04:00

Mrs. Johnson yawned and hit the pause button on her Pioneer. She was listening to a band called the Drag Coefficient, a group of aerospace engineers (but not, she noted wistfully, transvestite ones) whose percussionist had ambitions to sign on as an apprentice. Surprisingly, the music was semi-danceable and the percussion showed signs of real inventiveness. This one would be passed on for review by the musical residents.

Time for everyone's check-in. "Labs," she said, punching in the main lab number in the Institute's com system. "Secure," came the answer. The voice belonged to Chapatti, a geneticist from New Delhi; Mrs. Johnson's ears were so finely tuned that she recognized any voice -- and detected any effort to falsify it -- after hearing it only once, a legacy from the years when she lived in a world more of sound than sight.

"Gates?" "Copacetic."

That was New Jersey, eagerness brimming just in the single word. Pinky Carruthers had taken the lanky doctor in hand and part of his regime was nighttime gatekeeping. Pinky vigorously denied all suggestions that his helpfulness was motivated by a perceived need for a physician who might provide nostrums when Pinky's experiments in personal chemistry grew a little too esoteric for mere aspirin and Alka-Seltzer.

"Fence?" "All clear... uh, say, Mrs. J, do we have any wolverines here?" Mrs. Johnson's eyebrows climbed. "Gee, I dunno. Ask someone from bio in the morning-- unless you think it needs to be checked out now?"

"Oh no, no," the interns on the fence answered in chorus. Mrs. Johnson would indeed rouse a full-fledged security team on their say-so, but woe betide the fence-rider who turned senior residents and Cavaliers out of their beds because of a stray cat.

As if they read her thoughts, the fence team said, "Probably just a cat." "Yeah, a big fat one."

"Stay in touch," Mrs. Johnson said, giggling after she broke the connection. Nothing short of an elephant sighting would move those two to call her now.

"Computer room?" Silence. Perfectly OK. Mrs. Johnson ran her ancillary check, hiking the gain on her reception and feeding it into a security program. The program blipped: someone was in there. Two someones. Motionless. Mrs. Johnson gave the situation a moment's thought. The comp room housed the only terminals outside the bunkhouse Common Room that could access the Institute's most sensitive information; entry to the room was very limited at all hours. But Billy Travers and his current inamorata were both among the few with access.

Mrs. Johnson ran some feedback into the comp room speaker. "Rise and shine, Billy and Felicia," she said brightly. She got a sheepish callback within seconds. "I was just about to lock you in there," she informed them mendaciously. "We're gone, we're gone," said Billy.

Everywhere else checked out empty and secure for the night. Mrs. Johnson went down to the secondary kitchen for some fresh coffee, then returned to her chores, picking up another tape from the slush pile. This one was called Jelly Side Up. It was late afternoon on Mrs. Johnson's personal clock.

~~~ 

05:45

Buckaroo's private line buzzed. He put down The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and found Mrs. Johnson waiting.

"Sorry to bother you, boss. That Smirnoff, the President's guy? He's on the line for Perfect Tommy and Tommy's unplugged his phone again."

"I'll take it," Buckaroo agreed with her judgment. "I wasn't asleep."

"Right. Thanks. Sorry."

"Dr. Smirnoff, what can we do for you? This is Buckaroo Banzai."

"Dr. Banzai, good morning." The national security advisor sounded puzzled. "We were calling to speak with Perfect Tommy concerning certain ark-architectural peculiarities of the city of Tripoli, with which it is our information he is familiar." The charming stammer made the President's aide very popular on the Washington party circuit.

"Why Yakov, are you planning a little pubcrawl on the Sidra coast?"

"Something of that nature." The Russian's richly-accented voice was hesitant with this admission. Whatever it was, was serious. At least, it was as serious as the Widmark Adminis- tration was capable of being.

"I'll have Perfect Tommy on the line in a second," Buckaroo said crisply, and put him on hold. As he headed out the door, it occurred to him to wonder what D.J. had running on the hold system -- you never could tell, some days it was Beethoven, some days U2 or Laurie Anderson, and there had been one cruel week of Slim Whitman.

As he went into the hall, Buckaroo found Rawhide emerging as well. "What's up?" his friend asked.

"Smirnoff wants Tommy on the horn," Buckaroo said. Rawhide veered toward Perfect Tommy's room, understanding the rest of the situation instantly. Buckaroo smiled and went back to his book.

Rawhide knocked twice, gave Perfect Tommy five seconds and went through the door, which he opened loud and rudely with a boot. "Up and at 'em, Sleepin' Beauty," he said. "The White House wants you."

Perfect Tommy had been wide awake and possessed of his Uzi by the time the door swung open, and now he looked at Rawhide with a peculiar blend of disheveled outrage and well-armed savoir faire. Long tendrils of someone's red hair stirred beside him and a female voice somewhere in the tangle of sheets made an inarticulate sound of inquiry. "It's cool, but hold still," Tommy said over his shoulder.

"Let's go," Rawhide said. He was stooping over, groping for the wall jack where Perfect Tommy would have unplugged his extension.

"The adder's out--" Tommy started. He wasn't entirely sure he felt like warning Rawhide. It would teach the big cowboy some manners if he lost a hand to snakebite.

In the darkness, there was a sudden flashing movement.

"So I see," said Rawhide, standing up straight again. He was holding his right arm directly out from his body, and had his right fist clenched around the tail end of a yellow-backed serpent with a royal blue belly. He held it in the light from the open door. "Pretty thing, isn't it?" The snake writhed but couldn't double on itself.

Perfect Tommy regarded his pet with disgust, while Rawhide smiled. "I couldn't do this with a cobra," the cowboy said. "You'd know that if you ever read a book." Tommy glared at him.

"Phone's plugged in. Pick up line one," said Rawhide, leaving. "Buckaroo said you'd be right on," he added, ensuring that Perfect Tommy wouldn't leave the national security advisor on hold indefinitely just for spite.

Passing Tommy's closet, Rawhide held the snake's head close to a boot, an offer which the viper accepted, slithering into the close, secure darkness where it could coil up and feel sorry for itself. Help keep the kid's reflexes sharp to find a little snake in his shoe, the cowboy mused. Rawhide closed the door behind him as he left.

