The Soft Machine

gangs Uranian born in the face of nova conditions, cut word lines, cut time lines—Take it to Cut City, muchachos

—'Minutes to go-

Jungle invades the weed grown parks where armadillos infected with the Earth Eating Disease gambol through deserted kiosks and Bolivar in catatonic limestone liberates the area—Candiru infiltrate causeways and swimming pools—Albinos blink in the sun—rank smell of rotten rivers and mud flats—swamp delta to the sky that does not change—islands of garbage where Green Boys with delicate purple gills tend chemical gardens—terminal post card shrinking in heavy time.

Muttering addicts of the orgasm drug, boneless in the sun, eaten alive by crab men—terminal post card shrinking in heavy time. 'Thing Police keep all Board Room Reports—Do not forget this, Senor—'

They were searching his room when he returned from the Ministry of Tourist Travel—Fingers light and cold as Spring wind rustling papers and documents—One flashed a badge like a fish side in dark water—

'Police, Johnny.'

'Campers,' obviously—'Campers' move into any government office and start issuing directives and spinning webs of inter-office memos—Some have connections in high sources that will make the operation legal and exempt narcotic—Others are shoestring operators out of broom closets and dark rooms of the Mugging Department—They charge out high on ammonia issuing insane orders and requisitioning any object in their path—Tenuous bureaus spring up like sandstorms—The whole rancid oil scandal drifted out in growth areas—

Bradly was reading the sign nailed to a split-bamboo tenement—The sign was printed on white paper book page size:

Cut The Sex and Dream Utility Lines//

Cut the Trak Service Lines//

The paws do not refresh//

Clom Fliday Meester Surplus Oil//

Working for the Yankee dollar?//

Trak your own utilities//

Under silent wings of malaria a tap on his shoulder: ' Documentes, senor. Passaport.'

His passport drew them like sugar flashing gold teeth in Uttle snarls of incredulity: ' Passaport no bueno. No en ordenes.'

The fuzz that could not penetrate to the passport began chanting in unison: ' Comisaria! Comisaria!

Comisaria! Meester a la Comisaria!—Passaport muy malo. No good. No bueno. Typical sights leak out.' The Comandante wore a green uniform spattered with oil and gave out iron smoke as he moved—A small automatic moved round his waist on metal tracks trailing blue sparks—Seedy agents click into place with reports and documents.

'It is permiso, si to read the public signs. This'—his hand covered the white sign on a split-bamboo wall— 'is a special case.'

A man with a green eyeshade slid forward: 'Yes. That's what they call it: 'making a case'—It's all there in the files, the whole rancid oil scandal of the Trak Sex And Dream Utilities in Growth Areas.'

He pointed to a row of filing cabinets and lockers— Smell of moldy jockstraps and chlorine drifted through the police terminal. The Comandante turned the newspaper man back with a thin brown hand: 'Much politics that one —It is better to be just technical.'

A Swede con man hiding out in Rio Bamba under the cold souvenir of Chimborazi, junk cover removed for the nonpayment, syndicates of the world feeling for him with distant fingers of murder, perfected that art along the Tang Dynasty in the back room of a Chinese laundry. The Swede had one thing left: the grey felt hat concession for 'growth areas' hidden under front companies and aliases. With a 1910 magic lantern he posed Indians in grey felt hats and broke the image into a million pieces reflected in dark eyes and blue mountain ice and black water and piss and lamp chimneys, tinted bureaucrat glasses, gun barrels, store fronts and cafe mirrors—He flickered the broken image into the eyes of a shrunken head that died in agony looking at a grey felt hat. And the Head radiated: HAT. .HAT. .HAT. .HAT. .HAT. .

'It is a jumping head,' he said.

When the hat lines formed one thing that could break them was orgasm—So he captured a missionary's wife and flickered her with pornographic slides—And he took her head to radiate anti-sex—He took other anti-sex heads in coprophiliac vice and electric disgust—He dimed the Sex and Dream Utilities of the land. And he was shipped back to Sweden in a lead cylinder to found the Trak Service and the Trak Board.

Trak has come a long way from a magic lantern in the Chink laundry. The Heads were donated to the Gothenburg Museum where the comparatively innocuous emanations precipitated a mass sex orgy.

Vagos Jugadores, sola esperanza del mundo, take it to Cut City, the black obsidian pyramid of Trak Home Office.

'The perfect product, gentlemen, has precise molecular affinity for its client of predilection.

Someone urges the manufacture and sale of products that wear out? This is not the way of competitive elimination. Our product never leaves the customer. We sell the Servicing and all Trak products have precise need of Trak servicing. . . The servicing of a competitor would act like antibiotic, offering to our noble Trak-strain services inedible counterpart. . . This is not just another habit-forming drug this is the habit-forming drug takes over all functions from the addict including his completely unnecessary under the uh circumstances and cumbersome skeleton. Reducing him ultimately to the helpless condition of a larva. He may be said then to owe his very life such as it is to Trak servicing...'

The Trak Reservation so-called includes almost all areas in and about the United Republics of Freelandt and, since the Trak Police process all matters occurring in Trak Reservation and no one knows what is and is not Reservation cases, civil and criminal are summarily removed from civilian courts with the single word TRAK to