The Callahan Touch

by Spider Robinson

  “That’s irrelevant,” the Doc said at once.

  “Dat’s-a right. Continue your examination, Mr. Persecutor.”

  Jonathan ignored the badinage, sipped more beer and went on. “Question: Dr. Crawford, where does modern medical science now believe AIDS came from? Answer: from African apes. There is a simian version of AIDS, and a whole spectrum of other monkey viruses which are markedly similar to, in some cases partially identical to, the human AIDS virus. It has recently been found that there may be a second form of human HIV, HIV-2, even more similar in genetic structure to the simian version. Question: and how do authorities believe the virus crossed from apes to humans? Answer: they haven’t got a clue.”

  “Objection,” Doc Webster said. “I’ve read a couple of theories. Something about weird African sex rituals—”

  “Even if you believe that over the last fifty years, some Africans in fact routinely cut their genitalia and smeared them with monkey blood—which I don’t for a minute, and I know something about Africa—even so, it doesn’t explain why the disease didn’t cross over centuries ago.”

  “He’s right, Doc,” Isham said. “I heard that story too. It’s Jungle Jim bullshit.” Isham happens to be an expert in African history, customs and traditions.

  Jonathan nodded. “Question: then you did in fact begin the crossover process—you personally, Dr. Crawford—by injecting human beings with infected monkey blood and infected monkeys with human blood? Answer: that is precisely why I have been brought—” He winced as he saw the pun coming, but delivered it anyway: “—before the bar.”

  “Now hold on a minute,” Doc Webster said. “You couldn’t have been the only guy using monkeys, or even monkey blood, to make vaccines in 1940.”

  “Virtually everyone else in the world worked with rhesus macaques from India—right up until the Indian government noticed they were almost wiped out, and banned their export in 1955. But not me. I had a better idea. I had a cheap source for so-called ‘African green’ monkeys, from what was then the northeastern Belgian Congo. It has recently been established that they were the original carriers of SIV—the simian AIDS. It wasn’t until the early ’80s that SIV made the jump to macaques…whereupon it was discovered, because the macaques got sick. You see, SIV lives in green monkeys, but it doesn’t make them sick.

  “Question: where is the most intense focus of the African AIDS infection? Answer: Zaire—what used to be the northeastern Belgian Congo. And when the Congo threw off Belgian rule and became Zaire, what French-speaking blacks with no ties to Belgium migrated there en masse to help run the new government? Answer: Haitians. Question: where, outside the homosexual community, was the first major outbreak of AIDS in the Western Hemisphere? Answer: remember that literally sick joke that was going around awhile ago, about how the worst part of having AIDS was convincing your parents you were Haitian?

  “Question: if you expose a virus to a new host, about how long will it take to mutate into a form that can live in it? Answer: roughly twenty to forty years. And when did AIDS first become a significant problem? Answer: about forty years after my ingenious experiments.”

  He stopped, took another sip of beer, and said to the room at large, “Cross examine?”

  △ △ △

  “You tested the blood thoroughly,” Doc Webster said, and it wasn’t a question. “For every known pathogen. I know you did.”

  “Every pathogen known in 1940, certainly. Monkey B virus, and a dozen others. And then I injected the blood into human beings. I proceeded, not because I knew the blood was safe, but because with existing technology no one could prove it wasn’t. In light of the results, would you say that was good enough?”

  Silence fell.

  “What’d you do after that?” Merry asked after a long while.

  “Continued to chase greatness,” he said bitterly. “With no more success: malaria continues to laugh at me, and all my colleagues. Along the way, I had the only lucky break of my life: I met Martin, and somehow convinced him to love me. I had Martin for twenty-eight years. The best years of my life.” He paused and frowned. “And in all that time I don’t think the poor man ever got more than twenty percent of my attention. I was so consumed with my work, so sure that one day I’d be hailed as one of the great microbe hunters, a gay role model. Isn’t that the classic gay mistake: to care more about your gayness than about your lover? He never gave me anything but kindness and devotion, and I…I was short-changing him for nearly thirty years before he died in m-my arms today, of a disease I created for him!” He tossed back the rest of his beer. “My gayness died with him. My sexuality died with him. My last ambition died with him. The best parts of me all died with him. So my toast is to self-destruction—”

  And with that he pegged his glass into the hearth so hard that the shattering glass sounded like a small explosion.

