Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

by Spider Robinson

  Gradually, without suddenness, each living thing

  became aware of a curious stuttering drone to the far east, which became audible too slowly to startle. It swelled, drew nearer, and small muscles and sinews tensed, then relaxed as the sound was identified as familiar, harmless.

  A pale green 1960 Dodge, with no more than three cylinders firing, crept jerkily into view through the shrouds of snow. Wipers blinking clumsily, the great machine felt its way along the road, its highway song hoarse and stuttered. With a final roar of mortal agony, it fell silent: wipers ceased their wiping, pistons ceased driving, lights winked out, and the huge car coasted gracefully off the road and rolled to a stop with its nose resting on a snow-laden mesquite.

  Stillness returned to U.S. 40... and still, on either side of it, the animals waited.

  Even as she finished speaking, the walking bass line with which she was underpinning her mournful chord returned to that dysharmonic C sharp. Then with breathtaking ease it slid down two tones to B, became the dominant of a simple E minor, and as bass, organ, and drums came in from nowhere she began to sing:

  Snow fallin' gentle on the windshield

  Sittin' on the side of the road

  Took a ride—my engine died and left me

  Sittin' on the side of the road

  In a little while I'll get out and start a-walkin'

  Probably a town pretty near

  But it just occurs to me that I ain't got no

  More reason to be there than to be here

  But I'll be leavin'

  (sudden key shift)

  Soon as I find me a reason to

  Right now it's nice just to watch the snow

  Coverin' the windshield and windows...

  She finished on a plaintive A minor, toppled off it back into that ghostly mosquito-biting E minor sixth again, and the other instruments fell away, leaving her guitar alone. Again, she spoke:

  Snow now completely covered the windshield, and windows, forming a white curtain which hid the interior of the car, and any activity within—if there was any to be seen. No sound issued from the car, no vibration disturbed the snow on its doors. The animals were puzzled, but delighted: perhaps a human understood at last.

  The C sharp walked down to B again, but this time it belonged to a clean, simple G chord, supported by a steel guitar and the trapping of bluegrass, a comparatively happy sound that only lasted for the first four lines as that voice—that voice!—-picked up the song again, etching us with its words:

  Don't worry now. I'm goin'

  Any minute now, I'll be goin'

  Leave the car

  —It isn't far to walk now

  Any minute now, I'll be going

  (slowing now, an electric guitar leading into an achingly repeated C-E A-minor progression that went nowhere...)

  Soon as I can find a place I want to go

  Soon as I can find a thing I want to do

  Soon as I can find someone I want to know

  Or think of something interesting and new

  (a sudden optimistic jump into the key of F...)

  I mean, I could make it easy to the next town

  (twisting crazily into E flat...)

  But what am I to do when I get there?

  (inexorably back to C...)

  That's what I made this odyssey to find out:

  Two thousand miles and still I just don't care...

  (a capella:)

  Is it worthwhile to go on looking?

  We wanted to cry, wanted to shout, wanted to run forward with a hundred reasons for living, find some way to heal the hurt in that voice, and no one made a sound. Alone again with her guitar, Bobbi Joy wove that dysharmonic tapestry of hurting notes that was already becoming as familiar to us as the taste that a bad dream always has in the cold morning; and as she began to speak again, not a muscle flickered in her ebony face, as though her scar was all the expression she would ever need or be allowed.

  The snow began to drift.

  In a minute—or an hour—the car was half-buried in a heavy white winter coat of wet snow. The animals were already beginning to forget about the car. It had not shown movement in so long that they were coming to regard it as part of their environment—of less interest than the tattered 1892 edition of The Denver Record pinned under a rock, which at least still fluttered occasionally in the wind.

  For the memory of the animals is short, and the years are long, and they have found that very little is worth puzzling over for very long.

  And still, the snow fell...

  This time she stayed with the C sharp, built an A chord around it, and was joined only by harpsichord and bass. There was no ambiguity to this part: a simple, mournful melody that had no change-ups, no surprises, just the quiet calm of resignation, of unheeded defeat.

  Sort of friendly here inside the car

  Even though it's gettin' kinda cold

  Haven't stirred, or said a word, in hours

  I believe it's gettin' awful cold

  In the glove compartment, there's a small flask:

  Little Irish whiskey for the soul

  But reachin' out to get it seems a great task

  And anyway, it isn't all that cold

  It might keep me warm

  But it just ain't worth the trouble...

  Her shoulders seemed to slump, and the droning background of her guitar took on a terrible finality.

  There was no longer a Dodge by the side of U.S. 40; just a drift like many others, peaceful and horribly cold. A faint illumination began to expose mysteries of snow-sculpture, hummocks and valleys of white. But for the swirling haze, you might have said it was dawn.

  The car was completely hidden from sight—and so, in caves, holes, and shelters, were the animals. But they no longer remembered the car... and at least in their dwellings were some signs of life.

  And with shattering unexpectedness she slammed into E major, driving with horns and bass and moog and drums in a frenzied hallelujah chorus that dared you to begin hoping again. Surely that throbbing beat was a heart starting to beat, surely that energy was purposeful!