 ~~~

07:10

The house's big kitchen and dining room were filling with people coming in for breakfast, or, like Mrs. Johnson and New Jersey, for a late snack. Several of the residents had settled at one formica-topped table, and Perfect Tommy, breakfast in hand, was headed for it.

Tommy had a faraway look in his eye as he moved toward his friends, threading his way among other tables. Perhaps this abstraction was the reason his legendary reflexes didn't quite compensate for the jolt he received from Apache, a Blue Blaze who was also carrying her breakfast to a table and not looking where she was going.

Perfect Tommy caught his bowl and used it to catch most of his breakfast in mid-air, but a few ounces of cornflakes and milk, along with one stray raisin, splashed to the floor.

The Blaze, appalled, stammered an apology and hastily mopped up the spilled cereal.

Perfect Tommy's face was expressionless. "Good thing those weren't Rice Krispies," he told her. "If they were, I'd've had to kill you."

The Blaze shrank away from him, unsure if he was joking.

Tommy continued his progress to the table and settled in next to Reno, who was yawning over refritos and eggs and coffee. Reno's blue corn tortillas smelled good, so Perfect Tommy took one. "You and I are catching a chopper down to Washington in a couple hours," Tommy informed Reno as he chewed.

"Yeah? What for?"

"National Security Council meeting on the Middle East."

"Why me?" Reno, the former Beltway bandit, was displeased. "It took me ten years to get out of that town."

"Right," said Perfect Tommy. "So you'll know a good place for lunch. Besides, I think President Widmark's big solution to the whole problem of international terrorism is a mano-a-mano between him and Muammar Qaddafi, so he'll need you to explain the rules."

"Two scorpions," Reno answered, taking a sip of his coffee and remembering. "The best are the little white scorpions from the north Mexican mountains around Durango. You pin them an arm's length apart on a bar. Then you put your elbow in the middle and take the other man's hand, and you begin. At this moment, if you look into a man's eyes, you see his soul."

"I doubt whether Colonel Qaddafi would care to see Billy Widmark's soul," said Rawhide, joining the group. The cowboy had little respect to spare these days for the President who'd said 'Forget we're the good guys' and been willing to order an American first strike. Perfect Tommy glared at Rawhide, but it was just for show. The volatile blond was now looking forward to the NSC meeting.

"And Senator Helms would want to see the scorpions' green cards or else deport them as illegals," added New Jersey.

Reno chortled. It would really be worth the trip just to hear what Perfect Tommy had to say to Widmark, his none-too-swift Veep Winthrop J. Biddle IV, the well-meaning but frequently three-seconds-behind Dr. Smirnoff, and the panoply of lobotomized general officers and paranoid spooks who attended these things.

"OK, I'll go," he said. Actually, the icing on the cake would be whatever the august Secretary of Defense, carrying a grudge since Yoyodyne, would bring himself to say about any proposal Perfect Tommy might make.

Billy Travers joined the group, reading aloud from a magazine. "It says here you're a cowboy/entomologist/accountant/ piano player," he nodded towards Rawhide. "And you're," tipping his head toward Perfect Tommy, "an aerodynamic engineer/rockstar/ armaments expert/trendsetter..." ("trendsetter," Perfect Tommy muttered with a disdainful roll of the eyes in a vain attempt to hide his pleasure). "And I'm just a computer whiz/comic book consultant..." Billy sounded deeply disappointed.

