The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Read online

  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.

  6

  Technically 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.

  At the risk of digressing further, I must say that B. Banzai had empirical evidence supporting his ideas, or I am confident he would never have staked his own life as well as the Banzai Institute’s great world renown on the outcome. This evidence derived from an experiment gone awry in the 1930s at Princeton University in New Jersey, during which Professor Hikita and a scientific colleague named Dr. Emilio Lizardo accidentally glimpsed a burst of enhanced consciousness radiation or, put simply, alien life on another dimension. From this void of brilliant colors came the despairing screams of the damned, captive monstrosities that defied belief, much less description. Lizardo had, in fact, for a brief moment that seemed an eternity, been sucked halfway into the void through a supposedly solid wall. Alien hands clutched at him! What further horror he witnessed as a result of the terrifying ordeal was never known, except to say that when he emerged to safety he was plainly mad. His hair had turned to orange, and he fled in terror, almost immediately embarking upon a life of crime. Subsequently he was captured by the authorities and sentenced to an asylum where he never recovered. (More on this shortly.)

  Well aware of Lizardo’s case, B. Banzai nevertheless undertook the perilous journey to the seat of consciousness, into the mountain, his devouring passion to know perhaps even fanned to flame by the prospect of danger. What he saw there has been widely viewed, insofar as the film he brought out with him. One may see the hideous shapes, the hues of unnatural color, the fragments of mysterious light, and the rest of it, along with the voices that still cause my skin to creep with terror; but watching another fall through a trapdoor is not the same as failing through it oneself. Film is not the reality and cannot convey the true feel of the place, if place is the word. B. Banzai’s obsession had become all too real, and he had no way of knowing, once inside, whether he would ever escape.

  General Catburd:

  Where is he? Will somebody tell me?

  Rawhide:

  Sit down, General.

  General Catburd:

  Not until I get an explanation.

  “Like a roller coaster ride through a meteor shower,” was how Buckaroo would initially describe the experience of traveling through what has come to be called “The Eighth Dimension” by the popular press. The G-force was apparently vastly greater than anything ever experienced on earth. The car’s two inch thick windscreen broke as if struck by a sledgehammer, Buckaroo’s Plexiglas helmet shattered, and he was hurled back in his seat and riveted there like a helpless doll. Gigantic static electrical charges lit the unfamiliar atmosphere laden with acrid odors. Amid tears and wailing and ferocious stinging pests that managed to penetrate even Buckaroo’s flight suit, there were the fearsome veils I have already mentioned. A red viscous stream and its tributaries were encountered, swirling like a great river toward an unknown destination. Sinister shadows with sweat-grimed faces and membraned eyes attempted to grasp hold of the car as it shot past, adopting any such desperate means as might help them escape the dreadful place. One such beast even came face to face with B. Banzai as it fell headlong across the hood of the car and managed to hang on for a moment, its horrible stare and foam-flecked mouth a sight Buckaroo will not soon forget. To the young reader’s excited fancy, this may all seem the stuff of romantic adventure, but I must believe Buckaroo Banzai when he tells me that never in his life had he felt such . . . yes, fear was the word he used. These angry demons had a way of infiltrating even the spirit. B. Banzai hearing them jabbering with glee within his brain, experiencing the pulsing exhilaration of pure evil, chaos. “Now I know how Lizardo felt,” he remembered thinking. But he was stronger than Lizardo. The psychic attackers could not subjugate him, although if the incredible journey had lasted a moment longer . . .

  Of the terrain, I have alluded to the red river. In addition there were vast chasms of hissing swamp and stench, alpine ranges with countless crags, which B. Banzai avoided with difficulty. Spurts of flame issued with volcanic energy from unseen sources, forming huge thunderclouds and gurgling rock formations of fantastic shape. Here and there the topography seemed to fall away altogether, and there were descents into great voids of pandemonium, illuminated by flashes of momentary radiance. These blinding rays would last but for an instant, to be followed by a darkness likened to liquid ebony, total and all-enveloping. At one point, a gasping B. Banzai recalled looking up into a heaven full of stars, only to realize he was upside down and the glowing lights were not stars at all, but millions of eyes peering up, lost souls in the black mantle of eternity.

  As for those of us back in the blockhouse, we held our breath; for although the harrowing passage seemed to last forever, in fact it was mere seconds before the Jet Car blasted out the opposite side of the mountain to our cheers of victory tempered with relief. Like owners of a winning thoroughbred, each of us—Rawhide, Perfect Tommy, Hikita, and myself—felt a part of a glorious moment. (How glo
rious we could not yet even guess!)

  “Banzai!” shouted Hikita, thumping the table with his fist, and I turned, feeling a muscular hand grip my shoulder. It was Rawhide, that quietest of men, dancing a jig and embracing me. To the others, the invited guests, we must have seemed mad, but we didn’t care. For once the news media were as good as speechless, confronted with the story of the century.

  Commentator:

  I have seen something strange, something very strange.

  General Catburd:

  Certainly irregular.

  (Senator Cunningham jumps a foot into the air, her heart contracted with excitement.)

  Senator Cunningham:

  He’s done it! He’s gone through the mountain without a scratch! Oh, my God!

  Secretary of Defense:

  Oh, my God!

  He had done it, but Buckaroo could not relax just yet, having his hands full trying to slow the still-speeding Jet Car, wooing it like a woman. “Easy now. Come on,” he cajoled, tugging a switch to release the trailing parachute, but would it be enough in the scant space remaining before the next ring of mountains? There would be no more passing through solid matter today; he was low on liquid helium. The OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER was of no use. It was strictly man versus machine now. He plunged the brake to the floor and tugged at the wheel. To his dismay the loss of hydraulic brake and steering pressure had been greater than he thought.