We have nowhere else to go . . . this is all we have.
—Margaret Mead
At the risk of stating the obvious, the fishbowl effect of life in the Imperial City dictated that Buckaroo and the president meet out of view of the public eye. To do otherwise—given the glare of publicity—would be uncomfortable and counterproductive for everyone, except perhaps the president’s normal cheerleading squad, who enjoy such media stunts; but to Buckaroo Banzai, who gets hit with twenty questions everywhere he goes, such attention is unwelcome, even less so when the world teeters on the edge of oblivion.
Of course this was entirely my own thought process regarding the seriousness of the present threat, based upon what little information I was able to glean as our government car—with what looked like a shotgun hole in the windshield—wound its way through the white-sepulchered city, past soaring monuments to the greatest Americans, and Tommy grumbled, “Which building is the Ministry of Truth and Love? And where are all the public serpents, the resident gutter rats with Samsonite briefcases full of brother-in-law deals?”
“We can disagree without disagreeableness, Tom,” cautioned Pecos.
“Is there anything we can do about it, Tommy? Do we hold the whip of power in this country?” I reminded him and watched him struggle mentally.
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I’m gonna look deeper into this shit.”
Buckaroo meanwhile traded calls with Postmaster General Mantooth and Jill of All Trades at World Watch One, the nerve center of our worldwide intelligence net back at the Institute. From these snippets I was able to form a pair of tentative conclusions: our immediate task had to do with stolen Jet Car technology, and Buckaroo was growing angrier by the minute, directing his ire at more government agencies than I even knew existed.
Thankfully, I was not the target of his wrath (which I have discussed already), but as his trusted secretary and sometime amanuensis, I sat directly opposite him on the ride in from Andrews Base and felt the weight of his worries as he juggled text messages on both of his handhelds.
“Want to talk about it . . . ?” I ventured, point blank. “How much trouble are we in?”
“A world of it, looks like,” he said, going on to relate how a disgraced high-ranking American military officer was accused of transmitting to the World Crime League classified data having to do with our research into dark-energy velocity fields and interdimensional nexuses, ambiguity bits, and the oscillation overthruster tachyon generator, along with blueprints of the Jet Car and its superslick, antielectromagnetic molecular coating.
“The whole kitchen sink, bugged by technology, in other words,” Pecos groaned. “Do we have a name?”
“Just his initials, which I make out as General William Wagoneer, commander of Nellis Air Force Base, home of Area 51. Our number one fan . . .”
“You know him?” asked Pecos.
“He’s written me a ton of fan letters over the years,” Buckaroo said. “I’ll go so far as to say he thinks he’s me. He thinks he shot down John Whorfin.”
“What? And he’s in charge of top-secret Area 51?” Pecos erupted in disbelief. “That’s outrageous! He needs to be put down like a rabid dog. How is such a thing even possible?”
“Bunch of government buzzards blowing smoke up our ass, in other words,” interjected Tommy. “Any of this ring a bell? It’s only about the hundredth time we’ve had this conversation. You don’t think a traitorous sleeper mole, maybe one of our own . . .”
Irritated by the suggestion, Buckaroo said, “Anybody in mind, Tom?”
“Start with that keyboard player who turned out to be ATF or that crazy runaway who jumped into the hog pit . . .”
“Or the same people who put spyware in our Wi-Fi and have been cutting our fences and our cables,” piped up Pecos.
“Yeah, creepy Webmaster Jhonny needs to go. Not a good fit,” said Tommy.
“You’re wrong, Tommy—Jhonny’s a good man. Let’s not have any witch hunts,” Buckaroo cautioned . . .
. . . as Tommy demurred and peered out the window at the Capitol dome, grumbling, “The corridors of power . . . ha, ha . . . nothing but snakes, lizard lobbyists, and fat cats, thieves with briefcases, armchair quarterbacks, and pencil pushers. I don’t even know why we come here . . .”
“Because the pot goes to the kettle, not vice versa,” Buckaroo explained. “When we heard reports that the Pentagon was trying to hack into our networks and was sneaking spies into the Institute to steal the blueprints for the Jet Car and the oscillation overthruster, I didn’t want to believe it, despite the fact that I felt in my bones something was amiss and the signs were there . . . such as that small detail of a pretty good knockoff overthruster for sale in that Spanish bazaar a while back. But when we asked for help from the intelligence community, I was given the runaround . . . their usual strategy of lullabying you to sleep, then back-shooting you because that’s the way it’s done in this town—making a mess and then denying authorship.”
