Equations know more than we do.
—Werner Heisenberg
Some weeks later, we received two-part replies to our peaceful entreaties to Hanoi Xan. By this I mean to say that each of our emissaries was returned to his tactical commander in two parts, in sloshing five-gallon buckets. All had gold Krugerrands in their mouths and had been cut up pretty badly—though I suppose that is stating the obvious when a man has been cleaved in two. Hell naturally followed; how we howled and wanted to spill Xan’s blood! For days, we were so many beasts in a state of wild desperation.
But the world did not end, at least not yet. One of the torsos was also accompanied by a bloody Chinese New Year card that I chanced to handle at the breakfast table before passing it around. Other than the embossed holiday greeting, I could make no sense of either the card’s private message in an unknown language or the provocative drawing of a cowboy riding a penis-nosed dolphin toward a pot of gold coins, while three observers on dromedaries watched from a nearby promontory.
“I recognize the Three Wise Men, the Manchu and the Mongolian, but this language here, these scrawls . . . what is it?” I said, handing the card to our house mother and chief nutritionist Mrs. Johnson, who gazed at it quite intently for several seconds.
“Wow,” she said, “my Linear B’s a tad rusty, but I studied a little Old Enochian at the state normal school—or maybe it was Old Etruscan—as transmitted by the angels to the Archons’ Assembly of Divines and Eternal Elders. The way I read it is ‘When you have drunk all the water in the Yangtze River, I will tell you where she is.’ Then he offers Penny in exchange for the location of the Great Khan’s treasure, passed down from your ancestors . . .”
“Penny? Meaning her body?” Tommy blurted out.
Mrs. Johnson seemed to nod and shake her head simultaneously while saying, “According to Xan, she crossed the Rainbow Bridge, but somehow in some sick and twisted way she’s back . . . resurrected from the dead. This goes beyond disrespect. Not acceptable.”
“Not acceptable, but not out of the ordinary,” Buckaroo commented with a pained expression, taking the card from Mrs. Johnson and turning it over in his hands with utmost care. “The Face That Is No Face, who ‘needs no introduction,’ says, ‘This message confirms all tidings’ . . . that one of his sorcerers has changed Penny into a river dolphin . . . and that’s where she is now, somewhere in the Yangtze. If I don’t believe that nonsense, she’s working as a courtesan in the Yoshiwara or starring in the Takarazuka. Either way, he’s offering to return her if I pay tribute: the Jet Car, the overthruster, and the location of the Great Khan’s tomb, plus additional charges.”
“Additional charges? Dear God, that sadistic, belly-crawling, egg-sucking crème de la slime is lower than snake scum, lower than a one-celled amoeba,” grumbled Mrs. Johnson. “Makes me want to take two showers even touching this filthy greeting card. This low blow will not go unrepaid. We need to nail his ass, good and hard, once and for all.”
“Tall tree, a rope, and a horse,” suggested Pecos.
“You got that right. I spit Beech-Nut in his snake eyes,” Tommy added and spat into a tin can . . .
. . . as Mrs. Johnson continued, “The Yoshiwara is in Tokyo, is it not? What a beastly ass, and that poor, sweet girl tossed into a brothel . . . it pulls the heartstrings. Also, even with my limited Mongolian, I notice in the message that Xan mentions his own name before yours, Buckaroo. Isn’t that considered a gross insult?”
At this, I suddenly experienced something like a light bulb moment.
“Your nightmare, Buckaroo, or whatever it was!” I reminded him. “Wasn’t Penny a dolphin in your vivid dream . . . ?”
“You’re right, Reno, and with an exaggerated nose,” he replied. “Good catch. Maybe I was on to something.”
“Maybe you were on something,” Pecos corrected.
“Like death by a thousand cuts,” Buckaroo muttered to himself, seeming lost in a reverie. “ ‘Round and round flew the raven, and cawed to the blast. He heard the last shriek of the perishing souls’ . . .”
“What, Buckaroo?” I asked him.
“ ‘Right glad was the Raven,’ ” he said softly. “ ‘They had taken his all, and Revenge it was sweet!’ ”
“Hell, yeah, looks like shit stain Xan’s circling the wagons, spoiling for a fight,” said Tommy.
“And hate-filled to the top,” replied Buckaroo.
To whom was he referring? Xan or himself? At that moment I tried to read his demeanor as he stared long and hard at Xan’s missive before slipping it into a drawer; but whatever hurt or cold fury he was feeling, he masked it well by turning his attention to his prized crickets and back to the job at hand.
