Callahan's Place 02 - Time Travelers Strictly Cash (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  His cyclone passage among us had shattered our group stasis—the room was filled with the rooba-rooba of many people talking all at once. When the last of the three empty glasses hit the hearth, and the fragments had spelled PHEE next to the AL, the murmur became a standing ovation.

  "Mister," Long-Drink said, "that was the best goddamn juggling I ever saw in my life."

  Phee smiled indulgently, shook his head. "You haven't lived until you've seen it done with chainsaws. Eek! Heavy, baby."

  Eddie spoke for all of us. "What de fuck is goin' on?"

  "Mutual introductions, of course. I am Al Phee, and you are, in order," he ticked us off, "Marshall Artz, Boyle Deggs, Tom Foolery, Rachel Prejudice, Dee Jenrette, Miss Fortune," (pointing at Josie) "Flemming Ayniss, Manny Peeples, and Euell P. Yorpanz. Now that we know who we are, we may consider what we are: c'est simple, non? Shitfire, and dog my cats. I am a yoofo."

  "A which?"

  "Not a foe of you, but a UFO. And you are all Hugos. Unidentified goggling objects. What's wrong with you imbeciles ce soir, don't you see? Ding an sich: I am from outer space."

  "With reindeer?" Callahan asked.

  "We used to make 'em look like dishware, but believe it or not, that wasn't silly enough—people who saw us kept reporting it. Nobody reports a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer."

  I think Phee expected this latest announcement to be the most stunning so far. If so, he was disappointed. Long-Drink nodded and said, "Sure, that explains it," and there was a general air of demystification everywhere. I wished that Mickey Finn were around that night. (Finn is an extraterrestrial himself, and I wondered what he would think of this guy. But of course it was summer, and Finn was way up north on the Gaspé Peninsula, tending his farm.)

  "So what can we do for you?" Callahan asked imperturbably.

  "What's a pantechnicon?" I added.

  If he was disappointed at our collective sangfroid, Phee hid it well. "Merde d'une puce," he exclaimed, eyes flashing, "don't you know your own language?" He had one of the loudest voices I'd ever heard.

  "Furniture warehouse," Gentleman John put in.

  "Correct," Phee admitted, "But not the meaning I meaning."

  "Oh, you must mean the nineteenth-century bazaars in London," John said, light dawning.

  "—where arts and crafts were sold, yes," Phee said, applauding silently. "B-plus. Pan plus technikos—comme j'ai dit, a bazaar of the bizarre."

  Callahan's eyes widened. "Do you mean to tell me—?" he began, teeth clenched on his cigar.

  Phee smiled like a flashbulb going off. "Exactement, my large. I am an Intergalactic Traveling Salesman."

  People began to giggle, then laugh outright, then guffaw. Folks folded at the middle, slapped their thighs, pounded on tables with their fists, met each other's eyes and laughed anew. Even Callahan roared with gargantuan mirth, clapping his big knuckly hands together. Phee might have been excused for thinking we doubted his story—but I could see through my own tears of mirth that, after a moment's annoyance, he understood. Somehow he understood our laughter was not derision but delight.

  It's like I said earlier—when you've been hanging out at Callahan's bar for a while, you begin to see a zany kind of symmetry to the way things happen there. "Hannibal's Holy Hairpiece, it's perfect!" Long-Drink crowed. "A traveling salesman has flown into Callahan's on Tall Tales Night. Sell my clothes, I'm gone to heaven!"

  Phee bowed. "No fear? Marvelous; I impress. Hot damn. It is a business doing pleasure with you. I was told by blackguards that you did not civilize yet. Lies, by jiminy!"

  "It just come on recent," Doc Webster said, and broke up again.

  Phee waited politely until we were all finished. Then he produced a burning cigarette from out of thin air, flipped it into his face, and began chewing on the filter. "To business we then progress, jawohl? Groovey. Innkeeper, gib mir getrank—a flagon of firewater. Darn the torpedoes. Gosh."

  Callahan poured whiskey and passed it across the bar. "How come no sample cases, brother? What's your line?"

  "Oh, but I have a sample case, sweetheart. Mais oui." He reached into the inside pocket of his blazer and removed a hole. It had no edges, no boundaries, and it was no color at all. It was just… a hole, about the size of the lid on a gallon of ice cream. He held it by the edge it didn't have, extended it to arm's length, and when he dropped his hand it stayed there, a circle of nothing.

