The Callahan Touch

by Spider Robinson

  More: I could spot ghastly booby traps in every single one of those wishes that occurred to me in that first rush of thought—and there were bound to be mines I couldn’t spot. Indeed, in every single story I’d ever heard, in every fantasy from every culture and clime, “wish” was a synonym for “booby trap.” That was the point of wish stories.

  What good is world peace, if it comes at the cost of liberty? The simplest way to end hunger and pollution both is to exterminate the human race. Lose too much tyranny, and you lose order. I might not be able to bring myself to pour booze into coffee that tasted as good as it smelled. Universal freedom denies my right to restrict Jeffrey Dahmer’s recreational and dietary habits. If acoustic guitar ever came back, I’d be masochistically tempted to turn the bar over to Tom and go back on the road.

  A truce between the sexes? Are you out of your goddam mind, Jake? What else is there to distract us all from onrushing death? Television?

  Honor for prostitutes? Who would cops and politicians and the legions of unwanted have to look down on, then? (Or would politicians be honored too, by professional courtesy?) What would all the crippled egos and frightened souls do to keep functioning, without a class of people defined as inferior to everyone? At best, gay-bashing and racial baiting would skyrocket dramatically to compensate.

  An off-switch for the pain system? Suppose you neglected to switch it back on? Have you ever been stupid enough to disable the little routine on a Macintosh that asks, “Are you sure you want to delete the file N—?” before letting you trash applications?

  There is a good high without addiction or drastic backlash, and with several medicinal benefits to boot. The only one the government’s brain-damaged “War On Drugs” has been even moderately successful in suppressing. Create another, they’d make that a crime too.

  A cure for AIDS? Dr. Jonathan Crawford could have said a few things about that one. He’d been trying to cure malaria…and might just have caused AIDS as a side effect.

  Death is reputedly a totally effective specific for suffering. And if living people did not suffer…would they be people?

  A cure for death without the sudden universal wisdom and restraint to control birth would be a recipe for horror unimaginable. For that matter, so would a cure for death without a concurrent cure for aging. Old age is not for sissies, as Niven said.

  I am not the man I was the day my wife and daughter died—or the man I was the day my mother died. If I could bring them back, uncorrupted and untraumatized, just as I remembered them…would they love me? Would they know me at all? If they did, could my own heart take the stress of an emotional one-eighty like that?

  The more I tried to come up with three wishes, the less I was inclined to venture a single one…

  △ △ △

  Multiply my dilemma by—

  —no, raise it to the power of—

  —the number of people present with me in the room.

  △ △ △

  Now do you want to be telepathic, Jake old buddy?

  △ △ △

  “Whaddya say we blow de tree wi—de tree tings quick on sometin harmless,” Fast Eddie whispered a thousand years later, “before we get ourselves inta trouble, here?” His forehead was so wrinkled you could have played washboard on it.

  Long-Drink gently put a hand over Eddie’s mouth. “What,” he asked, “is absolutely guaranteed harmless?”

  Eddie’s brow wrinkled up even tighter…and the rest of him slumped.

  “Well,” Doc Webster murmured, a timeless, silent time later, “it could be worse.”

  “How?” I asked mournfully, and several others groaned approval of the question.

  “We could be down to one,” the Doc explained. “This way we have a little room to breathe. If we screw up too bad the first time, we can always get ourselves out of trouble—or at least back where we started—and still have a backup wi…option. It seems like our first priority is—”

  “No backup option, Doc,” Jordin Kare corrected. “The third one is the most important one of all. Say you’re right: we goof the first one, we undo it with the second…and there we are with a cluricaune in the house. The third is our last hope of ever getting rid of him.”

  “Sure,” the Doc said, “ideally we hold Losing The Cluricaune in reserve for our third w—our third expressed desire, naturally. But if we…choose that one first, there’s nobody to grant the other two.”

  The cluricaune was smiling in his sleep.

  “And you think there’s any way in hell that you can get this many people—even these people—to agree on one choice?” I asked. “Without a fight? Are you ready for that fight, Doc?”

