Stopped at the Institute's entrance, the big Texan in the red Ford pickup repeated a phrase from the wire he'd received, with the result that Buckaroo Banzai got a Go-Phone call in the lab directly from the gate. "A guy out here just used the penguin code," said Pinky Carruthers. "This guy looks a lot like someone we know."

"I'll be right there," said Buckaroo.

Notifying Rawhide's next of kin was no easy task; only Buckaroo knew who they were and he had declined, even in the aftermath of what he had believed to be Rawhide's death, to share that information with anyone. There were brothers, but how many, and where...

Buckaroo knew that Rawhide's oldest living brother had had a steady address in Huntsville, Texas, in the wake of a few unauthorized borrowings of automobiles from the people who were actually paying for them. It turned out, however, that this worthy had been paroled and was working as a pickup musician wherever he could all over West Texas. Because discretion kept Buckaroo from using the Blue Blaze Irregular network, it took four weeks for Buckaroo's telegram to find this man, and by the time he arrived in New Brunswick, Rawhide was not only not dead, but hale.

True to Pinky's suggestion, Rawhide's brother did indeed resemble him strongly, hair a little lighter, build a little heavier, and signs of dissipation that were missing from his sibling notwithstanding. Buckaroo rode back to the house in the pickup and filled in its owner as they drove. The sight of a man resembling Rawhide walking in company with Buckaroo drew many curious glances as the two went up to the infirmary and into Rawhide's room.

I should have warned him, Buckaroo thought, seeing the blend of pleasure and wariness that came over his best friend when his brother entered the room. Buckaroo started to leave but glances from both men asked him to stay.

The two brothers studied each other. Finally, Rawhide spoke. "Well, I ain't dead, so you can go now."

The other man laughed. "Shit, 'n I thought I was inheritin' all your worldly goddamn goods."

Now Rawhide laughed; as his brother well knew, Rawhide never owned anything worth mentioning. "Tell you what I don't have," Rawhide said, "and that's wheels."

His brother laughed harder. "Damn, but you're mean," he said appreciatively. "But I gotta Ford truck now'll eat any dustsuckin' coupe for breakfast. All mine," his brother savored. "Had a six-month steady gig."

Rawhide smiled, not the tight grin of their combative joking, but something friendly. "That's nice." He meant it.

His brother couldn't let go. "Playin' drums," he said. "Only damn thing you left me." He looked at Buckaroo. "By the time he was twelve, this boy played nearly ever' instrument you can think of, including the shiteating zydeco. But he didn't like the drums-- never did understand why."

"Not enough notes," Rawhide said straightfaced. Buckaroo heard disappointment in his voice.

Maybe his brother heard it too, because he shifted tone abruptly. "Jay-jay's lookin' after the place. She and the Weasel were pretty broken up when I called."

Rawhide's niece and another brother, Buckaroo remembered. The ranch used to belong to Rawhide's uncle, now belonged to all the brothers; the niece was the child of the brother who'd died in Vietnam, and was Rawhide's favorite relative. Buckaroo and Rawhide had spent the summer on that ranch eleven years ago.

"I'll call 'em," Rawhide said.

"How you doin', anyhow? What the fuck happened? All I can tell from the electric TV is that Buckaroo here and two kinds of aliens had some kind of shootout with all y'all in the middle."

"That's about it," Rawhide said. "I missed most of it, myself."

"What hit you?"

Rawhide smiled. "They're still thinkin' about what to call it. But I'm OK now."

"Yeah, you're lookin' good." It occurred to Buckaroo that Rawhide, sitting at his makeshift desk, had yet to make any movement that would reveal his physical limitations. Even as this thought struck him, Rawhide leaned back in his chair and casually crossed his right leg over his left, with no suggestion in his manner that it was completely impossible for him to cross the left leg over the right.

Rawhide's brother was shifting feet as if a little nervous, and he shot a look at the door. "Well, since I don't gotta cart home your saddle..."

