His head ached something fierce. His tongue felt like a straw doormat. He was terribly nauseated and he was so weak it seemed like his muscles were just a lumpy rug thrown over his bones for warmth. And something in his back made him feel like a bug on a pin.

Not only that, but when he opened his eyes he found an intense, pop-eyed young man bent over him with a ludicrous expression of concern. And that had been the part that made sense, because the next thing to heave into view strongly resembled the Creature from the Black Lagoon, minus a few dorsal fins. Hallucinating, he told himself, his eyes drifting shut. Something happened... He opened his eyes a fraction again. The pop-eyed man was talking to the Creature, maybe. It sounded like "ooo- ooo." Ears don't work, he thought. There's that "ooo" again. The Creature from the Black Lagoon came toward him. He experienced a sensation of threat, and was jolted by a sudden associated memory-- Buckaroo, look out!

With a terrible effort he jerked upright, trying to shout. But the pain and nausea rose ahead of him and in the next instant he fell back in a dead faint.

~~~

New Jersey, ne Sidney Zwibel, whirled around as his patient abruptly groaned and collapsed. He checked quickly, but Rawhide seemed OK. The cowboy was going to be doing a lot of sleeping over the next few weeks, New Jersey deemed. He went back to John Kildare, and repeated once again, slowly, "You--tell--Buckaroo..." How could this guy-- if you could call him a guy?--be so dumb? Was he really the only Black Lectroid who didn't speak English? Was he really a physician at all? Or was he just pulling the leg of a susceptible human medico, making him look foolish by reducing him to babble?

New Jersey had a flash of resolution, fueled by his exasperation. Enough mishegas already. "Never mind," he told the Black Lectroid. He waved his hands nervously. "I'll talk to Buckaroo." The Black Lectroid didn't seem to change his expression, but then how could you tell if he did? She? Were there any female Lectroids? And why were they all called John? It would have to wait.

Agitated, he left the infirmary to look for Buckaroo. He didn't like the uncertainty of the diagnosis he had to deliver, though he was sure Buckaroo would have already reached the same conclusions for himself. Bad enough to treat a case with spinal involvement when you could pretty much tell what the spinal involvement was. Much worse when your only understanding of what might have happened proceeded from the haltingly translated syllables of a surgeon who was not only new to your language but new to your planet.

And much much worse when the patient your colleague called you in on happened to be his best friend, and the two of them happened to be the half-legendary Buckaroo Banzai and Rawhide. But he didn't have any choice.

Responsibility. Choices. The Cavaliers acted as if choices were easy, taking consequences and going on to the next choice. What if you chose wrong? "Forget wrong," Buckaroo told him. "It clouds your thinking. Attend to the choice." What the devil did that mean?

"In the tunnel," Buckaroo had gone on, "you chose." New Jersey shook his head. "I just fired-- reflex." Buckaroo grinned.

"Reflex is nothing but a very fast choice," he said. "Think about it."

New Jersey ran this dialogue through his mind once more as he climbed the stairs, three at a time, to the bunkhouse. Physiologically, of course, Buckaroo had a point -- most actions human beings consider to be reflexive are actually learned reactions, so often proved to be correct that they become nearly -- but never actually -- involuntary stimulus/response. But that shot in the tunnel...

Taking the last three stairs, he sighed, reaching a familiar intellectual impasse. If it was a choice, it was one he hoped he'd be able to make again.

He found Buckaroo noodling with his guitar. The amp made a grouchy sound as Buckaroo's fingers tensed on the strings when New Jersey came in.

"He's surfacing," New Jersey informed him. "He's out right now," the gangly surgeon added hastily, as Buckaroo made to leave. "He tried to sit up and went back under."

Now for the tough part. "I'm pretty sure it was the pain that knocked him back out," New Jersey said. He tangled his fingers together and wove them into a cross-hatch, then pulled them apart to gesture with doubt. "There's absolutely nothing visible, no pressure, no implant. But there's definitely a very high degree of response to any manipulation involving the entire lower body. And there's perceptible residual paralysis."

"Notably the left leg." Buckaroo's tone was flat.

"Yes." Buckaroo had seen it himself, then. Rawhide had climbed pretty steadily out of his coma for the past week. He had begun registering vast pain in Stage Three, and displaying limited responsiveness in the left leg in Stage Five.

"I'm sorry," New Jersey added. "John Kildare says -- I think -- that stinger absorption is consistent with autopsy results on Lectroids who've been killed by these, uh, spiders. Of course, they've never had a survivor so he has no idea -- I think -- whether the effects, uh, whether there might be a better response later on." New Jersey laced his fingers again. "He says there's no reason to hope so, though."

The last part of John Kildare's message, which New Jersey had thought would be the hardest to take, affected his friend perversely: he broke into a grin.

"Then John Kildare is an idiot," said Buckaroo Banzai.