By now we had self-organized into small interdisciplinary ad hoc groups, having delegated tasks, and set about to analyze our situation as scientifically as possible and plot a way forward. In this strategy the thoughtful reader will recognize the theory of precession at work, by which I mean subplots at right angles to the main action, such that the reader who might expect a pulse-pounding chapter—or, at a minimum, the development of a clear plan of action—encounters instead a certain sense of drift and a bare patchwork of narrative threads, but only so many as are at your modest author’s disposal.
There was of course the suspected traitor General Wagoneer and the supposed sale of Jet Car plans, which he continued to claim were slipshod imitations, flawed in such a way as to be worthless to any buyer. But we were still waiting for the president’s promised trove of secret government data or any other elaboration of a possible Xan-Whorfin connection (the worst of all possible worlds) and were therefore off to a fitful start; indeed, how could it be otherwise when high-ranking military brass and government intelligence officials feared being held accountable for their shortcomings more than any other outcome? To put it bluntly, the imminent threat to our world mattered less to certain palace mandarins than getting blamed for it; and without assistance from the Department of Defense and the various alphabet intelligence agencies, unwilling allies all, we could not know if the general was telling the truth.
Applying his own lie detector test—his hand over Wild Bill’s heart—Buckaroo believed the general to be clinically insane, incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality; and in any case, while the matter of the Jet Car weighed on our minds in a personal way, the bigger question of John Whorfin and his political opponents’ threat to destroy our world had to take precedence in our efforts. But on this score, too, the truth would prove elusive, since our own observatory, and others with whom we were in constant contact, had lost track of the mystery planetoid, indicating that it had either left our system or was somehow flying under the radar, likely cloaked in stealth-mode technology.
But which of these hypotheses was correct? Had the sword of Damocles hanging over us been lifted? Sad to say, there was really no earthly way of knowing. While it is tempting to blame ourselves for our lack of progress during this period, I will go to my grave secure in the knowledge that we left no stone unturned in our search for answers. To that end, we prized our late-night roundtable discussions in the Huddle Room, putting our heads together and analyzing intelligence, advancing theories, grilling Wild Bill Wagoneer in his more lucid moments, and following up rumored sightings of countless old men resembling Lizardo—“bobbing for horse apples in a punch bowl,” as Tommy so colorfully put it.
And even an enhanced clinical understanding of Lectroids did little to help us answer the crucial question of whether the pneuma of John Whorfin still existed in a vital state, either as a free entity or in the body of another human host; and along these lines there was another possibility that we were as yet unwilling to entertain.
General Wagoneer had frequently mentioned the Abbot Costello. When queried, however, he professed to have little memory of their actual encounter beyond the prelate’s powerful trumpet that he theorized had brought the laboratory crashing down like the walls of ancient Jericho.
As scientists and presumably empiricists—and we were all cothinkers in this—none of us put stock in the notion of exorcism, whose results could not be empirically verified. I will go further: the atavistic ritual of driving out demons, present in virtually every primitive society, was offensive to our coldly logical thinking, particularly since Whorfin was not of the religious spirit world—at least not in the traditional sense that we think of it—but rather had entered our dimension and the physicist Lizardo’s body through some actual physical process that we ironically had taken to calling transubstantiation. How this all had come about, scientifically speaking, was, to put it mildly, an enigma; and the brain-addled Wild Bill was of precious little help even under hypnosis. As for the perennial mind-body conundrum—unsettled even for our own species and a problem Buckaroo has wrestled with for the greater part of his life—I will avoid dipping even my toe in it.
It was in such a woeful state of general ignorance that we thus played a waiting game and felt increasingly useless in our efforts to trace both John Whorfin and the mystery planetoid that was nonetheless beginning to make its presence known in a somewhat perverse way . . . by which I refer to the uncanny disruptions to worldwide radio and television broadcasts by a generic middle-aged individual going by the quaint title of Archangel Brother Deacon Jarvis, who appeared onscreen as a digitized simulacrum swathed in sublime light and molded in the image of the white-haired Quaker on a certain oatmeal container.
While engineered to sound human, his pasty white face never changed expressions in an otherwise flawless impersonation of a radio evangelist whose inflamed religious zeal and mangled speech he seemed to have copied from life.
