloves
with retractable claws
...
gloves with lead
in the fingertips for the deadly spear hand to the throat, with lead
along the sides for a karate chop
...
gloves
with the palm side laced with razor-sharp down-curving
blades
...
gloves with a rubber cup in the
palm that traps a cushion of air for a slap to the trigeminal nerve,
also useful for rupturing eardrums
...
come-along
gloves with a palmful of fishhooks
...
electric
gloves lined with rubber
...

Kim adds to his
wardrobe, packing purchases into a Gladstone bag of gila monster
skin and toddles along to the Biologic and Chemical section, which
has the aspect of a vast abandoned medical and research
complex
...
goats bleat in Emergency, Arab
families have moved into the wards, cooking in beakers, surgical
trays, and bedpans. Children push each other up and down the halls in
crash carts and stretchers. One electrical genius has rigged the
Intensive Care Unit into pinball machines. Kim stops to chat with a
tattooed Maori boy who has a vial of blue octopus venom. Kim buys it
for his twenty-shot dart revolver (neurotoxic
...
unconscious
in three minutes, dead in an hour). He draws his smoothbore
44
loaded with number-six shot and decapitates a cobra that
has crawled out of a rusty instrument cabinet.

There's the Mushroom
Man with his black-market plutonium talking to a CIA man who works
for Qaddafi. There is a selection of disease cultures, some of
which purport to contain active cultures of diseases thought to be
extinct.

Kim runs into Cash
Tod, a biologic broker.

"Olafson says
he's got the Sweats. Here are his charts."

Kim leafs through
the papers..."Monkeys, is it? Monkey business too, if I know
Olafson."

The Sweats was a
plague that swept through England in the fourteenth century. There is
an account in
The Unfortunate Traveller
by Thomas Nash.
In a few hours the victims sweat away all their bodily fluids and are
reduced to desiccated mummies. The disease is spread by the bodily
fluids and excretions exuded or propelled from the victim as body
temperatures soar to
120
°
,
turning entrails into a caldron. In some cases steaming
excrement and urine spurts from the patient to a distance of
thirty feet, spattering unfortunate relatives, physicians, and
curiosity seekers. A singer exploded on stage, favoring the furthest
balconies with his lethal exudations.

The end product, a
desiccated mummy, is noninfectious, and brutal death-wagon drivers
pound the mummies down to a yellow dust for ease of transport and
handling.

"He's working
on the Freezies now
...
accelerated
hypothermia
...
victims freeze to death
with blankets piled on them...
"

"Tampering with
the thermostat. Well it's more a blueprint than a tested product...of
course we don't want to be associated with any human
experiments...
"

"One looks
away...
"

"What a
beautiful sunset...
"

"And here is
the Rots...First symptom is a reek of carrion...it's the smell
that spreads it. Masks are ineffective. You smell the Rots with your
whole body."

Since the market
stocks artifacts from all history, it is also a functioning museum
with documentary films and lectures.

The Museum of Lost
Inventions:
...
As one makes the round of
display cases, lectures and films switch on, seemingly activated by
one's presence...

Spread out in dusty
display cases, devices from extinct cultures so remote in space
and time that no link exists to tell the viewer what function they
could have served.

"This cluster
of interlocking perforated crystal disks? purely decorative?

"This cabinet
about the size of a large TV set
...
cabinet,
for lack of a more precise word, and difficult to assign dimensions
since there is no apparent symmetry. Most of the surfaces seem curved
rather than angular, then you see quite a few angles
..."

No symmetry? This
absence gives Kim a hint as to the cabinet's function
...
a
ghost escape. Symmetry is predictable, therefore a good escape route
must randomize symmetry
...
an intricate
arrangement of panels that can be opened or closed in thousands of
different combinations. The panels are slotted, emitting an eerie
music of escape from forgotten dangers.

"What exactly
were these things used for?" asks a CIA man in dry incisive
disapproving tones. The Custodian grounds the question with a curious
reverse shrug, a slight downward movement of the shoulders.

"The uh human
species
...
Homo sap
...
(laughter)
is perhaps two million years old
...
prehistorians
keep pushing our birthdate further back
...
perhaps
an abortion would be the uh simplest solution
...
(laughter)
but the incidence of clearly recognizable
artifacts
dates
back only fifty to a hundred thousand years. In that modest span,
gentlemen, we have come from stone* axes and spears to
intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads
...
the
same principle as the spear but rather more
efficacious
...
(laughter). Is it not
feasible that other cultures may have traveled the same road and
disappeared without a trace? Nor can we rule out the possibility that
artifacts were deliberately destroyed. The river people of New
Guinea fashion masks for their festivals which are burned once the
festival is consummated. And what would a historian of the
distant future make of pseudo artifacts of modern art? Who is that
artist
who does a barrelful of nuts and bolts? He went on to
burnt kitchen chairs...Oh yes...Armand...How could our future
scholar know that this artifact commemorates the sale of a name.
It's an Armand and worth so much just as the coppers of Kwakiutl
potlaches were valued according to the transfers they had accreted."

