Free The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

top-secret files are open to him. The rich and powerful of the earth, those who move behind the scenes, stand in deadly fear of his light.
    The dim silver light of Margaras can invade and wipe out other programs. He is the Call. The Challenge. The Confront. His opponents always try to evade his light, like the squid who disappears in a spray of ink.
    Preferences in food and wines, evaluation of pictures, music, poetry and prose. An identikit picture emerges, charged with the energy of hundreds of preferences and evaluations. He can hide in snow and sunlight on white walls and clouds and rocks, he moves down windy streets with blown newspapers and shreds of music and silver paper in the wind.
    Being albino, Margaras can put on any eye color, hair color, skin color, right up until he "whites" the target. "Push," "off," "grease," "blow away" are out: "White" is in. The White Purr: without color, he attracts all colors and all stains; without odor, he attracts all odors, the fouler the better, into smell swirls, whirlpools, tornados, the dreaded Smell Twisters, creating a low-pressure smell wake so that organic animals explode behind them, the inner smells sucked into the Stink Twister round and round faster faster throwing out a maelstrom of filth in all directions, sucking in more and more over a cemetery and the coffins all pop open and the dead do a grisly Exploding Polka. Privies are sucked out by the roots with old men screaming and waving shitty Montgomery Ward catalogues.
    Odors can also be the most subtle and evocative agent for reaching past memories and feelings.
    "The nuances, you understand."
    The wise old queer Cardinal, oozing suave corruption, slowly slithers amber beads through his silky yellow fingers as the beads give off tiny encrusted odor layers. "Ah, a whiff of Egypt . . ."
    Chlorine from the YMCA swimming pool, the clean smell of naked boys . . . and the differences, my dear. Just whiff this, from before World War I, when people traveled with steamer trunks and no passports. I mean, of course, the people who mattered . Comfortable, isn't it? And smell the Twenties . . . those dear dead days, hip flasks, raccoon coats.
    Now sniff way back, to a time before homo sap made his perhaps ill-advised appearance. Notice the difference? Nobody out there. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to impress. Hollywood moguls simply drop dead, like divers with their air lines cut. Personally, I find it exhilarating. I can fancify how I would have done it all. Ah, well . . .
    And you know the difference between the air before August 6, 1945, and after that date: a certain security. No one is going to explode the atoms you are made of... with a little strength and skill one could outlive himself . . . but now . . .
    Margaras is on the Dead Dream case. If you intend to destroy an individual or a culture, destroy their dreams. This is happening now on a global scale.
    The function of dreams, they tell us, is to unlearn or purge the brain of unneeded connections—according to this view what goes through the mind in a dream is merely the result of a sort of neural housecleaning. They also suggest that it may be damaging to recall dreams, because doing so might strengthen mental connections that should be discarded. "We dream in order to forget," they write.
    But Joe knows that dreams are a biologic necessity, like sleep itself, without which you will die. Margaras is sure this is war to extermination. Sure, forget your biologic and spiritual destiny in space. Sure, forget the Western Lands. And make arrangements with a competent mortician.
    But desperate struggle may alter the outcome. Joe is tracking down the Venusian agents of a conspiracy with very definite M.O. and objectives. It is antimagical, authoritarian, dogmatic, the deadly enemy of those who are committed to the magical universe, spontaneous, unpredictable, alive. The universe they are imposing is controlled, predictable, dead.
    In 1959, a member of the scientific elite of