Herewith, a sampling: “Beware of the evil Red one! Promising you a new vehicle with all the bells and whistles! A promotion at work! Money in the bank! A hot new cutie pie! Just kiss the devil’s hairy lip and you’ve got it made in the shade, right? Lemme tell you, folks, Red John Whorfin is the rat of the world—can I get an amen, a hallelujah, and a cheeseburger? I’m willing to pay.”
At this point an image of the appalling-looking John Whorfin in his natural state as a Red Lectroid—dead black orbs in a craggy face that hinted at the void within—normally filled the screen, along with a rolling chyron announcing a “fat reward” and the phone numbers of the Banzai Institute, Interpol, and a special United Nations hotline.
“Tie that snake up and toss him into the fiery pit of the Book of Revelation—better yet, back into the Eighth Dimension! Rebuke him! Tell him your traveling preacher, the old country boy Archangel Brother Deacon Jarvis, said, ‘So long, loser, fallen overlord, scumbag of the universe, bald-faced liar, treacherous subjugator and seducer, unutterable beast kicked out of heaven by Her Highness, Empress John Emdall Thunderpump! Hallelujah be her name! Mother of Wonder, Star of Hope and True Light of Heaven, Light Who Begat Light, warning you to clean up after yourselves or heads will roll and she will mess with your axial tilt! Amen and hallelujah! So forget the scratch tickets and try the full, warm feeling, folks! But time is limited and this offer may expire without notice! I’m talking happy and fat, all sorts of wonderful stuff—remember you won’t get a lemon from Toyota of Orange. Tell ’em the old traveling preacher Brother Jarvis from the Love Connection sent you!”
“Are you kidding me? What is this thing? Words fail” fairly summarized our collective reaction on seeing this synthetic throwback to an old-time country evangelist who always appeared on the verge of having a heart attack at any moment.
But here was a clue—“Toyota of Orange”—that gave him away, when a viewer from Orange, California, recognized him as an ex-car salesman turned tent evangelist who had miraculously disappeared in a car crash some months earlier. As no foul play was expected, the strange case was never investigated, and now the mystery only deepened. What was his face doing in the sky? Was he still in one piece? Possibly abducted and digitized by an alien exploratory craft? Were the strangers, then, already among us?
These questions were unnerving, to say the least. As noted, these electromagnetic storms flared sporadically and without warning, other than a short, melodic prelude of tubular bells, in virtually all nations and in many tongues, often accompanied by changes in the actual weather, including incandescent lightning and hellacious cracks of thunder. And yet, lacking an explanation for the incidents, most world leaders followed the lead of the United States and variously attributed the Jarvis phenomenon to Russian dirty tricks, a pirate radio ship operating off the coast of Africa, or a Mexican border transmitter perhaps financed by Toyota of Orange.
Even given the advanced state of spy satellite technology, it was impossible to trace the original source of the transmissions, much less a location in space. The question for us—assuming the outbursts were from the planetoid, as we suspected—was whether they were intended as disinformation or merely a means of demonstrating their alien power over our world and thereby laying the psychological foundation for our future subjugation.
We nevertheless continued to aim our call signal and weekly radio show in the general direction of the invisible Planet 10’s last known quadrant, though well aware of the obvious folly of such an endeavor. Even putting aside the immense distance such a signal would have to travel, what did we expect to happen if by some chance the alien ship intercepted our radio signal? A return call? A slightly less far-fetched plan—a last desperate hope, more accurately—involved the previously mentioned possibility of instantaneous brain wave transmission, or telepathy, a subject in which Buckaroo had long been interested.
“If we could tweak the electrical frequency of our theta brain waves, a technical application utilizing human telepathy might be doable,” Buckaroo speculated one day. “Remember how the World Crime League, working with the KGB, almost succeeded in electronically programming an entire generation of American kids through antennas disguised as mouse ears and raccoon-tail caps. Luckily, somebody at Disney blabbermouthed to J. Edgar Hoover during sex or we’d all be Russian-speaking phone zombies.”
“Yep . . . something to think about,” I said, already suspecting that he was miles ahead of me. “Luckily, the epidemic of premature facial hair on prepubescent kids gave the plot away, only to have the brainwashing technology find its way into our own government’s nefarious thought-control projects, like kids’ braces and emulsified lipids in tattoo ink, all capable of subliminal radio reception.”
With a friendly grin he reminded me, “Not to mention the increasing number of crypto-blipverts we’re seeing lately on virtually every television channel and new streaming service. I think we both know how things work and who’s behind the curtain . . .”