  And took out his gun…

  4

  Mac Attack

  I spoke up hastily. “Has the prosecution rested?”

  He sighed deeply and worked the slide on the automatic. “Not in years.”

  “So does the defense get a chance? Or is this a Nazi kangaroo court?”

  He shook his head wearily and placed the gun to his temple. “I have had several decades to examine the excuses I might offer,” he said. “None of them are any good. Thank you, but—”

  I pulled my sawed-off out from behind the bar and drew down on him. “Hold it right there!” I barked.

  He was so stunned he froze, unable to think of anything to say or do. There were a few murmurs from the crowd, but nobody tried to stop me or express an objection.

  “If you blow your silly brains out in front of all of us, and don’t give us a chance to argue you out of it,” I said, “what you’ll be doing is dumping all your bad karma on our laps and leaving us no place to put it, no way to get rid of it. Before I’ll let you do that to my friends and me, you selfish son of a bitch, I’ll blow your God damned head all over the wall. I got problems of my own, friend. Now put that piece away!”

  For a long moment I thought I was going to have to put him down. Just as I remembered the safety was on, and surreptitiously flipped it off, he slumped and lowered his gun. For the second time, he burst into tears. “I’m sorry—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “It’s our turn to talk.”

  He waved the gun at me, butt-first.

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “Put the safety back on and put it in your pants.” He did as he was told. “Now sit down and shut up and listen. Doc, you want to go first?”

  As Jonathan took a seat at one of the tables, Doc Webster strode over to the hearth, and turned to face the room. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’d like to begin with something that may seem irrelevant. How many of you have lived around here long enough to remember the story of the Great White Trash Mountain of Long Island?”

  About ten hands went up.

  “Every township on the Island has a garbage disposal problem, and none of them has a solution that’s any damn good. Some decades back, one township administration—no sense identifying them—came up with a beauty. They decided to build a mountain of garbage. A layer of trash, a layer of soil, a layer of trash, a layer of soil—voilà: instant mountain. Long Island is as flat as a pool table: put artificial snow machines on the sucker, they reasoned, and you’d have the only ski resort for a hundred miles in any direction.”

  “‘The White Trash Mountains of Virginny,’” Maureen said, quoting the Firesign Theatre.

  “An inventive notion,” the Duck said.

  Doc Webster nodded. “The problem was, they didn’t do their homework. They got the thing half-built, placed a noncancelable order for the snow generators…and then all that weight started to work on the bottom layer of garbage. Pressure. Friction…”

  Tesla began to giggle. “Oh, my goodness—”

  I nodded again. “That’s right. The mountain caught fire…and over a period of weeks, it burned to the ground.”
/>
  Howls of laughter all around. Even Jonathan came close to smiling. “Oh Lord,” the Duck crowed, “the smell—”

  “They spent a bundle and used up every favor they were owed keeping the story out of the national news,” the Doc said. “But the next township downwind had some pungent things to say. And they said ’em in court. Do any of you happen to recall exactly why the mountain men lost the case?”

  Expectant silence.

  “My, it’s hard to talk when you’re thirsty.”

  “Jesus Christ, Doc,” I said, and slid a beer down the bar to him.

  “They lost the case because they hadn’t even needed a competent engineer. Anyone capable of working a slide rule could have done the calculation that showed the scheme wouldn’t work. The town simply failed to even ask the question. But if it had required a competent engineer to spot the problem, they would have won the suit…because you can’t require someone by law to hire the right engineer.