“A mess of historical proportions . . . thousand-dollar hammers and toilet seats,” Tommy reminded us. “I think we all know where that money went. Hanoi Xan must be laughing his ass off.”
“Yeah, of all the deceitful . . . power-tripping leeches,” muttered Pecos. “But we were ninety-nine percent sure no one got through our cybersecurity safeguards.”
“True,” said Buckaroo, “but there’s always the one percent, and the one hundred percent chance we don’t know what we don’t know. And then the Jet Car crash . . . the disappearance of the wrecked oscillation overthruster, not necessarily due to souvenir hunters.”
“Reverse engineering?” I suggested. “From Uncle Sam? Perish the thought . . .”
Buckaroo ruminated long and hard before answering, “So many rumors . . . and overall ignorance . . .”
Tommy continued to seethe, declaring, “Lying polecats don’t sit well with me. Spying is stealing, and body snatchers are the lowest . . .”
When Buckaroo flashed a twinge of pain, Tommy corrected himself just in time: “There’s nothing lower than scurrilous officials abusing their power.”
“Pathetic drivel from the mouths and egos of the high and the mighty predatory cronies,” added Li’l Daughter in her Bavarian accent. “By now it’s practically in their DNA.”
“Whose DNA?” Pecos wanted to know. “That’s the question. How high does it go? Even President Monroe?”
“And how much info could they have gotten?” I wondered aloud.
“The Jet Car’s supervinyl wrap and smart-grid timing belt?”
“A lot but not everything,” Buckaroo speculated, pointing at his head as the ultimate storehouse. “My hunch is even President Monroe is not altogether aware . . .”
“Not hard to believe. He was probably medicated from the get-go,” suggested Pecos.
“Not the brightest bulb,” I agreed.
“Probably couldn’t pour piss out of a boot,” said Tommy. “Or feed himself if you dropped him in the middle of a farmers’ market.”
“Enough, Tommy,” Buckaroo objected. “He’s a decent man, but without getting into palace intrigues, it’s possible the wolves are running the show without him.”
His furrowed brow and cowboy hat were reflected in the limousine’s supposedly bulletproof glass, a self-image he studied briefly in restless contemplation; or perhaps he was looking beyond the smoked glass at hot dog carts, bottled-water vendors, and sidewalks full of bundled-up homeless and tourists in Bermuda shorts. Whatever he saw when he turned back and scrolled simultaneously through hypertext on both handhelds, it became apparent that the bad news was getting worse.
At one point I thought I heard him mutter, “Lizardo . . . ?” But this was only a momentary lapse in his intense concentration, as I noticed that in addition to our conversation, he was intently watching a baseball game on his mobile. Broadcast in Japanese, the translation now came to us, courtesy of Buckaroo: “Bottom of the ninth . . . two out, Naruta batting . . . Otagiri on the mound . . . hurls a splitter. Damn the day! Damn you roundly, Naruta, and the day you were born! Damn his eyes . . . long live the Hiroshima Carp . . .”
“I wouldn’t know a Hiroshima carp from a Louisiana catfish,” said Tommy.
Buckaroo merely let his head droop and lamented, “A ninth-inning home run. The Giants win. Down goes Hiroshima, plummeting out of first place.”
“I’m sorry, Buckaroo,” I said. “But it’s just one game in a long season. Find strength.”
“Right, no sense wallowing,” he admitted, at the precise moment his second phone, his most private number, suddenly jangled loudly with an avalanche of dissonant ringtones I had never heard before; nor, may I say, had Buckaroo, who stared at the message screen in amazement.
“Something rotten in Denmark . . . ?” I heard him mutter.
“What is it, Buckaroo?” I asked; and precisely at that instant what appeared to be a blinding apparition burst forth from his device, causing Buckaroo to drop the glowing phone like a hot rock and shield his eyes from its intense light that did not seem to be a hologram, but rather a more tangible presence, like a flesh-and-blood visitation. Squinting through my fingers, I beheld a shimmering form—vaguely female and humanoid, save for her splay-toed, furry feet—who wore the angular headgear and costume of the Nova Police.
