Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  I looked at Callahan.

  He looked back at me. “Your place, son,” he said.

  I tried to remember what had ever made me want to give up the joyous carefree life of a starving musician. Surely there was going to be another Folk Music Scare, any decade now…

  “Have you got an ETA, Solace?” I asked.

  “Not an accurate one. Insufficient data. I have only a single frame—and the next shot of that portion of the sky is not due to be uploaded for another eight hours. My best estimate, based on doppler inference, is…call it dawn, plus or minus three hours.”

  I nodded. “So we have three to nine hours to cobble up something that can take out another Mickey Finn?”

  “Essentially correct.”

  Now it was so quiet I could hear other people thinking.

  Okay. First step: take inventory of assets. “Nikky,” I called out, “can your death-ray do the job?”

  “No,” he and Finn answered together. “I could write on the face of Mars with it,” he went on, “…but Mr. Finn could do as much with his smallest finger. I am not certain I could construct a weapon of the requisite power…and I am certain I cannot do it in nine hours. And if I could, we could not use it.”

  I didn’t get that last part, but was too busy to pursue it. “Mick? How are your repairs coming?”

  “Life support: now nominal. Perceptual: ninety percent functional. Motive power: seventy-five percent. Defensive: fifty percent. Offensive: twenty percent. I will not be able to enhance the last two systems more than five percentage points each within the deadline stated.”

  I sighed. “Mary? How are your mojos holding out?”

  “Just about the same as Mick’s,” she said bitterly. “I’ve lost about half my defensive capability and three quarters of my offense. But it doesn’t even matter, Jake—”

  “Just a second.” Buck had his hand up, like a kid in class. “Yes, Buck?”

  His eyes were very bright. “Look, I’ve given up, okay? I am prepared to swallow any premise whatsoever, no matter how preposterous. But I insist that the logic parse, after that. What is this crap about a deadline?”

  I blinked. “I don’t think I get your question.”

  He turned to face Callahan. “Mr. Callahan,” he said, “my name is Buck Rogers.”

  Callahan didn’t bat an eye. “Nice to meet you, Buck. How’s Wilma?”

  Apparently—perhaps understandably—Buck had never read Nowlan’s original stories; he batted both eyes, several times. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said finally, “she’s still living in Bedrock with Fred. What I wanted to ask you was…correct me if I have this wrong, but you are a time traveler, are you not?”

  Mike nodded. “For my sins.”

  “You come from the future?”

  Mike nodded again. “From a planet called Harmony.” He pointed down and to his right. “Thataway a couple of light-centuries, although it isn’t inhabited at the moment.”

  Buck’s turn to nod. “Where there doubtless will one day exist a sophisticated and mighty civilization, with powers I can only dimly imagine.”

  “Right.”

  They were nodding at each other like two novelty mannikins, and then Buck yelled, big, “So why the hell can’t you just pop back home and bring back the Harmonian Marines?”

  Mike sighed and spread his arms. “Because I didn’t,” he said.

  Suddenly I got it. Now I understood why Tesla had said that even if he had a big enough weapon, he couldn’t use it, and Mary had said that her own firepower and Mick’s didn’t matter.

  The problem was Time Traveler’s Dilemma.

  “He doesn’t dare change history, Buck,” I explained.

  He may not have read Nowlan, but he had read some sf, or at least watched Star Trek; his face fell as he took my meaning. “But…but isn’t he changing the past right now, just by being here?”

  Callahan shook his head. “Not unless my presence here and now enters the historical record. Time can heal itself around little discontinuities, son—but history is the main thread. Individual memories fade, but the collective memory of a culture endures. Poke one hole in history, and the fabric of Time comes apart. I can put my hands on weapons you can’t imagine, easily powerful enough to beat another Mickey Finn. But they’re all gaudy. Bright. Noisy in several spectrums. Their use would cause talk. History says that no such weapons were employed in this ficton—so I can’t use ’em.”

  Acayib spoke up. “As I understand it, the last time you people had alien trouble, you used a goddam atom bomb!”

