The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (23 page)

I am of the opinion that shortly before the attack upon Sam, the Lectroids had already split up, an intern later recalling that before any of the commotion a man of John Bigbooté’s description had stuck his head into his laboratory cubicle to ask where he might find Professor Hikita. The intern had suggested a couple of places, including the professor’s laboratory at the end of the hall. The man had said thank you and departed amiably. The intern, thinking the visit somehow queer, had gotten up immediately and gone to the door to peer out. He had seen the man, if indeed it was Bigbooté, walking alone down the corridor and continually glancing back as if to be sure he was not being shadowed. He finally disappeared down the stairwell and scant seconds later the alarm sounded, whereupon the intern hurried down to the lobby, caught sight of the man briefly outside, and then inexplicably lost him. (We now assume Bigbooté climbed one of the trees surrounding the building and from there jumped to the roof, appearing soon afterward at Professor Hikita’s window.)

Hikita himself was typically fused to his desk. He later said he never heard the alarm, although that is impossible. It is more likely he heard it and dismissed it because he resented the interruption. With little exertion, he could be cross even with the Almighty if He deemed to appear before him uninvited. Rawhide had found him only minutes before in such a sour mood that when he popped his head into the room, Hikita had delivered a glass retort in his general direction.

“How’s it coming, Professor?” Rawhide had solicitously inquired.

“I’m busy,” the professor had, returned.

“If you’d be so excessively kind, Professor, Buckaroo would like to know how the formula is coming—”

“It will never be finished if you stand there.”

“The bus for Yoyodyne leaves in twenty minutes, Professor. We need it.”

“Stand still so I can hit you,” the professor had said and quickly whirled, throwing the retort. By the time it burst against the wall, Rawhide was long gone. The professor turned back to his work, which, unlike one might have expected from his demeanor, was actually going quite well. He had created the new compound indicated by the formulae that Buckaroo had transferred to his forehead; the difficulty was in knowing what it was supposed to do and, without his being able to test it, whether it worked—whether it was in fact “correct.” He brooded upon this and went over to his desk to recheck his figures, not dreaming for a moment that he would learn the efficacy of the compound sooner and at greater peril than he expected.

When deeply involved in his work, it was the professor’s habit to take off his spectacles and rest his eyes by looking out the window behind him. Invariably it would raise his spirits—it had for many a year. On this strange evening, he went to the added trouble of raising the glass to allow some pure air into the room which had become musty and filled with the most bizarre chemical odor he could ever recall inhaling. Whatever the new pale green synthesized compound was, its smell was indeed stout, especially in the small room. So the professor raised his window and for a second or two, without special emotion, found himself face-to-face with a bona fide space monster. It was Bigbooté standing on the window ledge. The “antidote” had enabled the professor to see him as he really was.

In shock, the professor turned from his window and reached for his glasses. Being quite myopic without his lenses, he wore a quizzical look, but that was all, as he turned back to the window and tried to scream only to find that his voice had a catch in it. It was John O’Connor’s Lectroid “hand” around his throat.

“Where’s the Overthruster?” Bigbooté demanded, as the professor, thinking quickly, brought down the window as hard as he could, freeing himself of the Lectroid’s hold in the process and racing for the door. Bigbooté simply crashed through the closed window and, now heated, ran in pursuit.

The professor’s first impulse was understandable: to save the OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER. But he had no way of gauging what sort of force he was up against, other than the obvious fact that a single hideous beast was chasing him. In retrospect, of course, he should not have entered the room where the OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER was kept (Rawhide having returned it to its regular place of safekeeping shortly after the bus pulled in), despite his fears of it falling into their hands. I do not wish to linger on the past and recognize perfectly well the effect the face at the window must have had on a man his age, but his thoughtless move nevertheless nearly ended the planet. Instead of running to save himself and leaving the Lectroids none the wiser as far as the OVERTHRUSTER was concerned, he seized it himself and in attempting to safeguard it, almost lost it. As he emerged from the room, OVERTHRUSTER in his grasp, he found himself set upon no longer by a single Lectroid but by three, coming from opposite directions. Seeing no way out but to retrace his steps, he hurriedly went back into the room, opened the window, and went out onto the second floor ledge. As the Lectroids converged on his tenuous position, Hikita debated whether to drop the OVERTHRUSTER to the ground below and perhaps risk damaging it or having it fall into other Lectroids hands. (He had no idea how many there were.) He hesitated nearly too long, trying to decide, and in the chaotic chain of events it was here that the girl named Penny Priddy reentered the picture, having disobeyed orders and left Buckaroo Banzai’s bedroom.