  There were whistles and much awed murmuring.

  "Nonsense," Phee said airily, "Is nothing sacred? Voila le sample case."

  "Say," Long-Drink began, "how many of those would you think it'd take to fill the Alb—ouch!" He glared at Doc Webster and began rubbing his shin.

  "No, compadres," Phee said, "it is not a hole-o-graph. It is a hyperpocket, a dimensional bridge to a… ahem…pocket universe. Regardez!"

  He reached an elegantly manicured hand into the hole, and the hand failed to reappear on the other side. "Pardon" he muttered, rummaging. "Ah!" His hand emerged. It was holding, by the throat, an extremely long-necked dragon, whose scaled head had barely fit through the hole. Reptilian eyes regarded us coldly, the fanged jaws opened, and a gout of flame set Phee's hair on fire.

  "Damn," he said irritably, "wrong drawer. One of these days I'm going to get this office organized." He thrust the dragon's head back into the hole with an air of embarrassment. He ignored the fire on his head, and it seemed impolite to mention it, so it burned undisturbed as he rummaged, until his scalp was covered with black smoldering curls. The beanie was unaffected. "Boñiga de la mestizo enano … aha! Now see."

  People edged discreetly away, and he pulled out a vaguely spherical object wrapped in soft cloth. He yanked on a corner of the cloth, and the object flew sparkling into the air; he caught it with his other hand. My first crazy thought was: "burning ice."

  "My line," he said triumphantly. "Jewels."

  It looked something like a cut diamond the size of a Softball, at least in physical structure. It was symmetrically faceted, very nearly transparent, and contained within it, like flies trapped in amber, perhaps a dozen splashes and streaks of liquid color, unbearably pure and lambent. The colors and shapes harmonized. It was so beautiful it hurt to look at.

  "Is there anyone here who is chronically worried?" Phee asked loudly.

  Slippery Joe Maser stepped forward. "I got two wives."

  "Splendid! Kommen ze hier."

  Joe hung back.

  "Umgawa," Phee rapped impatiently. "Don't be such a chickenshit. Four centuries on the road this trip, and I haven't lost a customer yet. Come on, be a mensch."

  Joe approached uneasily.

  "You are a worrier. Lucky I was passing by. Catch!"

  He tossed the gleaming jewel to Joe, who caught it awkwardly in both hands. He stared down at the thing for a long moment.

  "What do you worry about most?" Phee asked. "No, mon vieil asperge, don't tell me—just think about it."

  Joe closed his eyes and thought about it.

  From the places where his fingertips touched the jewel, streamers of a gray, milky substance began to infuse it, like milk being poured into a glass of weak tea from several points at once. Soon the entire interior of the gem was swirling gray, all the spatters of aching color hidden.

  I tore my eyes from it to look at Joe. His face shone with the light that was obscured now in the jewel. Every feature was relaxed; for the first time since I've known him, his forehead was utterly smooth, no more wrinkles than a Gothic novel.

  His eyes opened. "What the hell was I worryin' about?" he breathed contentedly. He worked his shoulders like a man who has just set down, at long last, a crushing burden.

  "What's to worry?"

  Callahan's voice was shockingly harsh. "Is that goddamn thing addictive?"

  "Nyet," Phee responded at once. "Au contraire. Watch."

  Joe was looking at the gray-washed jewel in his hands, and his expression was mournful. "Geeze," he said sadly, "did I do that?"

  "You
see?" Phee said smugly. "To despoil such a loveliness is ashaming: the sahib feels like a jerk. The more-he uses it, the more he is conditioned not to generate worry in the first place. Bojemoi. One's self-indulgence is less tolerable when it is made visible as dung on a diamond, n'est-ce pas?"

  "What's de t'ing cost?" Fast Eddie asked.

  "Just pennies, I told you," Phee said, rummaging in his hyperpocket again. "Now this little sucker here is even more amazing, calculated to breed greed and fully warranteed." He produced and unwrapped a second jewel. It was similar to the first, but tinted rather than clear. The tint was the blue of a tropic lagoon before the white man came, restful to contemplate. Within it were not color impurities this time, but tiny angels. Miniature aleate females, the size of fireflies and correctly scaled. Somehow they flew slowly and gracefully to and fro within the jewel, as though it were filled with viscous fluid instead of being solid. It made my eyes sting.