"You're only seventeen," New Jersey pointed out consolingly.

"As long as it don't say I'm the worst man unhung," Rawhide grumbled. He loved the First Amendment but hated the press.

"Now who would that be?" Reno wondered aloud. "Idi Amin?"

"Hanoi Xan, no contest," said Mrs. Johnson. Everyone at the table had lost at least one dear friend to that murderer, and she, like Buckaroo, had lost a spouse.

"Besides him," Reno agreed. "Pol Pot? Papa Doc?"

"Rhyming tyrants," Pecos wrinkled her nose. Other names were proposed, with political figures making up most of the nominees. The world's living practitioners of genocide topped the list, with politicians ignoring famine within their borders and those permitting spoilage of ecosystems, ranging from Russia's high plains to Brazil's rain forests to America's coastal wetlands following closely. Corporations were named, but disqualified by Reno unless a specific individual could be fingered.

Perfect Tommy was paying careful attention. As a general matter, the Knight of the Lesser Boulevards disdained politics, but this consideration of politicians constituting a blight on the landscape drew a higher level of his interest as more closely approximating gossip, which, next to the Jet Car, was his favorite topic.

It crossed Pecos' mind, with some trepidation, that Tommy might be compiling a list of people deserving his personal attention. It was well known that Perfect Tommy refrained from killing people who annoyed him only out of deference to Buckaroo's known views. Pecos quailed inwardly at the thought that Perfect Tommy might request dispensation with respect to these global undesirables.

The boss, on the other hand, believed deeply in political self-determination. He also disapproved strongly of anything that wasn't a clean, honest fight, and no fight with Perfect Tommy in it could ever be an honest fight, unless Perfect Tommy chose to slow down and give you a chance, however slim.

Fortunately, Tommy's mind had moved on to other concerns. He turned to New Jersey, who was wolfing a liverwurst sandwich. "You know, since you're signing on for a long hitch, you'll have to pick up some mano-a-mano yourself."

"Yiddish, yes. Spanish, no," answered New Jersey.

"Hand to hand. Martial arts skills," Perfect Tommy amplified. "Reno here teaches a pretty mean knife, and I run courses in most of the poison-hand systems. Buckaroo teaches kama, kendo and a course with the balisong, those Phillipine butterfly knives. Pecos could teach you karate, jujitsu, or any other hard system that interests you. And any one of us can give you firearms training."

New Jersey finished his liverwurst sandwich. "I'm a doctor," he said with great solemnity. He sat back and folded his arms. "A surgeon."

Reno and Perfect Tommy traded a glance. It couldn't be that he was going to proclaim himself a pacifist -- they'd already been through Yoyodyne together.

"I shall stick to the knife," New Jersey announced ceremoniously.

Perfect Tommy smirked and shot the cuffs of his elegant linen shirt. "You'll be sorry, man."

"Actually," Reno deliberated, "with legs like yours you should learn savate, French kick-fighting. Or Korean boxing, also legwork. Rawhide's good at them."

The Texan looked up from contemplation of his coffee; he'd been listening quietly as the others talked. New Jersey glanced at him and grinned.

"One thing at a time," said New Jersey. "I'm already signed up for another kind of lesson from Rawhide."

"What's that?" Tommy hadn't heard that Rawhide was teaching anything at the moment.

"Goyische equitation," said New Jersey. He smiled at Rawhide and left. The cowboy looked down at his coffee again.

"Ek-what? What's that in English?" said Perfect Tommy.

