The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (20 page)

“She’ll be staying with us a while,” Rawhide said. “At least until Buckaroo gets back.”

I thought the thrust of Rawhide’s last remark unkind and uncalled for, but now was not the time to debate the point. Perfect Tommy and New Jersey had already headed up the stairs to the computer room, and now it was our turn to follow. I nudged him, and we went, leaving the women to their own devices.

“Come on, I’ll show you around,” Mrs. Johnson said to our mysterious guest. “It’s quite a place, especially for a woman.”

“Yes, I know,” said Penny. “I mean, I can tell it is.”

A half-glimpsed grin escaped Billy’s lips. Eighteen years old, our resident computer whiz, he had already established for himself a legendary reputation among fellow hackers when he showed up at the Banzai Institute unannounced one day and presented his credentials: a mountain of super secret data culled by him and his Atari 800 personal computer from electronic data-processing (EDP) facilities of the Pentagon, the National Security Administration, and the CIA, among others. According to him, and I have no reason to doubt it, the NSA at one point offered him a job at the age of fourteen. He was, as one might expect, not the modest and withdrawn type, and quickly finagled his way into our compound, where he has been ever since, usually in the computer room, creating new computer simulations for all sorts of things, based on the theory of games pioneered by the Institute.

His old hacking instincts had never really left him, however, and when Rawhide and I arrived on the scene, he had already accessed the Yoyodyne EDP bank.

“A piece of cake.” He smiled. “But it’s pretty strange.”

Perfect Tommy and New Jersey were already studying the hard copy of the material Billy had provided them—personnel files, financial reports, the usual corporate records—when Tommy was heard to mutter animatedly: “Holy cow, look at this!”

“What is it?” I said.

“Billy, could you put page two of the personnel file up on the viewer?”Tommy said.

Billy nodded. “Coming right up.”

“This is incredible,” said Tommy, and in a moment we saw what he meant: a list of names of its employees, a hundred or more, all with the first name “John” and beside the names their social security numbers.

“All with the same first name,” New Jersey said, articulating the immediate first impression of us all. “Not a single woman.”

“Unless she’s named John,” Rawhide said.

“There must be another page,” I said.

“Nope,” said Bill. “That’s it.”

Tommy chewed his gum faster. “What are the odds of a hundred guys working for the same company with the same first name?” he asked.

“I could get you the exact odds in a second,” Billy said, “but I’ll tell you this—it’s more than a few million to one.”

“And look at the last names,” I pointed out. “Those aren’t all your everyday names.”

Some were, and some weren’t. As I have stated before, some Lectroids carried regular last names taken at random from a Manhattan telephone book, whereas others, those names which now drew our eyes, were evidently translations of Lectroid pictographs, their primitive form of writing.

(To clarify a point, all inhabitants of Planet 10, Lectroids and Adders alike, for the purpose of this book have the first name “John,” although it is to them less a name than a form of greeting, comparable to the use of “che” in the Argentine or, to a lesser extent, our own “hey”)

There, interspersed among such ordinary names as Jones or Smith were such queer ones as these:

“Look at this,” Tommy laughed. “What is that? They have a lot of Indians working for them?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “This is crazy. Maybe this isn’t their real file. It must be some kind of joke . . . a dummy file.”

“Trust me,” said Billy convincingly. “It’s their real file.”

None of us knew what to say to shed any light on the matter, and so we all quietly meditated. New Jersey meanwhile, that fresh spirit among us, had been gazing quietly at the screen all along and formulating a question of his own. “Look at the social security numbers,” he said.

In the excitement about the names, we had overlooked the numbers; yet in their own way, they were just as astounding. They followed a sequential pattern discernable to the human eye. “What are the odds of this?” I must have muttered aloud, for Billy promptly replied.

“About ten billion to one,” he said.

“How difficult is it to access the Social Security Administration’s files?” Rawhide asked him.

“It’ll just take a second.”

