The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (22 page)

“Oh, yes,” she suddenly remembered. “You know that girl that came on the bus with the guys—?”

“Penny?” said Perfect Tommy.

I at once looked at Buckaroo, on whose countenance the name so happily registered. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Well, that’s what I wanted to say,” said Mrs. Johnson. “I can’t find her. I guess I was a little hard on her. She must have run away.”

Buckaroo looked as if he had been stricken dead but said nothing of what was in his heart. “Never mind. We have more important work,” he said and headed for the door.

“What about me, Buckaroo?” Tommy said, in that peculiar gloomy fashion of his when he feels left out. “What do you want me to do?”

“Check with Sam in the garage,” Buckaroo answered. “Tell him to get the Jet Car ready. I’m taking it out.”

“Right,” Tommy nodded. “Where’re you goin’?”

Buckaroo kept walking. “To get my guns,” he replied.

Tommy and I looked at one another, as though the idea of Buckaroo getting his revolvers somehow made official the dire portent of the moment. In a kind of awed whisper, Tommy said, “Getting his guns? Holy cow.”

They were the Navy Colts he used only when going in search of Hanoi Xan, massive heavy pistols which had belonged to his father. The sun was down; for some reason I had the image of many sheeted dead, an entire generation or so, something more horrible than anything that had gone before.

Secretly I trembled.

T
he more years I traverse in this life, the more I am struck by the force of its beauty and fascinated by the terror of its end. Like tiny flickering flames in a mammoth cavern of darkness, we hew out lives for ourselves, experience sensations and emotions recalling countless other lives and souls who have gone before us. Gradually, we realize that life amounts to little more than sights and sounds, pain and pleasure, a few steps forward, and then . . . the cumulative effect of all our words and actions ultimately leaving as much of an imprint on the world as stockinged feet on a rocky floor. And in the end, while most of us are still wrestling with this bewildering gift of life, trying to decide what to do with it, the flame burns out. And the smoke remaining? What is that? Do we remain, but in darkness?

I am reminded of the dance of the corpse which La Negrette, the beautiful zombie, was given to performing. It had all the appearance of liveliness, but no amount of movement or pretending could hide the tortured look in her upturned eyes, the ghastly coldness of the whole spectacle.

That was how I felt as I assembled the interns hurriedly before the great hearth in the living room of the Banzai Institute common house—full of despairing energy, sufficiently sensible to realize that some of them would die in such a situation as we found ourselves.

I briefed them on our mission and had to say little for them to reflect upon its consequences, should we fail. All rational men and women, highly intelligent, with scientific backgrounds, they required no elaboration from me on the patent meaning of a global nuclear exchange. All the human progress of two thousand years would, in a blinding flash, be the remote past; and indeed whether the human species could even survive in any kind of reduced circumstances was arguable. The point was not to let it happen.

As I spoke to them, entirely detached from my words—indeed I was out of myself—my thoughts turned to Pecos, those glorious eyes, her crack-brained technological schemes and inventions. How she loved a mystery! Would I see her again? That was the question now, as suddenly I felt like a green and tender youth. I had once given her a bezel ring; I wondered if she was wearing it. I longed to feel her freshness upon my face and for an instant felt I did. Blindfolded, I could have sworn she was with me.

But those were only my feelings, preparatory to our embarkation into the great unknown. Everyone in the room had his or her own melancholy thoughts, and outside the room new events were rushing toward us, thick and heavy.

Casper and Scooter Lindley had reached Yoyodyne and succeeded in taking a series of aerial photographs of its environs despite drawing some scattered fire. They had meanwhile been notified by radio to rendezvous with our bus location a half hour distant.

Billy and his computer helpers had managed to ascertain through Yoyodyne financial records those construction companies in the Grover’s Mills area which had done work over the years at Yoyodyne and which might be expected to have blueprints of its buildings. A number of Blue Blazes in and around Grover’s Mills were contacted and sent to the various companies to ask for the blueprints, stressing that Yoyodyne officials were under no circumstances to be notified of the unusual request. Where there was hesitation or resistance on the part of any of the companies to comply, a personal phone call from Buckaroo Banzai to the company’s chief executives had its intended effect. Within half an hour, all blueprints of Yoyodyne had been collected and were on their way to the rendezvous site I have alluded to above.

And what of the activities of the other side? While John Whorfin exhorted his followers to work faster on the giant Panther ship, he fretted and fumed over the unexplained disappearance of his top three subordinates. They had not radioed their whereabouts in more than two hours, ever since they had located the Adder thermopod. What could have gone wrong? he wondered. Perhaps they had taken a wrong turn and become lost, but that could not explain why they had not radioed. Perhaps their radio was affected by the strong energy field of the Adder fleet now approaching Earth, but that only made it all the more imperative that they hurry back to base. Damn it, he needed that little Jap, Hikita! Where in hell were John Bigbooté, John O’Connor, and John Gomez? Time was running out! What was the point of completing the Panther ship without the OVERTHRUSTER? They would be shot out of the sky like a lumbering goose. Where were those imbeciles?

He could not know, nor could we, that following the debacle of letting both B. Banzai and Professor Hikita get away, no one of the three shamefaced Lectroids was of any mind to inform John Whorfin of what had happened. Rather, in one last-gasp effort to cover themselves in glory, they headed for the Banzai Institute, where their arrival coincided with sundown and, unfortunately for us, our necessarily hasty arrangements to undertake our mission to Yoyodyne. As a result of this unhappy coincidence and our own state of momentary distractedness, the Lectroids found it simple enough to gain entry to our compound in scaling first the main wall and then an electrical fence, which in their case only whetted their appetites and had reasonably the same effect as a chocolate moat might have on ants: it delayed them, but slightly. Between the time when they entered our compound and the first sounding of the alarm by Sam in the garage, a period of roughly twenty minutes elapsed. We know this because of John Parker.