  “Now Jonathan’s case here is a sort of mirror image. It’s not that he was such a lousy scientist, he failed to realize what he was doing was dangerous. In this case, any scientist alive who had looked over his shoulder would have made the same mistake he did. There was no one he failed to consult who could have straightened him out. Except God, who has a nasty habit of not returning His calls. As far as Jonathan could possibly have known, the experiment was…well, not ‘safe’—nothing that involves altering human biochemistry is safe, ever—but safe enough that it was legal to do.”

  “Legality isn’t the point—” Jonathan began.

  Doc Webster overvoiced him. “And it isn’t my point, either, so kindly leggo of that red herring, okay? The experiment was moral to do, too. Do you deny it? Can you name one scientist or ethicist who—at the time—would have argued?”

  “It does not mitigate my guilt to tell me that there were thousands of other people just as criminally stupid. I was the one whose sloppy thinking triggered the disaster. I know that’s bad luck…but it’s bad luck I earned. The point is that no one, ever, can look at an organic substance and say, ‘Now that is perfectly safe: there’s nothing in there I don’t know about. That is safe to shoot into human beings who would really rather I didn’t, people I’ve manipulated into volunteering.’ It was wishful thinking—or would have been, if I’d ever thought about it. I didn’t.”

  The Doc sighed. “Your turn, Jake. He’s just washed his brain and I can’t do a thing with it.”

  I came around the bar, walked through Jonathan’s imaginary podium and made him join me at a table. He didn’t resist. The gang crowded gently around us, then parted again to let Tom Hauptman through with a couple of low-octane Blessings. I clinked mugs with Jonathan, and did my best to hold his eyes with my own.

  “I’m going to tell you a little story,” I said, “and I want you to believe that I’m not trying to measure my pain against yours, okay? But once upon a time I had a wife and daughter, and I loved them so much my teeth hurt. And one day I decided I could save thirty bucks by doing my own brake job, and the next day I didn’t have Barbara or Jesse any more.”

  He lifted one eyebrow and grimaced, as if to say tough break and big deal at the same time.

  “Listen to me,” I went on. “Understand me. I replaced the rear shoes myself, with a Chilton manual to help, and that night I decided to take both of my loves out for a drive. And suddenly I needed brakes bad and they weren’t there. A truck hit us. While I was unconscious, Barbara and Jessica were conscious and trapped and they burned to death; the M.E. said so. I woke up with nothing worse than bruises and one first-degree burn. Physically. Also, the trucker died, so I had to deal with the additional guilt of deep-down not giving a shit about his death. Now, I’m not saying I’m in your league, okay, Typhoid Johnny? But I was proud and stupid and my loved ones and one stranger suffered horribly and I escaped miraculously—are we together so far? Is this sounding at all familiar? Is there that much difference between killing two loved ones, or killing one loved one and two million strangers? Do I have the right to say I know a little bit of what you’re feeling?”

  He closed his eyes and sipped coffee. “I’m sorry. Yes, you do.”

  “I carried that sack around by the testicles for fifteen years,” I said quietly.

  He opened his eyes again, set the mug down on the table and took my hand in his. “How did you stay alive?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  I looked around the room and tried to think how I could possibly explain it to him. “Friends,” I said finally.

  His hand held mine in a deathgrip.

  “But I haven’t finished the story,” I said. “I’ll make it as short as I can. Fifteen years after the crash, I stumbled across proof—proof!—that it hadn’t been my fault after all. The brakes I’d fixed weren’t the ones that failed. It was the front brakes that went.”

  He gaped at me.

  “Do you get it? All those years of guilt and remorse and self-recrimination—all they accomplished was to put lines on my face and give me gobs of character. I spent a third of my life giving myself a beating I didn’t deserve. I’d sentenced an innocent man to life imprisonment on circumstantial evidence. All I can say is, thank God I didn’t believe in capital punishment, like you.”

