Then the next morning, without even so much as pausing to hook up The Machine, we left everything there in boxes and went to help four other busloads of people off-load at their new homes, and got that accomplished just after sundown. It being a Friday night again, the temptation to party was enormous, and many of us yielded to it.
Nonetheless, the informal council I’d formed the previous week convened at my (new) place after supper. There’d been too many volunteer locals around all week for me to have a chance to safely discuss the end of the universe with anybody, and I wanted to get everybody else’s thoughts and ideas before Tesla showed up. There was enough room on the porch for eight or ten of us, seated on assorted boxes and crates; a couple more perched on the railing; the rest gathered on the little patch of lawn in front of the porch, some on blankets and a few on folding chairs.
To my surprise, progress had been made. Instead of having no candidates for Cause of Ragnarok, we now seemed to have two competing theories.
The first, unsurprisingly, came from Acayib Pinsky, our resident physicist.
Barring Marty, Acayib was the most recent member our caravan: he’d wandered into Mary’s Place for the first time on the last night of its existence, fifteen months earlier—just in time to get plugged into our telepathic hookup and help us defeat the Dark Side of the Lizard. He suffers from a quite rare hereditary condition called Riley-Day Syndrome (three hundred cases in the whole country), which leaves him with several major deficiencies. The first is definitely the most spectacular: he is and has always been absolutely unable to perceive physical pain.
Think of that: a man who has never once in his life said “Ouch.”
Until he met us, anyway. Perhaps understandably, he had always had an irrational yearning to feel pain, to know what all the fuss was about, to be like everyone else. In that first timeless moment of entering telepathic rapport with the rest of us, he had learned better. He told me once later that pain had struck him as so utterly outrageous that he could not understand why people who believed in God had not put a price on His head. In the end, he decided that maybe Riley-Day Syndrome wasn’t such a bad deal after all.
Does it seem that way to you? Consider what comes with the package. As Tom Waits said, “The large print giveth…and the small print taketh away.” Perhaps because they never got any exercise, Acayib’s tear ducts never developed: he can cry if he’s sad enough, but is quite unable to produce tears. He’s prone to ghastly skin rashes and profuse sweating and sudden spasms of vomiting. His blood pressure and temperature fluctuate like the Dow Jones index. He can’t keep his balance well and tends to fall down a lot. And, of course, he’s a mass of scars and badly knit bones—for fairly obvious reasons. The scars are worse on parts of his body that are outside his field of vision, but he has lots on his hands, too. He used to see his doctor for a checkup four times a year—but then one time the doctor found a bullet in the meat at the back of his thigh, and Acayib didn’t even have a guess as to when or how he’d acquired it; ever since, he got himself looked over monthly.
He had also developed a constant ongoing alertness, an almost Zen state of awareness of himself and his immediate surroundings that never flagged. It gave him a great personal presence and charisma that even profuse sweating, big purple blotches on his face, and a tendency to vomit without warning could not entirely erode. And though he was only twenty-six at that time, he exhibited a maturity far beyond his years.
Well he might: Acayib knew that statistically he was most unlikely to see his fortieth birthday. Fully half of all Riley-Day babies are dead before age twenty.
Sorry for the digression, but Acayib’s an interesting cat. Take it all as background, to give you the full benefit of the horrid hilarity in what he had to tell us. You see, Key West’s warm damp air had been paradoxically good for his rash: the only blemish still visible was a dark purple patch on his forehead…that made him look just like an underweight Mikhail Gorbachev. And what he had to say to us was:
“Is everyone here familiar with the expression ‘God is an iron’?”
Most of us were, but Mei-Ling raised a hand and shook her head no.
“A person who commits felony is a felon,” Doc Webster explained. “A person who commits gluttony is a glutton—”
“—and a person who commits larceny—” Slippery Joe began, but his wife Susie stepped on one of his feet and his other wife Suzie stepped on the other. Suzie’s maiden name is Larsen.