“Greetings from the Secretariat of Nova Police to Buckaroo Banzai, remarkable luminary of blue horizons and fullness of vigor whose deeds are surely immortal,” the apparition began and now flashed an electronic badge. “May you enjoy ease of heart and days of joy in these end times.”
“What?! End times?” Tommy interjected, momentarily drowning out the mysterious visitor’s voice. “Shut up!”
“No, you, Tommy! Be quiet!” ordered Buckaroo.
The emissary continued: “This is a high-level information bulletin that is not open to replies. Please save time by not replying . . .”
Strangely, the otherworldly messenger now turned by coincidence in Tommy’s direction and demanded to know, “Who is the hothead? I request respect.”
In point of fact, however, the hologram was not interactive and to the keen eye displayed a fair amount of buffering, lacking the capability to respond to our comments. Instead it merely continued with the prepared script.
“You do not know how much trouble you are in. Why this warning knock on Buckaroo Banzai’s door, of all doors? Why Buckaroo Banzai, amid a dwindling pool of honorable humans, who combines cunning with a first-class scientific knowledge and has more than a nodding acquaintance with the criminal fugitive John Whorfin? Tough and tenacious Buckaroo Banzai, whose brain is his weapon, who lives virtue in his daily life, values hard work, and encourages good citizenship . . .”
“Yes, yes . . . the fairy tales, everything good and perfect in the world . . . but let’s not beat a dead horse,” Buckaroo said impatiently, objecting to such profuse flattery.
“. . . yet who failed to put an end to John Whorfin . . .” the message continued, prompting Buckaroo to jump nearly out of his seat.
“Failed to put an end to Whorfin . . . ? Confound you! What are you talking about?” Buckaroo pressed adamantly . . .
. . . as Tommy again interrupted, shouting, “Shite on a sheet, Buck! Careful! For all we know, Hanoi Xan sent this joker!”
“Information lately come to us. I have the extreme displeasure to inform Buckaroo Banzai that real terror comes by attack from Planet 10, a single man-o’-war siege vessel and planet destroyer, largest of the Planet 10 attack planetoids with pos-ion torpedoes, has entered your near beyond, on the rumor that the shadow of John Whorfin yet lives and is waiting in the wings, a free subject in your world—”
“!”
“What?” we ejaculated nearly in unison.
“Then the rumor is wrong,” an astonished Buckaroo exclaimed. “In what hell or alternative universe is John Whorfin alive?”
“I speak of a war party of several million strike-master Lectroids of the mottled ringneck variety . . .”
“Several million . . . what? ‘Strike masters’ . . . ?” Buckaroo demanded to know.
“Traveling under charter from the Virgin Empress John Emdall, who has detected a sighting of the animal Whorfin and will herself do the monumental work of destroying his genetic information and every Earth mammalian . . . without a doubt. This is the full truth I am given to report, without adding particulars. Godspeed—whatever that means. You do not know the first thing about terror.”
With that parting shot, the visitor froze in front of our eyes, leaving us miserable witnesses to rave and carry on under the weight of her words.
“Hell, she’s flaky as pie crust. You’ve got a smart mouth, lady!” Tommy scoffed and aimed his middle finger at her and the universe in general. “No way this thing’s on the up and up! It’s pure devilment, phony to the phoniest!”
“A phony-baloney,” concurred Li’l Daughter of the Rhine. “Isn’t that what you mean, Tommy? A scam of some sort? Some phony-baloney going on?”
And I had my own doubts, thinking out loud, “Virgin Empress John Emdall . . . ? The same John Emdall who . . . ?”
“John Whorfin’s archnemesis on Planet 10,” Buckaroo recalled, still uncertain whether his comments were reaching the now mute and motionless oracle.
“That’s idiotic,” I objected. “A damnable lie!”
“I say we don’t pay any attention—now I’m plain-ass mad!” swore Tommy, who, ever loyal to Buckaroo, suddenly launched himself blindly at the emissary with the intention of throttling her . . . but managed to grasp only a handful of air.
“Tommy, Son of Thunder! Sit down!” demanded Buckaroo.
“Yeah, Tommy!” yelled Pecos. “It ever occur to you this might be important . . . as in a scary situation?!”
“I could give a red rat’s ass!” Tommy retorted. “Makes me want to break something!”
“Can you hear me? Are you still there? How can I reach you?” Buckaroo was still asking the lifeless figure hovering in midair. “What if we capture John Whorfin? Is there a way to reach John Emdall?”