  We sat up straighter, and crossed our fingers.

  I've got it!

  There's something that I want to do

  A thing that seems to have some kind of point

  I've got some grass, enclosed in glass

  Here inside my shirt

  Think I'm gonna roll myself a joint

  (the bottom fell out of voice and arrangement, scared away by solemnity and a trembling echo...)

  A complicated operation—might disturb the peace

  But it ought to warm me just as well as drink

  So it's something worth the trouble and it's gonna help me find

  A reason to get out of here I think

  (a capella)

  Now where did I put all those Zig-Zags?

  Again that C sharp rang out, shocking return to inevitability, and the droning guitar cut the rug out from under us. Helpless, not knowing whether the music or the words frustrated us more, we waited in fearful silence for what had to come next. And for the last time the expressionless voice spoke:

  Two weeks later, when a road-crew dug out the car, they found inside it the frozen corpse of a young woman, incredibly tranquil and serene. Between the blue and rigid lips was the pencil-thin column of ash from a hand-rolled cigarette, which had burned undisturbed until it had seared the lips and gone out. The crew-boss silenced his men, radioed a call to the State Police with remarkable calm...

  And then went home and made savage love to his wife.

  And that damned unnerving guitar fell to pieces on the E minor sixth, as resolved as it was ever going to be.

  The silence persisted for a full minute before anyone so much as thought to look into his drink for any answers that might be skulking around in there. And when we did, we found none there, so we tried looking at each other. And when that failed, we turned as one to regard the stranger who had brought u
s this vision. His hand was back at his side, now, and the fireplace was back where it belonged, naively attempting to warm a room that had gone as cold as death ...

  "That, gentlemen," he said simply, "is Bobbi Joy."

  No one said a word. I saw Doc Webster groping desperately for a wisecrack to break the spell, and it just wasn't there. The stranger had been right: now that it was over we could scarcely believe that it had happened, scarcely believe that we were still alive.

  "Now that you know her," the stranger went on, "you're ready to hear her story, what made her what she is and what I hope to do about it."

  Bobbi Joy (the Meddler continued) was born Isadora Brickhill in the back seat of a gypsy cab somewhere in Harlem, in the year 1952. I can see by your scowls, gentlemen, that I don't have to explain what that means. She didn't even have Billie Holiday's classic two choices—no one was hiring maids in those days. By the training and education she received, she was prepared only for the most basic trade there is: by 1966 little Isadora was an experienced and, if rumor is to be believed, accomplished whore.

  Even in that most cliched of professions she was an anomaly. She did not drink, touched no drugs save an occasional social reefer, and never seemed to project that desperate air of defeat and cynical surrender so characteristic of her colleagues. She had a fiery fighting spirit that demanded and elicited respect from all who knew her, and except for physically, no one ever touched her at all. Madams loved her for her utterly dependable honesty in the split, the girls loved her for her unflagging courage and willingness to be of help, and the Johns loved her for the completely detached professionalism she brought to her work.

  Then came the bust.

  Some sort of political mix-up, as the story goes—a payoff missed, an official inadvertently offended, a particularly well-written expose that demanded token action. Whatever the reason, Hannah's House was raided in April of 1974 in the traditional manner, wagons and all. Bobbi, as she was by now known, was loaded into the wagons with the rest of the girls before she had a chance to grab a wrap. Consequently she attracted the attention of a patrolman named Duffy, who had come to appreciate that in such situations, a policeman hath rank privileges. He attempted to collect what he regarded as only his right, and was refused: Bobbi allowed as how she might be for sale but she was damned if she was for free. Duffy persisted, and bought a knee in the groin, whereupon he lost all discretion and laid open Bobbi's face with the barrel of his pistol. This so mightily embarrassed Duffy's sergeant, who was also Duffy's brother-in-law, that he was forced to ignore the wound, locking Bobbi in with the rest of the girls in the hope that her disfigurement could be passed off as the result of a razor fight in the cells. By the time she got medical attention, it was too late. She was scarred through and through, and forever unsuited for the only

  job she knew.

  Almost a year later, a producer received an unsolicited tape in the mail. Such tapes are never played, but this one had the songs listed on the outside, and the producer's eye was caught by the first title: "The Suicide Song." It was a crude, home-taped version of the song you just heard, audio only. The producer played it once, and spent a frantic seventeen hours locating Bobbi Joy.

  He didn't make her a star: he simply recorded her songs and made them available for sale. She became a star, a star like there had never been before. At least seven of her recordings, tape and holo, were proscribed from public broadcast—because areas in which they were played showed sudden jumps in the suicide rate. The seventies and eighties were not good years in which to live, and Bobbi Joy spoke for all too many of us all too well. She was a phenomenon, endlessly analyzed and never defined, and if some of us took a perverse kind of courage from her songs, maybe that was more reflection of us than of her. And maybe not.