  Mike nodded. “Local technology. And we were lucky. For what seemed to them good and sufficient reason, the powers that be decided to suppress the news. In historical terms, they made it didn’t happen. If a second nuke went off in the same county within a few years, we might not be so lucky. And consider this: Mickey Finn was standing at ground zero when that bomb went off—and managed to protect not only himself, but every one of his friends. The Beast, all gods be thanked, was not as heavily shielded as his scouts. It would take something a lot splashier to make the nut this time…and history says it didn’t happen, so it can’t.”

  Buck was aghast. “So what the hell are you saying?” He shouted. “We just sit here and wait for the damned Lizard to get here and destroy the Earth, and that won’t make the papers?”

  Mike shrugged. “Of course not. What I’m saying is, whatever we do can’t involve anachronistic weapons. Or conventional ones beyond a certain strength. And if we lose, all of reality goes away.”

  ***

  “Mike,” Doc Webster boomed, “why can’t you go back home, check a couple of planet-crackers out of inventory, fetch them back to this moment—and go take the Lizard out there, in deep space, before he gets any closer? So maybe a couple of odd plates appear in some astronomer’s data; so what? Solace ought to be able to do a little judicious image-enhancing in the Net…”

  Mike shook his head sadly. “Nice try, Sam—but the energy required would be naked-eyeball-visible from Terra. A hole too big to mend, having a supernova occur where no star was. Not to mention the fact that a display like that could draw the whole Cockroach race down on us: they’d extrapolate his course and find Earth. We need something brilliant…and I haven’t got any more of that back home than we have right here.”

  Buck did something I’ve read about but never seen before: he actually reached up and tore a couple of handfuls of hair from his head. “This is all three of George Carlin’s categories of dumbness: Stupid, Full of Shit, and Fuckin’ Nuts!” he cried. “We’re supposed to take out a space monster who blows up stars for a living—only we’re not supposed to attract any attention doing it? That’s as crazy as—”

  “—tossing money on the fire?” I suggested.

  “Burning money isn’t in the same league!” he insisted. “This is…is…hell, there’s no way anybody could do it.”

  The Lucky Duck walked up to him out of the crowd and held out his hand over a nearby table, palm up. There were three quarters in it. I could guess what was coming. As Buck watched, confused, the Duck flipped them high in the air. They landed on the table simultaneously—

  clack!

  —all three on edge.

  They poised there momentarily, but the tabletop was ever so slightly out of true; as one they rolled to the edge and over, bouncing high off the floor and into the Duck’s waiting hand. He wasn’t even watching; he was holding Buck’s gaze.

  “I’ll bet you a million dollars we can,” the Duck said.

  ***

  Slowly all the fear drained out of Buck, and thus the anger, and he seemed to shrink slightly. “What the hell,” he said weakly. “What do I know?” He shook his head. “Okay, let’s see the color of your money.”

  The Duck sneered. “What for? If you win, you ain’t gonna be around to collect.”

  “True,” Buck conceded. He thought for a minute. “In that case, I insist on one condition. If you win…you have to pitch the dough
into the fireplace.”

  “Just what I had in mind,” the Duck agreed.

  A cheer went up, full of whistles and hoots and clapping and foot-stomping.

  As I listened to it, I felt an emotion I could not name—and still cannot—sweep over me. If you can imagine a combination of terror and pride and fierce joy that add up to serenity, you’re in the neighborhood. This was where I wanted to spend Armageddon. This was the place to be, come Ragnarok. This was the company of glory I wanted to muster with on Judgment Day. These were the people I—

  All at once I heard the ending crescendo-crash! of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life,” saw the wormhole sequence from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and had a rush of brains to the head…

  “I have a plan,” I said softly, wonderingly.

  The cheer was still going on, and starting to devolve into general conversation; nobody heard me except Zoey. And what she murmured in reply floored me.

  “I knew you would, stringbean.”

  The she downshifted vocal gears, to something more like a stevedore’s bellow. “HEY, EVERYBODY! JAKE’S GOT A PLAN!”