"Whyn't you stay? 'S plenty of room," offered Rawhide.

"Nah, nah, I'll be goin'. Gotta three-nighter in San Antone, better get back. But, uh, take it easy, you hear?" The man's voice, all but identical to Rawhide's, had a sudden conviction in it that raised Rawhide's warmest grin. He stood up without a trace of weakness. Appearing to bear weight on both legs, Rawhide held out a hand as if for a shake; his brother stepped closer and the two men shared a short, back-slapping embrace. They shook hands, too, as they pulled apart.

"You take care," the drummer said.

"You too," Rawhide answered.

"Fuckin' A, brother. 'S about the only damn thing I do know how to do." The grin that came with this assertion was both cocky and abashed. "Whyn't you come home sometime?"

Rawhide smiled in a way that plainly said I am home. "Do good in San Antone," he nodded.

His brother nodded back. "See ya 'round."

"I'll walk you out," Buckaroo said. Rawhide's brother was silent on the walk to his truck, and for most of the way to the gate. As they pulled up and Buckaroo made to get out of the pickup, its driver abruptly said, "You know, that sumbitch is stronger than horse piss."

As Buckaroo looked back, startled and amused, the man grinned and said, "If he wasn't my brother, I'd love him like one, but as it is I cain't stand more'n five minutes of him. He makes me feel like there's some goddamn geometry homework somewhere I need to finish."

The man noticed Buckaroo's expression and laughed. "I bet you always did your homework, didn't you? But you and me got this much in common: if our ass seriously needed savin', he'd show up and do it. But then he'd kick my ass for puttin' him to the trouble. I don't suppose he'd do that to you."

Buckaroo thought of the number of times and ways Rawhide had protected his life. The complex mixture of responses on his face resolved into a smile. "No, I don't suppose so."

Rawhide's brother scowled. "Well, it's a fuckin' pain to have a brother like that." The scowl turned hostile. "I gotta go."

"Right." Buckaroo hopped out of the truck and closed the door. "Have a good trip." The intern on duty opened the gate.