“—therefore,” the Doc went on, ignoring the interruption, “God is an iron. Acayib is telling us to brace ourselves for some sort of punch line. Acayib?”
“Wait,” I said, “let me guess. We’re looking for the missing Second Half of the Armageddon Trigger. The first half is an energy beam devised by Nikola Tesla. So the second half has to be some forgotten secret invention of Thomas Edison. It uses DC current, I bet—right, Acayib?”
He shook his head. “That would be a good joke,” he agreed. “But I have a different irony in mind—one that pivots not on who created the two things, but on who deployed them, and why.” He waited, in case anyone else wanted to try and guess.
Jim Omar was the first to get it. “Oh my God…you mean—”
Acayib nodded, wiped sweat off the purple blotch on his forehead, and said, “The first part of the trigger is an orbital weapon secretly deployed by the Defense Department. So naturally, another part will—I think—be a perfectly legitimate, aboveboard, purely scientific satellite…orbited by the Soviet Union.”
“What satellite?”
“Mir.”
Acayib explained. Unfortunately, he began to do so in Physicist…but we were able to head him off and get him to summarize in Layman. The gist was this:
He had been researching the current state of the art in high-energy physics, searching for something that, in combination with a Tesla Beam, might disrupt the vacuum—and had pretty much come up empty. It was hard to be sure, because the only baseline we had for the Tesla Beam was a large eighty-one-year-old hole in Siberia—but as far as Acayib could tell, no known particle accelerator even potentially operational by August could deliver enough power to do the trick, probably not by a few orders of magnitude. But in researching the literature, he had run across a snide reference to one of the devices in Mir’s Kvant-1 module.
The experiment was a real long shot…but on the other hand, it was pretty cheap, and the potential payoff quite high. High-energy physics is done by whacking very fast-moving, powerful particles into each other, and observing the results of the wreck. On Earth it is very difficult and thus expensive to get the particle going that fast. But space is full of very high-energy particles: cosmic rays. Oh, they vary considerably—but some of them are the most energetic known things there are in the universe.
Just not many of them. And there’s no way to tell when the really zippy ones will arrive, or from which direction.
The Soviets figured what the hell, and put a particle detector aboard Mir. Perhaps before it got so old it fell out of orbit, the space station would chance to intersect a really high energy cosmic ray or two at just the right angle…and then Soviet science might see things even the mighty canceled SSC could not have shown. So far, as expected, no dice—the author of the article Acayib read had been pretty snotty about their chances.
“That article started me thinking in two directions at once,” Acayib told us. “First, as I said, some cosmic rays are extremely energetic. They are also extremely tiny—but I believe that if an ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray were to meet with a Tesla Beam coming in the opposite direction, the impact might very well produce a pinpoint of a high enough energy density to perturb the vacuum. If Tesla and Coleman are right, even a pinprick in the vacuum would be enough: the new, lower-energy vacuum would expand at lightspeed.”
Rooba rooba rooba.
“This naturally led to the question, why would a Tesla Beam be coming in the other direction? What might the Deathstar be firing on? And as I said, I had begun b
y thinking of cosmic rays hitting the detector on Mir…”
“I think I see where you’re going,” Omar said excitedly. “Say a really high-energy cosmic ray hits the Mir target. Maybe it’s one of the really rare ones, much more powerful than they anticipated, and it…I don’t know, wrecks their detector.”
I began to see where he was going, and felt the blood cooling in my temples. “Wrecks it in such a way—”
“—in such a way that the American Deathstar satellite might well misinterpret it as a nuclear weapon, arming. And fire on it.”
There was a rooba rooba, a sonic collage of exclamations of dismay, and Acayib tried to get the floor back. But Doc Webster’s booming voice overrode everyone.
“Wait a second,” he insisted. “Hold on, now. If that happened…well, I wouldn’t want to be on Mir at the time…but I’m damned if I see how it could destroy the universe.”