  “Jake, it seems to me we have a responsibility—”

  I reached an instant, unilateral and irrevocable decision. If even Doc Webster, always one of the most sensible and wise and level-headed of us, was thinking along these sorts of lines—and so rattled that he had to keep making an obvious effort to avoid tripping over his own tongue—we were in big trouble. I knew he was wrong. He was being as reasonable and logical as any chump protagonist in a fantasy story; a hundred thousand stories said he was thinking like a victim. We had to break the mold somehow, move laterally. But I was not sure I had the emotional weight to sway the gang from his way of thinking—and that uncertainty made me a little frantic. Any one of them could doom us all, any second, with the best of intentions and a single sentence. Damn it, this was my bar, for now at least! It was up to me to decide who had what responsibilities to whom in here. If any of us was going to bear the weight of this, it had to be me. So I made a choice that hadn’t even gotten onto my preliminary ballot. To assert my authority—I yelped for higher authority.

  “God,” I said loudly, cutting the Doc off, “I wish Mike Callahan was here right now.”

  A great shout went up—

  7

  The Mick of Time

  My, didn’t Mike look surprised, when he materialized there in front of my bar?

  I was a little startled, myself. The big red-headed mick was stark naked, and even more red-faced than usual. From these and other evidences, it was apparent that I had caught him in the midst of a tender…well, no, possibly more of a volcanic…moment with Lady Sally McGee, or some designated alternate. Even the cluricaune—who had roused from his stupor the instant I’d spoken my wish—opened his drunken eyes wide at the sight, and stared in uncharacteristic silence. Mike, of course, shifted mental gears in something under a second.

  “The saints preserve us with BHT,” he boomed cheerfully, “and calcium propionate to retard spoilage. I thought I’d seen the last of you mugs. You pulled it off, then? No, I see by your faces you haven’t. Then how in the name of God’s gilded gonads did I get here? Jake?”

  My heart was hammering like mad. No, like glad. Just the sight of the Mick of Time was enough to make me feel that same wave of fierce joy I’d felt last night, when my friends had come through my door for the first time in much too long. I felt a little like an Apostle on Easter Sunday afternoon. “Hi, Mike. It’s not a short story. More of a novelette…”

  He nodded easily. “You know me,” he said. “I got time.”

  Then there was a medium brief interruption. I was the first to lose it, vaulting over the bar, but I only led the pack by instants. I will simply say that not one of us experienced the slightest hesitation or self-consciousness or awkwardness about hugging a big naked Irishman, then or ever, and if you find anything weird about that, I condemn you to live in that skull for the rest of your life.

  Isham and Tanya kept guard, of course, but I think everyone else managed to slip into and out of that gang hug before it was through. We were all laughing and crying and considerably less worried than we had been a moment ago.

  All except me. As I stood back and let my friends have a chance to hug our mentor, I got in about a good ten seconds of happiness. And then I had a thought that made me literally bite my tongue. If I could wish Mike Callahan into my bar…why couldn
’t I wish Mary Callahan-Finn into my bar?

  Why couldn’t I wish her into my arms again?

  Barbara and Jessica had been gone for nearly two decades—my mother even longer. But Mary had only been lost to me for a period measurable in months…

  Of course, she was married now. To a guy that blew up planets sometimes. A good friend of mine, besides.

  (I winced, remembering something from my browse through Irish history—the Finn Cycle. It’s the story of Fionn Mac Cumhail, or Finn MacCool. He fell for Cormac’s daughter Grainne, but she eloped with a member of his own band—much the way Mary dumped me for my pal Mickey Finn. The second-century Finn betrayed his friend and stole his beloved back…and ultimately died by treachery himself.)

  Fast Eddie ducked outside briefly to fetch a spare pair of work pants from Isham’s truck (Ish being the only one in the room whose pants would fit Callahan). Once he’d stepped into them, Mike spotted the stranger in the crowd, walked over and offered the Duck his hand. “Howdy, friend. My name is Mike Callahan.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” the Duck said. “They call me Duck.”

  Callahan looked the hairy little guy over. “Your name wouldn’t be Ernie, would it?” he asked.

  The Duck had started to put out his own hand; now he froze. “How did you know that?”