Once again, some explanation is in order. Following not just one but several traumatic experiences, Penny had sought safety as she had throughout her entire life—by running away. She had wandered up and down the grounds of the Institute before finally winding up at the bunkhouse and eventually in Buckaroo Banzai’s bedroom. Although not by nature a stealthy person, she had lingered there the remainder of the afternoon, prying into places where she had no business poking around, excavating old scrapbooks and memorabilia, and at last, quite by accident, uncovering a picture of Peggy. She, who had always fancied herself a hard-featured realist, was reduced to tears by the smiling image of the woman whom she had spent her life mistakenly believing dead—her long-lost identical twin who was now long lost indeed; or was she? Reno had mentioned something about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Peggy’s death. What if Peggy were not dead? Then there was a chance the two of them could still meet one day and get to know one another as sisters, as twins, between whom there could be no secrets. All her life Penny had felt discontented, incomplete in some way, restless without knowing why. Now at least she had a theory . . . this photograph of the beautiful woman in her lap. How pretty she was in the picture! Then that must mean I’m pretty, too, thought Penny, because we’re twins. How beloved she was by Buckaroo and everyone who knew her! Then maybe they can love me, too, because I’m just like her. The oblique staring expression in Peggy’s eyes fascinated her. How she longed to be inside that mind and know those thoughts! All her life many people had taken her for a perfect fool, but in her heart she had always known with proud satisfaction that there was more to her than met the eye. Not even her adoptive parents—they least of all!—would hear of the matter when she used to bring it up, but it came down to this: “I have a counterpart somewhere,” she used to say. “Someone who is just like me and at the same time all the things I am not. The truth will not be hushed. Somewhere there is another me!”

“Then a mistake has been made,” her bulldog-faced father would joke. “That’s the girl we want.”

Penny would break out into a paroxysm of sobbing and run to her room, slamming the door behind her, until that day . . . when she had slammed it the last time. She had run away in spite of the cold and wandered the back roads near Cheyenne for some three hours before a bunch of cowboys gave her a lift into town. The landscape had been so cheerless, and yet that night was the happiest of her life, until now. Now at last she had found the missing alter ego she had always known she had. It was only a picture, and yet from merely listening to stories and reading articles from Buckaroo’s scrapbook about Peggy, she felt like she had known her all her life. More important, she herself was beginning to feel in some way reborn and unyoked from the terrible past. As if a sad veil had been lifted from in front of her eyes, a pleased expression crossed her face and those same slate-blue eyes began to shine; and she was untroubled for the first time she could remember . . . since the fire, anyway. She, Penny Priddy, was now penitent for her vagrant years and vowed to change. She would remain at the Institute, no matter what, and do something worthwhile with her life. What was the motto of the Banzai Institute—Science for Humanity? She would adopt it as her own as well, for had it not fallen her lot to continue where Peggy had left off? She was convinced of it and would be no shirker, she promised. She only wished she had some means of proving it, some challenge, some historic mission to accomplish so she could vindicate herself before the world.

Thus, as she was thinking some of this, down upon her knees, surrounded by Buckaroo Banzai’s most treasured personal momentoes, who should walk through the door but the great man himself? Knowing him as I do, I have an idea what he must have said, but I will not put inventions of my own into B. Banzai’s mouth. I am certain there was a look of perplexity on his face, as there usually is at such times, and I am equally certain he avoided moralizing. Beyond that I will not hazard a guess, although obviously the subject of Peggy must have been raised.

Only minutes later when Tommy arrived at the room, in response to my suggestion that Buckaroo be notified (remember, Buckaroo had lost his Go-Phone at the pod crash site), he overheard the following exchange between the two of them which he subsequently passed on to me:

Penny Priddy:
Should I deny that I sneaked in, that I went through your personal belongings, that I invaded your privacy?

Buckaroo Banzai:
Perjury is no worse than what you did.