Again, I must regress to bring the reader up to date.

Following his delivery of what I will continue to refer to as the hologram, John Parker had found himself at a loss to know what to do next. His assignment had been completed to the best of his ability, and in fact there was nothing else for him to do and nowhere else for him to go. On an alien planet and lacking a way to go home, the mysterious creature simply searched out a restful spot and waited—for what, even he did not know; but with the onset of sundown, his entire cutaneous “early warning” system (I lack a more graceful way of putting it) became agitated in the extreme, and he realized that Lectroids were near. Stepping out of his hiding place (although he was not hiding), he observed Bigbooté, O’Connor, and Gomez as creeping shadows near the main wall and resolved to follow them, fully aware of their evil tendencies. He, too, climbed the wall (although “jumped” is a more accurate description), and was equally unimpeded by the electrical fence. He later told us that he was prepared at all costs to stop them from succeeding in their plot (which he was able to divine as he got closer to them, the Adder’s sensitive cutaneous system functioning as a telepathic as well as his main sentient organ), and was on the point of alerting us to the Lectroids’ presence when he himself was detained by mounted security. Not given a chance to explain coherently what he was trying to warn us about, he was taken into custody while the Lectroids, unseen by the intern guard, continued on their merry way.

My first notice of any of this came when the door of the common house living room sprang open as I was briefing the interns, and the escorted John Parker appeared as a silver giant before my eyes. Six-feet-ten, his long black hair woven into dreadlocks, his dark eyes smoldering, he was easily the most imposing sight I had seen since John Emdall and I connected him to the hologram immediately.

“My name is John Parker!” he shouted slowly, the words perhaps taking him ten seconds to say. “Here . . . Lectroids! Here!”

Buckaroo Banzai had used the term Lectroid as had John Emdall, and I was suddenly very ready to listen to what this “man” John Parker had to say. Before he could go further, however, alarms began to rattle everywhere and a second intern on security duty burst into the room, clamoring, “Intruders! In the garage!”

Naturally the same thought crossed all minds: in the midst of the world coming to an end, as if we didn’t have enough to occupy us, someone was also trying to steal the Jet Car. The fact that John Parker had just mentioned Lectroids only served to heighten the drama as I ran past him on my way out the door and tapped him to follow. “Come on,” I said. “This way!”

As we raced toward the garage, John Parker easily outdistancing me with his long loping stride, I directed the interns to fan out and used my Go-Phone to spread the word. I remembered that Tommy had just been directed by Buckaroo to tell Sam to prep the Jet Car and wondered if he had seen anything suspicious.

“I just came from there!” Tommy said over the Go-Phone.

“Did you see anything?” I asked.

“No.”

“Where are you now?”

“In the bunkhouse, packing my gear.”

“Well, you’d better tell Buckaroo there’s trouble,” I said. “And tell him I’m with the guy from Planet 10 who brought the hologram.”

“You’re kidding!” Tommy said, as I switched my phone off in midstride.

“Perfect Tommy?” John Parker wanted to know. I nodded. “Buckaroo?”

“Buckaroo Banzai.”

“Buckaroo Banzai? You?”

“No, I’m Reno,” I said.

“Ah, Reno. My favorite one.”

What he meant by that I had no idea, although he later explained that whatever intelligence network these Adders had maintained on our planet these many years had included news of the exploits of Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers as part of its regular reports back to Planet 10. We are in fact “very big” on Planet 10, he later told us.

But now suddenly he changed course. “This way!” he said, and I could not determine whether he was merely repeating my words or if he was truly onto something.

“No, this way,” I said, indicating the way to the garage; whereas he pointed toward the building where Professor Hikita’s lab was located.

“Over here! Lectroids!”

“Blast it, I wish you could speak faster,” I said, deciding to trust his instincts and go with him.

“English bad. Spanish better,” he said, and from that point on we communicated much more freely, in Spanish,* as his “hunch” about the Lectroids, or whatever it was, quickly proved correct.

*
(According to John Parker, under occasional optimum conditions, certain powerful Mexican radio stations can be picked up on Planet 10. He may have smiled when he said it—I can’t remember—but his Spanish was us good as mine.)

“Reno?” It was the voice of Rawhide over my Go-Phone, which I immediately switched on.

“Yeah?”

“I’m at the garage. Sam’s dead. I’m not sure how, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Any sign of who did it?”

“Looks like they’re after the Overthruster. I’m on my way to check on Professor Hikita.”

“Yeah, so are we,” I said. “We’ll meet you there.”

“A poisoned barb,” said John Parker, opening his mouth and making the motion with his lips of someone spitting. “Lectroids blow poisoned barbs from their esophagus. Best way to kill them . . . to shoot esophagus.”

I vowed to make a note of that, as I quickly patted the pistol under my jacket for reassurance and then shifted it to my hand.

“Little gun is no good,” said John Parker. “To need big gun against Lectroid.”

As he was eyeing my .45 automatic when he said this, suffice it to say that I was filled immediately with a sick fear and may have unconsciously dropped back another stride or two. If a .45 was useless against them, why in God’s name were we running so fast toward where we believed them to be?

Sam certainly had never had a chance. Rawhide and several of the interns found him in a contorted position on the floor of the garage, between the Jet Car and Peggy’s old Vauxhall Wyvern, an aspect of gut-wrenching pain upon his face. He had apparently heard something outside in the darkness, had stepped briefly outside to investigate, and then pressed the button on the alarm just as the terrible yellowish barb resembling a snake’s tongue had shot out of his killer’s mouth and imbedded in his stomach. The end had come quickly but not quickly enough, to judge by the look of him.