Suddenly the man was smiling again. "Don't plan on no other kind," he said smoothly, dropped the clutch and shot out the gate.

~~~

Back in his room, Rawhide was at work on Institute bills when Buckaroo returned. Rawhide looked over his shoulder and asked "You see him off?" rhetorically.

Buckaroo leaned on Rawhide's bed. "I liked your FDR imitation," he said.

Rawhide put his pen down and swiveled the chair around to face his friend.

"You noticed that, huh?" Rawhide didn't volunteer anything more, and that looked like the end of it. Buckaroo had been an only child, but it wasn't hard to guess that Rawhide's deliberate concealment of his weakness had its roots somewhere in the past. Especially not given that crack about drums, which reminded him--

"You never told me you play zydeco."

Rawhide smiled. "Nobody who plays it'll tell you I do."

"As bad as that?"

"Worse," Rawhide grinned. A pause followed, but Rawhide never ducked an issue, even one that had been tactfully dropped.

"Look, Buckaroo, if you say my leg's gonna be fine, then it's gonna be fine. I can wait."

"The fact that you'll walk better in the future is not a good reason not to walk as well as you can now."

Rawhide showed traces of anger. "Look around, Buckaroo. Around the whole place. You see anyone hobbling along? You see anyone in a leg brace?"

Buckaroo frowned. "There is no one who is not here because he or she wears a leg brace." That went without saying -- why was he having to say it to Rawhide, of all people?

"Well then it's a curious coincidence, but this outfit doesn't currently include any gimps."

Buckaroo looked at his friend as if from a distance. "You're right, I don't have any use for a gimp," he said curtly. "What I could use is Rawhide. You happen to be the only person on earth with the capacity to be Rawhide, so I suggest that you get up and do that."

"You sound like Christ callin' up Lazarus." There was a bitter edge to Rawhide's voice. "Nothin' in the Bible says Lazarus limped."

Incredulity was plain on Buckaroo Banzai's face. "Have we met?" he said.

The joke worked. The bitterness vanished into Rawhide's usual stoicism, and the cowboy sighed. He looked up at Buckaroo and said candidly, "Tommy just about went out the window at the sight of me. I don't blame him. I'm about as agile as a cow in a cage right now." He scratched his head. "Truth is, I don't know how to be crippled up, and if waiting a few days will save me havin' to learn, I'll wait."

Buckaroo shook his head. "There's only one way that can happen, pal, and that's if you cripple yourself. Remember what Peggy said about Stephen?"

Rawhide's jaw had set mulishly, but now it loosened. "Yeah," he said.

A decade ago, Buckaroo had taken Peggy, then in her final year at Cambridge, to meet his friend and her idol Stephen Hawking. They had discussed Hawking's theory that the present laws of physics had been inapplicable -- indeed, would have been unworkable anomalies -- in the minutes immediately following the Big Bang. It was a theory that Buckaroo and Professor Hikita had later given practical application with Buckaroo's trip through the Eighth Dimension.

That summer, Peggy had rhapsodized about the meeting over a communal breakfast at the Institute. She made no mention of Hawking's physical infirmity, a muscular degeneration so severe that even his voice was twisted by it.

"Isn't he disabled?" someone had asked.

Peggy shook her head in the negative. "Before him, we're all disabled," she answered. A smile lit her face as she turned to Buckaroo and tweaked his shoulder. "Even you, my love, are a bit weak in the ankles."

The memory made both men smile. Nevertheless, Rawhide looked steadily at his friend and boss, and said with some finality, "Buckaroo, I'm not doin' my job if everybody I get near drops what they're working on to get me a pillow or find me a chair or pour my water... and that's what's happening so far. I'd rather give it a day or two."

Buckaroo pursed his lips, visibly disagreeing, but said, "It's your call."

"Yup." Rawhide was firm.

"I can't make any promises about when you'll recover full function," Buckaroo added. "I may not be right."

Rawhide chuckled and leaned back in his chair. "You're right. It's kind of a habit you have."

Buckaroo smiled. "OK, I'm right. But I can't say when. It could be years, even."

Rawhide nodded seriously. "I know. But this is how I want to play it."

Buckaroo took a breath. "Just watch out for the jack of diamonds," he said, and left.

~~~

In the bunkhouse, Buckaroo found New Jersey assiduously practicing scales on the piano, a habit that soothed his nerves though it drove Billy Travers crazy. He looked up swiftly as Buckaroo came in.

"No dice," said Buckaroo. His disappointment was evident.

New Jersey grimaced, trying to sort it out. He had a glimmer. "Perfect Tommy's been staying away from him."

Buckaroo cleared his throat, looking at an early Jet Car sketch. Finally he said, "I know."

"Rawhide doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would let Perfect Tommy call his shots, though," New Jersey continued cautiously. Joking banter about various aspects of each other's character seemed to be S.O.P. among the Cavaliers, but serious character dissection apparently completely forbidden. "It could be that he's so used to running things, he wouldn't want to be perceived as diminished. He might be ashamed to be weak. It could be a vacation."

"Uh-huh," said Buckaroo unhelpfully.

New Jersey got a little impatient. "So what it is with him?" He threw his hands up. "Can we help?"

Buckaroo took his eyes off the sketch. First, last, and always a doctor -- a man could have a much worse stance in this life. "Sid, I don't know that we can."

"Fear of ridicule, denial, a desire not to recover at all, passive aggression, dependency, desire not to be dependent -- it could be any of those things," New Jersey tallied. His elbows came down on the piano keys, causing Billy Travers to flinch yet again. He spread his fingers wide, then closed them into fists. "I don't have enough information, Buckaroo."