“Buckaroo,” blurted out Tommy. “We’ve got trouble!”

Buckaroo already knew that, as capable of hearing the blaring alarm as any. It was his too good heart which made him linger a while to talk to Penny, in whose eyes tears had now risen.

“Don’t cry,” he said to her, a blush invading his own forehead. “It seems your fate and mine run together. Penny.” Then of Tommy he asked: “Who signaled the alarm?”

“Sam at the garage,” Tommy answered. “Maybe someone’s fiddling with the Jet Car!”

“Let’s go,” Buckaroo said and started out of the room when Penny, with a shriek that meant business, pointed to a window.

“There!” she said. “There was someone there!”

Whether there was or was not anyone there, we shall never know; Penny identified John O’Connor later by his clothing as the man whose face she had seen at the glass, but, as I have said, John O’Connor was seen at more or less the same time by the unidentified intern some fifty yards away. I am not saying she didn’t see him—to the uttermost depth of her being she may have been convinced she was telling the truth as Buckaroo raced to the windows with his pistol drawn. At all events it was a convenient way of keeping him in the room.

There was, however, no one at the window. “But I glimpsed him,” Penny said. “Buckaroo, did you mean what you said about—?”

“Where did he go?” Buckaroo asked.

“I don’t know. By the time I screamed he was gone. Did you mean what you said about our fate—?”

“He may have gone up to the roof,” Buckaroo said.

“I’ll go check,” said Tommy.

“I’ll go with you,” Buckaroo insisted, telling Penny, “Wait here. Stay in this room till I get back.”

She nodded, but her head throbbed with an intensity that mounted the longer she waited and he did not return. Finally, when she had endured it as long us she could—a period of perhaps thirty seconds—she undertook an expedition of her own in search of B. Banzai and “all the excitement,” as she later remarked. In terms of the latter, she certainly found it.

While Buckaroo and Perfect Tommy searched for the peeping John (forgive me) and John Parker and I raced in the direction of Professor Hikita’s lab, Penny Priddy, it seems, was actually the first remotely friendly face the professor saw. Drawn by his cries of help, she arrived to see him standing on the second floor ledge, holding the OVERTHRUSTER in his hand.

“Young lady!” he beseeched, looking down and preparing to toss her the priceless object. “Take this and run!”

Then he threw her the OVERTHRUSTER. I am ignorant of her moves for the next minute or so, but events would indicate that she did not run far, for in the final analysis, when the rake of the croupier had passed, we were left with two dead and no OVERTHRUSTER. This result came about in the following manner:

As John Parker and I raced up the stairs on one side of the building, Rawhide charged up those opposite and encountered one of the Lectroids coming down. A struggle doubtlessly ensued, but let us say that Rawhide’s fate was upon him before he knew it. The powerful creature, most likely John Bigbooté, sank one of its poisonous barbs into our comrade’s back, causing Rawhide to crumple up and fall down the steps to the floor of the lobby, where we found him moments later. In the meantime, however, John Parker and I had reached the second floor corridor and, hearing noises, ran into the room through which Professor Hikita had climbed out onto the ledge. Greeting us was John O’Connor, who spun around suddenly at the window as we entered and who, upon seeing John Parker, gave such a bloodcurdling shriek that it haunts my nightmares still. His mouth opened, and from it issued a tiny missile not unlike a fishing lure. The projectile seemed to scream as it shot past my head and imbedded itself in the wall with what to my ears at least was a small cry of pain. As John O’Connor quickly opened his mouth and “fired” another, John Parker pushed me quickly to one side and made an astonishing leap across the room, grabbing John O’Connor by the throat and throwing him down. One of the most violent titanic struggles I have ever witnessed then ensued, as the two “men” battled with a ferocity found on our planet only in the wilds. Indeed, the only event comparable to it in my memory was an occasion once in Africa when I had the rare opportunity to see a crocodile and a lion duel to the death, the lion’s rapacious claws slitting the crocodile’s soft underbelly in roughly the same instant that the reptile’s powerful jaws clamped shut and practically bit the great cat in half. It was a sight I imagine few non-Africans have ever observed, and while it was terrible to behold, it was also awestriking and beautiful in the way that Nature’s terrors often are.