The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Read online

  A billion or so people awaited the result on television and none with greater anticipation than Xan. His expression no longer so arrogant, permeated by dark depression over the incredible achievement of Buckaroo Banzai, he felt events now crowd in on him with a rush. One hand reached for the telephone as he watched B. Banzai struggle to stop the car. He dialed the number of a home for the criminally insane in Trenton, New Jersey, and requested to talk to Dr. Emilio Lizardo, one of the inmates.

  In the same instant he knocked aside a glass with an angry blow. Banzai had stopped the car in the nick of time, as the soulless Xan had expected and perhaps deep down had hoped he would, for it was never fated that Banzai die by accidental means. That happy moment would belong to Xan and his ruffians, if Xan had his way. The joy of driving a dagger through Banzai’s heart would be Xan’s destiny, and his alone.

  “Hello.” It was a curious voice at the other end of the phone, a thick Neapolitan accent speaking from a long distance.

  “We have a bad connection,” said Xan.

  “No, I am weak,” was Lizardo’s reply.

  “Are you watching television?”

  “No, I’ve just been drugged.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “What’s on?”

  “Banzai. Turn on your set.”

  7

  No hurried explanation could account for the insane, wild, unkempt figure which Dr. Emilio Lizardo had become. Once handsome and faultlessly groomed, now he was a twisted creature with pendulous cheeks and unsightly paunch, his only solace the treacherous antipsychotic drugs given him daily. So far and so long had he deteriorated that one could faithfully say that the best that could await him now was a painless death. Inflamed eyes beneath a shock of red hair, he was nightmare incarnate, a fitting mate for the devil himself. Trembling in every limb as one crazed, which indeed he was, he dropped the phone and surged for the television with a terrible whoop. Looking neither right nor left, he fell back limp in his armchair and clasped his hands to keep them from flopping. His beloved TV was coming alive; and by turns recoiling and seething like a reptile, he watched as the smoking Jet Car came to rest in a thicket of stump mesquite trees and B. Banzai clambered out the driver’s window.

  Ah, yes, Banzai . . . convinced somehow by his own dementia that the two were kindred souls, Lizardo had followed B. Banzai’s exploits over the years. He had more than once even sent friendly overtures to the Banzai Institute.

  “How’s your work coming, pal?” I recall one such letter. “My suspicion is you need help.”

  Buckaroo had paid little heed to the message, but I had inquired about the unusual name. It had rather caught my fancy. “Who is this Dr. Lizardo?” I had asked him.

  “He’s a true tragic figure,” Buckaroo had said. “An incalculable loss to science and to those who knew him.” He had gone on to relate the circumstances of the experiment gone awry in the ’30s, the close friendship that had once existed between Lizardo and Professor Hikita, fellow professors in the Princeton physics department. As for the “other vexatious business,” as Buckaroo put it, no one could say. “The whole thing about going into another dimension, another sideband of consciousness, is still so foreign to us that perhaps we won’t really understand his case until long after his death.” All in all, the entire bizarre tale made a lasting impression on me, arousing more pity than anything else.

  “Did you ever meet him?” I asked Buckaroo finally.

  “No, I never did,” had been his reply. “Hikita-san went to see him once, and Lizardo had to be restrained from attacking him. He’s simply not the same man.”

  Still, though they had never met, to Lizardo it seemed more than coincidental, uncanny almost, how his and B. Banzai’s paths had intertwined over the years; how through Banzai’s mathematics Lizardo felt he had come to know the man and know him well. To Lizardo, B. Banzai’s was the only mind near his equal. They approached problems similarly; they shared the same cosmology. They were the twin jewels of intellect on this planet. Still, there were differences. Banzai was an upstart, a Johnny-come-lately to the field of extra-dimensional physics. He had started with the ground plowed already, plowed by the blood and sweat of the Great Pioneer Emilio Lizardo. Granted, Banzai had inherited his parents’ talents and then some, but no one should forget that it was he, he, Emilio Lizardo, who as a young man with dreamy eyes and jet-black hair had smashed the never-before-broken dimension barrier. The Greatest and Most Unappreciated Scientist of His Time, who before being framed and unjustly incarcerated for crimes he had no knowledge of, had, in a flash of vision, dared catapult himself through a solid wall before running off terrified into the night.