"That is English, pendejo," Reno said, laughing. "Riding lessons."

 ~~~

10:00

"Okay now, climb aboard."

Grasping the saddlehorn firmly in his left hand and the cantle just as firmly in his right, New Jersey launched himself vertically up on the stirrup, crooked his right knee and swung his right leg over the grey mare's back, dragging the tip of his boot across her spine.

Completing his swivel, he braced both hands on the saddlehorn and, looking down, unbent his right knee and fished around for the other stirrup with his toe. Once fully upright with his weight distributed in both stirrups, he bent and spread both knees, dipping gingerly down to the saddle seat in a splay-legged position.

He released his weight onto the saddle slowly, at all times keeping his knees pointed almost at right angles away from the mare's barrel. Fully settled, he brought his knees inward a bit with a little grin of satisfaction.

Only then did New Jersey release his death grip on the saddlehorn and move his hands forward to pick up the reins, one in each hand, looping one completely around his left thumb and basketweaving both between the fingers. Finally, he settled his hands onto the saddle before him so that the reins trailed slackly over the saddlebow.

"Well, here we are," New Jersey smiled triumphantly. "Whaddya think?"

Throughout this performance, Rawhide stood impassive, holding the bridle and once flicking a glance at the mare's ears, which flattened when New Jersey scraped his boot toe over her back. As the ungainly doctor settled slowly into the saddle, Rawhide's lids had drifted equally slowly down over his eyes, so that if they held any expression, it was concealed.

What he was feeling was raw disbelief. He hadn't expected a boy from Fort Lee to look like Tom Mix the first time up, but this was incredible. For sheer excruciating awkwardness, this was worthy of John Cleese.

Now, as New Jersey finished his ascent and looked over to him, Rawhide cleared his throat and moistened his lips. He nodded at the physician. "Some things to work on there," he said. "Let's go for a walk."

He put his hat and gave the mare's bridle a gentle tug. Lily Marlene, fourteen years old, patient, sensible, and, in Rawhide's opinion, bone lazy, moved forward without complaint.

New Jersey rocked from side to side like a clock pendulum, thinking to sway with the mare's gait the way he'd seen in old movies. Rawhide glanced up at him briefly then looked back down at his boots.

"I'm sitting on a horse," New Jersey marvelled as they moved out of the barn. "I'm riding a horse and I'm not dead yet."

Rawhide stopped as they got into full sunlight and squinted up at New Jersey. "OK," he said. "You want to tuck your knees in, see?" He pushed New Jersey's extended left knee close in to the horse's body. "'N, uh, your toes are parallel here, right?" He straightened the foot in the left stirrup.

He wondered if New Jersey was repeating this operation on the right side, or if one half of him was still wildly angular in the saddle. Out of sight under his hat, Rawhide pulled a smile at the mental image this conjured, then looked back up at the new saddleman. He was met with an expression that was almost childlike in its frankness. Rawhide continued.

"The reins go in the left hand, horsemen call that the near hand. Left is near, 'cause that's where you climb on, and right is off. Like this, right?" He took the reins from New Jersey, mated them, and strung them through New Jersey's left hand.

"Now you don't rest your wrist on the saddlehorn unless you're lazy or real tired, 'cause you lose some of the feel of the horse's mouth if you do." New Jersey immediately elevated his left hand halfway to his chin. "And you don't have to move in the saddle. The horse'll take care of that for you."

"OK, right," New Jersey said, concentrating hard.

Rawhide smiled at him. You couldn't fault the man for sheer earnestness. In fact, it was pretty likable. "And the main thing is to relax, huh?"

New Jersey grinned back down at him. Rawhide shook his head and jiggled Lily Marlene's bridle again. "Let's go."

As they walked a careful line past the barn and down towards the near paddock, New Jersey speculated, "I'm not the first person you've taught this to, am I?"

Rawhide chuckled. "No." He thought for a moment and smiled again, beneath his hat where New Jersey couldn't see it. "First person was twenty-odd years ago -- was a little girl called Peggy."

 ~~~

12:20

Hikita To-ichi sat motionless on a stone bench looking carefully at the striations and cracks in the surface of the massive rock before him. It was one of six he'd set in this zen garden, carefully placed so that only five were visible from any point, an homage to Ryo-anji in his native city. He came daily to tend it, pulling away grass or weeds that pushed up through the various sands and pebbles, then carefully raking the surface into flawless patterns. The groundskeeper Hollywood might be responsible for the entire rest of the Institute's four hundred acres, but she was forbidden to touch here; this quarter-acre was Hikita's private country.

The stone, granite with quartz intrusions, was heavy and ancient, yet in some lights it had a character almost of whimsy. Hikita thought for the thousandth or ten thousandth time of the fires and pressures that formed it, trying to unbind his reflections and merely be present. But fire was a difficult, painful thought; as the crystalline quartz sparkled in the stone, so fire sparkled in his mind. The wild lightning of the other dimension. Masado-san.

Behind him, there was the crunch of footsteps approaching along the graveled path, then veering away. Without turning around, Hikita said "Buckaroo," and lifted his right hand with a slight gesture of beckoning.

Buckaroo Banzai sat down next to Hikita without speaking and also fixed his gaze on the great stone. They sat for long minutes, knowing that neither could truly meditate in company but preferring to share this silence. At length, the Professor spoke.

"What do you see, 'roo-chan?" Hikita asked very quietly.

Equally quietly, Buckaroo answered, "Mountains from a great distance. Enzan no metsuke." It was a bushido maxim Hikita taught him as a child; watch your enemy with a mind like that of a distant mountain. "And you, Hikita-san?"

"Chaos. A great collision of forces." He turned his head slightly and Buckaroo saw rare distress in his mentor's eyes. Hikita spoke softly, but with emphasis. "The Eighth Dimension is here also, Buckaroo."