  “Lucky guess,” Mike said. “I like your comic strip.” He took the Duck’s hand and shook it firmly, and the Duck blinked at him in obvious bafflement and let him get away with it.

  “Mike,” I said, the second I decently could, “you and the Duck need to talk, later, but just now we got a small problem—”

  “So I can see,” he rumbled, gazing into the twinkling eyes of the cluricaune, and twinkling right back at him. “A cluricaune, sure as me mother was Irish! Good cess to you, Naggeneen!”

  “Call me a blatherskite—Brian Boru!” the cluricaune cried tipsily. “Good evenin’, Yer Majesty, glad you could visit! And how are they keepin’ in old Tir Na Nog?”

  If there’s anything Mike Callahan knows, it’s how to humor a drunk. “Oh, merry as ever—not unlike yourself. You’re into your cups to the neck, it appears.”

  “I wish it was hers,” the little man said, leering at Tanya. She shook him by his cuffs and growled from deep in the area referred to. “Or possibly not…Your Majesty, tell these Fomorians here to unchain me! I’m caught fair and square and I’ll give me parole.”

  “What’s in it for me if I do?” Callahan asked.

  “A reasonable question.” The cluricaune appeared to pass out cold for a second or two, and then he became animated again. His pipe flew up from below him and found its place in his teeth as he spoke. “I’ve got it, bejabers! I’ll put my request in the form of a wager, and you be the judge if I win it or not. If I make every soul in this room drop their jaw—in a minute or less—and with two little questions—can I be restored to the use of me hands?”

  With two questions? “This oughta be good, Mike,” I said. “Some of us here didn’t drop our jaws when he changed into a werewolf.”

  The cluricaune cackled loudly. “It’s not an illusion I offer yez here, t’is a fact—one you know, that’s been sittin’ right under yer face all yer life—you’ll never believe that yez missed it yerselves!”

  Mike looked to me. “Your bar, Jake.”

  A small but distinct thrill went through me at those words. Like the first time my father ever said to me, “It’s your house, son.” I filed it for later basking. I was busy.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “he knows where my buttons are located. You think if we give him parole, he’ll keep it? Obey us ’til our business is done?”

  “I swear by me beard that I shall—an’ a cluricaune’s word is as good as his bond,” the little man proclaimed.

  “How good is his bond, Mike?” Fast Eddie asked suspiciously.

  “Good, Eddie,” Callahan said. “As good as those bonds you got him in, anyway—and lots better than the ones they use on Wall Street. A little slipperier, maybe. You gotta be careful what word, what bond. But this seems pretty safe.”

  “Well, I do hate to keep a guest in irons if it’s not absolutely necessary,” I said. “Not that burning curiosity has any influence on my thinking.”

  “Mine either,” several patrons chorused.

  “Go ahead,” I told the cluricaune. “Étonne-moi!”

  He contrived to bow in handcuffs—not bad for someone too drunk to stand unassisted, even in mid-air. “Thank you, Your Worship. It’s curious you should be speakin’ in French, for the story I have for yez starts out in Cannes, the cinema festival place—oh, there’s champion drinkin’ there, almost as much as Oktoberfest, even a cluricaune can’t make a dent in the liquor supply. So I go there one year, oh, a decade ago, and I find meself there in a room…well, a tavern…and who should be sittin’ across from me, sharin’ a dram, but that big Orson Welles and that Mankiewicz feller, director and writer of Citizen Kane! I bought them a drink on the strength of it, told ’em how much I admired their movie—”

  I had my eye on the clock. (Yes, it’s a Counterclock, like the old one at Callahan’s. I had to have it made special. Don’t ask what it cost.) I intended, since Mike had said cluricaunes were literal-minded, to hold him to his one-minute deadline…and so far I didn’t see him near a jaw-dropping punchline. So he’d met some celebrities, once…

  “—and said I’d a question I wanted to ask them, a question pertainin’ to Citizen Kane. Well, Orson and Herman most graciously said they’d be happy to answer whatever I asked. So I sez to ’em, ‘Right at the start o’ yer movie…Charles Foster Kane dies alone, am I right?’ And Welles nods and Mankiewicz says, ‘Quite alone.’”