~~~

New Jersey called for Buckaroo immediately the next time Rawhide woke up. Late morning light was streaming through the infirmary's windows as the Cavaliers' piano player opened his eyes and flexed his hands.

New Jersey approached him carefully. "How many fingers am I holding up?" he asked the drowsy cowboy. Rawhide frowned. "Do you know what year this is? Do you know where you are?" They were standard questions used to establish the degree of consciousness, and the neurosurgeon was distressed that no immediate response was forthcoming. "Do you know your name?"

Rawhide compressed his lips, then drew a breath, clearly preparatory to speaking. New Jersey leaned closer, in case his voice should prove to be weak.

"Last time I saw you, you were wearing an excessively silly hat," Rawhide drawled. "You look a little better today."

Taken aback, New Jersey laughed nervously, but proceeded with the appropriate routine. "Do you remember what happened?"

It seemed that he did, because astonishment flashed in Rawhide's eyes, but he was distracted from whatever he might have said by the appearance of John Kildare, together with John Parker, who commonly served as his translator. John Kildare gobbled something, and John Parker spoke to Rawhide.

"He says he is pleased you have made so much progress, Mr. Rawhide," came the Nova Policeman's lilting accents.

Two Creatures from the Black Lagoon. "I thought I hallu- cinated y'all," Rawhide managed to say.

"They're Lectroids, Rawhide," New Jersey said hastily. "Dr. John Kildare here helped to treat you." It hadn't occurred to him that Rawhide would be seeing the Lectroids' true forms for the first time; like everyone else at the Institute, New Jersey had grown accustomed to seeing them this way since Professor Hikita's formula had been piped into all the ventilating systems for weeks now.

Rawhide stirred, then flinched. "Lectroids? But Buckaroo said--"

"Those were Red Lectroids," New Jersey hastened to forestall the highly uncomplimentary words that would have followed. "These are Black Lectroids. They helped us take out Yoyodyne and deep six John Whorfin." A moment of extreme self-consciousness assailed New Jersey. Where had he learned to talk like that? He was a doctor, not a commando. Or at least he hadn't been, before Yoyodyne.

"Yoyodyne," Rawhide said urgently. "Buckaroo?"

"He's fine, everybody's fine. Everybody but you and Sam and Mac, and you're going to be fine. The Black Lectroids help us bring you back, all three of you." New Jersey instantly wished he hadn't said back -- would Rawhide ask back from where?

No. Instead, the big man started, "Speakin' of backs--" The Lectroid doctor and his translator headed for the door and New Jersey cut in again.

"You've been out for about three weeks, uh, one way or another," the neurosurgeon said. Now really wasn't the best time to tell the man he'd been clinically dead for eleven days. Nor, probably, to discuss his diagnosis...

Rawhide's eyes reflected his understanding that there was something New Jersey didn't want to talk about. Fine. He knew a neurosurgeon who was neither mealymouthed nor evasive.

"Where's Buckaroo?"

"Right here." Buckaroo came in at a pace that indicated hurry, then, seemingly without transition, stopped and was perfectly still. His friend was lying weakly on the white sheets, his bulk looking terribly misplaced on a hospital bed.

Rawhide, seeming to read his friend's mind, smiled with a rueful self-consciousness. Buckaroo nodded casually.

"We need you on the job, pal."

Rawhide smiled again. "Got a little sidetracked," he said.

"I'm docking your pay," Buckaroo warned.

