The same metaphor of destruction as a form of possession, which I have mentioned, could be seen repeated in the condition of their private compound. Away from the public portion of the Yoyodyne plant, in that secret hangar where the Panther ship was being constructed, valuable machinery lay broken and helpless, seemingly vandalized in orgiastic fits of fury, vilely humiliated so as to confirm who was master. In a safer time, such profligacy would have been of less concern, but now it could easily spell the difference between success and failure; and failure meant—
“Failure means death!” shouted Whorfin, haranguing them in their native tongue with that strange Italian accent he could not avoid. Dreadful to behold when he was in such turmoil, he paced to the right and the left, making a spring like a great cat now and again to recapture the attention of his corpselike audience. “How could you take vengeance on machines?” he railed. “Are they your enemy? What have these low objects done to you, except in your pitiful imaginations?”
Neither was he averse to flinging himself down upon the floor to implore them. “Because you have done this, we have lost precious hours! Days! Above us, the Nova Police! You hide, they seek! History is made tonight. Character is what you are in the dark! I should slay a score of you, nay, two score; the sight of your heads rolling would give me comfort! But in your heads is where your vital essence lives! I need that essence to fulfill my desire. Without your companionship, I am but a poor old dreamer, more dead than alive, trapped in this miserable three-brained being’s feeble body, led on only by irrational hope. No power of mine can get us off this rock! I freely admit it, and yet the appointed time has come! I have cast the die! And yet you gibe and mock me. I came here expecting to find the great ship finished. Instead I find the equipment turned on its side.” He sighed, gauging their expressions. “Is it payment you want? Booty? It’s waiting for you on Planet 10! The dusky ones have your payment! So do their dusky wenches! Payment of another kind, the Nova Police will surely give ye!” Now he was giving them the medicine. They were with him now, their hard eyes brightening. “My wisdom can err! My knowledge is small compared to the Flying Fish.” (The god they idolized—Reno) “But the Flying Fish is never wrong, and the substantial terrors of my mind are laid to rest when he speaks to me, as he has. Gather closer, closer.” The beasts came nearer so that he could lay his hands upon them with a certain tenderness. “I have a message from the Flying Fish.” His face torn with passion, he resorted to the time-honored debating trick of taking a piece of paper from his pocket and pretending to read from it. “He addresses us: ‘Mighty soldiers of Whorfin, ignorant fools, listen to Whorfin when he tells you that the time has come to reclaim your planet. A thousand years of waiting has culminated in this moment of great importance. You must finish the Panther ship in these short hairs remaining!’ ” An obvious slip of the tongue engineered by the accursed Lizardo, Whorfin quickly shaking his head violently and correcting himself: “ ‘In these short hours remaining, you must succeed because you labor within the very jaws of death! For the sake of cruelty if nothing else, murder those who have brought you to this desolation! Listen a second time! Murder those who have brought you to this desolation!’ ” So choked with emotion and theatrics had his voice become that huddled figures long thought dead were beginning to emerge from the shadowy tunnels of Yoyodyne, more Lectroids coming forward, drawn by his inhuman oratorical powers. “ ‘There is no time to be lost. In the space of waiting, all may be lost! No more beheadings, no more volunteers. Show your unconquerable strength by getting to work, using every resource to finish the craft and stealing Buckaroo Banzai’s Oscillation Overthruster!’ ” He crumpled the paper, concluding by saying, “I need three volunteers.”
Every arm in the place shot up, but Whorfin’s gaze had already settled upon three of his most capable lieutenants the aforementioned John Bigbooté, Chief Executive Officer of Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems; John O’Connor, Vice President, Research and Development; and John Gomez, Vice President, Controller. They would be the ones, chosen over all their companions, for this mission so glorious and decisive to their race, and it was they who appeared as an unlikely trio at the press conference wearing forged credentials.