  "Is anyone here particularly angry?" Phee inquired.

  Gentleman John looked long at Josie—who was watching Phee with rapt attention—and then at me. "Well," he said, "I'm not generally angry, but I suppose I am particularly angry. This bleeder here wrecked a perfectly good pun."

  "I heard, from on high," Phee agreed sympathetically. "Monstrous. Insupportable. Tough shit. Venez ici."

  John took the jewel from him, glanced again at me, murmured, "rat bastard," and closed his eyes.

  The jewel began to suffuse with red. The tiny angels tried unsuccessfully to avoid the red, and where it touched them it congealed like quick-setting Jell-O, imprisoning them. Soon they were invisible, and the jewel was an angry scarlet. People gasped.

  John opened his eyes, blinked at the thing, and slumped. "What a vile thing anger is," he said bitterly. "I'm truly sorry, Jake." He smiled then. "Glad to be shut of it, though."

  "Both jewels will clear again within an hour," Phee said brightly. "With real rage, this one becomes uncomfortably hot to the touch, in proportion to the strength of the fury. Both may be used repeatedly at hourly intervals, and will never wear out or malfunction. The Tsuris Trap and the Rage-Assuager, available only from your pal Al, votre ami Phee. Sanitario e no addictivo—"

  "Cuanto?" Eddie said. "I mean, how much?"

  "C'est absurdite ou surdité." Phee frowned. "I already told you, ducks: just pennies! Fritz du Leiber, twenty-three skidoo! But you ain't seen nothin' yet." He looked at the hyperpocket. "Well, perhaps you have—but the best is yet to come, as the bishop said to the actress. Behold, deholed."

  He produced a third jewel, and this one was untinted and contained hundreds of tiny beads of every color in the rainbow, writhing like kittens beneath the scintillant surface. It… wept music as he touched it, little plaintive chords and arpeggios.

  "You," he said, pointing at me. "You say you play a guitar. Your face is furry, your hair abundant. You have experience of hallucinogens, si?"

  "So?"

  "Ca." He tossed me the jewel.

  Phantasms flickered briefly around the room as I caught it, little not-quite-seen things. My fingers tingled where they touched it.

  "Think of a piece of music," Phee commanded. "Any music that you love."

  I picked the first thing that came into my head. Suddenly the room filled with lush strings. I jumped and they were gone.

  "Again," Phee directed. "Roll 'em, baby."

  The strings returned, and when they had finished their simple eight-chord prelude, Brother Ray sang, "Georgia…"

  People sat back and smiled all over Callahan's bar.

  At first it was precisely like the definitive recording that everybody knows—right down to the crackle-pop surface noise of the treasured copy I own. It skipped in the same place. That told me where it was coming from, so I experimented. I have never willingly missed an opportunity to record a Ray Charles TV performance, and I have eleven different versions of "Georgia on My Mind." I concentrated, and Ray suddenly slipped smoothly into the extended bridge he has been using the last few years, where the band and the drummer just go away and let him play with it awhile. The surface noise vanished; fidelity became perfect. When the bridge was over he segued back into the original without a seam, and murmurs of appreciation came from Fast Eddie and a few others.

  I glanced down at the jewel, and it seemed that all the glowing beads vanished a quarter-second after my eyes touched it. There was a collective gasp, and I looked up and The Genius himself was sitting at Eddie's beat-up piano, big black glasses and the whitest teeth God ever made, rocking from side to side in that distinctive way and caressing the keys, singing "Georgia on My Mind" for the patrons of Callahan's Place.

  His finish was fabulous. I'm proud to say it was not one he has ever, to my knowledge, recorded.

  As the applause died down, he modulated from G down to E and began the opening bass riff of "What I Say?" The original Raeletts appeared next to the piano, Margie Hendrix and Darlene and Pat. I shivered like a dog and threw the jewel at Phee, and artists and music vanished.

  "Don't get me started," I said. "But thank you from the bottom of my heart. All my life I've wanted to do that. What is that thing?"

  Phee did not reply vocally, but suddenly there was a flourish of trumpets and the word visualizer was spelled out in the air in letters of cool fire, like neon without tubes, rippling in random air currents. They flared and bisected, wedged apart by a new group of letters all in gold, so that the new construct read: visual(synthes)izer. It flared again, and the parenthetical intruder departed once more.

