Callahan’s Secret, page 18
I saw my friends, and rejoiced. Seeing them, I could hear again in my head the vast thrumming music that we made, feel their support. I saw the far wall of Callahan’s Place, the glass-strewn fireplace, flames dancing crazily, whipped by chilly winds that howled in through the space where the ceiling used to be. I knew I was looking at The Beast, we were all triangulating on its signal, but I could not see it anywhere. Was the damned thing invisible?
I blinked, and now I saw it. It had been there all along. Standing proud and arrogant before the fireplace, The Beast, the shark, the Master, the terrible entity that Mary Finn called a Cockroach.
It was a cockroach. In a little cockroach pressure suit…
The room exploded in laughter, the loudest, merriest belly-laugh that had ever rung the rafters of Callahan’s Place, back when the Place had still had rafters…
It was about twice the size of the biggest cockroach you’ve ever seen in your life—unless you live in New York; it would have aroused no comment at all on the Lower East Side. Now I understood the puzzle it had mentioned, and now I understood for the first time humanity’s instinctive, unreasoned loathing of periplaneta Americana, one of the oldest life forms on Earth. Cockroaches were distant, long-lost cousins of a galactic obscenity…
We had to laugh at the true visage of the thing which had so terrified us, terrifying though it genuinely was, and our laughter momentarily undid the creature. For a subjective duration equivalent to that of a trillion-year-old human, it had ruled supreme over all the life forms it had ever encountered. We looked upon its awful majesty and roared and howled and hooted with uncontrollable mirth, and it stood rooted in place for an interval long enough to be perceptible by a human, paralyzed by mortified rage. (Through my head came a line from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters: “The devil cannot abide to be mocked.”) Its mental control over us snapped and was gone.
In the instant that we saw it, we laughed, and in the instant that we laughed, we stopped fearing it so much, and in the instant that our fear abated, our minds began working again, generating the obvious, logical question:
Why is it talking so much?
Why had the damned bug bothered to devote the attention and energy necessary for its time-sharing tour de force, merely to argue with us about the moral merits and deficiencies of our respective positions, insult us, and pose riddles?
It was trying to distract us from something.
Somewhere in our collective awareness were the tools we needed to defeat it. And realizing that much, we now knew what they were.
The solution was drastic, but it was the only one we had. Nothing good, they say, comes without sacrifice.
It was Noah Gonzalez who had been struck by a falling piece of ceiling; while that had not hurt him, the burning beam had knocked him sideways and then set his arm afire; it was on the rare side of medium rare and quite useless. That made me the nearest effective, and I knew what I needed to do. So did everyone else; as one they moved together and formed a screen between me and The Beast. Except Mary, who grabbed the coat rack and held on, and Callahan, who did the same with his Lady Sally. Our song rose to a final, indescribable hundred-note chord that rang in my skull and filled my heart with joy. We all closed our eyes.
And I reached into Noah’s open airline bag and rolled the fuse-timer back to quadruple-zero.
Invisible hands slapped me, as hard as I’ve ever been slapped, over every inch of my body at once—including my eardrums, which went dead. At the same time someone kicked the world violently away from me and spun me end over end. My body was rigid as stone, petrified in the act of reaching into the airline bag. Even with my eyes closed I saw bright while light strobe as I rotated. Then I was slapped hard again, principally on the ass, and after a timeless interval I could see and hear and move again.
I sat up and looked around.
I was in deep woods, in the dark, surrounded by shattered branches. The bright white light must still be going on, but it was somewhere else, and the only illumination was feeble moonlight through the branches overhead.
I felt numb. Shell-shocked.
Branches rustled nearby. I got to my feet like a very old man made of cornflakes and roofing glue, and followed the sounds. Even before I reached him I knew who it was. I smelled the cigar.
“Mike!”
His deep merry chuckle came through the darkness. “Howdy, Jake. Nice work.”
“Uh…thanks. Where’s Sally?”
“Looking around for Mary and Mick. Listen: there’s somebody else. Hey—over here!”
The newcomer was Noah. “Hey there, Mike. Good thing you had me go back for the bag. Hi, Jake—you did that great!”