Before I proceed, the reader may wonder about their appellations, in particular their common “Christian” name “John,” this latter being no coincidence but rather an approximation of the sound they call one another in their own language. With the exception of Whorfin and Bigbooté, which are their true names rendered phonetically, the other Lectroids in the main carry legal surnames chosen at random from a Manhattan telephone directory found in the Grover’s Mills social security office where they originally applied for identity papers after entering our dimension during the so-called Halloween hoax broadcast by Orson Welles on that fateful day in 1938. I will come back to this later; suffice it to say that all Lectroids have two names, just as Yoyodyne had two sets of books, one for Earthly consumption and the other for themselves.
I wish I could say that something about these three individuals—Bigbooté, O’Connor, and Gomez—attracted our keen scrutiny in that hotel ballroom we had hurriedly booked to disseminate the facts of B. Banzai’s latest astounding feat to a breathlessly waiting international press corps. But, it would be simply that, wishful thinking. On the other hand, I doubt our knuckles deserve rapping. There was, other than a certain reluctance to come forward atypical of most newsfolk, nothing about them to set them apart in any way. Perfect Tommy has since told me that he thought them immediately suspicious-looking by the way they lurked near the coffee urn and peered cautiously from side to side while filling their cups with enormous spoonfuls of sugar. The little good service his suspicion does us at present is obvious, so there is scant cause for raising it except for these annals, where the question, Did Tommy have a leg up on all of us?, may or may not join the many interesting disputes in the world today.
At all events, it is a matter of public record that the press conference was easily half an hour underway before the grim adventure began in earnest. Up until the supposed phone call from the President of the United States, independent of all modes and customs, there was not a hint that soon to come, was the most bizarre introduction to a case we have ever had.
I will set the scene. Buckaroo and Professor Hikita were fielding diverse questions from the media. Seated at the dais under the bright television lights, besides myself and the two scientific stalwarts to whom I have just alluded, were Rawhide, Perfect Tommy, the Secretary of Defense, Senator Cunningham, and the two fellow travelers we had only minutes before taken aboard . . . the studious, medicinal New Jersey, who had already found a place in our hearts, and the troubled Penny Priddy, who I’m sorry to say had not. Still in the bus, very much in the middle of things thanks to the wonders of modern electronics, was Big Norse and her team of technicians.
Buckaroo had already given a brief history of the OSCILLATION OVERTHRUSTER concept, from the ill-fated Hikita-Lizardo experiment at Princeton in the ’30s to the mortal accident involving his own parents on the arid Texas prairie. He had explained, as well as it could be explained, the amazing notion of matter going through matter, not in a ballistic sense but in the sense of two objects occupying a single space. He touched upon that revolutionary thesis which had sprung from his own fertile head, the theory of consciousness as the fifth basic force governing all matter in the universe:* and had made veiled reference to that which we saw, and found, in the other dimension.
*(The other four being the so-called strong forte, or nuclear force, which holds the atomic nucleus together; the weak force, which governs particle decay; the electromagnetic force, which binds electrons to the atomic nucleus; and gravity.)
He had at one point tapped the table in front of him to make a point. I quote excerpts from the transcript.
(He demonstrates by picking up his plastic water glass and dropping it, splashing water as the container naturally bounces off the table.)
Buckaroo Banzai:
&nb
sp; This table I’m sitting behind, it appears to be solid matter, right?
(A collective murmur of assent.)
Buckaroo Banzai:
But in point of fact, the solid parts of this table . . . the quarks which are the elementary building blocks of neutrons and protons, along with leptons . . . comprise only a quadrillionth of its total volume. What is the rest, I wonder?
(Since no one else answers, I volunteer.)
Reno:
Nothingness.
Buckaroo Banzai:
Nothingness? You mean the Great Void?
(I refuse to be tripped on this point, having sat in on a physics seminar or two.)
Reno:
Chang Tsai said that when one knows the Great Void is full of ch’i one realizes there is no such thing as nothingness.