Buckaroo took a deep breath. He thought about what Rawhide had told him so long ago, his mother wasting away, his father running out -- "Not too little love," Rawhide had said. "More like too much." It would give New Jersey the clue he needed.

It would be unpardonable.

"New Jersey, it's his choice. You'll have to ask him."

"Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars," New Jersey fired back angrily. "You know something that could help me, could help him. And you're not telling me."

Now Buckaroo showed a flash of impatience. "Then that's my choice, isn't it?"

It looks more like malpractice from where I stand, thought Sidney Zwibel. You never side with the disease. He shook his head. There had to be a better answer than that, because he knew Buckaroo Banzai would need a better answer than that. What is it that I'm not getting?

He shook his head, full of doubt. "I would have said there wasn't an ounce of give-up in that man's character."

"Believe that," said Buckaroo quietly.

New Jersey focused on him intensely. That's the clue. But what the dickens does it mean? He ran his fingers down his jawline and curled them under his chin. Why did Buckaroo have to get gnostic every time he had something important to say?

New Jersey concentrated as hard as he could, but couldn't eliminate any of the possibilities. He looked at Buckaroo in frustration, his mind going blank. In the next second, he snapped his fingers.

Choices. Responsibility. What a doctor could do for a patient, and what he couldn't do.

New Jersey knocked on Perfect Tommy's door a little after eleven.

Told to come in, he found himself in the middle of a strangely schizophrenic room, half immaculate, half disastrously untidy. A quick glance around told him that the immaculate half included the closet which held, he supposed, Perfect Tommy's fabled wardrobe, which, in his brief tenure at the Institute, had so far been everything it was cracked up to be. The untidy half, cluttered with books and an assortment of weapons, seemed to be work-related -- if you could call shuriken and nunchakos and a bullwhip part of Perfect Tommy's work. New Jersey supposed that you could.

"What's up, Doc?" the bass player greeted him.

"Well, this is a professional call," he said. "It relates to the therapeutic needs of one of my patients."

"Really?" Tommy's cheeriness grew cautious.

New Jersey threw his own caution to the winds. "Really," he snapped. "Specifically, I came here to tell you to grow up because one of my patients happens to need you to."

Tommy already looked like an approaching tornado, but New Jersey kept going. "If you keep treating Rawhide like he's dead, he's going to feel like it himself. Can you possibly be so immature that you can't--"

The rest of his sentence was caught in his throat and held there by Perfect Tommy's hand slamming him against the wall and cutting off his breath. If he crushes the trachea, I die, a cold-blooded part of his brain told him. If he continues this pressure for another hundred seconds, oxygen deprivation and brain damage. He didn't struggle and he met the redhot anger in Tommy's eyes with a cold ferocity of his own.

"I don't take that from anyone," Perfect Tommy whispered.

The pressure had eased, almost imperceptibly. New Jersey, still meeting Perfect Tommy's eyes, reached up and pushed the hand away from his throat. Tommy let it go but was still glaring.

"It's an easy thing to kill a man," New Jersey said contemptuously. "Much harder to help one live." Is this me? asked the voice of Sidney Zwibel, the eternal equivocator. What, did I hear this in the movies? But no trace of indecision showed in his face.

The two men stood at an impasse. New Jersey broke it, deliberately relaxing his stance and crossing his arms. After all, if Perfect Tommy really wanted to kill him, there wasn't anything he could do to prevent it.

The viciousness left Tommy's face suddenly, to be replaced with a desperate candor. "If something I design doesn't function optimally, I dump it," he said. "Weakness -- weakness is for enemies."

"If Rawhide can be hurt, you can be hurt," New Jersey's intuition took him to the real wound. "Imperfection. You'd rather die outright, wouldn't you?"

"So you're punishing Rawhide for being alive. If I were your doctor, I'd tell you it's perfectly natural to be terrified when someone you love is damaged, perfectly natural to be angry at them for their weakness." New Jersey drew a breath, and paused to notice that he was still breathing, that Perfect Tommy was taking it.