"We are here, Hikita-san." The first truth at all times. Perhaps his earliest lesson from this second father.

Hikita smiled a little. The boy was presuming to repeat the lesson to the teacher. He nodded and made a gruff, wordless assent.

It was time to leave Hikita-san to meditate. Buckaroo stood, wondering at the source of his trouble. Poor Emilio Lizardo's renewed insanity? Or was it that they had at last seen the face of the Eighth Dimension, so many years after that first disastrous glimpse? The thought took hold of him.

"Forty-six years is a long time, Hikita-san," he ventured.

Hikita smiled again. Where had the child learned his peculiar intuition, and this very bad Western habit of making personal observations? "Not so long as this stone has endured," he answered.

So. "No, not so long," Buckaroo echoed, and left. What does one do after an event one has planned for forty-six years comes to pass? A koan surfaced in his memory, the one beginning, Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water . . .

 ~~~

13:40

Canary and the Neon Highlander, interns from widely separated parts of the world who shared the same oddly orange hue of hair, paused to watch as Mrs. Johnson posted a notice on the Institute's bulletin board. It read, "HKC-- meeting put back to 8:30 tonight."

Canary looked at the notice wistfully. So far, her soprano voice had managed a total of about forty seconds of backup vocal on one Cavaliers tune, and then Perfect Tommy or Pinky Carruthers or Clyde had mixed its level down so low she couldn't pick it out on the final master. Much as she liked peering down a microscope at paleolithic-era seeds, she would've liked to sing more. "Wouldn't it be great if that were for us?" she sighed.

"You'd not say that if you'd ever heard me sing," answered her Bobbsey twin in a watered-down Glaswegian brogue.

Canary had stepped closer to the bulletin board, which was thickly covered with its usual collection of gripes, notices, requests, clippings from the New York Times about Institute doings, and a goodly selection of Larson's Far Side cartoons.

Today, Chapatti and Hollywood were asking for suggested names for the new orchid they'd bred out of Hollywood's most treasured specimen, Perfect Tommy had tacked up a death threat for whoever'd filched his blueberries (handpicked from his favorite bush on Bread Loaf Mountain in Vermont) out of the fridge, Catnip wanted her sphygmomanometer back, the Hong Kong Cavaliers were scheduled to play the E Street Band for the rock 'n roll softball championship of New Jersey, Made Marian the Librarian wanted about forty overdue books returned, Felicia had posted a highly embarrassing revelation about Billy, and--

"Hey, there's one here for you," said Canary. "From Sam. 'Neon Highlander-- face it, honey, it's over. Give the Beast a bullet in the carburetor and find yourself another ride.'" Canary paused, knowing her friend would take this news hard. "I guess he couldn't bring himself to tell you in person."

Canary's theory was pure diplomacy. Even though she herself drove a red kit-built Lotus Super Six slightly spiced with airplane parts she'd pinched from her jet-building father, she sympathized with her friend's love for a stock economy car that all the other mechanics at the Institute freely stigmatized as a toad. Sam had been trying to get the Scot to scrap her beloved "wee buggy" since the day she drove it onto the place. The Institute's chief mechanic had taken one look at the black AMC Pacer whose tailgate bore the painted legend 'DIRE STRAITS', and said, "about all I could say for it is, it's truth in advertising."

"Och, crumbs," Neon Highlander said sadly. "It were such a grand car."

"It's broke, Highlander," Rawhide said behind her. Neither intern had heard the Texan walk up, and they both whirled around, startled. "Get a horse." He left with long strides.

The two young women stared after him, nonplussed. After a long silence, Neon Highlander summoned her spirits for a pronouncement. "What I am going to get is a Guinness, and that right speedily," she said. "It's Molly Malone's for you and me, eh lass?"

Canary smiled. "Lend me a tenner and I'll buy you a drink," she said. The little proto-wheat seeds had waited ten thousand years for her attention -- they could wait one afternoon more while the two of them held a proper wake for a Pacer.

 ~~~

17:15

Buckaroo and Pinky Carruthers were on their way in from an afternoon ride when they spotted Hollywood ensconced in her rocking chair in front of one of the two big greenhouses that provided lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, and several more exotic comestibles and spices for the Institute's kitchens. Hollywood also managed to raise rare plants from all over the world under those glass roofs. It was not often that any Banzai Institute scientist would manage to go to a conference abroad without being asked to dare the wrath of the Department of Agriculture by smuggling some horticultural specimen through customs on the return trip.

The groundskeeper herself, however, was not often seen; she tended to stick to the remote areas of the grounds. The best time to find her was in the afternoons when, as now, she would pull her rocking chair out, settle into it with a big black and white cat on her lap, and smoke a pipeful of something she grew in the greenhouses. In these hours, she was restful company.

