Breakfast on a rainy Friday. Reno and Pecos were talking about life aboard the Calypso, Perfect Tommy was basking in the adulation of five or six visiting Blue Blazes who had come to help with the ongoing Yoyodyne cleanup, Zoo Story had brought a slimy-looking petri dish to the table with her and was showing it off to the Seminole Kid and Pinky Carruthers with all the beaming pride of a new mother, and there was a general hum of morning conversation as the Institute's residents, interns, and Blazes all floated informally in and out of the dining room. Buckaroo Banzai was sitting at one corner of the long table, deep in thought. He had been the first into the room, and was carefully being left undisturbed.

Zoo Story picked up her petri dish and carried it over to Pecos and Reno, waving it almost under their noses. Pecos recoiled, then, as Zoo Story began to explain what was in it, leaned forward with fascination. Big Norse joined the group, and almost dipped her long hair into the culture as she looked. Reno drifted over to hear Perfect Tommy finish telling about Yoyodyne for the twentieth or maybe twenty-fifth time, thinking he might pick up a new detail or two for the book, which was going to be called either Adventures Across the Eighth Dimension or Buckaroo Banzai and the Invaders from Planet Ten.

"Of course!" Buckaroo Banzai sat bolt upright and slammed a hand onto the table. "If it was a snake---"

Suddenly aware of his surroundings, Buckaroo looked around to find the entire room silenced and all eyes fixed on him. His old friends looked at him with raised eyebrows and smiles, waiting for the familiar phrase to end.

Buckaroo smiled back. "--it would have bit me and been in the next zipcode by now," he said with immense cheerfulness. "Where's New Jersey?"

"Anywhere this side of the Hudson," Perfect Tommy said facetiously, but was drowned out by the real answer.