While Billy went off to pull wires, the rest of us conjectured about what the strange data could mean. “It’s like the song of an unknown bird,” said Rawhide. “I know I’ve never heard it before. I just wish I knew what kind of bird it was. Buckaroo was muttering something about Planet 10.”

“It’s the planet I postulated as existing years ago,” said Tommy, “due to the irregular orbit of Pluto. It might be a planet, it might be a moon.”

“Buckaroo said it was a planet,” said Rawhide. Tommy shrugged. “But how would people travel from there to here?” Rawhide wanted to know.

“People?” I asked.

“Whatever we’re talking about,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing,” I said flatly.

“Any such thing as what? Extraterrestrials?” Tommy said.

I dug in my heels. “Exactly,” I said. “Until I see one, there’s no proof—just a string of circumstantial evidence. This supposed signal from space that Big Norse picks up, the weird phone call to Buckaroo, after which he starts seeing things, and now this whole Yoyodyne connection. I admit it looks weird but—”

“You have to admit it’s quite a coincidence,” said Tommy.

“Definitely,” I said. “But nothing more at this point. As a scientist, I’m not prepared to leap to a conclusion.”

Nor was anyone else, it appeared; complete bafflement being our shared predicament for the moment, as Rawhide once more posed his question: “How
would
people, or other beings, travel between here and there? Assuming the Planet 10 we’re talking about is a part of our solar system, which it may not be—it’s not as though it’s the most unique name around—it would still require years to make the trip, unless we’re talking about the speed of light, a spacecraft simulating a photon. But nothing I know of prepares me to accept that possibility.”

I nodded in agreement, doing some quick mental arithmetic. “How far is Pluto? About 30 AU?* That’s nearly three billion miles.”

*
(1 AU = approximately ninety-three million miles, the mean distance from the earth to the sun.)

“At the speed of light about a four-hour trip,” said Tommy.

“Right. At the speed of light,” I said.

“It took Marco Polo twenty-four years to make his round trip from Venice to China,” interposed New Jersey.

“So?” I said.

“So, nothing,” the rangy doctor replied. “There’s no law that says trips can’t take a long time, that’s all.”

Perfect Tommy was quick to concur, though adding, “I don’t think they would have even had to come through this dimension the whole way.”

“You mean the Oscillation Overthruster?” Rawhide said.

“That’s one way,” said Tommy. “Or they might have gone through a rotating black hole, traveled spirally, reversed direction and passed into another space-time world—another dimension. It’s possible they have maps of such things and could take a short cut by simply leaping forward whatever amount of time the trip would have taken, using an Oscillation Overthruster or some such device to reappear wherever they wanted back in this dimension.”

“In which case they would not even have had to come from our solar system,” Rawhide said. “They could be from anywhere.”

“Exactly,” said Tommy. “It’s hard to imagine there being any kind of life on Planet 10. If it’s like Pluto and the other outer planets, only more so; it has extremely low density and is probably composed mainly of methane ice.”

If there were any clue couched in our conversation as to what we were up against, we overlooked it, and so were reduced to sparring about vortices in nature and the like, until Billy enthusiastically called us over to his desk near his beloved IBM 370 to show us what he had come up with. I gathered that our collective look of incredulity amused him, as we stared at the information on the screen.

“Is that some kind of joke, Billy?” Rawhide said.

“The joke’s on somebody,” Billy retorted. “Look at those dates.”

He was of course referring to the dates on which the Yoyodyne employees had first applied for their social security numbers. As it happened, they had all applied on the same day—November 1, 1938—and in the same town—Grover’s Mills, New Jersey!

“I can’t believe this,” said Rawhide.

“There must be a simple sufficient explanation,” someone else said.

“Does this mean they’ve worked for Yoyodyne their whole lives? All of them?”

“Most likely.”

“That’s more than forty-five years. They must all be old men!”