“I think we both know how things work,” I replied.
He nodded thoughtfully, saying, “We have to tread carefully here . . . a whole field of soft science we need to analyze in depth. You know I’ve long been fascinated by this but keeping my work under wraps for security reasons. But let us suppose there is a universal psychic frequency and let us further suppose, for the sake of experiment, that the frequency to connect all isolated clusters of ganglia to the greater universal community is fifty-one point five or four hundred thirty-two hertz, further supposing . . .”
He fell silent, momentarily lost in thought, before adding, “Anyway, Mrs. Johnson is working on it and, because of the emergency, I’m also putting together an ad hoc group over in Special Weapons to complete development of my shock wave Bubble Gun, ASAP.”
“I’ll get right on it,” I said immediately.
But he demurred, informing me, “I’m putting Pecos and Li’l Daughter in charge. What’s the status of the directed energy beam project?”
“The Jelly Beam? We’ve been working like dogs to miniaturize it, still diagnosing a couple of—”
Buckaroo cut in impatiently: “Ready for field tests or not?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied, at once seeing a certain misery invade his face and wishing I could take back my words.
“ ‘Not sure,’ Reno . . . ? That’s a fake answer, Reno . . . the answer of a politician and a weasel. What are the only answers we accept?”
“Only two,” I recalled at once. “ ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I know for a fact’ . . .”
“So which is it?”
“ ‘I don’t know’ is my answer.”
“Then find out. We’re clear?”
“Clear as a bell,” I said, perspiration trickling down my back.
“Sorry to be testy, but we’re under the gun,” he explained. “I also need you to focus on a weaponized aerosol for now, perhaps our Graco paint sprayer or a kid’s hydrosoaker. I’m thinking you, Jhonny, the Marchioness, and Hoppalong . . . I want a potent insect killer with additives of dextrose monohydrate, chlorpyrifos, aluminum salts, and peanut butter.”
“Nasty. Weaponized corn syrup and insecticide . . . ?” I said.
“A little extra green energy and killing power,” he replied. “Empty the soft drink fountain dispenser in the bunkhouse cantina. Mrs. Johnson will know what to do and how to mix the whole concoction with emulsifiers and saturated vegetable oils . . . and also maybe add a malodor function, something stinky that a Lectroid might like.”
With difficulty I swallowed my pride, as well as my inherent objection to putting my imprimatur, as it were, upon what promised to be a dreadful killing tool, and I merely replied, “I’ll get right on it. With any luck we can design a cheap, functional apparatus that anyone can use. I’ll even throw in a mess of heavy metals and free radicals to maximize oxidative DNA damage.”
“You’re right, Reno,” he said with the merest trace of a smile. “I don’t like killing any better than you, but neither are we a rug to walk over. What have we come to if we don’t defend our home for future generations? If need be, we’ll give these wind-up monkeys a hot welcome they won’t forget.”
Indeed, the future of our beloved Mother Earth was at stake, so now was not the time to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves or our enemies, much less debate ethical niceties. Although we knew next to nothing about the inhabitants of the planetoid, the example of John Whorfin—a Red Lectroid known for his vile atrocities against all comers—predisposed us to expect the same belligerence from these new arrivals. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” as always, was a sapient motto, along with Tommy’s corollary: “Hope means Jack and shite, and Jack left town.”
Our confirmation bias in this regard doubtless reflected our growing frustration from circular discussions that went nowhere. It also did not help—and here I can only speak for my own working group (Hoppalong, Pilgrim Woman, the Marchioness, and Pinky Carruthers)—that Buckaroo’s own thoughts were mostly kept from us, revealed only in our daily general sessions, when he listened to the ideas all the chavrusas had managed to generate . . .
. . . such as the possibility of Buckaroo traveling via another dimension to Planet 10 for a face-to-face meeting with John Emdall Thunderpump, who was thought to favor him. But as Buckaroo explained to Li’l Daughter—whose suggestion it was—the odds of the operation actually succeeding loomed impossibly long, especially on a first attempt, given that one had to consider not only distance and our dearth of information about Planet 10’s erratic behavior but also the Earth’s rotational and orbital speeds, not to mention the rotational speed of the Milky Way and our galaxy’s own velocity through space.
“Keep in mind, even if I were certain of Planet 10’s location and somehow devised a flight plan through the proper bog hole”—he did his best to explain to us bemused, puzzled listeners—“remote-control guidance doesn’t work from one dimension to another. Navigation is strictly by the seat of my pants and three orthogonal accelerometers, as well as certain vibration techniques I’ve learned through trial and error . . .”