This provoked a laugh that ended a little too abruptly.

"How're you feeling?" The question was intended seriously.

"Trifle below par," Rawhide admitted. Buckaroo took this to mean he was in considerable pain. Rawhide gestured at his IV apparatus. "They've made a junkie of me."

"The needle to the last, eh, Watson?" Buckaroo said.

Rawhide chuckled carefully. New Jersey, feeling awkward in the middle of this exchange, said, "Oh, this is nothing. We had you hooked up like a Christmas tree for a long time -- catheter, trache, nasal..." his voice trailed off. "I think I'll go look in on Sam and Mac," he said. In defiance of his own nervousness, he turned back at the door and met Rawhide's eyes. "Glad to have you back," he said simply, and was surprised at the easy smile he received in return.

Left alone, Rawhide and Buckaroo looked at each other without speaking for a minute.

"For a while there, I thought you'd gotten one dimension ahead of me," Buckaroo said quietly.

Rawhide smiled. "Yeah. Me too." A silence fell.

Rawhide broke it. With typical forthrightness, he said, "Let's talk spinal trauma. What's wrong with my back? Dr. Zwibel and those Lectroids didn't seem to want to talk about it."

"That's because they don't know. I don't either. The Lectroids didn't know it was possible to survive this wound and we humans don't know what the wound is." Buckaroo smiled wryly. "You're an object of considerable medical interest right now, old son."

Rawhide's short grunt amply expressed his feelings about this distinction. "When can I get out of bed?"

Buckaroo spread his hands. "Theoretically anytime. As far as we can tell, the only thing wrong with you is that there's nothing wrong with you and you're hurting anyway."

"I feel fine," said Rawhide. Concealing the effort it took, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up next to the IV tree. And immediately fell, as an irresistible pain shot out from his lower back and his legs buckled under him.

Buckaroo's hands were on him even before his knees could touch the floor, pulling him up and onto the bed again. Rawhide's breath was hissing rapidly between clenched teeth and he was suddenly soaked with sweat.

"Wait until you feel a little finer," Buckaroo said, concern written deep in his face.

"Guess so," said Rawhide. His discontent was palpable.

~~~

Word that Rawhide was, or had been, awake and alert spread almost instantaneously. Though the piano player himself remained sunk in deep sleep for the rest of the morning and through lunch, New Jersey found his patient's room changing aspect each time he looked in.

Big Norse sneaked up to the bunkhouse and brought down the photo of Rawhide with his Tuareg friends Rashayd and Mohammed, as well as a pack of cigarettes. Perfect Tommy devised a game of magnetically retrievable darts with a dartboard that Reno promptly adorned with a cartooned arachtoid. (Pecos took down his first sketch, a caricatured Lectroid, as being in poor taste since John Kildare was officially one of Rawhide's attending physicians.)

Mrs. Johnson provided a boom box and some of Rawhide's favorite tapes; Billy rigged a terminal that was mounted immediately over Rawhide's head to be swung down at his convenience, anchored entirely with Superglue to avoid waking Rawhide with the sound of drilling. To complete the instant clutter, Hollywood brought plants from the greenhouse ranging from cacti to her favorite African violet (the Los Angeles variety, "too cool to bloom," that had driven her to distraction for months).

When New Jersey arrived for afternoon rounds in company with John Kildare, John Parker, Dr. Zorba the neurosurgical intern and Catnip the ICU nurse, he found Rawhide completely surrounded by companions who seemed to be trying to catch the half-conscious cowboy up on everything for the Yoyodyne assault to the autoclave breakdown in Bio and the Institute's need to find a new bottled water supply company. As New Jersey tried to enter the crowd, Mrs. Johnson had the floor.

"... you shoulda heard the guy from Sparklets. Remember Lily Tomlin's telephone operator? Like that." Mrs. Johnson launched into a singsong imitation of the outraged water supplier. "We understand that your Institute is, shall we say, an unusual facility, and we have been tolerant of certain irregularities in the past. You may recall that someone returned one of our bottles with a boat in it--"

"Boat?" Perfect Tommy was outraged. "That was a working model of a Trident-class submarine. And I gave it to them. What utter ingratitude. Peons."

Mrs. Johnson resumed her imitation. "...but when it comes to having one of this company's representatives bodily accosted by a person or persons from another planet..."

Buckaroo arrived, brushing past New Jersey, who had raised his arms in a vain attempt to get someone to heed him. Without seeming to push, Buckaroo moved straight through the group of people, got their attention, and dealt with the assembled multitude summarily.

"Out," he said. "No visitors until further notice."

Behind the crowd, Rawhide turned out to be very tired, clearly straining to keep his eyes open and his mouth closed. As his visitors left, Rawhide yawned hugely and faded out.

"Sparklets," he mumbled. "Tell 'em to try Purolator."

"You bet," said Buckaroo. Rawhide didn't hear it.

