Callahan’s Secret, page 14
“It’s not that simple. Mary put him on standby—”
“So we pry his mouth open and pour the stuff down his throat—”
“Mike, in this mode, his stomach won’t uptake.”
“Oh. Well, can you power him back up again?”
“We’ll have to wake Mary up: she’s the only Authorized User inside the orbit of Neptune. Give us some silence, people. She’s had a shock; it’s going to be hard to do this without damaging her…”
We shut up and let them work. After maybe five long silent seconds, Mary opened her eyes and sat up. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said, “the Roaches could jerk his chain any second now.” She got to her feet quickly enough to surprise even me, who have reason to know how limber she is. Obviously Jim and Paul had brought her up to date in the process of waking her. “It’s time to get up, darling.”
The statue of Finn came to life. The eyes started to smolder.
“Don’t worry, now,” she said quickly. “Open your mouth and drink what I give you.”
“Yes, Mary.”
Without taking her eyes from him she held up her hand, and the little bottle of chloral hydrate that Callahan tossed landed squarely in it. (I thought of my own father, and Mount Washington, and a hat.) “About thirty cc’s,” he called, and she beheaded the bottle and poured the dosage past her husband’s teeth. Fast Eddie and Long-Drink and I were alert; we reached Finn in time to help Mary and the MacDonalds break his fall. Finn’s more than six-eleven, but thinner than me; he looks and moves like he weighs less than his wife. But this was the second time I’d helped carry him, and I’d guess him at six hundred pounds or better. Lead in the alloy? A grain of neutronium? I’d always meant to ask. We laid him out near where Mary had been a moment ago, straightened up and rubbed our kidneys.
“Well,” Long-Drink rumbled, “everything’s fine, now. Finn’s the most powerful critter that ever walked the earth, and the people who scare the crap out of him are on the way to exterminate us, and we’ve successfully put out the lights of the only guy who might have any ideas. Anybody feel like playing darts?”
“We’ve still got Finn, in a sense,” I said. “Jim-Paul, you took a reading on him.”
“All we’ve got is data,” Paul answered for them. “Not the metaprogrammer part, the part that generates ideas and thinks ten times faster than a human.” He looked helpless. “And not much of the data, either. We’ve never been able to read more than about fifty percent of Finn’s mind, and we only got maybe the surface five percent of that—a human brain just doesn’t have the storage capacity, Jake. Not even two human brains.”
“Mike,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said hollowly, “drinks for the house, on me.”
Do you know, I had room left in my brain to be startled by that? Of course, I realized at once, he was going to put it on his tab…
“Did you get a reading on how soon the Cockroaches will get here?” Mary asked as Callahan began passing out fresh booze. “And what’ll happen when they do?”
“They’ll check Mars first, then come here; they should reach high orbit in an hour or so. Not having heard any response from Finn, the first thing they’ll do is to scan the planet for clues to his fate. If they don’t find any, they’ll sterilize Earth and go on to check out Venus—then when they don’t find him there either, I guess they’ll—”
Fast Eddie spoke up from his place on the piano bunch. “I don’t t’ink I give a shit what dey do after dey sterilize de Oyth, Paulie.”
He sighed. “I don’t suppose I do either, Ed.”
“What happens if they do find Finn?” Callahan asked.
“If he wakes up between now and then, you mean? Why, I guess they’d come here and look him over, find out what caused him to malfunction and see if he could be restored to service. Then they’d sterilize Earth—probably have Mickey do it for them, to make sure he was working properly again.”
“How many of ’em do you figure there are?”
Both MacDonalds shrugged. “Impossible to say, Mike. Finn couldn’t come up with a reason why any of them would come here.”
“Are they vulnerable to anything?”
“Oh, yes. If they were as strong as Finn, they wouldn’t need scouts like Finn. That’s why he can’t imagine what would bring them here; he’s certain there are no other scouts along with them. Anyway, all you’d have to do is detonate a small tactical nuke in their immediate vicinity and you’d have Cockroach Soup.”
