The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (4 page)

“Fire when ready, Buckaroo,” came the voice of Big Norse.

Buckaroo’s hand moved to a final row of controls, the pulsating power of the jet behind him increasing with each successive throw of a switch until at last it seemed the car was a quivering caged beast. To his infinite relief, the vehicle had thus far held together, but he could not be certain until the last switch, which his finger now curled around like a fatal trigger.

He drew a breath deep into his chest, though the air was noxious with the odor of kerosene. So circumstanced, having so long dreamt of being here, for a fleeting instant a ribald song from his days at Merton College, Oxford, came to mind, a song he had once sung to Peggy despite his vociferous protestations.

“I won’t sing it,” he had said.

“Yes, you will, if I have to wheedle it out of you.” She had laughed, tickling him until he surrendered.

“You’re crazy.”

“Crazy about you, Buckaroo Banzai. Now sing.”

He had sung the song, as he sang it now in the Jet Car. How could he not sing it? She had been so lovely, lying by the Thames, wearing a garland of roses he had fashioned for her, and a summer dress. Some young Oxonians, mates of his, had come upon them and raised their draughts of wine in hearty laughter when they heard him singing.

“Who’s the bird, Buckaroo?” they had shouted.

“My fiancée,” he had replied.

“I didn’t know you had a fiancée,” one of them had said.

“Neither did I,” had retorted Peggy, gazing at Buckaroo in an altogether accusing way.

“Will you marry me?” he had proposed on the spot, and the shining tender light in her eyes was the only answer he needed.

“Yes,” she had said, not hesitating lest it prove a dream.

Had he looked further, he would have seen the squat furtive shadow of Xan looking down on them. Xan, the renegade and blackguard of the 20th century, whose cowardly plot would soon unfold and deprive B. Banzai of yet another person close to him.

Eyes burning, Buckaroo pressed the final switch and threw the car into gear. To the observer it appeared that the hand of a giant had grabbed hold of the car and flung it as far as one could see in a single second, so fast did it dart toward the horizon.

Perfect Tommy, Rawhide, and I leaned forward, knuckles turning white, watching his progress on the monitor. Nearby, Professor Hikita furrowed his brow in resolute concentration. “Now it’s in the lap of the gods,” I heard him murmur.

T
echnically speaking, although B. Banzai’s surname is Japanese, both he and Xan can trace their ancient lineage back to the steppes of Mongolia, back to that race of aggressive Asiatics who from the fourth to the seventeenth century struck terror in the hearts of Europeans. Hordes of these invaders, one wave after the other, raped and pillaged as far as the Atlantic coast, laying waste to all they encountered. It was they, the Mongol ancestors of B. Banzai and Xan, who overthrew Constantinople in 1453, enslaved Russia for centuries, and extinguished the glory that was Baghdad. It was among these, too, that the hatred between B. Banzai’s forbears and those of the savage Xan gave rise to the terrible blood feud of generations to come.

On that morning of the Jet Car test in Texas, halfway around the world at his cave city in Sabah, Xan (or Hanoi Xan as Interpol knows him) practiced his usual deadly arts with his bravos, specially trained killers sworn to obey his every poisonous wish. I know from tales told me by his captured former associates what these daily sessions of grueling combat are like, and I have no reason to doubt them, having met a few of Xan’s bravos myself on more than one unpleasant occasion. Pound for pound they are the most lethal fighters in the world, and one of their rites of initiation of which I have heard is rather typical. The young man or woman desirous of becoming a bravo is nailed to a tree by the ear and is sometime later handed a knife to cut himself down. A moment’s hesitation or a single scream is sufficient grounds for being shot on the spot. The one-eared survivors are then led away for further training in sabotage and commando tactics. They are immersed in cruelty and learn to view pain and suffering with delight. It can be stated with no exaggeration that they study murder as a discipline, devoting the rest of their lives to what Xan calls “walking in the hidden ways.” He is the object of their veneration, unstintingly given, and acts of the grisliest nature are perpetrated in his name as a kind of perverse tribute.

