The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Read online

  Big Norse nodded. “I didn’t get an acknowledgement. There’s a strange atmospheric disturbance going on, localized over this area ofTexas. I don’t know if they received.”

  “Well, try again,” I said, at the risk of stating the obvious but not knowing what else to say.

  “Death dwarves,” muttered Perfect Tommy. “Some more of Xan’s radio-controlled experiments?”

  “Sounds like it,” I said, as we were joined by Professor Hikita who insisted on knowing what the ruckus was about. “Xan up to his usual deviltry,” was how I put it.

  “Was there an SOS?” he asked.

  Big Norse shook her head.

  “Then perhaps we’re getting worried for nothing,” said the professor, wrinkling his brow, eyes twinkling. “Perhaps the message means they have taken death dwarves prisoner.”

  At that we all smiled, congratulating one another. “Of course!” ejaculated Perfect Tommy. “That must be it! Otherwise—”

  The professor cut him short. “Otherwise there is nothing we can do about it.”

  We knew the truth of that, all of us stonily grim. To mask his own fretfulness, the good professor forced a smile. “Anyway, we have problems of our own,” he said. “I need some help with these Jet Car calculations, and we haven’t much time.”

  3

  Before proceeding, I must confess to being utterly lame of mind about the higher mathematics. Whatever explanation I can here contribute regarding that marvelous machine the Jet Car, keep in mind, reader, that it is the layman speaking, and the layman must inevitably rely upon poor metaphor, the turn of a phrase, to relate that which he fathoms only slightly. The result is to hold up one’s hand and mark the spot, so to speak, mentioning almost merely in passing, “Here is where the great leap forward occurred. Now you know.” All of this is by way of saying that it was Perfect Tommy, a whiz at figures in his own right, and not myself, who hovered near Hikita’s shoulder in the desert blockhouse as the professor peered at the Jet Car through a viewfinder and read aloud a stream of computer data.

  “T minus five hundred and counting,” announced the professor. “Phaser positive. Latch compressor.”

  What thoughts went through his mind that morning I can only imagine, but no soul, not even the phlegmatic Japanese, could have been indifferent to the irony in the situation. Barely thirty years earlier on this same desert track, a vastly more primitive speed machine had poised for takeoff and disintegrated, taking three of its creators with it, among them Hikita’s compatriot and mentor, Masado Banzai. It had been none other than Hikita who had thrown himself across the young Buckaroo and just as selflessly from that day forward, reared the boy as his own blood.

  “Power source output zero-zero-niner,” he continued. “Multistage axial compressor latched.”

  I made a point at that time of jotting down an unusual personal observation in my notebook which I still find amusing.

  All these spit and polish types, careerists from the Pentagon, pretending to be on top of things . . . If they only knew! If they only knew what they are about to witness! Their collars would pop, their socks would fall off. The Secretary of Defense seems impatient, almost bored. General Catburd of the Joint Chiefs is wearing his golfing clothes, anxious only to get to the next fairway. They’re here because the President asked them to come. The President, to his credit, thinks the Jet Car might have military applications. Wait till the test! He doesn’t know the half of it . . . In any case they’ll be excellent witnesses for posterity.

  One hundred yards away, members of the Banzai team filled the tank of the unusual-looking, asymmetrical car with extremely flammable jet fuel, while others, almost unnoticed, loaded aboard three special liquid helium dewars for supercooling the magnetic components of the Jet Car. These superconducting magnets were essential for the operation of the OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER, a miniature colliding beam accelerator which created intermediate vector bosons from the annihilation of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. My fellow residents and interns and I saw this being done and crossed our fingers, but I am certain the event went utterly unnoticed by the others in attendance, those representatives of the news media, the military, and the Congress who seemed more concerned with matters on the other side of the globe and the social whirl back in Washington than with anything that might happen on this desolate spot.

  The main subject of conversation seemed to be the exact whereabouts of Buckaroo. He had not been seen by anyone, and as Professor Hikita and Perfect Tommy continued to make ready the car, amid television screens and monitoring devices, I found myself stealing a peek at my own watch and overheard General Catburd’s aide give him the latest.

  “He’s not even here,” went the conversation.

  “Who?”

  “Banzai.”

  “Where the hell is he?”

  “At a hospital in El Paso.”

  “What? Why weren’t we informed? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He was called away to do some surgery.”

  “I’m supposed to tee off in a couple of hours. I have a golf game.”

  And so on. Catburd, feeling somehow vindicated by this bit of unexpected news, ambled over to the Secretary of Defense. “Banzai hasn’t showed, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “Looks like he’s got cold feet. I may as well go ahead and lift off.”