~~~

The medical team left Rawhide's room a few minutes later. New Jersey found it interesting, and annoying, that as the cowboy progressed, the Lectroid doctor's interest in him lessened. It was the pathology of strict survival that interested him, not the patient, New Jersey decided. As the group broke up, he found himself next to Buckaroo.

"He's asleep," said the lanky surgeon. "As simple as that. A nice, deep, sound sleep."

Buckaroo Banzai responded to the wonder and pleasure in his colleague's voice with a smile of almost childlike sweetness. "Maybe even dreaming," he answered, patting New Jersey's shoulder as he headed off.

New Jersey smiled after him, then turned back into the infirmary. He leaned on the frame of the door to Rawhide's room and watched for a few quiet minutes.

The sheets were rising and falling with slow regularity over Rawhide's chest; the face framed by white pillows was relaxed. Maybe the pain's receding, New Jersey thought. So far, Rawhide had refused to admit it was there, but his doctors knew better.

A thoughtful expression came over New Jersey's face. With bewildering speed, Rawhide had ceased to be just someone he'd heard of as Buckaroo's inseparable friend, materializing first as the scowling cowboy of the hospital in El Paso who visibly disapproved of Sid Zwibel's timorousness, then as a disciplined but easygoing team leader when they geared up to deal with Yoyodyne, and then as a dying man, joking a little and still demanding performance from his comrades even as he became aware his wound was fatal. All that had happened within thirty hours or so.

Then came the Yoyodyne strike, two wild hours during which Sidney Zwibel, the brilliant young neurosurgeon from Fort Lee, had shot and killed someone. Not a human someone, it was true, but a sentient being. That shot had saved Buckaroo Banzai's life and changed Sidney Zwibel's forever. Choice? New Jersey turned the thought over in his mind again. Well, it certainly wasn't an accident.

And the next time I saw Rawhide, he was dead, and I made him live. We made him live.

A few Red Lectroids had been abandoned on the ground; now they were the only survivors of Whorfin's gang. Perfect Tommy had immediately commenced field interrogations on site at Yoyo-dyne, using short stints with the Dream Goggles as an incentive. Late on the night of the summer solstice, one of the Lectroids had referred, purely in passing, to the fun of reviving arachtoid victims.

Twenty minutes later, Buckaroo Banzai had awakened Sidney Zwibel with no more explanation that "C'mon, we're busy."

Those first few days, decanting Sam and Mac and Rawhide, they'd invented a thermotactical strategy to reheat and stabilize them, and then had to hope each man would achieve thermal regulation on his own. That had worked.

Then came the concepts the Red Lectroid prisoners supplied, living tissue as electrical fields. As Buckaroo pointed out, this approach was not entirely foreighn to human medicine, and actually fell somewhere between the radical bioelectric theory published by the Karolinska Institute's Nordenstrom in 1983 and the millennia-old Chinese medical principles built around the body's flowing ch'i.

During their forty years in Grover's Mills, John Whorfin's followers had discovered that unlike Lectroids, human beings could be revived after suffering an arachtoid sting. But in reviving their victims, they had been bent on further torture, and had been most interested in neurological systems involved with perceiving and manifesting pain. New Jersey and Buckaroo had labored to adapt the Red Lectroids' techniques along lines suggested by John Kildare and John Eligius to ensure the restoration of the high order cognitive functions: reason, memory, intuition, emotion.

