The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (16 page)

“Get me a wet towel,” he shouted.

“I think he’s delirious,” I heard Penny say, as I felt the coolness of water.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You’re suffering from ague,” New Jersey said. “Are you all right?”

“Her perfume—”

“Her perfume?” New Jersey sniffed. “What’s that got to do with anything? You two take it easy—we’ll be at the Institute in a few minutes. Reno, you’re going straight to the infirmary.”

“I’m all right,” I protested and saw Tommy dimly across the aisle, a gleam of “I told you so” in his eyes, looking down on me in more ways than one.

“I’ll be around if you need me,” New Jersey said, rising to leave.

“I’ll take care of him,” Penny replied.

Once more “alone,” the circuit of my riotous thoughts broken, she remained to stroke my hair with graceful gestures and stare at me, almost hypnotically. I would like to say her smile gladdened my heart, but I cannot. When she leaned close, I could still smell that most subtle of lures, and I was more convinced than ever that the evasive scent was not a perfume at all. It was her breath, it was she!

As we neared the Institute, I wished to test my theory by bringing matters to a head. After some preliminary conversation about her past—the death of her parents and her identical twin sister in that terrible fire, about which she was confused by recent events; followed by her adoption by a distant relative out west in Wyoming; her flight from home as a troubled adolescent; a brief time as a
religieuse
in a convent; her adventures as a world traveler; her failures in various careers—the talk turned to me.

“You’re the writer, Reno,” she said. I did not deny it. “You write the Buckaroo adventure books.”

“I take notes and report what I see.”

“What did you do before you joined the outfit?”

“We in the ‘outfit,’ ” I said, “don’t ask one another such personal questions, but since you didn’t know better, I’ll tell you. I had my own think tank, but I got tired of thinking—I wanted some action.”

“What are you working on now?” she asked. “Or should I say what new adventure are you taking notes for?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Bui I am reminded of a story from classical antiquity, in which an Indian prince sent a beautiful girl to Alexander the Great as a gift. Naturally, the young conqueror was smitten by her loveliness, but what was more amazing about the girl, what set her apart from every other of her sex, was the strange delectable perfume on her breath, sweeter than any flower. It was this seductive scent which covered her terrible secret.”

“Which was—?”

“That all her life she had been raised on poisons, nurtured by them, fed them from her birth, so that the deadliest toxins became her element, as natural to her as water and the air we breathe, and in time she became poisonous herself . . . lethally so. Her embrace was literally the kiss of death.”

Like an owl, Penny watched me, her rapt attention attending every word of my tale, dwelling on every line of it. It was not the reaction I had expected but one I was happy to note. “So that’s how Alexander died?” she said. “He kissed her?”

“No,” I replied. “One of his soldiers saw through her and stole a kiss himself.”

“Or perhaps he did not see through her,” she parried. “Perhaps he only wanted a kiss before Alexander got there.”

“In any case, her plan was foiled. The end, when it came for her, must have been a blessed relief. It couldn’t have been pretty.”

“For her or the soldier who kissed her,” she pointed out.

“Oh, he died instantly. Her kiss was painless.”

She smiled at me rakishly, saying, “That’s the most roundabout proposition I’ve ever heard. Do you want a kiss, Reno?”

“It might ease my mind.” I said, whereupon she put her lips to my own and kissed me like a pagan. When she withdrew and I took a breath, no harm having come to me, I apologized at once. “I was wrong about you,” I said. “Please forgive me.”

(Bear in mind, reader, I was delirious with fever.)

W
e had not yet begun to worry unduly about Buckaroo Banzai. His locator put him on the road to Grover’s Mills, and at last report he was still following the Yoyodyne van, presumably at a sensible distance. Were life to mirror our intentions, however, it would be nowhere near as entertaining. B. Banzai may or may not have realized from the curious “phone call” that he had an appointment with destiny, but I am certain he could not see the serpentine road by which he would arrive; else he would have taken greater precautions. But how can one anticipate the behavior of extraterrestrials, friend or foe? They were the great unknown factor, the jokers in the deck, which in turn meant a new set of rules.