  Why had he run? Who was he? Whorfin? Who was Whorfin? Sometimes in the early morning when the dawn tinged the east and he had just received his antipsychotic dosage, he caught a glimpse of his old self behind the eyes, the eyes of this obviously schizophrenic red-haired old man whom he did not know but had learned to obey. The eyes seemed to scream: Help me. Who am I? What am I doing here?

  What was Banzai doing now? Lizardo stalked the TV and crouched. Upon taking inventory of the Jet Car, B. Banzai had discovered two unusual physical specimens which he carefully put into plastic sandwich bags to be labeled although they defied classification. From the wind screen, he removed a handful of foul-smelling gelatinous substance that looked clammy, hot to the touch, at least on TV, and close quarters inspection of the car’s undercarriage disclosed a curiously shaped parasite that attached itself to the drive shaft and now resisted attempts to dislodge it. B. Banzai appeared to pick at it with a stick but without much success.

  “That sucker’s stuck,” muttered Lizardo. “What the hell is it?”

  His outstretched prehensile hand reached for the phone he had dropped, as he watched Banzai poke at the apparently lifeless object only to have the thing spring at him and go skittering across the desert. Banzai in rapid pursuit. “What am I watching?” demanded Lizardo, finding Xan still there.

  “Do you see that mountain in the background?” Xan said.

  “Yes.”

  “Banzai went through it.”

  There was a moment of silence, Lizardo bereft of movement except for the odd palsy. “He what?”

  “He went through the mountain. He drove that car of his through a piece of rock a mile wide.”

  A creeping awareness of what Xan meant came over Lizardo’s unseeing bloodshot eyes. He who had labored day and night these past many decades, whose fierce devouring passion it had been to duplicate that singular moment when he had stepped through a brick wall as if it were slush, had now merely turned on the television to see the usurper Banzai snare his glory.

  For some time speech was impossible, but finally he said, “What’s it to me?”

  “Well, I know you have been interested in this sort of thing,” said Xan cagily. “You’ll recall you once came to me through my associate in Hong Kong, a chap named Lo Pep, seeking funds for your research in this area.”

  “I have no recollection of such a thing,” said Lizardo, and that much was true. Often just after his medication was administered, his memory became clouded. The staff would tell him things that the redhead had done, and he would try in vain to remember.

  “I don’t blame you,” said Xan. “I laughed in your face. I called you a simpleton, and I found your story about coming from outer space through a brick wall patently absurd.”

  “I’m sorry, I have no recollection of that.”

  “That’s your problem. There’s no doubt in my mind you’re exactly where you belong, but that’s not why I’m calling. I should have had the good grace to make you feel more welcome in my camp.”

  “I just have no recollection of any of that. My name is Dr. Emilio Lizardo.”

  “How are your own calculations coming on your solid-matter-penetrator?”

  “Well—” Lizardo feigned indifference, eyeing the spate of mathematical equations scribbled on the wall in his own jerky hand. “Not bad.”


  “That means you’re getting no place. Perhaps you need Banzai’s help.”

  “It could be opportune,” Lizardo admitted.

  “Very opportune, I would imagine. What would you say if I told you I could spring you out of that institution in a couple of hours?”

  “I would say who is this?”

  “It’s Xan, you fool! Hanoi Xan!”

  The name had a certain ring of familiarity, but again Lizardo could not say how he knew it. There was a hollow click at the other end of the line, and Lizardo regarded the call as he would a prank, meanwhile watching the plucky Banzai catch the errant parasite and stuff it into a sandwich bag before heading back to the Jet Car where his radio was crackling.

  General Catburd:

  This his frequency? Nobody’s home. Banzai?