Thus it is that these bravos hold all of Sabah in their bloody grip and do not rest until they find fresh victims. Xan, as the head of this unholy order, has bestowed upon himself the title “His Sublimity the Pivot of Mystery, the Hinge of Fate of all the Asias.” Needless to say, the peasants of Sabah bow down to the tyrant rather than dispute him.

On this particular morning, as B. Banzai prepared to race the Jet Car across the no man’s land of western Texas, Xan partook of the daily rigors of jujitsu alongside his bravos before retiring early to watch American television through the miracle of satellite communication. In his underground library, its every niche filled with dusty records of torture and mayhem, the lank-haired savage watched as B. Banzai blasted across the wide open spaces, the Jet Car throbbing as its speed approached three hundred and then four hundred miles per hour. Xan leaned forward, his repellent stare fixed on the screen. Something puzzled him, though even with his global web of spies he could not know what. He knew B. Banzai better than perhaps any man, perhaps better than B. Banzai knew himself. A mere world speed record seemed trivial to a man of Banzai’s intellect and talents. Xan stared and wondered, disdaining to talk to a swarthy servant who arrived with news.

“The death dwarves have been taken aboard the
Calypso,”
announced the servant. “Should we order them to detonate?”

“Not now, confound you,” barked Xan. “Out of my sight!”

In the blockhouse in Texas, eyes were similarly glued to the TV monitors, the streaking Jet Car seen from ground cameras and helicopters overhead. It was already forty-five miles downrange, its speed edging toward five hundred miles an hour. In reviewing my notes, it is evident all over again how unprepared were all but a few of us for what was about to happen.

General Catburd:
It’s fast, I’ll give Banzai that, but war ain’t Indianapolis. One heat-seeking missile and he’s history.

Senator Cunningham:
I doubt it, General. All the high-tech hardware in the world just might be useless against one American boy in a fast car. Isn’t that right, Rawhide?

Rawhide:
You’re the ones saying it has military applications. No one at the Banzai Institute has said that.

Secretary of Defense:
But surely, man, you must admit—!

Rawhide:
The Jet Car is not for sale. Just watch. You might miss something.

(Across the room I observe a female commentator from one of the networks sitting with Perfect Tommy. I will delete her name, for she is well-known. The mercurial Tommy is looking very pleased with himself as the amazing car which he helped design goes ever faster.)

Commentator:
Perfect Tommy, how on earth is Buckaroo able to keep that thing on the ground?

(Tommy, who can one moment appear dark and quarrelsome and the next bright as sunshine, does not take his eyes off the monitor as he answers in a calm, even voice.)

Perfect Tommy:
She’s just one sweet road hugger, lady. Plus the dude can motor, (pause) What are you doing tonight?

Commentator:
Flying to Cambodia.

Perfect Tommy:
What are you doing before you fly to Cambodia?

(The speed of the Jet Car is approaching six hundred miles an hour when suddenly it happens: The car veers off course sharply, toward the mountains on its right. The room is thrown into panic.)

Professor Hikita:
Buckaroo, do you read?

Big Norse:
Advise you abort. Over.

Buckaroo Banzai:
Sorry, can’t oblige.

(The car accelerates, Buckaroo’s voice through static and crackle, unintelligible, then a sonic boom. A shot from a helicopter camera reveals that the Jet Car is literally setting the desert on fire, leaving it smoking in its wake.)

Commentator:
The Jet Car has left its prescribed course, has broken the sound barrier at a speed in excess of seven hundred miles per hour. Radio contact with Mission Control apparently severed . . . Buckaroo Banzai in possibly serious trouble.

General Catburd:
Either that or he’s popped his cookies.

Big Norse:
Mach one point three. Buckaroo! Do you read? Commence braking procedure. Over.

Secretary of Defense:
He’s heading for the mountains. Must be a steering malfunction.