“Sounds good ta me,” Fast Eddie said.
“Think about it, Ed. The superparticle hits Mir. All hell breaks loose. This news leaves Mir, and has to travel at least some distance—admittedly at lightspeed—to reach the Deathstar. Then some computer on the Deathstar has to misidentify it, and issue the firing command. Even if the Tesla Beam requires zero warm-up, fires instantly, it still has to take some time to reach Mir. At best, it arrives late for dinner—at least a second after the superparticle has been destroyed. So where’s your Big Bang?”
“Right here, big boy!” Harry the parrot screamed.
By now we had all gotten pretty good at ignoring the bird. But it was harder to ignore the hole the Doc had just punched through the logic of Omar’s scenario. “Maybe two cosmic rays, one right after the other?” Omar said, but without any conviction. We all fell silent—for long enough to allow Acayib to grab the floor again.
“I’m sorry, Jim,” he said, “but I think your basic premise is flawed. Cosmic rays can be powerful—but as I said, they are also very tiny phenomena. And good detectors are dense, inert things. I don’t believe even the most powerful imaginable particle hitting the Mir detector would so much as cause it to seem warmer to the touch, let alone destroy it spectacularly.”
“Huh.” Omar wrinkled his forehead in thought. “Okay, I give up. Why would the Deathstar fire on Mir, then?”
Acayib shrugged, and wiped sweat from his forehead. “I’m not sure. Perhaps it will fire at something else. But Mir feels plausible to me. It must be very high, if not number one, on the Deathstar’s list of preprogrammed targets. Most of the other Soviet-orbited objects have long since been checked off as harmless—have been observed to perform functions that would simply not leave sufficient room aboard them for additional military gear of any consequence. If the Deathstar is to fire at anything, Mir is a likely bet.”
“Yeah, but why?” Long-Drink insisted. “The guys on Mir aren’t dumb: they’ve got to know they’re being scrutinized. Why would they do something threatening, just as their government down below is getting ready to pack it all in?”
Acayib shrugged again. “Madness? Mutiny? Malfunction of some kind? We know Soviet space technology is fairly primitive. Uranium would make an excellent cosmic-ray target, perhaps they’ve shipped a large quantity up to Mir, and the shielding is bad.”
I agreed with Long-Drink: it sounded pretty unlikely. The boys on Mir wouldn’t put up with leaky uranium-shielding for very long.
And looking around me, I saw a lot of other dubious expressions. But nobody had anything else to suggest.
Except Erin.
“Uncle Kay,” she piped up, “there’s another factor you may be overlooking.”
“What’s that, Erin?” he asked.
“Uncle Bbiillll told us a few weeks ago they saw the Aurora Borealis here in Key West. I thought he was pulling our leg—but I did a little research on the Internet, and he’s right. You know how sunspots run on an eleven-year cycle? At the moment we’re right in the middle of the biggest solar maximum in three centuries—and there have been all sorts of odd phenomena reported. Garage doors opening and closing by themselves in San Francisco. Northern Lights sightings all over the South. And they say it looks like it hasn’t peaked yet. The Earth’s magnetic field is all out of whack, just now. Could that…I don’t know, cause something that would make Mir temporarily look like a target to the Deathstar? Or maybe even just trigger the Deathstar all by itself—at just the wrong time?”
Acayib started to answer…then caught himself, closed his mouth, and started thinking hard. As he was doing so, Nikola Tesla appeared on the lawn in front of him.
Happily, he materialized between Long-Drink and Fast Eddie, who are so used to him by now they didn’t even flinch. Eddie dipped a can of cold beer out of the ice bucket and passed it to him. Nikky glanced down at it, poked at the pop-top ring…turned the can over, produced an old-fashioned church key, and punched a tiny hole in the bottom. In 1989, you could still do that. Pressure equalized, but no spray emerged. Then he punched a larger hole on the far side, and drank deep from it. “Thank you, Eddie,” he said, wiping foam from his mustache.