  He frowned. “The cases aren’t parallel. In my case there is no doubt—”

  “Bullshit, there isn’t. Can you describe the mechanism that caused SIV to mutate into HIV?”

  “Not at present, but—”

  “Then how do you know it did? And how do you know it happened in blood you handled? You’ve got less hard evidence than I did.”

  “But how else—”

  BONG!

  A G-major triad…followed by the unmistakable voice of Curly, of the Three Stooges, saying, “I’m tryin’a think…but nuttin’ happens!”

  I jumped, and frowned, and looked over my shoulder to see who had picked now to start playing games.

  But there was no one at all at the computer, or anywhere near it. It had—apparently—switched itself on. Its fan powered up to speed, its hard disk chirped, and the twelve-inch monitor lit up and said, Welcome to Macintosh.

  △ △ △

  Rooba rooba—

  “Duck—,” I began.

  “Nothing to do with me,” he said. “As far as I know.”

  I turned back to Jonathan. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Even for this place, that’s weird.”

  “It just turned itself on?” he asked, frowning.

  “As far as I know,” I agreed.

  We all silently watched the Mac II boot up.

  I had left the Mac set up with the Finder as the startup application—but now it bypassed the Desktop, went right into Multifinder and opened up two applications at once, in splitscreen. The modem program and a word-processor.

  And then it waited for input.

  “Jake—,” Doc Webster began.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell is going on. Or what to do next.” I thought hard, and a lightbulb appeared metaphorically above my head. “But I can think of one thing to try. Duck?”

  “Yah.”

  “Why don’t you go over there and close your eyes and hit eleven keys at random?”

  He hesitated a moment, then went wordlessly to the Mac, covered his eyes with one hand, and poked at the keyboard with a stiff index finger as if he were testing it for fat content. “Okay, that’s eleven. Now what?”

  “Hit ‘Return’.”

  He did so, and after a brief pause, the screen changed.

  “Aha,” I said softly, “I was right.” I didn’t know exactly what I had been right about—the intuition had been too vague to put into words—but I knew I was onto something now. We had reached one of the biggest scientific database services in the world, and it was asking for our password…

  “Hit random keys again,” I said. “As many as you like.” I had no idea how many characters were in the typical password for that service, but I was pre
pared to trust to luck.

  “Wait,” Jonathan said. “I have a password to that service.”

  I nodded. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  He got up slowly and went over to sit at the Mac, putting his coffee where it could be knocked over without endangering anything. He entered his password, and the main search menu appeared onscreen.

  “Now what?” he said to the room at large.

  I went over and stood at his shoulder, squinted at the screen. “What do you think, people?” I said. “Look up ‘AIDS’ and let the Duck hunt around starting there? Or ‘SIV’?”

  “How about ‘malaria’?” Doc Webster suggested.

  “‘Green monkey,’” Mary Kay Kare said.

  That was so out-of-left-field it felt right. “Punch up ‘African green monkey,’” I said to Jonathan.

  “This is silly,” he said, and did as I asked. People started to cluster around the computer. Tommy sat down next to Jonathan and reached for the keyboard—and Mary Kay took it away from them both. “This is my pidgin,” she said firmly, and they relinquished it. (Mary Kay is one of the secret masters of the world: a librarian. They control information. Don’t ever piss one off.)

  The database began listing appearances of the words “African green monkey” in scientific literature. Text scrolled upward on the screen. We all stared at it dumbly. After a few minutes it became evident that we could wait all night for the last citation to appear.

  “Can you get that thing to do correlations?” Doc Webster asked.

  “Of course,” Mary Kay said.

  “Tell it to list the citations in descending order of number of references to African green monkeys,” the Doc suggested. “Then cross-reference by number of references to viruses in the same source.”

  She nodded enthusiastically, and did so. The screen display froze momentarily as she worked, and then text began to scroll by again—but there were far fewer hits now, a total of perhaps thirty citations.