  Secretary of Defense:

  Give me the phone. You tell me, Buckaroo, what in tarnation is this going-through-solid-matter-and-rendering-all-existing-conventional-defense-perimeters-useless-overnight-bullcorn?

  General Catburd:

  Buckaroo, Catburd here. I’ve got egg all over my face—all right, crow feathers, too—but that’s okay. No room for egos here. We’re all Americans, and I wanna buy that toy of yours. Senator Cunningham here feels the same way—right, Madame Senator?

  Senator Cunningham:

  Don’t put words in my mouth, General.

  Secretary of Defense:

  We’ll talk turkey later.

  Professor Hikita:

  Not for sale, Mr. Secretary. Jet Car is not for sale.

  Secretary of Defense:

  I wasn’t talking to you, little Hikita-san.

  (Rawhide and I move closer to the professor, backing him up in the matter.)

  Professor Hikita:

  Buckaroo, did you see them? Did you?

  Secretary of Defense:

  See who?

  Buckaroo Banzai:

  See them? They about had me and the whole car for breakfast.

  Professor Hikita:

  They attacked you? They tried to take control of your mind? They exist?

  Buckaroo Banzai:

  With any luck I have the pictures to prove it.

  Professor Hikita seized upon the news, clutching it with the relief of a man from whose shoulders had just been lifted a cumbersome weight. For more than forty years he had lived with self-doubt concerning what he had seen the night of the ill-fated experiment at Princeton. Had he actually seen creatures in the other dimension, or had they been figments of the imagination? He was a scientist, an exponent of the scientific method, and the fact that he had been unable to repeat the experiment and ascertain the truth to his satisfaction had come to be an obsession. In hopes of learning more, he had made the painful journey to visit Dr. Lizardo, only to see with his own eyes the abject folly of the enterprise. Emilio Lizardo was gone; he had ceased to exist, his place taken by the raving red-haired apparition who called himself John Whorfin and who babbled endlessly about his empire somewhere on the other side of Saturn.

  8

  Several hours later, after Buckaroo had showered and shaved for the news media with the Banzai Institute’s latest invention, a gyroscopic razor that worked on the principle of a spinning top, Lizardo’s antipsychotic medication had begun to wear thin and John Whorfin seized control. This coup d’etat was usually accompanied by an irresistible urge to wander. The combination of a starry night and the fascination of travel often sent the two of them, Whorfin and Lizardo, to a comfortable chair by the window where they watched the heavens through the heavy iron grate that sealed them in.

  Whorfin would use these occasions to recite a daily menu of gripes, in particular berating Lizardo with accusations of stupidity and sloth, blaming him for a lack of progress in recreating the Princeton experiment. For his part, Lizardo tried to explain that his scientific work had been hampered by Whorfin’s presence.

  “You dominate my brain,” Lizardo would say. “You give me no freedom to think.”

  “If I didn’t dominate you, you wouldn’t help me,” Whorfin would reply. “You have no loyalty to the cause.”

  “That isn’t true. I want to help you get off planet Earth, because I know I’ll never be free as long as you remain.”

  “But you think I’m evil. There is resistance. I can feel it.”

  And around they would go. Out of this discord between two souls in one body would come nothing constructive, and every day brought more of the same—Lizardo praying for the next dawn and a fresh dose of medication which would bring him at least a few hours free of Whorfin’s torment. On this particular day, Whorfin seized control with dramatic suddenness and with a volley of furious curses commanded to see the television.

  The two of them were still in front of the set hours later, watching replay upon replay of the amazing Jet Car, when the phone on the wall rang.

  “You get it,” said Whorfin’s pouting lips, and the right hand (that side of the body in which Lizardo seemed to reside) reached for the phone. In his shaking hand he heard the voice of Xan.

  “Who is this?” demanded the villain.

  “John Whorfin. Who is this?”

  “Xan here, Whorfin. I called earlier. I must have reached Lizardo.”

  “Yes, you probably did. What’s on your mind, great Xan?”