  In the sudden stillness, I blinked and blushed and finished my Irish coffee. “Uh…well, not exactly what I’d call the main plan, exactly. But I think I have a very promising Step One. And God knows it’s right up our alley. Hell, we were born for the job.”

  “Lay it on us, Jake,” Callahan said.

  “Tell it, cousin,” Isham Latimer called.

  “Whip it out,” Long-Drink said.

  “You put it down, Nazz—we’ll pick it up,” Doc Webster rasped in a fair imitation of Lord Buckley.

  “What’s de plan, boss?” Fast Eddie summed up.

  I stared around at all of them, flabbergasted by the twisted, goofy rightness of it. How come nobody else had figured it out?

  “We get drunk and have fun,” I said. “And maybe shoot the shit a little.”

  ***

  Amazing how many different ways there are to grunt. Everybody made some sort of huh noise at once, and I swear no two were alike. Some were in descending mode, and meant something like, I can’t think of a better idea but I was rather hoping for more from yours. Some were in ascending mode, and meant, are you out of your cotton-picking mind? But a slight majority rose and then fell, meaning, now that is really one hell of a good idea there. And a couple of those repeated, as the implications sank in.

  Buck, however, was of the ascending school of thought. “That’s your plan? We turn off our brains?”

  “Au contraire,” I said. “We switch ’em on.”

  A few ascenders switched their ballot to up and down.

  “Of course,” Doc Webster said. “We play to our strengths.”

  “Exactly, Doc,” I said.

  Long-Drink McGonnigle raised his stein. “My life has not been wasted,” he said solemnly.

  Buck was still looking baffled.

  “Look,” I said, “the last time this happened…well, that atom bomb was useful, sure…but it wasn’t what saved our asses. Just about any other group of people on Earth could have had ten atom bombs, and a Mickey Finn to shield ’em from the blast forces, and still gone down.”

  More ascenders were coming over to my side.

  “What saved us was, we were telepathic at the time.”

  The late returns from the grunt poll indicated I had just about everybody but Buck and Acayib, now. Even Nikky was nodding.

  “Because we were telepathic, we were able to outthink the Beast, and keep him off balance, and most important, distract him at the crucial instant. If he’d had as much as a second’s warning, he’d have been out of the solar system by the time that bomb went off. If we’re going to take out a creature that’s even tougher, I figure we’d better get telepathic again. Problem is, we no longer have the MacDonald brothers to help us connect.”

  That went over Buck and Acayib’s heads, of course, so I paused to briefly explain about Jim and Paul MacDonald, the telepathic brothers who, in time of crisis, had been able to bootstrap all of us up to their level of telepathic awareness—and had been murdered by the Beast for their pains.

  “Jim and Paul always claimed that everybody has telepathic potential—that all the equipment is in place in all of us, and it’s just a question of learning how to use it.”

  “I think we’re all born knowing how to use it,” Doc Webster said. “Then all these telepathically-deaf-and-dumb giants start yapping at us, insisting that we learn to use sound and facial expression and gesture, and before long we forget how to really communicate.”

  “You may be right, for all I know, Doc,” I agreed. “Jim used to say it’s a matter of learning how to shovel the shit out of the communications room…that what you have to do is unlearn a lifetime of tricks you’ve picked up for suppressing telepathy. He said it’s fear that holds us all back from telepathy, and that the best recipe he knew for dealing with fear was just what we do here most of the time: drink and think and share and care together.”

  “Whoa,” Buck said. “Hold it right there. What makes you think you’re smarter than your ancestors?”

  “Pardon?”

  “If I accept your premise—that we all have telepath machinery in us, waiting for us to invent an owner’s manual—then it has to follow that at one time the whole race was telepathic. Function begets organ. An organic system simply can’t evolve a couple of million years before it gets used, right?”

  I thought about Atlantis legends, Eden myths, Dreamtime legends. I glanced quickly at Callahan, but he was poker-faced. “Could be. Make your point.”