Buckaroo Banzai:
Then what is ch’i?
Reno:
It is a force. Like alaya consciousness.
Buckaroo Banzai:
Like—?
Reno:
Alaya consciousness, the consciousness which is never extinguished, which flows eternally in order to make the world exist. It is the universal force that transcends the centripetal force of the so-called ego-consciousness.
Buckaroo Banzai:
It is the true consciousness in every object, in every empty space, between all particles?
Reno:
(Unhesitatingly) Yes.
(Out of the corner of my eye, I can observe Rawhide getting a message over his Go-Phone from Big Norse in World Watch. From the look of him, it is something important.)
Buckaroo Banzai:
It is different from sentiency, that is, what we individuals mean when we say we are conscious?
Reno:
I would say so. We are sentient receptors of consciousness, even receptacles of it, as the memory can be said to retain bits of consciousness in the way a computer retains information. The conceit is to think consciousness resides, or originates, in the brain. The effect of a beautiful melody, for example, is felt even by lower organisms who cannot possibly be said to be “conscious” as the term is generally understood.
Perfect Tommy:
Even plants. I once had a science fair project—
Reno:
Exactly. An organism need not even be a sentient being, as the term is generally understood, to receive conscious “radiation,” for lack of a better term. Nature is full of examples.
Buckaroo Banzai:
Perhaps one need not even be “alive,” for lack of a better term.
(In this I was somewhat nonplussed, feeling suddenly out of my league. I must remind the reader none of our exchange was rehearsed, although such seesawing dialogues are an everyday occurrence at the Banzai Institute, Buckaroo being of the Socratic school.)
Reno:
Perhaps.
Buckaroo Banzai:
Is the glass I dropped conscious of the table?
Reno:
If it wasn’t, it is now.
(Buckaroo laughs, along with the news media, as Rawhide now steps over, whispers in his ear.)
“Buckaroo, the President’s calling you,” was what I subsequently learned Rawhide had whispered, a statement sufficiently vague to warrant Buckaroo’s counter.
“Which President?” Buckaroo asked.
“The President of the United States.”
“Is he having trouble?”
Now it is I who should explain. Besides being a friend of the President entrusted with certain details of State and the odd mission owing to his unique versatility, B. Banzai had recently attended the President in his capacity as physician. Upon examination, surgery of a minor nature had been recommended and performed by B. Banzai himself at Walter Reed. It was to the still tender condition of his patient that he now referred.
“I don’t know,” said Rawhide. “Big Norse has jacked the signal way up, but it’s still pretty fuzzy. She patched him through to the pay phone down the hall.”
In such an inauspicious way did our series of mischances begin, Buckaroo arising slowly from his chair and telling Professor Hikita to go ahead and begin the slide presentation which Tommy and I had arranged. “I’ll be right back,” I overheard him say.
Naturally, his departure attracted the attention of every eye in the room, including my own, and under ordinary circumstances I would have followed to investigate, but in this particular case there were other considerations. An audience of some billions was watching on television, and it would have been, I think, abnormal ugliness for us all to have gotten up to leave the room. Thus, despite my intellectual deficiencies, I remained to assist Professor Hikita in explaining to the world in allegorical terms that which B. Banzai had done.
I recall making some failed attempt at levity and instructed the first slide to be shown. The old adage of a picture, even a poor one, being worth a thousand words was again brought home to me as the haunting face of a young United States sailor appeared upon the screen. Comely and spruce and yet with the stamp of horror upon him, he flies out at me even now as I reperuse that distressing moment in my memory. Tommy and I had examined the slides on a light box, but that had been at a single sitting, and the full impact of what we were seeing had not truly sunk in until now, when I felt at once overwhelmed.
“This slide was taken yesterday in the other dimension,” I announced and then, ignoring the frenzied hands of the journalists, said, “Next slide, please.”