We have but conjecture to rely upon as to why the Yoyodyne van suddenly veered sharply into the ditch by the side of the road and reversed its course, nearly running down B. Banzai in the process. The most probable explanation is that the three Lectroids inside received a radio message from home base, informing them of the downed thermopod. Essentially a life craft dispatched by the Nova Police father ship to find Buckaroo Banzai, it was shot down by those now-famous duck hunters whose posthumous pictures have appeared in so much of the media.

The details of the incident are well-known but merit repeating for the record: Two duck hunters on a weekend outing north of Grover’s Mills fire into what they think is a phalanx of mallards. The mallards turn out to be electronic camouflage for a bizarre UFO approximately the shape and outer texture of a tangerine. (How this electronic camouflage is done by both the Nova Police and the Lectroids themselves I will come to later.) The UFO crashes into the upper branches of a tree; the terrified duck hunters observe what seems to be a dread-locked Jamaican emerge from the craft in a silver Nova Police spacesuit; the “Jamaican” loses his footing and crashes to the ground—upon his death turning into a hideous thing from another world, that species which on Planet 10 is called an “Adder,” a sleeker, less brawny sort of creature than the Lectroid and of a darker color, thus giving rise to the racial epithets heaped upon them by Whorfin and his followers.

By this time one can imagine the panic of the duck hunters, gazing in disbelief at the dead Adder on the ground, when a second “Jamaican” manages to scramble down the tree and with a graceful gait makes a run for it, carrying some kind of package under his arm. Despite being pursued by the duck hunters’ spaniel, he reaches safety, delivers his “present” to us, and thereby becomes a linchpin in our story. In person, full-limbed and wonderful-looking in human camouflage, he is the redoubtable John Parker, whose indispensable help in saving our world has earned him the undying gratitude of peoples and nations everywhere.

Upon seeing John Parker come out of the craft, the duck hunters hasten their retreat to the CB radio in their car. Having no idea how many such beings might be found inside the space pod, they decide to summon help. A state police car receives their SOS and is there within minutes, setting the scene for the arrival of John Bigbooté and company.

What thoughts must have gone through the three Lectroid minds when the news of the downed Adder craft was radioed to them? It must have hit like a bombshell. It could not be an accident, a mere coincidence that it crashed within miles of Yoyodyne, the Lectroids’ last refuge. The universe was too large, the chance too small of such a thing happening at random. It could only mean that their colony had been discovered, or had been monitored for some time. Perhaps always, thought John Bigbooté. Once an avid believer in the tenets and leadership of John Whorfin, Bigbooté now harbored considerable doubts. In Whorfin’s absence, Bigbooté had, in a sense, become his “own man.” He had taken over the reins of Yoyodyne in 1939, shortly after he and Whorfin had founded the company with the proceeds from Whorfin’s criminal escapades. Whorfin-as-Lizardo, already a wanted man, was soon arrested by Hoover’s G-men, but the fledgling new armaments company continued, its survival assured by the coming World War and cold war era. Under Bigbooté, the company had grown into the nation’s largest privately held defense manufacturer; and as its “innovative CEO,” as
Forbes
magazine had called him, Bigbooté hobnobbed with bureaucrats and captains of industry. Under his stewardship, company earnings had soared, key defense contracts had been bidded for and won, and there had been plans for expanding the company’s share of the ever-growing international arms trade by opening a branch in London. Toward that end a piece of property on West India Dock Road, in the heart of Limehouse, had been bought, and an artist’s conception of a new facility lay at that very moment on his desk back at Yoyodyne. Of course he had told John Whorfin nothing of this. All John Whorfin was good for was carping. He, John Bigbooté, had built Yoyodyne into all that it was today despite the constant interference and meddling of John Whorfin. Once before, Bigbooté had raised the question of the company’s growth and the inevitable prospect of hiring humans, and Whorfin had berated him loudly over the phone, threatening his life. Whorfin was an imbecile, Bigbooté was convinced, and the same was doubly true, unfortunately, of his own subordinates. The other two members of this management troika so highly regarded by business publications, John O’Connor and John Gomez, were irretrievable losses. Both careless simpletons, he dared not trust them with anything of importance, certainly not his true opinion of John Whorfin. No, for better or worse, he, John Bigbooté, was an unusual Lectroid, unique even. He had original thoughts, a rudimentary knowledge of Earth history, and even a lot of money. He was almost cultured.