“Not much room for error if you miss the exit ramp,” Tommy blurted after a good laugh, thereby exacting a stern look from Buckaroo . . . who continued:
“Thanks, Tom. What I’m getting at is that I may well miss the proper portal, which can be no larger than a crack in a sidewalk, or else I get through and find it a one-way pivot, expecting to arrive at Planet 10, only to learn I overshot and there’s no way back.”
“You mean even the tiniest variance in trajectory could throw you off by a million miles and a dimension or two,” gushed Mrs. Johnson, who arrived just at that moment with a tray of caramel flan and crumb cake.
“Not only that,” said Buckaroo, “but emotional information also affects the electromagnetic field. I can’t explain yet why this is so, but I’ve learned that a shift in my emotions produces a marked effect on vibrating corpuscles and wave-particle duality, as measured by my new, improved SQUID . . .”
“So feelings, not facts?” asked Pilgrim Woman, our new genomics researcher and reigning Guitar Hero champion.
“Feelings are facts,” answered Buckaroo, “in the same way that words left unspoken are still words. They may only exist in the rearview mirror, however.”
“Your squid, Buckaroo . . . ? Is that what I think it is?” said Mrs. Johnson, still butting in.
“My superconducting quantum interference device,” Buckaroo tried to explain . . .
. . . as Tommy interrupted to clarify, “Consisting of a tunnel-barrier sandwich . . .”
. . . whereupon Mrs. Johnson appeared to experience a frisson of delight and declared, “I love it when you talk about tunnels and your squid thruster, and especially the power of our feelings, Buckaroo—”
“It’s a mite more complicated than that,” Buckaroo said with a slight grimace.
“Complicated, my rear end,” she replied, “even if it is only a starting point for further investigation—which we may learn somehow ties in with the hermetic principle of vibration.”
“As well as the Buddhist—a logistical nightmare, but essentially you’re correct, Eunice. What my gizmo, the oscillation overthruster, does is twofold,” he said with a childlike gleam in his eyes. “It simultaneously synchronizes and amplifies submicroscopic wave energy below the electron level while also shooting subatomic tachyons, exciting the oscillating frequency of dark energy, and loosening attractors at different energy levels, creating a waterfall effect and allowing the superslick Jet Car to acquire negative mass and pass through resistance—vibrating solid matter—on a single Bose-Einstein macrowave that interestingly enough produces the high beat frequency and complex waveforms characteristic of motile eukaryotic organelles. Of course it’s not quite that simple . . .”
“This is so much fun,” Mrs. Johnson interrupted in her husky smoker’s voice, albeit in the same lighthearted vein.
“You mean to say that you pass through solid matter vibrating at the frequency of subunits of living cells? Cilia, flagella, and all that?” Lady Asquith-Gillette inquired in her upper-crust Oxbridge accent.
Buckaroo nodded, saying, “A very Buddhist notion, no, Marchioness? Everything vibrating as one, perhaps allowing us passage through . . .”
“Peace and love, indeed,” I said.
Of course there was also the variable of interdimensional slippage or leakage to consider, a phenomenon Buckaroo described in this way: “Think of the multiverse as a giant onion or a series of concave circles . . .”
“You get onion rings with that?” wisecracked Li’l Daughter.
“All you can eat and the best you ever had,” replied Buckaroo in the same bright spirit. “That’s why I prefer to visit the Fifth Dimension, a field of retained experience I call the Book of Life, where every traveler is on familiar ground.”
“The Fifth is like a scrapbook,” Mrs. Johnson explained proudly, “containing everything you ever did, right, Buckaroo? The Sixth is like your rusty altered memory, the Seventh your ideal fantasy, and the Eighth . . .”
“The Eighth . . . the highest rung of heaven or bottom rung of hell,” Buckaroo mused. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Li’l Daughter couldn’t resist mouthing the credo herself. “The only thing . . .”
“The depth of your soul crushed under the weight of your doubts,” he continued. “A sacred domain beyond the comprehension of any who’ve never seen it. Black and trackless, and cold, without pattern or form . . . no up, no down, just expansive nothingness that lends itself to greater velocity if you can stick to your course. A fellow can get lost pretty easy, especially if he has car trouble . . .”