"How're you doing, Hollywood?" Buckaroo greeted her. The black and white cat fixed intense blue eyes on him and blue smoke curled out of her pipe for a long minute before she answered.

"Roached," said Hollywood.

"Why's that?" Buckaroo pursued gently. That one word provided a good clue to her origins, which were mostly unknown. Perfect Tommy had identified it as a Southernism: "It's a bayou word," he'd said. "Cajun country people use it. It means severely peeved."

"Perfect Tommy's boa constrictor swallowed half a row of freesias and he won't let me take them back. Apache says it's perfectly legal, something called replevin, but Tommy says no."

Pinky cleared his throat while Buckaroo nodded sympathetically. "Would be kinda tough on the snake," he observed.

"It should have thought of that before it binged on my blooms," Hollywood said severely. She took a long draw on the pipe, and blue strands of smoke worked into her long dark blonde braid.

Buckaroo and Pinky fell to considering the justice of this remark, and the three people and the cat seemed to become a tableau in the yellow light of afternoon, with only the smoke moving. Both men were thinking that Perfect Tommy really shouldn't have let the boa find its way into the greenhouse and languidly considering what restitution was possible. In fact, nearly any thought you had during an afternoon visit with Hollywood seemed to become languid...

In the next instant, the tableau was shattered. Hollywood had leaped to her feet and jumped forward between the two men, propelling the big cat a good five feet beyond them. From under the cat, Hollywood produced a sawed-off shotgun modified for Silent Guns, levelled it, and fired, all in the split second it took the cat to hit the ground and hiss back at her.

"Got him," Hollywood said contentedly. She picked up her pipe and offered a silent apology to the cat.

"Which one?" Buckaroo was scanning the treeline she had fired into. Turning as she fired, he'd seen the flicker of motion but hadn't been able to tell who the target was.

"Clyde Von Drake." Hollywood smiled wickedly. "Bet his mind is on Mrs. J. I've been stalking him all day, and never even got a bead on him, and suddenly he's wide open."

"Nice job of tracking him," Pinky commented. He tipped his beret.

"Right out in the open is the best place to hide," Hollywood said. She picked up her chair and turned toward the greenhouse door. The cat, apparently mollified by her silent contrition, followed her with its tail straight up in the air.

As Hollywood disappeared into the greenhouse, Pinky laughed out loud. "Right out in the open," he said to Buckaroo, who grinned back. No one could understand how Hollywood had developed into the fifth-ranked Silent Guns player on the place, but computers didn't lie.

"It never was a small cat," Buckaroo reflected as they headed for the house.