They'd worked out wild adaptations of traditional therapies, had bombarded all three men with music and scents and tastes and sights and touches, using a modified version of Buckaroo's intracranial microphone to deliver these sensory stimuli directly to the brain. All the while, they'd used every tool they had, EEG, CAT, PET, MRI, to try to chart their path. Buckaroo had even prevailed upon Professor Hikita to modify the particle accelerator in the Oscillation Overthruster to continuously generate the radioactive glucose they needed for their most helpful tool, the PET scan. Day by day, they'd relied on the rainbow images produced by positron emission scanning to watch variations in the metabolic function in the three chilled minds, trying to figure out what was happening inside those skulls.

New Jersey smiled. One night, he'd turned around wearily after yet another series of brain scans to remark, "You realize we've done everything but put a foot up on the porches of their ears and yell 'Anybody home?'"

Buckaroo had nodded with the utmost seriousness and concurred, "You're right, we should try that."

And then there had been the wonderful hours when all three men showed clear signs of being in a mere conventional profound coma.

New Jersey laughed to himself. A mere conventional profound coma. And then Rawhide had risen out of it like a skyrocket, passing through the eight comatic stages in a matter of days. New Jersey looked back in at the bulky figure in the bed. Right now, Rawhide was just a big guy who was sound asleep in a sunny room. Maybe even dreaming.

And he'd even found a smile for the same old Sid Zwibel. Who isn't the same, though God only knows what the difference is-- Sid Zwibel to New Jersey? Caterpillar to butterfly? New Jersey laughed at himself. Moth, maybe.

He moved past Rawhide's room to the next door, the room where Sam and MacIlvaine still lay comatose. They were both in intermediate stages, not completely unconscious all the time, but never fully conscious, either.

John Kildare and John Parker came up behind him.

"These patients are not improving as quickly as Mr. Rawhide," John Kildare observed. Or, more accurately, John Parker observed for him, prefaced by the peculiar sound effects that constituted the Lectroid language. "Is there a reason for this?"

"I wish I knew," New Jersey said. He shrugged his thin shoulders. "It could be anything. For one thing, they all got hit so differently. Sam was hit in soft tissue, no CNS lesion-- central nervous system," he enlarged for John Parker, who couldn't handle jargon. "So he doesn't have generalized systemic pain like Rawhide. Mac on the other hand may be quadriplegic." Mac's arachtoid had apparently burned vertically down the bony surfaces of the cervical vertebrae and 'bitten' him near the base of the neck.

"This is the paralysis you described," returned John Kildare. Paralysis of any kind fascinated the Lectroids; it was unknown to their species. If they suffered CNS damage severe enough to produce immobility, it was fatal. "But it is not certain?"

New Jersey shrugged again. "Bupkes is certain." Though as a scientist he understood it, the Lectroid doctor's enthusiastic anticipation of impending paralysis, first in Rawhide, now in Mac, bothered him.

"Bupkes?" echoed John Parker. "Is this a medical word, Dr. New Jersey?"