“Well, hell,” Doc Webster said, “NORAD can handle that! With Finn to spot for ’em, maybe…” He trailed off as it dawned on him. “Aw, shit.”
“NORAD doesn’t have any H-bombs anymore,” Callahan rumbled. “Mick said he made a terrible mistake.”
Mary buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Pop! I made it, too!” She began to sob.
I wanted to rush to her and comfort her, take her in my arms and tell her everything was going to be all right. I never moved a muscle and I never said a mumbling word.
Her father came around the bar and put an arm around her. “So did I, darlin’, so did I. Not your fault. We guessed wrong, that’s all.”
“Pop, what’ll we do now?”
“I’m not exactly certain, hon, but the first step is to blow our cover.”
Her head came up fast. “Are you sure?”
The big barkeep grinned at her, waggled his cigar. “Hell, no! Got a better idea?”
She frowned. “I guess not. Your privilege; they’re your family.”
Callahan turned to the rest of us. “Folks, I’m afraid it’s time for Mary and I to face the music, and tell you people who we really are…”
And having said that much, the big red-headed son of a bitch stood there and looked at us for a while. He’s always had a pretty expressive face, but I’d never seen so many expressions chase themselves around it before. And while I’ve always known that Michael Callahan was a subtle and thoughtful man, I’d known it by his actions more than his face; his expressions had always been sort of carved out in broad strokes before. This was a change so sharp as to be perceptible. Somehow I knew that I was looking at a different man. No: at a different side of a man I knew. It was something like watching a brilliant actor step out of character after the lights have gone out.
It was exactly like that. I began to add up a number of things that I have always known but somehow had never felt inclined to think about for very long. Not, say, for long enough to reach the inevitable conclusions.
I glanced toward the MacDonalds. Jim’s eyes were waiting for mine, and he was nodding. I opened my mouth…then shut up and let Callahan say it.
“Friends,” he said slowly, “this isn’t going to be easy. A lot of words I need, I don’t have. Not that they don’t exist, but none of you know ’em—and I don’t have time for a language lesson. Uh…Mary and I aren’t from around here—”
“We know that, Mike,” Long-Drink said. “Brooklyn, right?”
“Dat’s where me and Mike hooked up,” agreed Eddie, the oldest denizen of Callahan’s Place. “At Sally’s joint.”
Callahan shook his head. “That ain’t where I’m from, boys.”
Eddie shrugged. “Well, you never said it was.”
“Thanks, Eddie.” Callahan smiled at the monkey-faced little piano man. “I’m pleased you noticed that.”
“All right,” Doc Webster said. “I’ll play. Where are you from?”
“A place that calls itself Harmony.”
“Isn’t that in New Zealand?” somebody asked.
“Nope. It’s about twenty billion miles further away, and quite a few years from now.”
There was silence for a time. Mary sat down at the nearest table and commandeered someone’s neglected drink. She watched Finn snore while she sipped it.
“Well,” Doc Webster said finally in a conversational tone, “that explains a lot. Always said there was something weird about you, Callahan. Anyone who would permit puns like mine in his establishment is just not normal.”
“Time traveler, huh?” Tommy Janssen mused. “You must be from further up the line than The Meddler or Al Phee.”
“Or Josie Bauer and her Time-Police,3” Callahan agreed. “To my time, yours and theirs are pretty much indistinguishable.”
“How far is that, Mike?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “where I come from, the human race has got it together. Nobody’s hungry; nobody’s angry.”
That far!
“And we’re startin’ to learn a few things. Oh, we’ll be a long time learning—but at least we’re finally on the case.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said faintly, “I wish I had time to ask you about five hundred questions.”
“Me too, Jake,” he said. “But I’ll tell you right now, better’n half of them I’d never be able to answer, in any words that’d have meaning for you. Like, right now, most of you are probably wondering about time paradoxes and so forth, and the answers simply won’t mean much to you.”