We all stood there, restless with the inadequacy of our brains to fathom what could possibly lay at the core of the mystery, when New Jersey, who for several moments had sat idly swinging his feet over the edge of Billy’s desk, abruptly snapped his fingers as if struck by a furious flash of intuition and began to chatter: “The first day of November 1938 . . . Grover’s Mills, New Jersey . . . why does this seem so familiar to me? I wasn’t even born yet . . . but something about it . . . Grover’s Mills . . .”

“Yeah . . . Grover’s Mills,” I seconded. “Where have I heard that before?”

“It’s where Yoyodyne is,” said Tommy innocently.

“Besides that,” I said. “There’s something else—”

New Jersey was already ahead of me, his mind harking back for some reason to that little mnemonic rhyme we all learned as schoolboys: “ ‘Thirty days has September, April, June, and November, but when short February’s done, all the rest have thirty-one’ . . . thirty-one, October, Halloween, 1938 . . .” Then with a tremendous volcanic vitality of which I would never have guessed him capable, he jumped to his feet, exclaiming, “Halloween, 1938 . . . Grover’s Mills, New Jersey! Don’t you get it?”

“I think so,” I said.

I wanted to say “yes” at all costs, such was his high pitch of nervous excitement, but the puzzle still did not come together for me until he said, “Orson Welles!”

At once I knew what he meant. With a smile and a flash of his teeth, he was on the verge of dancing. “Orson Welles!” I said. “That’s it!”

“That’s what?” said Tommy and Rawhide, still not guessing what had so set our nerves atingle.

“Orson Welles’s famous radio broadcast of 1938!” spurted New Jersey. “His Halloween broadcast of Martians landing in Grover’s Mills!”

“The famous hoax,” Tommy replied.

“Not necessarily,” said New Jersey.

Tommy looked at him, it suddenly dawning on him what New Jersey meant. “Nah,” he groaned, unwilling even to consider such a thing.

“Everyone thought it was real,” New Jersey said, “because it
was
real!”

Oppressed by a strange foreboding, Rawhide’s face was deeply furrowed. He did not dismiss the idea out of hand, but . . . “How?” he asked. “You’re saying real aliens landed, and Orson Welles covered it up?”

“Maybe,” New Jersey said. “Maybe they paid him.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Tommy. “Orson Welles is a great artist.”

Billy, by far our junior, had been quiet but now could not resist asking. “Orson Welles? The guy in the old wine commercials? The guy is a master salesman. He could sell anything—”

“Including a landing of space aliens as a giant hoax,” I said, hardly believing my own ears.

“But how?” again stressed Rawhide. “If people saw them—”

“Maybe they ‘saw’ them only in a cinematographic sense,” said New Jersey.

“What do you mean?” asked Rawhide.

“What I mean,” said New Jersey, as I marveled at the clarity of thought of this stranger among us, “is that as in a movie, people saw the beings and yet did not see them, some sort of camouflage being used. Did any of you notice an inexplicable level of anxiety among those in attendance at the press conference today, or was it just me?”

On thinking back, I was forced to admit he had touched upon something. There had been an almost palpable apprehension in the room, frayed nerves and a general agitation of mind that had seemed almost contagious and which I had at the time attributed merely to the momentous occasion. I, myself, had felt the onset of a headache shortly after entering the room; and although I had at the time thought nothing of it, when I mentioned it now, the others spoke of having experienced similar symptoms.

“Why?” Tommy wanted to know.

“Perhaps because some part of our mind was seeing something horrible and repressing it,” said New Jersey.

“That would explain the headaches,” I said.

“We were seeing, then—?” Tommy hesitated to say it.

“The same thing Buckaroo was cognizant of seeing when he returned from the phone call,” New Jersey said. “Monsters from Planet 10.”

It still sounded strangely in our ears; and yet as I sat there trying to arrange my opinions in my mind, I realized there was something to this theory of New Jersey’s. The sun was still shining and birds were twittering in the sky, and through the window all appeared normal and bright with happiness. Only those of us in that room, and Buckaroo Banzai, knew that anything was amiss. Just how badly amiss we could not know, but the valorous Adder John Parker was, even as we spoke, on his way to illumine us.