New Jersey grinned and spread his hands wide. "If you make a nice borscht and the Cossacks come to dinner, bupkes is what's left for you." That was exactly how his Russian-born grandmother had explained it to him.

~~~

The next time Rawhide surfaced it was to a background of metallic clattering accompanied by a strange gurgling, like plumbing backed up pretty badly. As he opened his eyes, he noticed the sun had shifted to the west; it was afternoon now.

The gurgling proved to be a conversation between the two Creatures from the Black Lagoon. John Kildare and John Parker, he remembered, pleased that his memory seemed reasonably well focused. One of them wore a white lab coat with 'Dr. Zorba' stitched over the breast pocket. The other one wore a silver lame jacket, hardly standard hospital garb, but on the other hand, this was the Banzai Institute. Both of them seemed to be wearing wet suits under their coats. Rawhide wondered if they had moist skin. Skin? Hides? Pelts? Don't get silly now; whatever this is ain't over yet.

The metallic clattering was coming from a basin that held numerous instruments; John with the white lab coat picked up a probe and started toward him. Rawhide decided to announce his awareness of this fact.

"Afternoon, gentlemen," he said. He was right, the Lectroids hadn't noticed he was awake. John with the lab coat flinched back and the two of them returned to their gargling conversation, accompanied now by considerable finger twitching. Apparently they reached some decision.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Rawhide," said the one in the silver lame jacket. "How are you now?"

"I'm fine, thanks," said Rawhide. "Tell me, John, uh..."

"I am John Parker of the Nova Police." That's a big help, Rawhide thought. But now he knew which was which. "This is Dr. John Kildare, Chief Medical Officer aboard the Nova Police cruiser the John Winterwheat. He and Dr. John Eligius have been assisting Dr. New Jersey and Buckaroo Banzai in your treatment."

"What kind of treatment are we talkin' about?" Something must have happened after he passed out. He remembered getting hit, creeping paralysis, hearing -- damn, this was the same silver lame coat who'd said it -- that there was no antidote.

"Your revival," answered John Parker. All of his inflections rose, not with a questioning sound but with Jamaican emphases that strangely de-stressed his most important words. 'Revival' came out 're-vi-va-al,' distractingly musical.

"Revival from what?"

"Oh, you were cold, they had you very cold. Cry-o-gen-ic." It was a hard word for John Parker, but even harder for Rawhide.

"Are you sayin' I was dead?"

"Oh yes, man." John Parker paused to consult with John Kildare, whose fingers fluttered. "Yes, you were dead, what you call it. Nothing at work in your body."

"Je-e-e-sus." The word came out involuntarily. Collecting himself, Rawhide asked, "How long have I been... out?" John Parker didn't understand. "How long was I in cryo?" Rawhide snapped, then moderated his voice. What would be easiest to understand? "What's the date today, can you tell me that?"

John Parker's fingers slowed down a little. "It is July too now man," was what Rawhide heard at first, then he adjusted for the idiosyncracies of the alien's speech. July second, he means.

Rawhide did some quick mental counting. If he'd been hit on June twelfth... three weeks, right on the nose. Right, New Jersey said something about three weeks. "How much of that time was I dead?" Why am I asking? But he felt a strong need to find out.

The answer was not at all what he expected. John Parker repeated this question to John Kildare, and received what was obviously a long technical answer. What he said to Rawhide was, "It is difficult to say. We cannot understand yet when it is that humans are dead. It is not the same as with Lectroids."

Oddly, the thought that flashed into Rawhide's mind was pure whimsy. That only leaves taxes. So death isn't a universal constant after all. He smiled at the thought, which set John Parker's fingers to trembling. Agitation, that had to be the meaning of the finger movements.

John Kildare came forward now, holding his probe aloft. He emitted a long speech which John Parker attended to carefully.

"Mr. Rawhide, he will take another sample of the cer-e-bral-spi-nal fluid. He will start with examining the entrance wound, please."

Incredulity swept Rawhide. He'd barely regained conscious- ness. His whole body, if he let himself think about it, was one gigantic ache, and this guy expected to do a spinal tap?

"Over my dead body," Rawhide said.

John Parker translated this for John Kildare, again provoking a lengthy statement from the physician. "Dr. John Kildare says it is possible. But, he says, are you certain you wish to go through the cry-o-gen-ic process again, that it is very difficult for the body to endure."

Lectroids-- no sense of humor. Rawhide rubbed a hand over his eyes. He took it literally. "You don't understand," he said, looking directly at the Lectroid doctor. "What I mean is 'no.' I will not permit you to perform a, uh, to take a cerebro-spinal fluid sample right now. Got it?"

John Kildare apparently did understand 'no,' because his fingers had commenced high-speed gyrations even before John Parker started translating.

Rawhide decided to pre-empt any response the alien doctor might make. "If y'all don't mind, I'm kinda tired," he said. "I'd like to get some shut-eye."

John Parker translated. Evidently this was a cross-cultural constant, because the Lectroid doctor set down his probe and walked toward the door. So a cranky patient is a cranky patient all over, Rawhide thought with some contentment. The universe makes sense after all.

"Sleep good sleep, Mr. Rawhide," said John Parker, following his colleague.

"I'll try," Rawhide answered.