"Morning rounds," said Zoo Story, whose Recombinant labs abutted on the infirmary.

~~~

"Sid, Rawhide will recover full use of his leg," Buckaroo was saying five minutes later. "It's inevitable."

New Jersey frowned deeply. "What have I missed? The current level of voluntary motor--"

"--has nothing to do with why Rawhide will recover," said Buckaroo Banzai. "The recovery will be complete because it is in the nature of Rawhide for that to happen."

Sid's frown became a full-fledged scowl.

Observing it, Buckaroo exhaled and recruited his own patience. "You were present at the press conference where I explained the nature of the fifth force, the non-sentient consciousness of all that exists. And I-- and Penny Priddy--made it clear that that consciousness is characterized by making itself known; it is neither active nor passive, but becomes apparent. What we must do is look in the right way."

New Jersey was rubbing his forehead as if weary.

"Look at Rawhide's healing curve. He climbed out of the coma in a week flat. Where have you ever seen a case like that?"

On his mettle, New Jersey had an answer. "Head wound. Garden State Parkway, 1983. Severe trauma, all quadrants. Patient became fully conscious within six days and recovered full motor function as fast as the fractures knit."

Buckaroo was unperturbed. "Why?"

New Jersey's shoulders sagged. "No one knows," he admitted. With a rueful smile, he added, "We pulled out an antiquated bit of jargon to describe it: we called it a miracle."

Buckaroo smiled. "I know. It was in that person's nature; it was an element of the non-sentient consciousness immanent in that person."

"The way you put it, it sounds like something in between the immortal soul and voodoo. What it doesn't sound like," New Jersey said a little reluctantly, "is good science, the kind that you can verify empirically."

"I verified this theory at Mach 2," Buckaroo said coolly. "I did it by passing through a space where a mountain both was and wasn't." In another man, the statement would have been arrogant, defensive, but Buckaroo Banzai was merely stating a fact.

"Do you get it, Sid?" Buckaroo's eyes were gleaming. "The injury was not a neurological injury. It just looks like one --the way the space a mountain occupies looks like the mountain. The injury was an injury to the capacity of ch'i to express itself -- to be perceived -- and it will heal."

"Do you realize what you're saying?" New Jersey was getting excited. "Is there some way to affect the course of any illness, any wound? Does the nature of this consciousness vary from individual to individual? Is it affected by character, or vice-versa, or is it independent?"

"Beats me," said Buckaroo. New Jersey blinked with startlement, marvelling, as he had since their very first weeks together in medical school, at the man's unconcern in the face of the unknown. Somehow, Buckaroo Banzai was always sure he'd find out.

Buckaroo was continuing. "This is hindsight. I'm looking backward and saying, this where we've been. This consciousness is an entity, not an attribute. It can be manipulated, but we don't know how. Yet."

New Jersey's doubt returned and took full possession. He shook his head. "It could be luck, just luck."

Buckaroo also shook his head. "The more I live, the less able I am to believe in such a thing as luck."

New Jersey pondered. "So you're suggesting that we tell Rawhide that his prognosis is full recovery."

"It seems to be indicated."

New Jersey balked. "Seems to you. 'Primum non nocere,'" he quoted, screwing up his face. "Buckaroo, I not only hate to disagree with you, I hesitate to, because, well, you know." He spread his hands, palms up. "But this is a patient who's already having trouble dealing with limits. First, do no harm, the oldest ethic of all. False hope," he shook his head, "to me that's harm, unless there's a strong indication that it's needed."

Sid drew a breath. "I find your theory fascinating, but I consider a positive prognosis to be contra-indicated." I can't believe I'm doing this, he thought. Me, calling Buckaroo wrong?

Buckaroo tucked his hands into his pockets. "He's your patient," he said gently. "Are you ordering me not to give him my reading of the facts?"

It was a perfectly proper question from a subordinate colleague to an attending physician, and one that New Jersey found uniquely appalling. "No, no, no," he burst out. He waved his hands. "I don't doubt for a second that he'll believe you. But I don't see it that way. So we'll give him both versions."

"The medical version and the voodoo version."

New Jersey stiffened. "Good God, Buckaroo, you don't think that I--"

Buckaroo let it show that he was teasing. "No, I don't. It's good that you're sticking to your guns. Even though," he added with sublime assurance, "you're wrong."

"Truth is," Rawhide said, "I never did see myself with this thing on. No way, no how. Like I know that's not my future."

"Well, that's what the cards look like," Buckaroo agreed. "Aces up, ace in the hole."

New Jersey folded his arms determinedly. "You do understand -- how do I say this? Not that I don't agree with Buckaroo, but that I can't. This isn't medicine talking, not yet anyway, but intuition. Theory."

Rawhide favored New Jersey with a thin smile. "Columbus sailed his theory all the way to Isla San Salvador," he said courteously. "'N Neil Armstrong rode Robert Goddard's theory to the moon. I believe this one'll get me as far as the door."

Irked, New Jersey gestured at the brace. "In the interim, that will get you out the door right now."

"He's right, pal," said Buckaroo.

This was about as much pressure as Buckaroo Banzai ever applied to Rawhide, but the cowboy shook his head. "Truly, Buckaroo, I don't see it," he said. He gave a short laugh, prompted by his conscience to a slightly fuller exposition of the truth. "Can't say that I want to see it, either."

~~~

"so far, 2,164 TV's, most of them tuned to MTV, about six tons of Cheetos and Twinkies, a whole bookcase of horoscopes for Scorpio going back to the late 'Thirties..."

"... this project the inorganic folks are working on, Zoo? Some kind of custard that you can 1) eat for dessert, 2) use for cast concrete, or 3)..."

New Jersey threaded his way through the tables, headed for his colleague. He walked slowly, though, still new enough to enjoy the fragments of other conversations.

"... looked like a boat and handled like a bathtub, but God, how I loved that old baby. Super Eighty-eight, 1961, two-tone, sweetest music under the hood you ever..."

"no, no, there's authorized, allocated, appropriated, obligated, ..."

"...yeah, but can you dance to it?"

"decelerates sixty feet per second per second faster than she did in Texas." This was Perfect Tommy, explaining to Buckaroo the improved retro's he'd gone to work on while they still on the plane home from El Paso. For a tense second during the Jet Car test, it had looked like Buckaroo was going to have made it out of the Eighth Dimension only to end up squashed like a bug against the next mountain over.