  In any event, the producer with remarkable ease became unspeakably rich. And it comforted him not. Poor devil, condemned to be the man who gave Bobbi Joy to the world, how could his heart be soothed with money? He gave most of it away to his mad brother, who thought he could build a time machine, just to be rid of it. He pickled himself in alcohol with the balance, and never, ever played her tapes for himself. Like all her fans, he ached to bring her peace and knew no man ever could; but there was more. He loved her with a ferocious and utterly hopeless desperation, and consequently avoided her company as much as possible. He dreamed futile dreams of fixing her hurt, and lost a great deal of weight, and when his mad brother told him one spring day that the time machine was a success, he knew what he had to do.

  His brother, though mad, was not so mad as he was by now, and sought to reason with him. He spoke of possible disruption of the time-stream by the changing of the past, and other complicated things, and flatly forbade the producer to use the time machine.

  Right now, years in the future, he's nursing a sore jaw and wondering whether I'm about to destroy the fabric of time. And so am I.

  I've been wandering around in your time for two or three days. I gave myself some leeway to make plans, but I've been using it to cool off. And now I don't know what to do. Maybe my brother was right; he knows a lot more than I about it. But I can't leave her in pain, can I?

  Oh yes, one more thing: the bust is tonight. About four hours from now.

  What could we say? We had to believe him—the technology inherent in that holographic sphere was certainly well beyond the present state of the art. More important, if that voice truly existed in our time, we would have heard of it long since. It was impossible to disbelieve that voice.

  Callahan summed it up for all of us.

  "What do you figure to do about it, brother?"

  The Meddler didn't answer, and suddenly I knew

  somehow, maybe from the set of his mouth, maybe a little from the glance he gave Tommy Janssen.

  "I think I understand, Mike," I said softly. "I saw him talking to Tommy while I was up on the stand, and I saw Tommy cuss him out. Somewhere outside he ran into someone who told him where he could find a kid who used to be a heroin addict, a kid who would certainly know where to get him a gun. He's going to kill Patrolman Duffy. Aren't you, friend?"

  The Meddler nodded.

  "Then you've made your decision?" asked Callahan. "One murder'll fix everything?"

  "It'll prevent that scar," said the Meddler. "And how can it be murder to kill a scum like that? The hell with a gun, I can get within knife distance easily—no one will be expecting anything, and I don't care what they do to me afterwards." He squared his shoulders, and looked Callahan in the eye. "You figure to stop me?"

  "Well now, son," Callahan drawled, "I'm not certain I've got the right to meddle in something like this. Besides, I reckon it's no accident you're closer to the door than any of us. But it seems like I ought to point out—"

  He broke off and stared at the doorway. So did the rest of us. A man stood there, where there had been no one a moment before. He looked like an older, wearier version of the Meddler, built much the same, but he wasn't wearing an overcoat so you could see that the pot-belly was actually an enormous belt strapped around his waist. Obviously, it was a time machine; just as obviously, he was its inventor, come to stop his brother from tampering with history.

  But our attention was centered not on the machinery around his waist, but on the much smaller piece of it in his right hand. Made of glass and seemingly quite fragile, it could only have been the handgun of the 1990's, and the way he held it told us that we ought to respect it. I thought of lasers and backed away, fetching up against my amplifier.

  "I can't let you do it, John," said the newcomer, ignoring the rest of us.

  "You can't stop me," said the Meddler.

  "I can kill you," his brother corrected.

  "Look, Henry," the Meddler said desperately, "I'm

  not going into this blindly. I know what I'm doing."

  "Do you?" His brother laughed. "You damned fool, you haven't the faintest notion, what you could do by killing that fool policeman. Suppose a criminal he would ha
ve apprehended goes on to kill some innocent people instead? Suppose the simple removal of him from history suffices to disrupt this time-stream beyond repair? You may be killing every man, woman, and child in your time, John!"

  "Don't you think I know that?" cried the man in the

  overcoat. "And do you suppose that's all there is to be afraid of? Suppose I'm entirely successful, and only bring about a world without Bobbi Joy. She brought us all a self-conscious awareness of collective guilt which had an enormous effect for good. I don't know that I have the right to deprive the world of her music.

  "Suppose there's a Law of Conservation of Pain? Suppose pain can't be destroyed within a continuum? Then all I'll have done is redirected her pain: I suspect it will all be transferred to me—and I can't sing worth a damn. Henry, I admit I don't have any idea what the consequences of my action may be. But I do know what I have to do."

  "And I can't let you," his brother repeated.

  He lifted the strange glass pistol and aimed it at the Meddler's heart, and I saw Callahan's big hands go under the bar for the sawed-off shotgun, and I saw Long-Drink and the Doc and Tommy Janssen start to close in on the gunman, and I knew that none of them would be in time, and without thinking I spun on my heel, twisted the volume knob savagely on my amp, clutched my fishing as high as I could and snapped the pick across it. A shrieking high-note lanced through the air, and I rammed the guitar in front of the monitor-speaker for maximum feedback.

  A red-hot knife went through every ear in the room, freezing the action like a stop-motion camera. The guitar fed back and fed back, building from a noise like a gutshot pig to something that was felt rather than heard. Glasses began to shatter along the bar, then bottles on the long shelves behind it...