“Let’s try anyway,” Doc Webster said. “Did you know this showdown with Finn’s Masters was gonna happen? Is that why you’ve been running this bar all these years?”
“Yes and no,” Callahan said promptly. “See what I mean?”
“Dammit,” the Doc growled, “I started out this night saying that all questions have answers.”
“If they’re meaningful,” Callahan agreed. “Doc, you just plain can’t frame a meaningful question about time-travel in English. The language itself hasn’t got the room: it’s based on the assumption that time-travel is not possible.”
The Doc frowned. “So it is. Can you do any better than ‘yes and no’?”
“It is known in my time that some event takes place at this locus in space/time. Something so major, so crucial to the history that produced my time, that it makes Pearl Harbor seem no more important than yesterday’s hockey scores. What that event is, is hidden from us. So is the certainty of its outcome. Some things in our past we can’t affect. Some things we have to affect. We don’t always know the difference. And no, that’s not the only reason I set up this bar, although it would have been enough. I know all that doesn’t make sense, in English, but if you want me to do even a little better than that, we’ll still be talking when the Cockroaches get here.”
Good point. “All right,” I said, “let’s cut to the chase. You’ve got to have some kind of futuristic wonder-gizmo you can zap the Cockroaches with, right?”
I don’t know when I’ve ever been sorrier to see a man shake his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Jake. You have to work with available materials. Whatever’s already in place in that space/time.”
“Mike—,” I hesitated. “If it was anybody but you, I’d say that was preposterous. How do you get your own time machine through?”
“We don’t use machines for time-travel.”
“Oh.” I would think about this another time, if there ever was one. “But in any case we can relax, no? At least a little? The fact that you’re here, from our future, means that the human race is not going to be exterminated in the next hour, nicht wahr? But we could suffer heavy casualties or something?”
That was when I’ve been sorrier to see a man shake his head. “Again, Jake, what you’re saying sounds logical—because you’re saying it in English. Take my word for it: my home space/time is just as likely as yours to stop existing in the next hour or so. Worse, to stop ever having existed in this continuum. If the Cockroaches steam-clean this planet, there’ll be no way for my home to ever come to pass.” He frowned. “This whole era is a tinder-box; we’ve got agents spotted all through here/now, doing what we can to cool things out. But we always knew that there was going to be at least one really major something around about now. What we thought was that the crucial event in question would be a nuclear firestorm. The shape of history seemed to point that way. We thought we had it covered, thanks to Finn.” He looked sadly at his catatonic friend. “But it was us made the awful mistake, not him.”
Long-Drink McGonnigle summed it up very succinctly, I thought: “Aw, shit.”
“Don’t feel bad, Mike,” I said. “You bet with the odds—nobody can fault you for using Occam’s Razor.”
He shook his head ruefully. “Thanks, Jake—but you’d be surprised how many chins William can’t shave. With the stakes this high, we should never have bet the farm.”
“William who?” Fast Eddie wanted to know. “And what’s dis about razors?”
That almost made me smile. Eddie must use an electric razor with an offset shim: at all times, he has exactly three days’ growth of beard. “William of Occam, Eddie. Stated the principle of Least Hypothesis—”
“Is dat, like, cheaper than a rented hypot’esis?”
Bless the runty little piano man, that did make me smile, and simplify my explanation even further than I had planned. “Occam’s Razor is a principle that says, if there’s more than one explanation for something, the simplest one is most likely to be true.”
“Not ‘certain,’” Callahan amplified. “‘Most likely.’”
Eddie looked thoughtful—not an easy trick with that face—and shook his head. “I dunno. Most o’ my life, de complicated explanation was de one to bet on. I don’t buy dis William o’ Whatever—”
“Occam,” I said.
“—an’ de horse he rode in on,” Eddie agreed. “He sure got it wrong dis time.” He frowned slightly at our grins. “Well, what’s our next move, boss?”
The grins went away.