New Jersey swung his leg over the back of a chair and settled in with Perfect Tommy's group, which included the Argentine, Pinky Carruthers, most of the engineering staff, Buckaroo, and the rarely-sighted Professor Hikita.

Perfect Tommy had turned pensive. "I'd like to roadtest this system," he said. "Sure wish Sam was healthy."

That's it? The guy's upstairs in a coma, and it's some terrible inconvenience? Perfect Tommy had a reputation for callousness, but this caught New Jersey, inured as he was to medical detachment, by surprise.

Perfect Tommy picked up some of the doctor's expression from the corner of his eye. He believed firmly that the best defense at all times was a fast retreat through your enemy's forward positions.

"Jeez, New Jersey, you want a little French fry with your catsup?"

New Jersey's public image around the Institute was changing over from the guy who dressed like a Lectroid cowboy to the guy who validated the theory that you are what you eat: he was built like a string bean and wore red shirts because he subsisted almost entirely on what Mrs. J called pommes frites a la sauce sanguinaire. Small potato-colored patches were visible inside the red glob New Jersey was just popping into his mouth. Professor Hikita was watching him with an expression closely approximating horror.

"Ahh..." New Jersey was caught short.

"The French fry, thoroughly immersed in catsup," opined Pinky Carruthers unexpectedly, "is a truly advanced dietary item. It is healthy, providing elements of most major food groups; it is physically appealing, consisting --if you will note, Perfect Tommy -- of our team colors, red and yellow; it is ecologically sound, since it leaves no petroleum-based container to dwindle out its half-life for the next several millennia; and, perhaps nicest of all, it is tidy, since it leaves not fork nor spoon nor knife to wash."

Sidney Zwibel didn't know whether to smile or gape in stupefaction as he listened to this oration. Nothing in this place is ever serious, he thought. And nothing in this place is ever not serious.

Doctoring: this, I know how to do. And singing: these are notes, this is the pitch. But do I know how run around a genius farm with a bunch of funny maniacs who are inventing the future, and oh, incidentally, pick up your Uzi, we're going on a raid?

Buckaroo Banzai watched New Jersey's introspection with some amusement. It had never been hard to read Sid's thoughts and now the man's small changes of expression might as well have been semaphores. Sid had come a long way very fast, Buckaroo reflected. It had been hard to stand back from treating Rawhide -- but that, of course, was the one absolutely critical contribution New Jersey had needed from him to cement his newfound confidence.

He'd known Sid was going to make the grade, Buckaroo mused, during their third day of the process Sid had dubbed "creative thermotaxis," the frantic efforts to revive their three cryogenically preserved comrades. That afternoon, the two neurosurgeons had suffered a setback that would have paralyzed Sid's judgment only a week earlier. New Jersey had turned around and simply said, "I'm telling you, Buckaroo, I think we should shove them in the microwave at 'Defrost' for five minutes and get it over with."

New Jersey guessed the train of Buckaroo's thoughts, and grinned. "You know, every day when I come down to breakfast, I keep waiting for someone to say, 'OK, we're onto you. Go home, you don't belong here.' And it never happens." He swished another fry around in the pool of catsup.

Buckaroo laughed. "You're looking good so far, pal. But belonging here is a choice that's truly up to you."

That word again. "How do I make that choice?" To truly belong among these brave, brilliant, free and easy comrades was something Sid Zwibel wanted more than he'd ever wanted anything in his life.

Buckaroo seemed to look right into his heart, but his answer was a stray bullet. "Do you remember the Beatles' movie Help!?"

New Jersey's face crunched up with puzzlement. "Sure; so what? What about it? Buckaroo, I was serious."

"Remember the scientist who gets his hands on the 'extract of certain rare orchids grown only in the Himalayas?' He holds up the little vial and says to his assistant, 'Do you know what this is, Algernon? Nobel Prize juice!'"

Buckaroo's eyes drilled into New Jersey's. "You were very, very smart, Sid, but you wanted that Nobel Prize juice. And the trick is to want nothing."

Sid ate the fry and licked off his fingertips.

"And then one morning you may find Nobel Prize juice in your coffee, or your shaving cream."