  “Once we were all telepathic. Then at some point we decided it was a good idea to invent speech, and facial expression, and gesture, and a thousand little tricks to suppress telepathy, and force them on all new humans at birth. What makes you think there wasn’t a damned good reason?”

  That one stopped us all for a moment.

  “That’s a hell of an interesting insight,” I said finally, “but it doesn’t get us anywhere, and it doesn’t address our present problem. I still say getting telepathic is our only move.”

  “Yeah, but Jake,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said, “how exactly do we go about it? I know we agreed, back on the night you opened this dump, that the best way we knew was to keep on doing just like we’ve been doing all these years, loving one another and sharing good times and getttin’ faced together and like that. But we’ve been doing that stuff, for months now, and I can’t say I feel any more telepathic than I did on Opening Night. How are we gonna we meet a three-to-nine-hour deadline?”

  I sighed. “Well now, Drink, there you take me into deep waters. All I can tell you is, somehow I know we’ve got it in us—if we can just find the handle. Getting drunk is the best start I can think of. Anybody else got any ideas?”

  General silence.

  “Mike? Mary? Jump in here any time.”

  They had nothing to contribute.

  “Nikky?”

  Nothing.

  “Boss? I gotta idea.”

  Fast Eddie had an idea?

  “Like de Beatles said: we oughta get back.”

  “I don’t follow you, Eddie. You mean Translate back in time, and—”

  “Nah. Get back to where we started. How we started. Why we started comin’ here inna foist place.”

  “By God, Eddie,” Doc Webster said, “I think I see what you’re driving at. I’m one of the oldest regulars, so I know how most of us joined this crazy company—but even I don’t know all the stories. And just about everybody else knows fewer of them than I do. Buck and Acayib don’t look awful clear on just how they got here.”

  I was beginning to get Eddie’s point. “You think reviewing how we all came to be here together will help somehow, Ed?”

  “We need a fast hit o’ magic. Magic is what got us all togedda. Let’s tell magic stories.”

  There was a murmur, consisting mostly of the rising-and-falling type of grunt, and an occasional “That feels right t
o me,” or “Sounds like a plan.” I glanced at Zoey, and she nodded.

  I had no better idea. “Okay. Let’s give it a try. The first step is to lubricate everybody’s throat—who needs a fresh drink?”

  The next five minutes were busy but uneventful. I remember thinking that for the first time, passing booze over the bar felt less like distributing refreshment and more like issuing ammo. Zoey’s quiet support buoyed me as I worked. We can talk a lot without words.

  “All right,” I said finally. “Who wants to go first? No, wait, I know who I want to go first. Better than half the stories I know about how people first came to Callahan’s Place trace back to one man: Doc Webster. You steered me here yourself, Doc…and somehow I never got around to asking you how you found the Place.”

  A rumble of agreement indicated that others had long wondered, too. “Hell,” Long-Drink said, “I always figured Mike just ran into Doc one day, and built a bar around him. It’s what I’d have done.”

  “Drink,” the Doc boomed, “one of these days an aroused citizenry will build an entire network of bars around you.” He sipped at his glass of Peter Dawson scotch, placed it where he could reach it conveniently, and sighed. “All right, children, brush your teeth and hop under the covers, and Grandpa Sam will tell you all how he met the big man with the smelly cigars. Eddie, a little bullshitting music, please.”

  Fast Eddie took his stool, and began something that managed to convey the essence of “As Time Goes By” without ever quoting or even paraphrasing it, a music most conducive to nostalgic reminiscence.

  People gathered round, pulled up seats, lit up smokes, and generally settled in to listen. Bill Gerrity tossed a couple of logs on the fire, and the room filled with the unmistakable tang of birch. Ralph Von Wau Wau curled up by the fire, and began to emit that soft sound for which we have not yet found it necessary to invent a word, which is the dog’s equivalent of a cat’s purr. The CounterClock ticked. The Doc folded his hands over his vast belly, thought in silence for perhaps twenty long seconds, and then began to speak.