I recapitulated the results of our thinking to date for him, with occasional assistance from others, and Tesla listened carefully, without interrupting. When I ran down, he sat a moment in thought. Then he finished his beer, and nodded. He gestured with the can, and it went away.
“You have done well,” he told us. “Any or all of these things could be factors in the catastrophe. And I fear I have identified at least one other candidate.”
“Jesus Christ,” Eddie said. “Anudda one?”
Tesla nodded. “There is a phenomenon just beginning to be noticed in this time, which will not be fully understood for many years to come. Did any of you know that hurricanes sometimes produce gamma rays?”
Rooba rooba rooba.
“It is true,” he assured us. “X rays as well, but especially gamma rays. Sometimes in beams, sometimes in rings that rise like smoke rings from the top of the hurricane—sometimes even in more exotic configurations. And sometimes at very high energies.”
“Harder!” Harry the parrot shrieked—but softly. For him, anyway.
Now that I thought about it, just about the only way you could detect such a thing as a blast of gamma rays rising from the top of a hurricane—and live to report it—would be from a satellite. We haven’t been putting the damn things up for all that long…and I imagine the first few gamma-ray detectors placed in orbit were trained either on the stars or on military targets—not on hurricanes.
Doc Webster cleared his throat. “You’re saying a hurricane could maybe turn itself into a natural gamma-ray cannon, firing straight up…and the Defense Department may not have known that when they programmed their Deathstar? And maybe it misinterprets what it sees as a blast of gamma rays and X rays coming down from Mir?”
Tesla didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. His face answered for him.
“And the fucking Deathstar is going up in August, right smack in the middle of the season,” Double Bill said softly.
Rooba rooba.
“That still does not mean a hurricane is necessarily involved in the end of the universe,” Acayib pointed out. “We already have sufficient…what is it, Nikola?”
Tesla started to speak, hesitated, then tried again. “As I told Jacob, I cannot prove that my own weapon is involved in this—but I am intuitively certain. It is too ironic not to be true. This is like that.”
“What is?” Zoey asked patiently.
“Lemme get it wet first!” screamed Harry.
Tesla sighed. “I hate anachrognosis. Information should never be passed from one ficton to another.”
“You peeked to the back of the book,” Erin said.
Tesla nodded. “Hurricanes cannot yet be predicted well…but once they occur they are public record. I time-shifted forward, and looked up the tropical storm records for this coming summer. One will occur just after the object we are calling the Deathstar is orbited—and, at several points, directly in the p
ath of Mir.” He stopped talking and looked away from Erin.
There was more. Somehow I knew there was more. “And?” I prompted.
Tesla said, “It will be officially designated ‘Hurricane Erin.’”
Rooba rooba rooba.
I wished The Machine were hooked up. As a working substitute for this meeting I had scrounged half a dozen Black & Deckers, and they were lined up in my new kitchen, all primed with Tanzanian Peaberry grounds and waiting to be triggered. I started to get up and do so, but Erin saw me and waved me back into my chair. “I’ll get it, Daddy,” she insisted, and scampered up the porch steps as quickly and gracefully as Pixel could have managed it, which I know because the cat followed her in like a furry shadow.
Zoey and I exchanged a glance. “I don’t like this,” she muttered without moving her lips.
“Me either,” I said in the same prison-yard murmur.
But I did understand Tesla’s conviction. This was the way things tended to work in my slapstick world. The only surprise was that it hadn’t been Hurricane Jake.
I wished it had been. I told myself the unease I felt was mere superstition, primitive magic thinking. But my precious baby daughter was, let’s face it, already entirely weird enough. Not too weird to suit me, mind you…I like weird…but I definitely did not want her name associated with the end of the universe, did not want her, even nominally, any more involved with it than she already was. She already represented, to me, everything we had to lose; it didn’t need underlining.
Callahan's Key Page 25