Perfect Tommy broke in on their colloquy. "Is that what's in the coffee? I knew there must be some excuse for it."

~~~

Within a week, Rawhide was spending most of his time out of bed. He converted the empty bed in the other half of the room into a makeshift office, and began catching up on the Institute's bills, contracts, patent and trademark licenses, procurement, apprenticeship applications, grant reviews, publications, reprint requests, and booking requests for the band.

There was also a great deal of new business relating to the recent Yoyodyne strike, though Reno and Mrs. Johnson had, during his incapacitation, taken over much of that work. Shuffling through the papers, Rawhide tried to think of a government agency that wasn't among the vultures picking over Yoyodyne's bones: the GAO wanted an inventory, the Smithsonian wanted any number of artifacts ranging from Lectroid Dream Goggles to the escape pod Buckaroo had used to zap Lord Whorfin, various branches of the military wanted the Red Lectroids' torture chamber, and the EPA wanted, what else, an environmental impact statement detailing the effects on North Texas of Buckaroo's trip through the Eighth Dimension.

Effects on North Texas, mused Rawhide, a hill country native. Improve the place, can't help but. He sorted another thirty pages of Federal forms. The IRS, thought Rawhide. I don't see anything here from them. Wonder how they missed it?

He was wearing his own clothes and could swing around the room quite easily without any help from his left leg. He looked altogether like the old Rawhide, even had his hat parked near the door where he could grab it on his way out. But he didn't go out. That would have mean crutches or a brace, and he refused both flatly.

He punched up the local papers on the terminal Billy had rigged for him, and scanned the classifieds, a daily habit that had produced many bargains over the past decade.

"Whoa!" he said out loud a minute later. He coded for a hard copy of the ad he'd just seen, reached for the phone and started dialing even before the printer could deliver it. "I want to talk to the agent handling the Thompson Chemical property in New Brunswick," he said into the phone. "Yeah, I'll hold."

Tucking the phone between shoulder and chin, Rawhide summoned the Institute's financial records. Buckaroo Banzai and The Hong Kong Cavaliers had piled up a good bit of cash the previous year, touring to promote the new album that had brought them three Grammys that spring. Rawhide had just found a use for it.

"Ms. Diaz? Morning. This's Rawhide, from the Banzai Institute here in... uh, thanks, that's real kind of you. Reason I'm callin', I saw this notice that the old Thompson Chemical plant has gone on the market... Yeah, we're right next door. What kind of shape is the lab in over there?" He listened. "That place runs about three hundred acres, doesn't it? Uh-huh. What're they askin'?"

Rawhide chuckled. "Well, they can ask it... Sure, I'll give the place a look-see, but I wouldn't pay that for the Taj Mahal. Uh, yeah, I'll be right d--"

Rawhide's sentence cut off. Unthinkingly, he had risen on his right leg and twisted for the door. Now he stopped. He looked at his hat on its peg, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

"Yeah, I'm here," he said into the phone. "Uh, Ms. Diaz, I'm gonna send someone over to pick up a prospectus on

the plant, 'n I'll want a complete schematic on the pipes and electrical facilities... yeah. Nah, I'll come look at it in a day or two... Right." He hung up, and sat down again. "Right," he repeated to the cradled phone.

~~~

Perfect Tommy lounged at his ease in the Common Room, picking idly at his bass and staring abstractedly at his boots. They'd come from San Antonio, Texas, made by a fifth-generation descendant of one of the heroes of the Alamo who was also the best living bootmaker anywhere. Jimmy Lucchese, the bootmaker, had a three year waiting list, but Perfect Tommy had been fitted for a pair within weeks of his first expression of interest because Rawhide had called the old man and asked it as a favor.

Perfect Tommy had not seen Rawhide since the cowboy's ill-fated effort to walk. Restlessly, he played a string of gloomy D's and E's and tapped the toes of the boots against each other.

On a nearby sofa, Pinky Carruthers sighed and slid a fraction lower into his already exceedingly relaxed slouch on the sofa. "It doesn't work unless you say, 'There's no place like home; there's no place like home,'" he said.

Perfect Tommy scowled. "Is that one of the unknown facts?" he snapped.