"But I'm his doctor, and I'm here to tell you that one of his best friends has run out on him, and even though I think he understands why and doesn't hold it against you, it's making it a lot harder for him to be what he is. And what he is, right now, is a guy who's got to get his tail out of bed and find out what he can do, and what he can't."

~~~

It was well past two when the door to Rawhide's room opened silently and a figure slipped through.

Gliding to a halt, Perfect Tommy noticed the fractional tensing of muscles as Rawhide awakened and decided to feign sleep. In the darkness, Tommy smiled.

"Hey, bud," he said offhandedly.

"You'll have to change aftershaves if you want to catch me nappin'," Rawhide drawled. He reached over and snapped on the table lamp. "That particular one smells like a cathouse in Waco." It was an easy joke -- Rawhide enjoyed ribbing Perfect Tommy's elegant tastes -- but Tommy noticed that his friend was watching him with unusual intensity.

Perfect Tommy stood poised as if to consider this advice. "While we're on the subject of good grooming," he shrugged, "metal is hot this year." He picked up the brace and dropped it at the foot of Rawhide's bed. "Might spice up that secondhand Marlboro Man look of yours."

It was a spirited attempt, but awkwardness infected Tommy's voice, and when he looked at Rawhide he found the older man looking back with a mixture of concern, humor, and gratitude that he found intensely embarrassing.

Rawhide stirred and sat up, bending his right knee to rest an elbow on it. It was a limber, comfortable movement of a man who had regained most of his customary strength, but Tommy found himself staring inexorably at the left leg that slid passively along with the body's action. Tommy's eyes, shot with renewed horror, met Rawhide's for a sharp instant. Rawhide started to speak, but Perfect Tommy got his words out first.

"Catch you later, man," he said, and was gone.

Behind him, Rawhide snorted, mostly with amusement, then sighed. He reached for the tangle of straps and buckles Tommy dumped on his bed and slid a finger down one thin aluminum slat. "Metal is hot this year," he repeated, an ironic inflection flavoring his drawl.

Like his friend, he looked at his unmoving though constantly tingling left leg as if it were a foreign object. "Thanks a lot," he told it. "Hurry up, huh?" He dropped the brace at the side of the bed and turned off the light. After a few moments, he lit a cigarette and leaned back in the darkness, thinking about Perfect Tommy.

~~~

Slow, heavy footsteps sounded on the stair, rare in this household of nimble, lightfooted people.

At the front desk, Mrs. Johnson was relaxing in the predawn hours with Echo and the Bunnymen after enduring some fairly arduous demo tapes. She noticed the unfamiliar cadence in the inner sanctum even through her headphones. Silently, she removed the 'phones and possessed herself of the Luftwaffe Luger she kept in a drawer, a legacy from her short marriage to Flyboy.

Cocking the Luger, she braced her back against the doorjamb leading to the stairwell, bobbed her head and the weapon into the open space and shouted upward, "Hey!" A highly familiar face appeared over the railing between the third and fourth floors.

"He-e-e-ey," she said in an entirely different voice. "Where you headed?"

The man looking down at her ran a hand through his untidy red hair as he considered this question. "Gonna get some health care," he told her finally. "A little PT."

"Whatever," she said, baffled. She uncocked the Luger. "Have a good one." Physical Therapy? Perfect Tommy? At this hour, neither one made sense.