  The Secretary shook his head. “I want you here,” he said, frowning at the general’s country club golf cap. “I have a hunch Banzai has something up his sleeve.”

  “Like What?”

  Perfect Tommy interrupted my eavesdropping. “Better see what’s keeping the boss, Reno,” he said.

  “Why me?” I replied drily, to get his goat.

  “ ’Cause I’m busy. And get your clodhoppers off the UNI-VAC.”

  I lowered my feet from the computer console and walked to a less conspicuous part of the room where I used a miniature television transceiver to dial Rawhide’s mobile number. It was a quarter of seven, and Buckaroo Banzai had already been up four hours.

  4

  I have heard it said that fame is the sum of misunderstandings that accumulate around a well-known name. If that is so, then B. Banzai is surely the most famous man on earth, as there is so much in error said and written about him. He is called a communist by the right wing and a bourgeois tool by the left. His motives are impugned, his name slandered. Lawsuits are filed against him simply to harass or for the notoriety. I am convinced that if Jesus Christ Himself were to return in this day and age, He would not be crucified but sued unto death.

  I have to think that it is simply a case of small mean minds unable to comprehend someone so different from themselves, as B. Banzai is different from any man I have ever met. He is, above all, a man who stands for certain principles, and unfortunately, in our time that elicits only suspicion, so cynical has society become. If one stands for something, if one draws a line and has the audacity to declare one side right and one wrong, he is lambasted by the popular press as being unnecessarily rigid, a throwback. Worse, he is accused of being a hypocrite, a poseur interested merely in getting his face on television. With B. Banzai it has always been thus, but he continues to fight for a better world, and there are those of us who choose to fight beside him.

  What are these so-called principles of his, these subversive ideas which set so many knees quaking in high places? Every school child who reads the Banzai comic books or listens to his weekly radio broadcast or watches his Saturday morning adventure show knows the principles by heart. They are called the Five Stresses, the Four Beauties, and the Three Loves. The Five Stresses, those things to be stressed, are decorum, courtesy, public health, discipline, and morals. The Four Beauties are the beauties of mind, language, behavior, and environment; and the Three Loves are love of others, love of justice, and love of freedom. Such is the nature of the controversial program set forth by Buckaroo Banzai, whose only desire is to help humankind.

  At the moment I called, in fact, B. Banzai was near
ly up to his elbows in living brain tissue. Rawhide at once stepped out of the OR into a small anteroom where he produced a microTV transceiver identical to my own, an exclusive patent of the Banzai Institute we call a Go-Phone. “What’s up, Reno?” he said into the Go-Phone, as my image appeared on the tiny screen.

  “I was about to ask you the same question,” I said. “They’re getting kind of anxious over here at mission control, yours truly included. How much longer?”

  “I’ll run it down,” said Rawhide, and I experienced with him the sensation of walking back into the operating room where he looked over Buckaroo’s shoulder at the open skull of a young man sitting in a chair. Using a laser instead of a scalpel, Buckaroo had plumbed to a depth just behind the youngster’s eyeballs, and I could hear the tall, somewhat ungainly surgeon next to him suppress a gasp of apprehension.

  “What are you doing now?” asked the young surgeon, who I vaguely recalled as having attended a seminar or two at the Banzai Institute.

  Buckaroo took the question in stride without batting an eye, continuing to manipulate the delicate laser beam deep within the brain. “What I’m doing, Sid, as you well remember, is fusing the artificial nerve fiber to the original, bypassing the massive tumor damage. Then we’ll implant the subcutaneous computer chip—”

  The young surgeon nodded, visibly shrinking before my eyes, as Rawhide cut in. “Sorry, Buckaroo,” he said, “but we’re running into a problem with scheduling. Any idea as to—?”

  “About twenty minutes,” Buckaroo said. “You wanna take it from here, Sid?”

  “I don’t know—I mean—are you sure?” Sid vacillated with the same look of unmitigated terror that I have often seen in the eyes of men about to enter battle. It is nothing more or less than a failure of the will, an assessment Buckaroo was quickly forced to make.

  “Maybe forty, forty-five minutes,” he said to Rawhide, at the same time growing noticeably exasperated with his surgical colleague, at least noticeable to this observer who has felt the same withering stare of disapproval from that sternest of taskmasters, B. Banzai. “What am I doing now, Sid?” Buckaroo continued. “Why don’t you explain to the others?”

  By the others, Buckaroo meant the crowd of curious surgeons in the spectators’ gallery.

  Sid stammered, trying to make points. “You’re connecting the computer chip to the subcutaneous microphone which will permit the patient to transmit verbal instructions to his own brain—”

  “Such as?” Buckaroo prodded.

  “Such as ‘raise my left arm’ or ‘throw the harpoon’ depending on the language and culture, there are different computer chips. This boy’s an Eskimo.”