  “You’ve seen the news?”

  “Banzai? Of course!”

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  “In the past it was always I who made the propositions to you, great Xan. What has changed?”

  “Shut up. I made the same offer to Lizardo I’m making to you. I don’t which one of you is which—”

  “That’s our problem.”

  “That’s the way I look at it.” Xan paused, perhaps second-guessing himself for ever getting involved with these two. “In case you’re interested, I can have you out of that hell hole by tonight. What do you say?”

  “I say there’s no doubt you can. Who is to stop the great Xan from doing whatever he wishes? But there is no need—my own boys can get me out easily enough.”

  A peal of irksome laughter came from Xan. “Your boys from outer space? What planet is it you’re from again? I forget.”

  Whorfin quelled his rage and answered calmly. “Planet 10.”

  “Right . . . Planet 10. Well, they haven’t gotten you out so far, have they? How long have you been rotting there?”

  “Forty-five years, which is but a day—”

  “I know . . . ‘which is but a day’ on your planet. Maybe you’ve got the time, but I’m not sure about Lizardo. He’s not of your planet, is he?”

  Whorfin cocked his head a short distance from the phone. Was Xan only humoring him, only pretending to believe his story about coming from Planet 10? Whorfin had learned many things about human beings (and I include Xan in this category only reluctantly), but he did not possess a sense of humor and hence could not comprehend one, much less one as barbed as Hanoi Xan’s.

  “You may have a point,” Whorfin said, looking at his gnarled hands. “Lizardo is getting old.”

  “And I’d say perhaps you miscalculated as far as your boys are concerned. We both know what loyalty among criminals is worth.” With this parry Xan obviously had touched a raw nerve, Whorfin’s own paranoia doing the rest. “They’ve probably got a good thing going on the outside,” continued Xan. “Why should they give a damn about getting you out? What do they need you for?”

  Whorfin listened and spoke little, the wheels in his mind turning on their own. His latest conversation with his boys had made him uneasy. John Bigbooté had sounded evasive, too busy to be bothered. They had had, by Earth standards, a long time to start life anew without him, without the discipline of a strong hand. Perhaps his fears were unfounded, but now was the time . . . Banzai had done it! Banzai had succeeded in breaking the dimension barrier! There at last existed the means of going home to Planet 10, if only he could . . .

  “I want you to build me what Banzai’s got,
” Xan said.

  “The Jet Car.”

  “Whatever it takes to go through solid matter,” said Xan, practically salivating. “I must have that power!”

  On the television, the entry of the Jet Car into the mountain was shown once again, and the attractive network commentator was still sitting next to the fair-haired Perfect Tommy, with Rawhide and myself along for laughs.

  Commentator:

  Here she is, slowed down as far as we can take it. Lookit there . . . slam. Right into the side of that mountain! Perfect Tommy, Rawhide, Reno, you guys are known as the Hong Kong Cavaliers, Buckaroo’s most trusted inner circle. So I gotta ask, did it surprise you fellows as much as the rest of us when the HB 88, the experimental jet vehicle, went right off the scope and with the device known as the Oscillation Overthruster vanished inside solid matter?

  Perfect Tommy:

  Nope, not really.

  Commentator:

  Was Buckaroo acting any different this morning? I mean, in terms of other mornings?

  Perfect Tommy:

  I don’t know. I was asleep. Rawhide, you saw him.

  (The quiet gunsmith Rawhide, uneasy before the cameras, knows only how to speak the truth.)

  Rawhide:

  I don’t think he went to bed. Buckaroo normally only sleeps an hour or two a night anyway, ever since—

  (Rawhide glances at us, notices our keen scrutiny of what he is about to say, and thankfully neglects to mention the profound change in Buckaroo since the death of his wife Peggy.)

  Rawhide:

  Buckaroo just doesn’t sleep much, that’s all. Plus, Tommy had a late-night petting party that went on till the wee hours. I doubt he could have gotten much sleep anyway.