Big Norse:
Eject, Buckaroo! Eject!

(On the monitors the Jet Car is seen heading directly into a wall of mountain, impact virtually assured.)

General Catburd:
Looks like Banzai’s finally gonna get more than he bargained for, and take the Friends of the Earth with him.

What to make of this? I include this portion of the transcript only to illustrate what confusion reigned at the precise moment B. Banzai had chosen to turn the laws of physics topsy-turvy. I shall never forget that sweltering blockhouse and the noisome array of witnesses to the incredible event which I am about to describe.

And what did Buckaroo see? Between the hydraulic fluid spurting across his visor from a leak overhead and the side of the mountain closing fast, it is accurate to say that he had barely time to see his life flash in front of his eyes before pressing the button marked OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER. In a picosecond, colliding beams of electrons and positrons exploded in a continuous burst of particles, spewing intermediate vector bosons in all directions, powerful super conducting magnets focusing the bosons at a single point on the side of the mountain, from which point radiated an expanding shock wave of spontaneous symmetry breaking, leaving in its wake a region in which the increased mass of photons drastically reduced the range of the electromagnetic force. For an instant, solid matter ceased to be solid, every elementary particle of the mountain in rapid motion, and the seven-hundred-mile-per-hour Jet Car slid through it like a hot knife through butter.

Big Norse:
It’s off my scope!

General Catburd:
What the—? What is going on?

With the exception of Tommy, Rawhide, Professor Hikita, and myself, the room was hysterical, for we had
seen
it. The helicopter camera had afforded us a perfect view of the Jet Car ‘hitting’ the mountain and disappearing within. Minds reeled, even my own, and I had been, as much as one could ever be, braced for it. It was as though slumbering devils had been awakened in all of us. There were screams, horrible laughs, but nothing compared to the torment Buckaroo was going through.

“God in heaven,” burst from his lips. Just as the solidity of matter had long since been dissolved into mere mathematical relationships in space, B. Banzai had for some time harbored the revolutionary notion that consciousness was not in the brain of the beholder but in the object itself. Consciousness was an intrinsic mysterious property capable of mathematical measurement, albeit its transmitting agent, as with gravity, was not yet known. It had been B. Banzai’s contention, along with Professor Hikita, for at least a decade that consciousness was a particle wave akin to light, and in the manner of a radio transmitter, broadcast on our planet on a single frequency, although it was mathematically probable that the exact frequency would vary throughout the cosmos. The reader will jump ahead to the next conclusion without any prodding from me: namely, that most humans are
aware
of receiving fuzzy signals of alien consciousness from other worlds, other dimensions, but for reasons of psychological resistance or biological limitation, cannot interpret them clearly. Not only until Buckaroo Banzai have we lacked a medical physicist’s concept of consciousness, but the probability is that we and
they
broadcast on different spectra. Unfortunately, the human brain, in particular the reticular activating system in the brain stem, localized by B. Banzai as the likely consciousness receptor, is even by our own standards of evolution a quite antiquated contraption. In effect, our so-called sophisticated brains are obsolescent radio sets without tuners. Locked into a single station, we miss the other ninety-nine hundredths of the dial.

There are exceptions, as B. Banzai noted in his last address to the American Psychiatric Association. Valid clairvoyants and schizophrenics, as well as certain “primitive” tribes which use mind-altering drugs, possess wider tuning ranges than the average person; and while these abnormal cases are intriguing in and of themselves, of greater interest to Buckaroo Banzai was the possibility of going to the seat of consciousness itself, within an object. Again to cite our radio analogy, instead of bringing his energies to bear on improving the tuner, he would go to the transmitter. For if consciousness were found to be a force within the atom, like the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, as he believed, then in the process of bending these forces with the OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER, the entire band-width of consciousness would become clear. It was central to B. Banzai’s theory that every object, every molecule, contained the full range of universal consciousness even if it “broadcast” or radiated only a miniscule portion of the spectrum.