  One question down. I mentally checked my jaw. Still in place.

  The cluricaune took inventory of the room with his sparkling eyes, with the same result, and then grinned broadly. He spoke slowly now, drawing it out for effect. “So I says to them, ‘How in the world, then, does anyone know that his last word is Rosebud?’”

  Thunderstruck. That’s the word I want. You like to think you belong to an intelligent species, and then something like this comes along. The film generally agreed to be the greatest ever made—certainly the most studied and analyzed movie of all time—had a hole in its plot you could drive a freight-train through, in the first minute—the entire premise of the film was logically impossible…and no one in all the world but the cluricaune had ever noticed it before. I think I exchanged glances with everyone in the room in about five seconds, and I didn’t see one face that didn’t have a dropped jaw. I hadn’t experienced such a sudden massive doubt of the collective human intelligence since, at the age of ten, I’d tried to woo a nine-year-old maiden with a poem in a classical mode, and she’d stopped me in my tracks with, “Why do they always say that—‘Roses are red, violets are blue…’—when violets are purple. Why didn’t they pick something that is blue?”

  The most amazing part is that there are probably a dozen ways Welles and Mankiewicz could have solved the problem, without spoiling the solitude of Kane’s death. It could have been fixed after the close of principal photography, with a single extra shot. (Kane had just finished dictating his will into a wire recorder as—A freak echo in the heating pipes conveyed his voice to the attic, where a maid happened to—An intercom he thought switched off shorted itself open just as—A bug planted by his enemies was found by—) But Mankiewicz and Welles simply never noticed the problem existed. It was too big to see.

  Mike Callahan broke the awed silence. “Turn him loose, Tanya—he’s won the bet.”

  Tanya shook off her stasis, closed her mouth, and produced a key from somewhere on her person.

  “Christ almighty,” Long-Drink burst out, maddened beyond endurance, “what did Welles and Mankiewicz say?”

  The cluricaune waited until Tanya had freed him, then lurched unsteadily to his feet (two feet off the ground, mind) and said slyly, “What’s in it for me if I tell yez?”

&nb
sp; Callahan had to grin. “A reasonable question. What do you…no, that’d be a silly question. Jake?”

  I sighed. “Tom says there’s a few more cases of stuff out in the van. You want to bring in a case of scotch, Tom?”

  The cluricaune turned up his nose.

  I sighed again. Well, it was worth it to hear the answer. “Make it a case of Tully.” Damned if I’d give him the Bushmill’s.

  He nodded acceptance.

  When Tom came in the door with the case, he nearly dropped it—for the instant he crossed the threshold, its weight diminished drastically. He appeared to try and fling the case up at the ceiling and change his mind in midstream. The cluricaune’s eyes began to glow like inspection ports in the wall of Hell.

  “Welles looks at Mankiewicz, pale as a haddock,” he said in a sing-song voice, “and Mankiewicz looks back at him in return…and together they puts down their drinks on the table, unfinished, and rises together and shows me their backs, and be damned if a word I could get from them after! Now dip me if that isn’t excellent liquor—and Jasus, it’s good to be shut o’ the darbies—WHEE!”

  Suddenly he was dancing a hornpipe—I don’t know, maybe a reel or a jig, I thought of it as a hornpipe—in mid-air, bounding high and recovering, drunk as a lord on the first of May. He kept missing steps and falling through his invisible floor, then swinging back up to try again, little arms flailing wildly. People flinched and ducked out of his way. Glassware fell from tables and shattered. Ish, backing up, stumbled into a table and demolished it. And then it got bad.

  The cluricaune began to sing—

  —worse, to sing, in a very piercing voice…not some Irish air or ballad…but an Italian (-American) song—

  —worse yet, a punning parody of “That’s Amoré”—

  “When-a you swim inna da sea, an’ a eel bites-a you knee, dat’s a moray—”

  There were howls of pain. The cluricaune laughed uproariously and kept on reeling about like Zorba on acid, trailing toxic peat fumes from his villainous pipe. As he careened past Tanya again, he nearly kicked her in the head; she heard his little boot go by her ear and snatched at it. And missed. She stared with her sightless eyes at her own fist.