The display case
contains something that looks like a bull-roarer...A tube of some
dull green metal two feet long, two inches in diameter with an
opening in each end. A smooth white cord sprouts from the middle of
the tube and is attached to a handle of the same green metallic
substance.

The room darkens...A
screen lights up
...
on a steep slope with
his back to a cliff we see a tall thin humanoid in sandals and
loincloth of some porous brown-pink skin. He holds the tube in his
narrow hands, not more than two inches across, with long tapering
fingers and four joints...Twelve uncouth savages with spears and
clubs advancing up the slope...

"The lone
survivor of a wrecked spacecraft, this being of an ancient race wants
only to live in peace with the natives
...
to
teach and perhaps to learn...But he finds himself threatened by
barbarians, inflamed by an ugly brutish hatred for a
foreigner,
a
being different from themselves...

"Got no hair on
him."

"All naked and
indecent."

"Wonder if he's
got hair on his balls?"

Cash thumbs his
knife..."I dunno, Clem, but I aims to find out."

The alien's face is
a light pink color, smooth as terra-cotta. His unwinking black eyes
with luminous blue pupils reflect something too remote and neutral to
be called contempt.

He draws twelve
darts from a sheath at his belt and feeds them into the tube. He
whirls the tube above his head.

"What's he
doing up there?"

"The Tube
Spirit takes over and animates the tube. It spins now on its own
volition. The tube derives its force from a compact between the
man and the Tube Spirit. The spirit agrees to animate the tube but
only once.
Once used the tube may never be used again."

The tube is a blur
now, the man has been lifted almost off his feet and stands poised on
tiptoe. A thin cold whine breaks from the tube and the darts whistle
out, each one finding a vital spot
...
head
...
heart
...
stomach
...
neck
...
the posse has been destroyed. But what if other enemies burst upon
him? He can fashion a weapon from materials at hand. A huge savage
with a stone ax, shooting red flashes from his berserk eyes, bursts
out six feet in front of him. The man snaps off a switch and levels
it ZUT right through the beast, severing his spinal column. He falls,
writhing like a stricken worm...

"Now some of
you may ask, didn't he run out of ideas? That's a good
question...Well
...
maybe he did...
"

A display case with
life-size masks of human skin compacted in layers
...
vile
faces
...
gloating faces, stinking of charred
flesh and screams
...
faces of abject
cringing cowardice dead soulless faces...

"A very old
game...It's called 'throwing the mask'
...
rather
like tennis...
"

A limestone court
with tiers of seats for spectators. The contestants arrive. They are
naked except for belts, and with their masks. They advance to the
middle of the court and look at. each other. The gaze of a mask
thrower can cut like a scalpel. Now they move back and face each
other at thirty feet. A player draws a mask and throws it in a blur
of speed. The other gestures and the mask flies back. After
three serves one player sends the mask spinning up into the
grandstands. The game is hotting up now as more potent masks come
into play. Sometimes they may serve and return thirty, fifty times
and with every exchange the mask gathers power.

WHAM

It hits. A player is
down
...
a broken idiot thing
...
drooling,
slobbering, pus oozing from the cataracts that cluster at his dead
burnt-out eyes...He will be left to the terrible urchins who haunt
the mask courts.

"Tennis anyone?

"Most weapons
operate on the projectile design
...
a spear,
a bullet, a shell... Something is
added
to the target. A
bullet, an arrow, explosive charge, poison gas
...
Consider
the possibility of taking something away from the target...A
tornado sets up a low-pressure area which causes buildings and
windows to
blow out...
Our weapon creates a concentrated and
localized low-pressure area so that a living target will literally
explode like a deep-sea creature brought up from the depths. It's an
awesome spectacle...See that African buffalo out there snorting and
pawing the ground? Most dangerous brute on the continent. He sees
us."

"This had
better be good."

The buffalo puts
down its head. The custodian presses a button
...
a
whistling roar and the buffalo flies apart in a great splash of red.
The horns stick in the ground a few feet from our truck.

"As you see, a
different design. We took something away from the target...in this
case, pressure...It can be aimed like a rifle or a pistol
...
suck
out an eye, explode a throat...Other facilities besides pressure can
be shut off...Oxygen, sleep, dreams, or that most basic of all
commodities, time."

Time is a resource.
Time runs out. The most basic problem facing any culture is the
conservation and disbursement of time. Human time is measured in
terms of human change. So the most flagrant time-wasting may minimize
change and thus conserve time. The English dictum of never going too
far in any direction is actually a time-saving expedient, ill advised
to be sure when it may be necessary to go too far in all directions
for a bare fighting chance of survival. Utopian concepts stem
from a basic misconception as to our mission here. So many
snares and dead ends. Nietzsche said, "Men need play and danger.
Civilization gives them work and safety."