Here he opened a drawer and produced what looked to be a miniature overthruster duct taped to an automatic .22 caliber pistol, a bottle of bubble liquid, and a modified Ryobi power pack, saying, “I’ve been working on a little something . . . haven’t quite worked the bugs out . . . oops!”
In a veritable split second, we all reacted to a gunshot and a superheated strobe beam that suddenly crackled from the device and blasted a hole in the ceiling, raining down plaster.
“Sweet hellacious Jesus!” Mrs. Johnson yelped, still with fingers in her ears despite the fact that the mini sonic booms and the blinding ray of light had ceased almost as soon as they had begun. “What the—?”
“A sonoluminescent beam, Mrs. Johnson,” Buckaroo elucidated. “Basically light resulting from microbubbles of sound and excited to a temperature hotter than the sun, produced by a mega-kilovolt battery and a miniature overthruster. I call it a Bubble Gun.”
“I’ll be got-damn—that’s one serious ass-kicking .22,” Tommy marveled, as Buckaroo carefully reaimed the device at a life-size human torso of ballistic gel and pressed the trigger, igniting another blinding blast that caused the torso to smoke and vibrate and then dissolve into what appeared to be a swirl of invisible syrup. In fact, except for a flurry of dancing dots before our eyes, it seemed the whole world had vanished in a heartbeat, except for the smell.
“Where’s everything gone?! I can’t see! Anybody else?” Tommy shouted.
“Did we croak?” said Pecos. “Smells like something dead, rancid!”
“What are those little specks banging together? Surely not big mosquitoes?” the Marchioness wanted to know.
“Not mosquitoes, Lady G,” Buckaroo replied. “You’re looking at fading electron bursts, my tracer bullets in the Eighth Dimension . . . sorry for the skunky smell.”
“Sorry . . . ? My stars, the alt-universe! Seeing it with my own eyes!” exclaimed the noblewoman with awestruck reverence . . .
. . . as our vision and the room now returned to their prior normal state, except for several jagged bullet holes in the ballistic-gel torso and the wall behind it, leaving Buckaroo to attempt to explain. “Still doesn’t feel right. It’s a bad job—still learning some hard lessons—but it could make a great little tool in a pinch. If nothing else, you’ve all seen that when we think of solid objects, we’re actually just imagining things.”
“And the wallpaper! Look!” Li’l Daughter exclaimed with glee, pointing at the bullet holes in the wall. “You peeled it away, Buckaroo, just like we were talking about! Are you telling us you could walk through that wall?”
“Walk? Not recommended. Only if I had a jet thruster, perhaps,” cautioned Buckaroo.
But, unable to resist, Tommy now rushed toward the wall in question, saying, “Hello. I’m tired of reality lying to me.”
Then, without another word, he ran smack into solid matter, giving us all a needed laugh and a welcome dose of common sense.
Small wonder that, even today, these discussion sessions are crystal clear in my mind’s eye. Some dozen of us are seated cross-legged on tatami mats (though Tommy often occupied the lone winged club chair, complaining of soreness) . . . while our chief kneels, seiza-style, at a low shittah wood table in front of several plastic milk bins full of fan mail, a rack of antique katana swords, an upright piano, and his enormous cabinet housing anthropological specimens from around the world: particularly shrunken heads, pickled brains, and a collection of abnormal human skulls. Too, out of the corner of my eye, I see the cats—Penny’s fluffy calico Gertrude Stein and Buckaroo’s black-and-white Tux—curled up together on a windowsill between a colorful mix of Indian corn and cut flowers in kutani porcelain. Next to them, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase is chock-a-block with vintage pistols, his mother’s Arriflex 35 mm camera, and an eclectic selection of volumes: The Prince, the Encyclopédie, The Art of War, essayists on the order of Bacon, Mandeville, Marcus Aurelius, Li Zongwu, and a range of Chinese and Japanese poetry from Du Fu and Li Bai to Basho, along with others with whom I am regrettably less familiar. Leather-bound first editions include Dumas (père) and Walter Scott, Lavoisier’s Elementary Treatise, Newton’s Principia Mathematica . . . while in a special illuminated shelf of honor reside works by various of Buckaroo’s friends and lovers (Kristeva and Nussbaum, among others) and Galileo’s famous “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.”