~~~

Left alone, Rawhide lay awake and watched the Institute's ordinary life out a west-facing window. He saw two Blue Blazes go by on their way in from riding fence, mounted on Lily Marlene and Wishbone. A female cardinal flew among the branches of a maple, and from his third-floor vantage he looked into her nest, saw her feed the barely feathered hatchlings that squeaked and cried for the worm she brought. It occurred to him that Lily Marlene needed a shoe -- or at least she had three weeks ago.

Dead. He rubbed his eyes, closed them, and groped around in the darkness for some impression of it, then opened his eyes and stared into the daylight.

Being dead had never crossed his mind -- other people's not being dead, that was his responsibility. Buckaroo insisted on exposing himself to every kind of harm in the name of accessi-bility, of having an ordinary life, of just being able to play music for people. Perfect Tommy had once remarked, "Death is nature's way of telling you you've made an error." Rawhide didn't see it that way, understood the Secret Service agent who'd cried fully twenty years after Dallas because he hadn't been between the third bullet and John Kennedy.

Well, this time he'd caught the bullet -- an "arachtoid," what the deuce was that? -- and known he was dying and waked up with a nasty flavor on his tongue and a backache. In between...

People died, it happened. It happened to Sluggo and Flyboy and Rocketsox and Peggy. Peggy. And before them, Mohammed and Rashayd, who'd taken him into the deep desert to live the nomadic life of a Bedouin. And before any of them, the gentle hill-country school-teacher from Hebbronville, Texas, who'd given her cowboy son a nickname to last a lifetime and her own abiding love for the piano.

Rawhide closed his eyes again. Three weeks. It almost seemed like there was something, teasing him from the very edge of his memory, out of reach.

Years ago, he'd lived for several months in a flat off Kensington Church Street in London, only a quarter mile from the W.H. Hudson bird sanctuary. One morning he had waked up hearing a pure and poignant birdsong like nothing he'd ever heard before.

He'd described it to a friend, an amateur ornithologist, who couldn't begin to guess what it was. Instead, she told him that she had heard but never managed to see a bittern, and that as time went by she was glad. "It reminds me how much I like a life from which something is missing," she'd said. "Something that I know is amazingly beautiful."

Whatever it was that was tantalizing him at the edge of his memory seemed like that; he seemed to remember it as something fine, even without being able to give it a name or a shape. Not flights of angels, necessarily, but a tune you liked a whole lot even as you were writing it, playing its notes into the world for the first time.

A couple of interns were playing frisbee out on the lawn. Rawhide let his thoughts go and just watched the weightless drift of the plastic disc between the two youngsters, whom he recognized as microbiologists, one from Japan, one French. Thrown inexpertly, the frisbee lofted, hovered, then fell in a sharp arc toward the ground, but was caught before it touched. The next throw was just right and the orange circle seemed to simply float through the air...

Rawhide lay back, still seeing the frisbee glide in mid-sky though his eyes turned away from the window. Long before the disc completed its journey to the Frenchman's waiting hand, Rawhide was asleep.

~~~

... and quite possibly the strangest, in which our lives were saved by Perfect Tommy's sinuses.

This untoward event occurred at a biochemical research facility not far from our home base in Holland Township, New Jersey. B. Banzai, intrigued by a report in one of his scholarly journals of scientists who were cultivating a biologically active virus in an atmosphere approximating that of our celestial neighbor, Venus, arranged for an Institute team to visit their lab. The visit was scheduled during Northern New Jersey's halcyon spring, when many species of flowering trees add their gaiety to the riot of man-made colors and shapes which customarily define our landscape. Unfortunately, this glorious display is not without its cost, however, for those individuals to whom the tiny spora of these trees are systemic irritants. Perfect Tommy is one such sufferer, and by the time the team reached the antiseptic interior of our colleagues' lab, his nasal passages had been neutralized.

Unbeknownst to us, agents of the World Crime League had acquainted themselves with our itinerary. Thus, when B. Banzai and the other . . .

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

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

reprinted by permission

~ 30 ~

~ Go to Ballad of a Well-Known Gun Part 2 ~