The only cloud on the horizon, until now, had been the disagreeable affair of the Navy’s top secret Truncheon sub-killer, a carrier-launched plane with advanced sonar and highly sophisticated solid-state hydrophones designed to recognize the “signatures” of Soviet Delta class submarines and identify them by name, from up to a distance of several hundred miles. By Planet 10 standards, the technology was fairly primitive, the job definitely ‘doable’ within the billion dollar budget allotted. The problem, as usual, had been Whorfin, and his insistence on diverting massive resources from the Truncheon program to the accelerated development of the secret Panther ship, that huge craft intended to enter the Eighth Dimension and collect the remnants of the Lectroid army and carry them home to ultimate victory over the Adders. As a result of this ongoing misappropriation of colossal amounts of funds, work on the plane had fallen far behind schedule. A congressional committee had interested itself in the matter, and he, John Bigbooté, had been subpoenaed to testify on the Hill. He had defended the company staunchly and vigorously. In the opinion of the company lawyers, the congressional questioners “hadn’t laid a glove” on him, to use their parlance. But the investigation was not over and showed no sign of going away. Worse, he feared that the reputation of the company had been permanently damaged. There was even some talk of an “on site fact-finding tour,” an inspection! The very thought made him tremble . . . hordes of media gad-flies and snoop-types from the General Services Administration poking their noses into every corner of Yoyodyne. Such a visit would require a huge generated field of electronic camouflage, and what if there were not ample time to prepare? What if something went wrong? They would find the Panther ship! How would he explain that away? Damn John Whorfin! It was perhaps a blasphemous notion full of bravado, but for some time now John Bigbooté had mulled the possibility of killing John Whorfin and eating his brain. Under happier circumstances, Whorfin had been like a father to him; but that was all remote now, those blissful bygone days spent shuttered from the cold and darkness without, wrapped in the company of trysting, writhing Lectroids and the frigid gray of Planet 10.

No, the more he thought on it, the more compelling the idea seemed. For the sake of the greater family of Lectroids and the aerospace company he had built into a thriving concern, it had to be done. By eating Whorfin’s brain, he, John Bigbooté, by law would become Lectroid Leader. There would be no one to dispute him, no one to whom he must report every purchasing order like a measly errand boy, no imperious sufferer of flatulence in whose eyes he must continually strive to pass muster. At the thought of killing, the old excitement returned. His eyes were lit with an icy shine, his stomach taut. It was a Lectroid tenet that the greatest deeds were possible to a murderous mood. The severity of the act must be indescribable, an attack so vicious that it would cause the entire universe to take notice, and other murderous betrayals to seem but trifles in comparison. He recalled once enjoying
Julius Caesar
some years ago in his “reading period” and resolved to look at the play again. How many blows had been delivered Caesar? He would stab Whorfin twelve times that number! It would be so easy! John Whorfin in that ridiculous Three Brained Being’s body! By the Oath of the Flying Fish, that bloodthirsty winged beast, he would have Whorfin’s three brains!

He dared tell none of this to anyone, nor invite coconspirators. He must choose his moment carefully and act alone, he thought as he caught sight of the state police car parked by the side of the road up ahead, and John O’Connor tapped him on the shoulder.