The walls themselves are mostly bare, both by his choice and because his medals, photographs, gold and platinum records, honorary degrees, and other memorabilia are displayed in the visitors’ center. Here in his intimate study, we see only an honorary Hiroshima Carp baseball jersey, a few Currier & Ives prints of frontier scenes alongside a Virgin of Guadalupe, a Grandma Moses, an old lithograph of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin, and a triad of nobori streamers with kanji letters. The first of these, a stark black-and-white flag, carries a single message in three parts:
at peace until disturbed
we will fight
by the rules of ancient liberty
On the second appears the legend progress over protocol. And on the third, the four sides of a black diamond in a white field are formed by the words farmer, artisan, scholar, warrior.
Taken together, the three banners capture the essence of who we are—although to the military brass and government nomenklatura in the Pentagon and elsewhere, we represent the late entry in the race; yet it would be up to us, coming from behind, to bring benefit to the world community and, with luck, even save the planet from the enigmatic alien race known as Lectroids, of one sort or another.
To achieve that end, however, we needed solid leads to pursue; and the first of these came to us in the form of a plain envelope bearing a Vatican postage stamp, a woman’s fine handwriting, and no return address. Inside were pictures of a blank-looking Lectroid and photocopies of a pair of highly unusual invoices revealing that a total of “35 Lectroids . . . assorted partial Lectroids and Lectroid products” had been sold for “1,000 liquid greens” (most likely $100,000 cash) to something called the “Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.”
“That’s precious,” I said, examining the photocopies. “Can this be real?”
“Why not the Knights of Columbus, while they’re at it . . . ?” remarked Tommy. “Could always be a fake, but I guess it’s worth checking.”
“Could be legit, Reno,” added Buckaroo thoughtfully. “I recall a report going around a couple of months back that one of the Bulgarian Army’s old Shilkas was stolen by a similar chivalric order . . . and never recovered. A similar story with that surface-to-air missile system stolen off a freight train in Belgium not too long ago . . .”
“Probably happens more than we know,” remarked Pecos.
“A Shilka,” I said, recalling from memory a page from Jane’s Defence Review. “Russian: a ZSU 23-4, zenitnaya samokhodnaya ustanovka . . . mobile antiaircraft gun . . . actually four autocannons on a modified light amphibious tank. A moldy oldie, but probably still lethal enough, even without being converted to a TEL for a SAM pod.”
Buckaroo nodded and pointed to some scribbling at the bottom of the second receipt.
“Notice the sloppy shorthand . . . ‘services of Abbot Costello for issues large and small,’ in addition to the hundred grand, signed by the Marquis of Lincoln,” Buckaroo said, trying to keep a straight face. “Not the first time we’ve heard that name or seen this handwriting.”
“General Wagoneer . . .” Pecos correctly guessed. “Bizarro. I wonder if Pope Innocent knows anything about this Abbot Costello.”
There was an easy enough way to find out. With one hand Buckaroo now reached for his phone and placed a call to the pope’s private mobile number, and with the other he released several of his prized Japanese hunting crickets from their bamboo cage. These appeared to amuse him no end as they went hopping merrily across his desk, traversing numerous maps and drawings of fanciful mechanical devices in the style of Leonardo. Elsewhere amid the clutter sat bottles of various colors and a miniature distilling outfit with a rack of test tubes, Buckaroo’s morning coffee and brandy, a few broken lumps of Mrs. Johnson’s black bread, a mathematical proof that he appeared to be midway through, the disassembled pieces of a Walther pistol, and a short stack of books, among them a musty old volume of Virgil in the Latin and a fine leather edition of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair that transported me back to the day he purchased it from a bookseller along the Seine in Paris.
“Strange,” Buckaroo interrupted as if he hadn’t heard us, abruptly hanging up the phone after several minutes of silence. “Getting hung up on by a rude somebody after ten minutes of the Vatican’s medieval on-hold music. I never had trouble getting through to Pope Innocent before.”
“Maybe he’s out watching over his flock,” suggested Pecos.
“Or kicking back and sipping a cold one,” joked Tommy.
“Let’s hope one of you is right,” Buckaroo said. “Truth be told, perhaps the pope merely misplaced his phone or left it in his other robe. The incendiary individual who answered his phone wasn’t exactly helpful. Yet another anonymous psychopath.”
Absorbed in deeper matters, he now peered off into the ether and said, “The situation in which we find ourselves is strange. Waiting for some startling bit of information, feeling in subjection to an unseen menace, an invisible authority that is threatening to destroy us. But let’s say Lizardo is indeed dead and we capture John Whorfin, assuming he still exists but in some other corporeal form . . . then what?”