Suddenly, without so much as a sound, the image of the messenger vanished, leaving us to look at one another with the stark realization that we were alone . . . and on our own.
“Talk about the long arm of the law,” Tommy piped up, voicing our collective sentiment. “I’ll be got-damn. Like a bad replay come to life.”
“And a lack of imagination,” noted Buckaroo, who gingerly picked up the overheated phone and still looked deeply worried. “If true, John Emdall has fallen once again into a Thucydides trap and gone into mad attack mode, envisioning John Whorfin as Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Harry Houdini all rolled into one.”
“Our old friend John Emdall,” Pecos mused. “Surprise, surprise . . .”
“How did the Nova Police get Buckaroo’s private number?” I wondered aloud.
“Maybe they know everything,” Pecos surmised. “If they can send a message across billions of miles . . .”
“Easy,” said Tommy. “Hot energy always goes to a cold spot, and Buckaroo’s the coolest dude on the planet.”
“I think I got it all, at least most of it,” I said, passing Buckaroo my Go-Phone, which I had found the presence to switch on during all the excitement.
“I’m guessing astral projection of an extremely high mental order or, as the message said, a Nova Police quantum network bouncing a signal off the magnetosphere, either through a Chinese server farm or induction loop antennas buried in the pavement beneath us,” Buckaroo replied, simultaneously attempting to reach the return phone number of the caller on his own device.
“Is the number not archived, Buckaroo?” questioned Li’l Daughter.
“Oh, it’s archived,” Buckaroo confirmed with obvious irritation, holding the phone carefully up to his ear.
“A sex talk hotline wanting credit card info . . .”
“Phawking sweet,” Tommy said. “That explains it . . . we’ve been spoofed, scammed, trolled, whatever. Either that, or it’s maybe time to buy gold . . . put our assets in precious metals, like lead bullets.”
It was a simplistic explanation we were eager to grasp. “Tommy’s right,” I asserted, though it pained me to agree. “How do we know someone’s not putting one over on us? Some kind of mind games. How could John Whorfin be alive? In which case, are we talking about Emilio Lizardo being alive, too? At the ripe old age of what? A hundred and some odd . . . ?”
“Extremely odd,” said Pecos.
Tommy proceeded, “I’m just spitballin’, but this whole Lectroid posse . . . how much damage can one ship do to a whole planet?”
“Do we want to find out?” asked a pensive Buckaroo. “And perhaps not just one ship—a large man-o’-war, probably a mother ship—but most likely carrying a fleet of smaller attack pods.”
Still fiddling with his other handheld device, Buckaroo added, “Of course, you could all be right. It’s too early to dismiss any possibility, and the possibility of a hack or a prank—someone stirring the pot and trying to rattle us—was certainly going through my mind as well; but I can think of no explanation for what just happened, other than an astral-traveling Nova cop sent to warn us about that mystery planetoid, whose existence we first posited mathematically after months of tedious work . . .”
“My God, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Pecos, “but the mystery object does seem to have jumped like a flea and left Saturn’s orbit. Could it be the Lectroid man-o’-war?”
“Or could it be the source of the astral messenger,” I conjectured aloud, “begging the question: if the Nova Police are aware of the threat to us, why did they wait so long? Why don’t they do more to help?”
“Anything’s possible, Reno, although you’re assuming they possess the means to do so. You’re also assuming we matter or that we even merit an explanation in a galaxy with billions of planets. It’s hard to imagine an interstellar sheriff. There’s a big difference between sending a warship vast distances and a simple warning by quantum packet or psychic wave, perhaps amplified and bounced off cellphone towers, mimicking a phone call to my private number,” Buckaroo went on, studying his revolutionary full-spectrum Go-Phone and its impressive array of electronic tools. “On a frequency of fifty-one point five hertz . . .”
“Fifty-one point five . . . ?” Pecos said. “No wonder I didn’t see it. My extrasensory spectrum sucks.”
“Mine’s pretty damn good,” Tommy insisted with typical bluster. “Nothing much gets by me.”
“Except fifty-one hertz,” I pointed out. “You’re not synchronized, obviously.”
“Why do you think they call it Area 51?” said Tommy.
“And the same incline angle as the Great Pyramid at Giza,” Li’l Daughter recalled.