"Maybe," Pinky said languorously. His wonted beret was tipping forward over one eye.

Pinky's serenity acted on Perfect Tommy's nerves as an irritant.

"It's not possible to know an unknown fact," he asserted with the icy assurance of an empiricist.

"Yeah," agreed Billy Travers from his usual place at the computer station. After Buckaroo, Perfect Tommy was his greatest hero. Billy brought an additional refinement to Perfect Tommy's philosophical materialism: unconditional disinterest in any datum incapable of reduction to binary expression.

Pinky regarded the pair steadily. It really was incomprehensible that so talented a guitarist and warrior as Tommy could be so inflexible a thinker. But since that was how the gods had arranged the young man's molecules, it would be folly to interfere. And young Billy Travers -- well, the lad had very few years under his beret and should not be judged too harshly.

But then again, no one should be judged, ever, at any time, Pinky reminded himself. A moment later, he pursed his lips and added a rider to this train of thought: unless that individual happened to be Hanoi Xan, Lord of the Deathless Legion and Light of the Poisonous Sun.

"Okay," Pinky said equably.

"Then there are no 47,000 Unknown Facts!" Perfect Tommy crowed.

Pinky opened his eyes wider. "Of course there are," he assured his bandmate.

"But you just said--" Tommy snarled.

"--that it's not possible to know such a fact," Pinky finished. "I don't agree, but I'm willing to allow the proposition because it is immaterial to the fact that I actually know these facts whether or not it is possible for me to know them."

"Bad grammar and worse logic," Tommy said despairingly. "It's like sparring with smoke."

"Perfectly correct grammar," said Buckaroo Banzai, who had, as always, entered unheard. "And that misty paradoxical quality is a hallmark of all true zen-roshi." "Thank you, sensei," murmured Pinky, warmed by the endorsement from one whom he considered to be exactly such a master.

"What we need around here is a little common sense," Perfect Tommy grated.

Pinky looked at him with complete comprehension. "Our common sense is in the infirmary," he said. "He might like to be visited."

Perfect Tommy flushed and rose with the guitar clenched in his fist like a club.

As if he hadn't noticed this exchange, Buckaroo went on to the next thing. "You look at these?" He was waving a fistful of Jet Car telemetry in Perfect Tommy's direction.

Perfect Tommy, easily distracted at any hour into thinking about his beloved Jet Car, brightened. "Nothing to get excited about; not valve flutter," he said. "Maybe a rebore, ream it out a little." He parked the bass and trailed Buckaroo out of the Common Room, only the forceful cracks of his bootheels on the floor giving any sign of the violence that had raged in his heart a moment earlier.

Billy Travers chewed on his pencil for a minute, obviously impressed by Buckaroo's words. He sat down next to Pinky, who appeared to have slid into sleep.

"Could you tell me one of the unknown facts?" he asked, almost shyly.

~~~

. . . where our lives were so nearly to end. We were sixty feet from the entrance before the poison began to take effect; cleverly, Xan's agents had chosen a heavy gas which we did not begin to inhale until we were several inches down in our air reservoirs.

Only the phenomenal ears of Perfect Tommy, who detects every stray hemidemisemiquaver in the bearlike growling of Jet Car's rocket, could have detected the message that meant our salvation. Chatting up the young researcher, Perfect Tommy nevertheless heard the faint S-O-S that B. Banzai tapped out on the metal of his air tank in his last moments of consciousness. The stuffy sinuses that had so plagued Tommy earlier now proved a boon, for they helped prevent any absorption of the deadly atmosphere into which he now heedlessly flung himself.

Only B. Banzai even dimly remembers how Perfect Tommy dragged us back to the door, and labored to stimulate our dormant respiratory systems until we were able to breathe independently.

Perfect Tommy asserts to this day that this incident vindicates his claim to perfection, since only impeccable -- indeed, even, clairvoyant -- sinuses would have chosen that particular morning to occlude his nasal passages. We greeted this averment . . .

excerpt from Bastardy Proved A Spur, Reno Nevada, Granite Press (1979)

reprinted by permission

~ 30 ~

~ Go to Ballad of a Well-Known Gun Part 4 ~