“Mike!” I said as an urgent thought struck me. “It’s New Year’s Eve! The rest of the gang are going to start showing up any second—all of ’em, not just the regulars. Shouldn’t we try to head ’em off? Go set up roadblocks? Something?”
He took one of those foul cigars of his from a shirt pocket and sniffed it meditatively. What more proof did I need that he wasn’t a normal human being? “I don’t think so, Jake. In the immortal words of Percy Mayfield—”
“—‘The Danger Zone is everywhere,’ yeah, I understand that. They’re no safer at home than they would be here. But do we want ’em all around underfoot, complicating the fight?” I felt my voice get hoarser. “There’s going to be a fight here, isn’t there?”
He lit his cigar. “Damn straight there is,” he rumbled. He dropped the dead match on the floor, trod it underfoot, and took Mary’s hand. “Damn straight.” Suddenly he grinned. “But who ever said a fight was complicated by reinforcements? Let ’em come, by Christ. Let ’em all come! If we have to, we can all go to Hell together—maybe there’s a group rate.”
“Callahan’s right, Jake,” Long-Drink said. “There ain’t a one of the gang wouldn’t rather be here on Judgment Day, and you know it.”
Doc Webster nodded vigorous agreement, jowls flapping. “Damn well told, if the world is about to end, we can at least have a drink on it together before we go!”
There was a general chorus of agreement.
“All right,” Callahan boomed, “let’s get to it. There’s two phone lines in this joint, and the one for the computer is miked. I’ll boot the directory disk and get a printout by last name—I’ll take A through M; Doc, you take N through Z—”
“Mike,” Jim and Paul MacDonald said simultaneously.
He broke off and tried to look at both at once. “Yeah?”
“It’s not necessary to use the phone,” they chorused.
He looked startled—then broke into a big grin. ‘Why, no, it ain’t at that. What’s your range these days?’
“With family? Callahan’s People? We could find one of you on the Moon if we had to.”
“Go to it then, sons.”
Jim and Paul found a vacant table, sat down on opposite sides. They took each other’s hands and smiled at one another. Then their eyes rolled up and their mouths went slack and they seemed to slump slightly.
Can you remember the very first time you used stereo headphones, and heard a voice speaking or singing inside your head? Or were you too young at the time to find that remarkable? This was a little like that: perceiving “sound” where sound had never been before.
(Further: You know that with stereo headphones an aural image can seem to move, from left to right or the other way around. In the Decca, Georg Solti recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen there’s a passage in which Fafnir roars—and on headphones the sound seems to move up from your throat to the crown of your head. An illusion, of course, and I’ve always wondered how Decca’s engineers managed it. Similarly—and just as impossibly—the combined “voice” of Jim and Paul MacDonald, which I heard now in my head, seemed to move from back to front, as though two tiny Paul Reveres entered the back of my skull, transited my brain at high speed, and left through my forehead.)
The double-tracked voice was quiet, calm—but so emphatically urgent that I was certain it would have waked me out of the soundest sleep.
“Mike Callahan needs you,” it said. “Hurry!”
The cold winter wind was choppy at this height, and the ledge was slippery; Walter clutched at the brick facade with slowly numbing fingers and at the pretty brunette’s gaze with tearing eyes. She was nice to look at, leaning out the window, the last pretty girl he ever expected to see—but he knew all the things she was likely to say, and knew that none of them would work. “You’re wasting your time,” he told her and her husband, whose head was visible beside hers. “I know all the clichés, and I just don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’ve got to come in soon, Walter,” she called from the window. “If you stay there much longer you’ll get Window-Washer’s VD.”
“What?” To be surprised astonished him.
“It’s a terrible thing,” her husband said earnestly. “You get a watery blue discharge, with a funny smell.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Herpes windex,” she said.
He laughed long and hard, to a point just short of hysteria. “You two really are good at what you do, you know that? I was in a lousy mood. This is a better mood to die in.”