“We kill him,” said Tommy. “Phawk being a gentleman.”
“And the gentleman, or woman or child or animal, whose body he might presently inhabit?” Buckaroo asked. “How do you split them?”
“I don’t know and I’m not real belly-ached about it,” Tommy retorted with a shrug. “Maybe just unstaple them . . . or with a machete or a chainsaw, after he’s dead.”
“After who’s dead?” Buckaroo pressed.
“After they’re both dead. Get a grip, Buckaroo,” said Tommy. “We’re talking about saving the planet, so what’s one life—?”
“One planet versus one life,” Buckaroo pondered, turning the question over in his mind while pretending to accept Tommy’s argument. “Even in survival mode, it’s important not to lose sight of our principles. And what makes us think we can trust the word of someone who threatens to destroy our world, killing billions? What’s to say they won’t blow us up anyway? If they would kill a planet, what’s a lie to them?”
“Good point, Buckaroo,” I cut in. “But isn’t doing nothing the far greater risk? I don’t see that we have that luxury, especially if we’re just a fun-size snack for these guys in their mighty warship. What are our options, really?”
Buckaroo nodded and framed the question as a thought experiment: “What if we captured Whorfin—let us say alone and in his pure form—and I gave him the key to the Jet Car, so that he could leave Earth? What incentive would his enemies have to destroy us, then?”
“Maybe because it’d be one sick twist that would royally piss off the space monkeys,” surmised Tommy. “Why not just tell everybody in the world to put all their belongings on the front porch so the thieves can have easy pickings and maybe leave us alone . . . ?”
“Bringing me back to my original point of why we should trust them,” Buckaroo said. “Or jump to their every string pull . . .”
“Or, by the same logic, why take the Nova Police seriously,” I pointed out.
“Does their mere word cut it, in other words?” echoed Mrs. Johnson, who had remained in the room to listen. “I hate liars. That stuff really heats me up.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Johnson,” Buckaroo said. “But Reno is probably right. Given the existential nature of the threat against us and the technological disparity between our two species, I suppose we have to trust the Nova Police report on the ship’s stated intentions . . .”
“I could bring up more points but I don’t have one,” Tommy said.
Buckaroo nodded without comment and continued, “At the moment, as I see it, we have three big problems: the rumored spaceship, the illegal transfer of Jet Car technology and possible Lectroid biomatter to parties unknown . . . and the whereabouts of . . . Whorfin.”
He had very nearly said “Penny” before correcting himself, and serious strain was evident on his face. “Of these, the priority is naturally Whorfin, but, as we all know, to unravel one secret usually helps unravel another.”
“There’s also the shitbird law,” remarked Tommy. “Every shitbird has a left and a right wing, thereby giving each wing plausible deniability. But they’re both stirring the punch bowl of shite—mark my words. Something phawked up is going down.”
“Very astute, Tommy,” Buckaroo said. “Something like the magpie theory, then . . . digging up whatever goodies we can use from different places to build tiers of information. It is certainly possible that either of the other trails—the stolen Jet Car docs or the Lectroid body bits—might lead us to Whorfin, if he is in fact still with us, as well as his human counterpart, Hanoi Xan. But at this point it appears the only common link between the two is the man who may have opened this can of worms in the first place, General Wagoneer . . .”
“Stewing in his own dark juices, with zero self-esteem,” Mrs. Johnson observed astutely. “Bound on a hellish crusade to wreak vengeance . . . on himself.”
“That’s the way I read it, too,” said Buckaroo. “I’m afraid what he really wants is a ticket home, a painless death.”
Their assessment was certainly valid. Wild Bill Wagoneer’s past was littered with failed relationships, if we were to believe his story; but that was precisely the question: how far to trust him? We could be forgiven for being naturally wary, but what choice did we have but to care for him and nurse his festering psyche along?
Certain of our doubts were answered a few days later when Wagoneer was “heart-checked” by Mrs. Johnson—by which I mean she took a ruler to his knuckles, took away his lunch and finally his dinner, before he decided to stick up for himself and “pitched a bitch,” as she put it. With a small group of us hooting and hollering, the two of them wrestled out by the old chuck wagon and at one point appeared to simulate animal sex—with Mrs. Johnson on top—before ultimately calling it a draw.
“Get your fat-ass carcass off me,” protested the general.
“He’s a scrapper, he’s got heart,” Mrs. Johnson announced, giving a thumbs-up verdict. “He’ll do.”