The footsteps ascended to the bunkhouse and made their way to the Common Room, then stopped.

~~~

A few seconds later, the music began. First, the Tennessee Waltz, slow and sweet and sad. Then a lively scrap of Mozart's Alla Turca, and then Professor Longhair's Blues-Rhumba and Chantilly Lace and Caledonia and Buckaroo's old favorite,

Rocket 88. Chopin waltzes followed, and then a florid, funny version of Some Enchanted Evening that smacked greatly of Liberace, and then a series of the piano player's own rollicking tunes.

And then the music just wandered, fingers fooling around with eighty-eight old friends they might not have met up with again. Mrs. Johnson, able to hear it all the way at the foot of the stairs, smiled: Piano Time. She recognized riffs from Keith Emerson and Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton and Jerry Lee Lewis and Otis Spann.

"Wow," she said to the empty air. "He's playing everyone but Barry Manilow."

Upstairs, the music was pulling the Cavaliers into the bunkhouse hall. By silent consent, no one went into the Common Room. Pecos grinned at Reno, who slipped his still slightly stiff left arm around her shoulders. "Rawhide's home," she told him comfortably.

Perfect Tommy's door swung open and Tommy appeared, clad only in a royal blue towel. He paused only momentarily, then moved swiftly toward the Common Room. The other bunkhouse residents followed as Tommy opened its door and went in.

Rawhide looked up as his friends came in. The brace on his left leg caught light from the piano's music lamp. Perfect Tommy stood stiffly at the front of the group, his arms crossed over his chest. His voice was crisp. "Do you take requests?"

Rawhide smiled a little. "I suppose so," he said.

"Then shut up so the rest of us can get some sleep," snapped Tommy.

Pecos, outraged, launched herself forward to administer retribution, but was snagged in mid-stride by Buckaroo, who was the first to understand Rawhide's reaction to Perfect Tommy's impeccably coldhearted words.

The cowboy was grinning broadly. It was a grin that only appeared on his face when he was sure that everyone was entirely safe and sound, and even then usually not until about halfway down a bottle of tequila.

He looked down at the keyboard and, one-handed, picked out the melody line of everyone's favorite piece, C-D-E-E, F-E-D-E... It was the bouncy tune Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers had written together years ago while in a state of advanced insobriety and adopted as their informal theme song ever since. Rawhide's hand came to rest after a few bars, and he stood up. He regarded Perfect Tommy with the unruffled calm with which he generally met the youngster's more obnoxious sallies.

"Think I'll grab some shut-eye myself," he nodded, and moved unselfconsciously toward the door. Passing Perfect Tommy, Rawhide shot out his right hand, grabbed the bassist by the throat and gave him one quick shake, all without looking at him. Perfect Tommy grinned like a born fool. "Night, bro'," he muttered.

Buckaroo fell in beside Rawhide, and the two of them headed off toward Rawhide's room, followed by a wolf whistle from Pecos and a splash of quiet laughter from people who'd begun to remember how sleepy they still were.

As the Cavaliers dispersed, Perfect Tommy passed New Jersey, leaning drowsily against the Common Room's back wall and rummaging for his glasses in the pocket of his pajama tops, which were decorated with tiny World War One fighterplanes. Perfect Tommy directed a quick smile at the bleary-eyed surgeon. "Thanks, Doc," he said.

Reno, overhearing, was curious. "What for?"

"Oh," New Jersey waved his long fingers dismissively, "a little medicine."

Perfect Tommy snorted. "Fairly stiff dose, I thought."

"Non-lethal," New Jersey yawned. His eyes opened a little wider, and he ran his fingertips along his neck as if by chance. "For patient and physician."

Perfect Tommy flashed an instant's vivid smile, then abruptly turned grim. He leaned toward New Jersey with an expression close to his murderous glare of a few hours earlier.

"If I ever have to look at those pajamas again," Tommy warned in a low, intense voice, "I will kill you." In the next second he was gone, and his bedroom door had closed behind him.

New Jersey was suddenly wide awake, adrenaline zinging through his system. Remember what you read about him and the guy who took his seat at McDonald's? said the Sidney Zwibel voice. For God's sake, go back to Sloan-Kettering while you still can.

Reno noticed the sudden visibility of the whites of New Jersey's eyes. "Aw, don't worry," the Cavaliers' chronicler told him, clapping the galvanized doctor on the shoulder. "Nine times out of ten he doesn't do it."

~ 30 ~