  Minutes later when the operation was over and B. Banzai and Sid washed up together, Buckaroo did not pull any punches. “You know, Sid—”

  “I know, I know.” Sid threw up his hands, profusely apologetic.

  “I know you know.” Buckaroo sighed. “If I wasn’t convinced of your talents, I’d haul you before the medical board. That’s what’s so frustrating.”

  “Maybe next time I’ll—”

  “The next time we might lose one, Sid,” said Buckaroo. “What if I hadn’t happened to be in the neighborhood?”

  “I know.” Sid wrung his hands, agonizing, as Buckaroo picked up a Nikon camera and walked over to take photographs of his handiwork before the Eskimo’s skull could be closed. Sid dutifully followed.

  “How long have we known each other?” Buckaroo asked. “Since Columbia P and S, right?”

  The motorized Nikon whirred as Sid, whose real name was Sidney Zwibel, nodded. “We met in Thornburg’s histology class and then later in enzymology.”

  “As I recall, you were near the top of your class in every subject,” said Buckaroo. “I don’t want to belabor the point, but we both know you have the gray matter to be a success in any field of endeavor.”

  “Then—”

  “But gray matter in itself isn’t enough. There’s a saying, ‘Consciousness is the impotent shadow of action.’ ”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, maybe you think too much. You’ve taken my seminar on this operative technique, you’ve read my paper, but when it comes down to it . . .”

  “I just don’t seem to have the confidence to try a new procedure.”

  “Confidence in the procedure or confidence in yourself?”

  Sidney slumped against the wall, his face drained of emotion. “Confidence in myself,” he said. “I’m filled with doubt, fear.”

  A notion occurred to Buckaroo. “Have you ever thought of coming aboard?” he asked.

  “You mean—?”

  “Joining me and my team full time.”

  “Are you serious? Have you got an opening?”

  “Possibly,” Buckaroo mulled. “Can you sing?”

  Sidney’s heart leapt. “A little. I can dance,” he said.

  5

  The first glimpse of B. Banzai by General Catburd and the other personages in the desert blockhouse caused a wave of excitement to sweep through the room.

  “There he is!” someone shouted, at the sight of a figure in a black commando parachute suit carrying a battered briefcase. “He’s getting in the Jet Car!”

  Crawling in, would be more like it. There was no door, only a window through which he slithered. I looked over at Hikita to see if his pulse had quickened as certainly as had my own. “Inertial control positive,” he continued, his throat tightening. “T minus seven zero and resume counting.”

  The voice of Mission Control, none other than Big Norse, crackled over the loudspeaker. “All systems righteous. We have a driver. Do you read, Buckaroo? Over.”

  “Roger.” Buckaroo was performing a preignition check, going down the list he had rehearsed countless times; and though I am safe in saying that he is a man to whom fear is unknown, he could not have been human without experiencing a momentary twinge of misgiving as he removed from his leather case an odd-looking object the size of his fist and plugged it into a gyro cradle near his head. At the flip of a switch, a light emitting diode on the object came on, and a similar signal was activated on Professor Hikita’s private console, causing the cryptic words OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER ARMED to flash.

  “All systems check,” crackled the voice of Buckaroo Banzai.

  Mission Control: “We have a definite ‘go.’ ”

  Then all was quiet, as only the American prairie can be, the odd gust of wind and the whirring of gnats deafening next to the nothingness that stretched for a hundred miles in every direction.

  The tension gave rise to nervous patter among some.

  “What’s this rust bucket supposed to do anyway?” said General Catburd to Senator Martha Cunningham of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  “Five hundred miles an hour, General,” she replied. “That’s my information.”

  “Senator, if you weren’t a lady—”

  “If I weren’t a lady, what?”

  “Then you’re full of stuff. Five hundred miles an hour?” Catburd scoffed.

  “Maybe the lady knows what she’s talking about,” interjected the Secretary of Defense as he looked out the viewing slot and was amazed to see a sheet of flame twenty-feet-long shoot out the back of the Jet Car like the exhaust of a fighter plane.

  Catburd’s face twitched, his head suddenly throbbing as it performed mental calculations. “Five hundred miles per?” he said, moving closer for a better look. “In that queer-looking thing?”

  Another flame erupted from the rear of the stationary car as Buckaroo stepped on the gas once more and took from his flight suit a ceremonial scarf emblazoned with Chinese ideographs commemorating the failed attempt of his father on these same windblown sands better than thirty years before. “Ready,” he said, tying the scarf around his helmet as his hand moved to the four-on-the-floor gearshift.

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

  Buckaroo’s hand moved to a final row of controls, the pulsa
ting 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.