“. . . above the range of ordinary neuronal firing but within the realm of expanded consciousness,” Buckaroo explained. “Think of a dog whistle. But how did they get my private number? Only a handful of people have it. If bad actors are behind this, they’re plenty good.”
Pecos added, “We could run to the government, but why do I feel they might be involved in this for their own purposes?”
“Not cool,” Tommy said. “Definitely not cool.”
“All vital points, from all of you,” said Buckaroo, “but, given the stakes, we have to assume the worst-case scenario and get a handle on it. Where do we begin to look for an Italian centenarian with an alien alter ego?”
Indeed, our heated discussion kept coming back to the crucial New Jersey resurrection story . . . and Buckaroo was talking mainly to himself: “Unfortunately, we didn’t have control of the crash site; but based on what I saw, the intense fire that enveloped Whorfin’s ship would have incinerated every trace of life, although perhaps not every scrap of burnt carcass, due to the Lectroids’ hard protein coating which might carry their genome and twisted DNA, in addition to their microRNA . . . I suppose theoretically it could have transferred horizontally when Whorfin and Lizardo melded in the Eighth Dimension . . .”
“And all this time we’ve just been sitting around, doing nothing in good conscience,” Pecos groaned . . .
. . . as Buckaroo continued his musings. “Let’s not forget that according to our old pal New Jersey, his uncle Ira actually managed to retrieve a piece of alien tissue before the feds moved in and swept the area clean . . .”
“Alien tissue . . . ?” said Li’l Daughter. “You mean a piece of a Lectroid? How in the Sam Hill . . . ?”
“New Jersey’s uncle lived near ground zero, and smoking Lectroid meat landed on his patio,” Pecos explained to the young German. “But he was a well-known UFO geek and a heavy drinker, so no one took him seriously, even when he tried to sell the stuff in town. Then when Uncle Ira died, Sidney stumbled upon the sample in his garage and did the responsible thing as a medical professional by calling the Health Department. But after that, his life changed. His home and office were broken into, and he started getting wiretapped and shadowed everywhere he went, forcing him eventually, for his own peace of mind, to accept an invitation from the Vienna Boys’ Choir to become its musical director . . .”
“That’s all true,” Buckaroo verified.
“And he claimed the US government continued to stalk him and the whole choir,” I said.
“Rumor had it,” Buckaroo reiterated, “although I may have simply come to believe the story, having heard it so many times . . . perhaps like the aerial dogfight itself . . .”
“What? But, Buckaroo, you saved the Earth!” we exclaimed unanimously. “We all saw you blast Whorfin’s ship out of the sky over Yoyodyne . . . blew it from here to Hades.”
“Did I?” he commented evasively. “Maybe in some dimension. Who can say for sure?”
“Then some special effect . . . ?” Tommy suggested. “Maybe we only imagined the whole thing. Damned ironic . . . shades of the Orson Welles radio broadcast, in which imaginary Martians landed in New Jersey . . .”
“But they weren’t imaginary,” Pecos said, reminding Li’l Daughter of the epic radio hoax orchestrated by “the traitor Welles.”
“Traitor?” questioned Li’l Daughter. “The great Orson Welles was a traitor . . . ?”
“A traitor to our planet,” Pecos patiently explained. “He took money from Hanoi Xan to make his first movie, Citizen Kane. But in return he created this big radio show to smuggle red aliens in from the Eighth Dimension, where they had been exiled for thousands of Earth years.”
“Martians?” Li’l Daughter guessed.
“That’s what he said over the radio, but they weren’t red Martians. They were Red Lectroids from Planet 10 by way of the Eighth Dimension and with powers of telepathic camouflage . . .”
“Oh my,” the young German marveled and turned up her nose in disgust.
“Exactly right, Pecos,” said Buckaroo. “Now let’s assume that if Sid’s uncle Ira found one piece of Lectroid remains on his barbecue grill, there may well have been others that the federals missed. It’s just possible that someone found Lizardo’s ass with that knucklehead Whorfin still in it.”
A palpable silence now overcame us all. We were—take your pick—flabbergasted, exhausted, mystified; and only Buckaroo seemed determined to continue our gab session, albeit with himself. As we stared into space or at our handheld devices, only his voice could be heard, debating himself. “And no shortage of secret government agencies out there . . . all depending on whether Whorfin’s genetic value has been degraded, and by how much . . . so yes and no. He could be said to exist and also not exist at the same time. More than two possibilities, certainly . . . I just wish the Nova Police deputy had given us a hint or two where to find him . . . assuming he’s in one single place.”