The details around the sailor had been obscured by shadow and a curious electrical fog, so that now when the second slide appeared, it produced a very odd effect upon the nerves, as I had intended it. It was the image of a United States naval vessel, the boyish sailor being but one of many visible upon her decks, all wearing the same ghastly expression of disbelief and helplessness, jaws ajar, eyes dilated and fastened on some nameless unholy terror.
To say that the exposure created a stir among those present would be understating the obvious. Exclamations of surprise echoed through the hall as I ceded the microphone to Professor Hikita, and it occurred to me how preposterous was our hope of laying forth the cold facts in any kind of objective way. Already, reporters were storming the exits for the telephones, more interested in getting a scoop than in getting it right. If this was how they reacted to the tamest of our disclosures, what would be their reaction, I wondered, to the handful of shocking creatures glimpsed in the other slides? Or to the foul parasite in the Igloo ice chest resting at the far end of the table? Something in the air boded ill. I feared outright hysteria at any second, as Professor Hikita called for order and spoke coolly.
“In 1942,” he began, “a U.S. Navy frigate, number 754, disappeared on a clear day in the North Atlantic. Long thought to have been the victim of a U-boat, it apparently entered the other dimension through a process we do not yet understand.”
I noticed the Secretary of Defense, his face the color of clay, as he jumped from his chair. A wild yell pealed from him, his breath coming in gasps. “Now wait a minute here! That’s my department! You mean to tell me—?”
“Next slide, please,” said Professor Hikita. “We have a lot of ground to cover.”
Outside in the hallway, equally dramatic events were unfolding, already conspiring against the ends of evil. Buckaroo had stepped into a telephone booth expecting to talk to the President only to find no one apparently on the line.
“Big Norse said it was a bad connection,” Rawhide said. “But they used the Elephant-Bravo code.”
“Mr. President—? Anybody there?” Buckaroo held the phone slightly away from his ear, enabling Rawhide to hear the odd-sounding computer switching equipment in the distance, through a hail of interference.
“Maybe just a prankster?” suggested Rawhide. “One of these computer hackers like Billy?”
“Then our codes need updating. I’m not going to stand here and fence with them, whoever it is. See if Big Norse can get us a clean line through to the President—”
“Right.”
Rawhide got on the Go-Phone at once, alerting Big Norse to the state of things, when abruptly it seemed that all the devils in hell had broken out of their holes as one to torment us. The telephone began emitting a high-pitched whine, and the air, of a sudden oppressive like a torpor or a strange dream, gave Buckaroo and Rawhide the queer feeling that their very souls had at once been laid bare. Buckaroo, in attempting to hang up the phone, felt something compelling him to do quite the opposite, to bring the phone once again to his ear and to listen to those mysterious noises. The sight of his face, the fact that it was trembling and twitching, prompted faithful Rawhide to try and rush to his chief’s aid, only to be obstructed by the inexplicable slamming of the telephone booth’s glass door. No agent had touched it, and yet it closed hurriedly, as if sentient. Such was the freakishness of the events taken as a whole that Rawhide’s typical calm deserted him. He began frantically to whack on the glass and watched impotently as the pages of the telephone directory inside the booth began to turn, again with no perceptible cause, flipping faster and faster, as Buckaroo held the phone to his ear, his elbow locked in the characteristic rigidness of tetanus. Suddenly an electrical jolt jumped from the phone to his ear, a shock of such magnitude that his hair literally stood on end and his body bent like a bow. His every sense heightened tenfold, his brain cudgeled to its limit, he gave a wild agonized moan as the lights now began to flash, and he reached into his pocket for a ballpoint pen with which he feverishly wrote certain mathematical formulae on the palm of his hand. These numbers and symbols evidently came to him in a kind of trance induced by the electrical impulse to his ear, as he scribbled them without volition or awareness. When he had finished, he dropped the phone, and the electrical phenomena I have mentioned completely ceased.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Page 10