Pinky shook his head. "Here come Reno and Tommy," he said. Caspar Lindley's helicopter appeared over the pines, adorned with the now-familiar "Price Wars" blazon. "You'd think he could find a new slogan," Buckaroo said.

 ~~~

18:30

"Meat loaf?" Perfect Tommy recoiled. "We had Chateaubriand and Grand Marnier souffles for lunch."

"In this outfit, you eat what you're served," said Pecos.

"You could try to hunt up your blueberries," Reno offered helpfully. "Somebody in this room has got 'em."

"It's called replevin," Buckaroo remembered.

The expression on Perfect Tommy's face resolved into a complex mixture of a temper tantrum, humor, and chagrin. So Buckaroo had heard about the boa. Oh well. With a lightning change of mood, Tommy shrugged and smiled cheerfully. After all, he had just had the pleasure of explaining to the Secretary of Defense in terms a child could understand exactly why you did not want to airlift tanks into a city prone to sudden sandstorms.

"Tactical considerations aside," he had said with maximum sweetness, "you have to think that it's something people would notice. We do want an element of surprise here, and while the sudden appearance of ten Sergeant Yorks in the air over Tripoli would indeed be surprising, it's not really the kind of surprise we mean."

The Secretary had gone along with him, and was nodding sagely by this point. "There is one way we might do this," Perfect Tommy had continued. Serious and eager, the Secretary had bent his full attention on the upcoming suggestion. "Paint 'em yellow and send 'em in as taxis," Tommy had finished. He got a full five seconds of continued sage nodding before Reno's choked laughter had tipped the rest of them.

So if he had to put up with meat loaf, he supposed he could.

As they joined a group already parked at the big, long table, they came in on a debate about a fence-riding report. It developed that the afternoon fence patrol had reported seeing a brown furry animal like a miniature bear, following up a morning fence-rider report that the horses seemed to be spooked by something they smelled in an area with unusual animal tracks.

The night Blazes, courting ridicule, had faithfully logged their possible wolverine sighting. Now everyone thought there might be something to it, and the people at the long table were brainstorming about how to flush it out.

"Maybe we could mix a little musk," Zoo Story was musing. "Throw in some wolverine pheromone. Lure it out and trap it and return it to the wild."

"Right, the wild of over the fence in suburban New Brunswick," scoffed Pecos. "How did a wolverine get in here?"

"Tunnel?" suggested a Blaze.

"Couldn't happen," Perfect Tommy said briefly. "Heat, sound, vibration, and motion detectors on the wall, over and under."

"Smuggled in," Reno said darkly. A day's exposure to the massed minds of the CIA, DIA, and NSA invariably left him disposed to see conspiracies behind every misplaced library book for at least a week. And of course, there always was the small but significant possibility that an apparently innocuous occurrence masked the latest machination of Hanoi Xan.

"I think we should get the wolfhound after it," said Perfect Tommy. "Tree the sucker and shoot it."

Perfect Tommy was known to have hunted with true Tennessee mountain hounds at some point in his cloudy past, but this suggestion was spurious. The wolfhound he had in mind was a completely untrained and sweet old animal, Sam's dog that lived in the garage and had, for obscure reasons, been named Cartune Dog by Reno.

"Why don't we just let it stay?" said Lagniappe, an intern.

"If there really is a strange animal here, it belongs to someone," Zoo Story said. She scratched an eyebrow thoughtfully. "If it's a wolverine, it belongs to a zoo, and it may not know how to take care of itself."

"It could eat cats," Perfect Tommy said callously. "'Way too many cats around here. What do you think, Buckaroo?" No answer came. "Buckaroo?"

Buckaroo had finished eating and was looking off into space, sitting opposite Rawhide, who was equally silently studying the swirls in his coffee. Buckaroo eventually looked over at Tommy.

"What's on your mind, boss?" Perfect Tommy asked curiously. Nothing he'd told Buckaroo about the NSC meeting deserved that deep a level of contemplation.

"Vikings," said Buckaroo Banzai, only halfway attending.

Perfect Tommy rolled his eyes. "Of course," he muttered. "Vikings."

"They undertook great voyages and discovered a continent that no one but its natives had ever seen. And they understood that it was a new land, but even so they let their settlements fall away and hundreds of years passed before it was all discovered again."

Several of the residents were rapt, fascinated by the odd turn of Buckaroo's thoughts, but Perfect Tommy wasn't one of them.

"What about this wolverine? Rawhide, what do you think?"

The Texan popped the cap off a bottle of Dos Equis and considered the question.

"I think we ought to let it go the way it came," he said.

This disappointingly passive approach interested no one but Buckaroo, who broke out laughing. Rawhide looked across at his friend, and finally allowed himself a slow smile at his own joke.

"What?" Pecos was baffled. Buckaroo flicked on finger at his temple, then turned back to Rawhide and started to talk quietly. The words "Texas" and "October" were barely audible in what he said.

"He means it's imaginary," Reno said, irritated. "Unless the little maldito turns up in his own bed--"

"I pity the wolverine that turns up in Buckaroo's bed," Zoo Story whispered to Pecos.

"Sure you don't mean envy?" Pecos whispered back.

 ~~~

20:45

For the group of musicians spread across the bunkhouse Common Room's furniture, the issue was whether to go on the road this fall or cut a new album. Feelings were more or less evenly divided, and the debate was taking a silly turn: Pinky had just pointed out how hard it was to find reliable drycleaners in small Midwestern towns.

Buckaroo picked up his white Fender, his fingers moving almost without conscious volition, as if they'd been dying to play, just waiting for him to catch up. Buckaroo smiled and looked down, beginning to give the instrument serious attention.

He reached over and powered up one of Tommy's five-seconds-to-hot amps. Then he just let it come over him and started really cooking with something old and powerful. It was the kind of sound that irresistibly makes some people get up and dance, and just as irresistibly makes others sit down and play.

Rawhide was one of the latter. He was still on his feet behind the piano when his fingers hit the keys and began looping melodies in and out of Buckaroo's lines, while his left hand took up the compelling rhythm Buckaroo had started with.

The two men looked at each other for a moment; it was very like how they had started out, a guitar and a piano and old music that said things to both of them. Buckaroo got a look of intense concentration on his face and sang, "I want to tell you about Texas Radio and the Big Beat..."

Rawhide laughed, a big belly laugh. Buckaroo ripped off a wild riff that dared Rawhide to counterpoint it. Rawhide found an answering run, and shifted back to the underlying song, singing the lyric low and wicked in his rough voice,

"Self-driven, slow and bad, like some new language..."