  " 'Synthes,' you've gone…" Phee sang, and Josie giggled. "It's a dream machine, dear boy. An hallucinator. Anything you can imagine, it gives auditory and visual substance to. Je regrette that at the present state of the art I cannot give you tactile—but, if you act muy pronto and because I like your face, I'm prepared to throw in olfactory for not a dime extra. Freebie, kapish?"

  Make no mistake: I wanted that thing. But I reacted instinctively, with the reflex-response of a Long Islander to high-pressure sales tactics. "I don't know…"

  "Schlep. Do you know what the olfactory mode can do for the porn fantasies alone?"

  Eddie stared at his now-empty piano stool and shook his head. "How much?" he asked again.

  Exasperated, Phee danced to the bar, grabbed up a funnel and took it back to Eddie. He stuck the business end in Eddie's left ear. "JUST PENNIES," he bellowed into it. "I'm telling you," he continued conversationally to the rest of us, "it's a steal. Good for fifteen minutes' use every four hours, an optional headphone effect for apartment use, and there's a failsafe that blows the breaker if you use it to scare people. Hoyoto! Banzai! Barkeep, more grog!"

  "You ain't paid for the last one yet," Callahan said reasonably.

  "Did I hear right through the roof earlier? On ce soir the teller of the tallest tale drinks gratis?"

  "That's so," Callahan admitted.

  Josie cleared her throat. "There's… another advantage."

  Phee looked gallantly attentive.

  She turned red. "Oh hell." She went up and whispered in his ear. His left eyebrow rose high, and the propellor beanie doubled its RPM.

  "Hoo ha," he stated.

  Josie looked around at us. "Well, it's just… I guess I'm grateful for a good laugh. Maybe it's an Oedipal thing: my dad is a brilliant jokester. And—and funny men are nicer lovers. They know about pain."

  Phee bowed magnificently. "Mademoiselle," he said reverently, "you are clearly the product of an advanced civilization. Furthermore you are spathic. Geologists' term: 'having good cleavage.' Alors, correct me now if I err: a truly great tall tale must, first, be a true story—or at least one which cannot be disproved. Second, it must be gonzo, phweet!, wacky, Jack. Third, it should conclude with a pun of surpassing atrocity, nicht wahr?"

  There was murmured agreement all around. Folks ordered drinks and settled back in their chairs.

  "Right. Dig it: a true story. I have witnessed this personally from my spacecraft and am prepared to do
cument it. The toilet tanks on your commercial airliners often leak. This results in the formation of deposits of blue ice on the fuselage. The ice is composed of feces, urine, and blue liquid disinfectant. Now: occasionally, when a plane must descend very rapidly from a great height, especially near the Rocky Mountains, chunks of blue ice ranging up to two hundred pounds can—and do—break off and shell the countryside. This is the truth," he cried, as we began giggling. "I have seen a UPI photo of an apartment in Denver which was pulped by a one hundred and fifty pound chunk of blue ice. The airline bought the tenants a house—and the landlord a judge."

  People were laughing helplessly, and Gentleman John's face was so red I thought he'd burst. "My God," he howled, "can you imagine them checking in at hospital? 'Cause of injury, please?' " He caved in.

  "Neither of them were hurt," Phee said. "And for a while—until it began to thaw—they were grateful for the coolness it provided. It was summer, you see, and the impact had destroyed their electric fan…"

  Callahan was laughing so hard his apron ripped. Doc Webster lay on his back on the floor, kicking his feet. Long-Drink laughed his bridgework loose.

  "So," Phee concluded, sitting down on thin air and crossing his legs, "even if you live where there are no strategic military targets, you can still be attacked by an icy BM."

  Instant silence. A stunned, shuddering intake of breath, and then—the only group scream I have ever heard, a deafening howl of anguish insupportable. Somewhichway it turned, before it was done, into a standing ovation and a barrage of glasses hit the fireplace. Josie ran over and hopped on Phee's lap, renewing the applause. John and I beat our palms bloody.

  Callahan came around the bar with a huge grin, a bottle of Bushmill's and three glasses. He held the glasses up, raised an eyebrow inquiringly at Phee, and let go. They stayed there. He poured them full, took one and held it out. "Fee-free for Phee," he boomed. "Keep the bottle." He gave one to Josie, pulled up a chair and sat down next to the third glass.

  Phee inclined his head in thanks. "God bless your ass. Caramba—is all that you? Comment vous appelez-vous?"