“As in the foggy world of the quantum, perhaps? Two places at the same time . . . ?” Tommy broke in with his most erudite voice.
“Maybe we’re splitting hairs or atoms here,” said Buckaroo.
To this Tommy remarked, “I just mean no whole truth at any given point. All is induction and supposition, not certainty.”
“Kind of like, the more you know, the less you know, Tom?” I ventured.
As we laughed wholeheartedly, Buckaroo continued. “In fact there are probably a lot of clues we’ve missed. Maybe the lesson is we’ve all been on the go a lot recently . . . working on solo research and recording projects, getting various treatments, visiting loved ones, going on adventures and outings . . . and I’ve withdrawn myself since Penny’s disappearance. Looking for answers by traveling to other dimensions, investigating my own psyche and the superstructure undergirding our universe. Yet it seems our own infrastructure, our world, may now be in mortal danger . . .”
Changing the subject slightly, I posed the question, “Why do I smell the hand of that cancer of humanity, the World Crime League and its puppet master Xan, in all of this?”
Buckaroo had the perfect reply. “You could be right, Reno, but also wrong. The World Crime League may be the nastiest cancer on our planet and yet still only be an elementary school bully compared to an existential threat from outer space. What’s our defense against something like that?”
Indeed, it was time to get serious. “Progress Over Protocol”—direct action—was of course our mantra, our allotted mission in life, and yet what were we adventurous souls to do? From an inexplicable message out of the blue—or black of space—we had been given to understand that the portal to hell, the fiery abyss, was about to open because John Whorfin might be alive and well . . . though how such a thing was possible, like the exact nature of the threat against us, was not clear. What was the horrible fate soon to be visited upon us? I don’t think we wanted to find out, though our ignorance was in no sense bliss.
Whereas only minutes earlier our most pressing concern had been a case of presumed-stolen Jet Car technology and a possible connection to Hanoi Xan and the World Crime League, all of that suddenly seemed a distant concern in light of the mysterious messenger’s dire warning. It was necessary to regroup; and what was needed at this moment was a plan to find the master brain John Whorfin, whose present appearance and location were unknown. At a minimum, a necessary first step involved attempting to communicate with the alien man-o’-war and even reestablishing contact with the Lectroid empress John Emdall. If this proved impossible, the collective psychic energy of Blue Blazes everywhere, some sixty thousand strong, would be employed in a mighty community effort to open a telepathic channel to either of these targets.
In more practical and earthly terms, we tasked ourselves to come up with a disposition matrix of behaviors—a kind of psychoanalytical algorithm—matching John Whorfin and Emilio Lizardo’s known personality profile. From there, a few keystrokes on our pocket Go-Phones might in mere seconds find close matches in the Banzai Institute Security Index and its archive of villains and case histories, which we could also share with our handful of trusted contacts in the intelligence community.
“Make a note, Reno,” Buckaroo told me. “Let’s find out for sure if there’s the slightest trace left of Yoyodyne . . . any leads to follow. Also send a ‘be on the lookout’ email blast to all Blue Blazes worldwide, along with Lizardo’s file photo . . .”
“Or just a picture of a warthog,” Tommy cut in. “They’ll probably think it’s a joke anyway.”
“With fire shooting out of his ass,” Pecos added. “Wouldn’t hurt to scour every police blotter from here to Timbuktu.”
“Just remind our volunteers what they’re getting into right up front,” urged Buckaroo. Perhaps I’ll know more after I talk to the president and find out what he knows, but in the meantime, let’s familiarize ourselves with every detail of Whorfin’s dossier and Lizardo’s bio, everything in our files. Just a hunch, but international travel would be difficult without a passport. Of course someone could have supplied one, but my hunch is they’re still here in the USA. Check food stamp rolls and men’s stores—we know Lizardo likes expensive clothes from the 1930s.”
Compiling such a laundry list was admittedly a long shot, but doubtless a better use of our time than filling in the spaces with our fertile imaginations. But there was also the business still before us: Buckaroo’s scheduled rendezvous with a certain rheumy-eyed general whose United States Air Force wings had been clipped, pending a top-secret investigation.