By now Perfect Tommy and Reno and Pinky were reaching for their instruments, and Pecos was uncapping her drumsticks. I guess we can settle about the road trip tomorrow, was the last coherent thought anyone had as Buckaroo Banzai and most of the Hong Kong Cavaliers settled in for a few hours of concentrated rock 'n roll.

 ~~~

23:53

Almost midnight on a summer night, almost too humid to move. Cartune Dog and a couple cats were sacked out under the Jet Car, and Sam was dismantling its ignition system, carefully laying the parts out in a tidy row on paper towels.

It had been good to wake up alive, and fun to join Rawhide and MacIlvaine in the "ghost squad" that struck at Hanoi Xan's Eastern headquarters, but it was best of all to settle back into the garage, tear down the Jet Car, and spend idle hours going over the miles of telemetry with Buckaroo and Perfect Tommy to rate its performance on the way through the Eighth Dimension.

He took another bite of the peach pie slice sitting at his elbow. It was dumb to expose the Jet Car parts to sticky fingers, and he would've royally reamed any Blue Blaze who did, but this was the very last piece of Illinois Kate's Hail the Conquering Hero pie and it was just right for a warm summer night. He could give all the little washers and stuff a gas-and-toothbrush bath later on, anyhow. Cartune Dog yawned elaborately under the car, as if agreeing with this train of thought.

"Hey, Sam," Buckaroo breezed in, wearing a full suit, jacket and all. Didn't the boss even notice it was 83o and 84% humid?

"Hey, Buckaroo," Sam said back. "What can I do ya for?"

Buckaroo came around the Jet Car and ran a knowledgeable eye over the magneto, at the same time pinching a tiny nibble off the pie. "I've been thinking about something," he said. "What kind of mechanical shape is the Jet Car in?"

Sam sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. "She couldn't go on the road right now, Buckaroo," he said apologetically. "I've got her halfway taken apart here. We could be streetable in a couple hours if I called in Cadillac Jack and Baby Driver and Canary." He thought for a moment. "And Tommy, if he ain't busy." Besides Sam, Lester, and Kate, those four represented the Institute's best automotive talent, and, except for Tommy, had formed the nucleus of the pit crew at the desert test.

More recently, of course, Perfect Tommy had taken the Jet Car to the beach, claiming he wanted to road test it. That short jaunt to Atlantic City was why Sam was carefully cleaning every part in the car, these nights. It would be hard to tell Buckaroo that the Jet Car was off peak because the carbs had been exposed to salt air.

"No, not city driving," said Buckaroo. "I want to go back," he added, as if that explained everything.

"Back-- where?" Yoyodyne?

"The Eighth Dimension."

"Holy sh--" Sam swallowed the word; Buckaroo really disliked idle profanity, though where Sam came from, it was the only way a man talked.

Sam took a deep breath. "Well, OK." After all, it was his Jet Car. "When you wanna go?"

"I'm thinking October," Buckaroo said. He seemed a bit distracted now, and headed back out of the garage.

"Gotcha," said Sam. "Well, g'night, boss."

"Goodnight, Sam," Buckaroo said. His mood shifted from pensive to buoyant in an instant, and he took another pinch of Kate's pie as he left. He walked out into the dense night air, taking pleasure in its pine fragrance. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

 ~~~

Of the tender scene which followed upon Peggy's first moment of conscious perception as B. Banzai brought her forth from the void of non-being to which villainy had condemned her for so many months; of the first words murmured between Buckaroo Banzai and the love of his life, the bride he had at last retrieved against all odds from a kingdom even more remote than that of Death; of what gesture passed between these immortally linked lovers following the harrowing of Hanoi Xan's private Hell, when sensate existence at last returned to the beloved frame, the wide mouth and unique nose, to the fingers equally at home on the controls of a cyclotron or a balalaika, and, pre-eminently, to the laughing gray eyes of Peggy Simpson Banzai; --- of these things I shall not speak. Common decorum, the simplest of decencies, must draw a veil over this most intimate of moments, even in this loquacious decade.

I will tell you, however, that the festivity which commenced upon the arrival at J.F. Kennedy International Airport (formerly sweet Idlewild) of the private jet (a rival syncopated music organization having generously lent it to B. Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers for our putative Asian "concert tour") was of not merely historic nor epic but millennial proportions. Even Pinky Carruthers, our redoubtable auxiliary guitarist, pronounced himself sated, once his larynx recovered sufficiently to enable him again to opine.

Even before the onset of our rejoicing, Peggy demonstrated that she was no whit altered by her long, strange trip. Ineluctably, as she deplaned, Peggy was accosted by a New Brunswick newsie who shouted for her attention, "Mrs. Banzai, Mrs. Banzai -- how do you feel?"

Peggy leaned against her spouse, swung one arm behind his back, and engaged the luscious music of her voice to drawl out a few bars of the wholly unprintable lyrics of a certain French ditty, a favorite of Buckaroo's since...

excerpt from Buckaroo Banzai Beyond the Deathless Void, Reno Nevada, Granite Press (1985)

reprinted by permission

~ 30 ~