The screen door creaked open and slammed shut. The blonde slinked in like a woman who knew her own worth and sometimes got it. She addressed the big man first.

"Set 'em up, barkeep," she purred. "Whisky, and fresh men for my horses." The big man grunted and started to pour.

The siren spotted the stranger sitting alone at the room's only table, and oiled into his lap. "You're new to these parts, aintcha?" she cooed. She ran a hand down the stranger's decisive jawline. "Mmmmmmmmmm," she approved. "I bet you shave with Occam's Razor."

The stranger looked at the girl on his lap without visible surprise. His eyes were like blue nuclear fire, passionate yet distant. "What's a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?" he murmured.

The blonde tossed her hair arrogantly and sat up straight. "You've got black hair, stranger," she said. "Are you a 'breed?"

The big man interrupted, setting down a glass in front of the woman. "Mind your manners, missie," he told her, none too gently. "Drink your drink and run along home." He also refilled the stranger's glass.

"Dom'aregato," said the stranger.

The blonde arched her eyebrows. "If that's your story, son, you stick to it." She tossed her drink back in a single wild gulp, her blonde mane arcing in front of the stranger's cobalt eyes.

She rose and stretched like a cat. "Well, fellas, it's been a slice, but my sitter has to get back to Nome by dawn and Leroy hates it if his over-easies ain't on the table by six."

A moment later, the screen door banged shut again.

"Ichi-ban, neh?" grinned the big man.

And the stranger: "Who was that masked quark?"

~~~

The first time his fiancee field-stripped an M-16 in front of his eyes, Buckaroo Banzai owned to being startled. When she split a bamboo wand with a longbow at sixty paces, he sent her white roses. And when she shot the pips out of an orange perched on his head, he gave her his mother's Stetson.

She was wearing it now, crowning a white lace dress sashed with blue satin, on a spring afternoon; they were floating down the Isis just below the 'Varsity and the punting pole slid automatically through his hands. Lobster bisque and cucumber sandwiches from Fortnum's were waiting in a black tin decorated with the bespoke caterer's trademark clock. Buckaroo Banzai was thinking about Nirvana and his wife-to-be was trailing her fingers in the green, green slow waters of the stream.

"Tuppence for your thoughts," he offered.

Peggy's eyes were full of good secrets. She blinked slowly and smiled even more slowly. She sang to him,

 Let it rain,
Let it pour,
Let it rain a whole lot more,
'Cause I got them deep river blues.

Buckaroo's face grew austere. "Oxonian water torture," he adjudicated. He lifted the punting pole clear of the stream, and swung it over his cringing fiancee. A big drop splashed to her forehead, rolled down one side of her nose and found its way down her throat. Continuing south, it disappeared behind the foamy lace of her collar.

Send me to the 'lectric chair, sang Peggy, saucy but repentant.

Buckaroo abandoned his post, though he did think to ship the pole. He wanted to know where the drop had gone.

"Where are we drifting?" Peggy whispered in her lover's ear some minutes later. "The lost isle of Hy-Brasil," he told her.

"Great!" she whispered back. "I have cousins there."

~~~

I gave up a promising career as a truckstop waitress for this? The woman whose name had been Pecos for the last 10 hours questioned her own sanity for at least the 20th time.

She'd arrived near midnight on a Friday. Between the Ozarks and New Brunswick, the van had broken down in -- oh hell, it was easier to think of where it hadn't broken down. So she hadn't expected bunting and a speech, but gee, maybe, something. Instead of which her new boss had marched her into a room with twenty people, announced "This is Pecos," which was news to her, handed her a plate and pointed her to the chili. He himself then instantly resumed a conversation with a wizened Japanese gentleman in which the words boatswain or boson and oarlock or airlock (or Loch Eyre?) had featured prominently, and after five minutes she still hadn't been able to tell which.

It went right downhill from there, she figured.

She'd been pronging fiery beans into her mouth, eavesdropping on the incomprehensible conversation across the table (though it had been a relief when she'd realized that half of it really was Greek to her-- or more properly, Japanese), when a glowy, leggy, intensely beautiful blonde had breezed in, draped herself over Dr. Banzai's shoulder, stared straight at the recently baptized Pecos and, nuzzling Banzai's ear, said, "Say, Mugsy, who's the frail?"

And Rawhide -- Rawhide, the calm, friendly fellow who'd told her how to apply to get here a mere month ago -- had materialized in the guise of a slavedriver, invading her bedroom at five a.m., booming out, "Let's go! We got work to do!"

Anyhow, I don't have to dread being sore later, Pecos thought. I'm good n' sore right now. Under Rawhide's direction, she'd mucked stalls, hauled feed, unbaled hay, swept floors and washed windows since before dawn. At least washing windows involves water, she consoled herself. There might be some nexus with marine biology in that.

"You slop the hogs yet?" It was the gimlet-eyed blonde from last night. She looked even springier and more beautiful by daylight.

"No," said Pecos dangerously. "I'm still totin' that bale and haulin' that barge." The marine biologist unshouldered the cement sack Rawhide had said should go into the tack room. She planted her feet. "Maybe you'd like to show me where the hogs are." Her tone said the exact opposite.

"Ooooooo," said the blonde. "Scary."

"Hey, Pecos, let's get a move on, huh? You need a shower." Rawhide loomed up behind her.

That would have been the last straw, except that she'd already raked up the last straw sometime around six a.m. Pecos whirled to deliver her valedictory address as an intern of the Banzai Institute.

An instant later, a slender, muscular arm draped itself over her shoulder. The blonde was leaning against her like an old friend, heedless of the sweat and dust that covered her.

"Oh, Rawhide," breathed the blonde in the most seductive voice Pecos had ever heard, "I bet you say that to all the girls."

~~~

... the incalculable fortuity by which the Banzai Institute's first gold record and its first Nobel Prize arrived in the same week. In conceiving the Institute, B. Banzai realized that many brilliant scientists were being forced out of academic institutions by virtue of reaching their allotted threescore and ten without any reference to their continuing ability and desire to conduct basic research. He therefore addressed letters to many of these senior scholars whose leasehold in the groves of Academe would soon end, offering them unfettered use of the then barely-conceived facilities of the Institute. Thus it came to pass that in the very early weeks of our existence (I say "our" advisedly, for my advent was some twenty months in the future), entire research laboratories sought to relocate from numerous of the world's most prestigious universities.

One of these early arrivals, an Italian chemist, was awakened from his fitful slumbers with the traditional pre-dawn notification that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize while ensconced in the none-too-capacious rooms of the East Orange Motel Six, pending Rawhide's hasty negotiations for the suite of buildings on ten burned-out industrial acres which, greatly renovated and pastoralized, now form the heart of the Institute. The following Thursday, the duo of Buckaroo Banzai and Peggy Simpson were informed that their single release, "Annihilating All That's Made (To A Green Thought in a Green Shade)," recorded (with Rawhide and Sluggo backing them) during one of their first appearances at the nightspot now known around the world as Artie's Artery, had crossed the sales barrier to gold.

Needless to say, the media, always quick to pick up on a sure thing, arrived in their hundreds immediately thereafter.

Not only Professor Montovani and the Institute's founders were affected, however. The teams applying consisted in several instances not only of the invited distinguished elder but of a phalanx of gifted and altruistic graduate students who were...

excerpt from Fate Took A Hand, Reno Nevada, Granite Press (1976)

reprinted by permission

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