“Thanks, Noah. Uh, how’s the arm?” Even in my numbness I could grasp just how horrid it must be for a man who has lost a leg to watch his arm burn.
“I’d rather not think about it if you don’t mind.”
“C’mere,” Callahan said. He examined Noah’s broiled wing in the darkness somehow, then touched Noah on the shoulder in a complicated way. “It’s fixable.”
“Jesus,” Noah exclaimed. “You fixed it, Mike.”
“Hell, no—that’s just a nerve block. But don’t worry—Sal’ll fix it up for you as soon as things quiet down a little. C’mon, let’s go find her.”
“Mike,” Noah asked, “how come a nuclear explosion didn’t hurt us, but I got my arm burned?”
“Finn specifically protected you folks against blast forces and hard radiation. He never thought to include fire.”
“Then why didn’t the nuke burn us?”
“For the same reason straws got blown through brick walls at Hiroshima instead of burning up: they outran the heat.”
Jesus Christ. And here I’d been thinking that I was invulnerable. I pictured myself trapped in a wrecked car—unharmed, conscious, and broiling slowly.
The way my wife and child had been…
We let Callahan lead us through the woods. Dimly I worked it out that this was the forest to the north of Callahan’s Place. “Hey, Noah,” I said as we walked, “aren’t you going to get in trouble for borrowing that nuke?”
He chuckled in the dark. “Are you kidding? I saved ’em Police Headquarters, and cost ’em a roadside tavern—they’ll probably give me a fucking medal.”
At the edge of the forest we came upon Lady Sally McGee and her daughter and son-in-law. Mickey Finn was awake now, surrounded by a large pile of coats. Mary, I recalled, had learned from The Beast how to manually revive Mick, something about an override bloodstream-flush—or perhaps he’d simply come out of it naturally. You just can’t get a better alarm clock than an atom bomb, I thought dizzily. The moment they saw us, Mary came at a gallop, caught me up in her strong blacksmith’s arms, and purely kissed the hell out of me. It was at least as disorienting as being at ground-zero had been, but this time only a portion of my body went rigid…
“Oh, Jake, you did it! You were beautiful! My hero!”
I was banjaxed, out for luncheon, voiceless and mindless, for the first time in my life caught without a wisecrack behind which to take refuge.
She turned to her husband, now the most powerful being within several hundred light years. “Mick?”
“Of course, darling.”
“Thanks, hon. Meantime, why don’t you and Mom and Pop gather up the rest of the family? We’ll meet you over there by the big power-tower.”
“Yes, dear Jake? Thank you. You have done something I could not have done. You have saved me, and Mary, and all our family. No, do not speak. I know it was mere chance that you were closest, that others here, perhaps all, would have done the same. But it was you who did it. I owe you everything.”
He and the others took off vertically, like helicopters, and disappeared into the night. Along with them went all of the coats except for mine and Mary’s. And Mary began to undress me…
I am in a position to state categorically that a nuclear explosion at arm’s length can be a comparatively trivial event.
“…Mary?”
“Yes, Jake?”
“That was just like the last time.”
She sighed contentedly and snuggled closer under my coat. “Yeah.”
“No, I mean…that was a kind of good-bye.”
“Yes, darling Jake. So was this. Our work is done here. Mom and Pop and I will be leaving soon. We’re needed elsewhen. And Mick needs maintenance he can’t get in this era.”
To my surprise, I was unsurprised, and undismayed. “I thought so. It was a great good-bye. They both were. You’re never coming back?”
“Never is a long time.”
“I’ll miss you.”
“Thank you. I’ll miss you, too, Jake. You really are a hero, you know. Triggering a nuclear explosion, on the unsubstantiated word of a time-traveling fat lady that it was safe—that took guts. We only had a second—if you’d frozen up, I would have had to self-destruct Mick…and none of us could have survived that. Let’s join the others, now—it’s time.”
“Yeah.” I found my clothes and put them back on. Perhaps it had been her husband’s brand of magic or something from her own time, but it was only when I was fully dressed again that I remembered it was January, and noticed how cold it was out here.
As we approached the LILCO power-tower around which all my friends were clustered, my attention was seized by the distant fading glow, and the heavy cloud that hung just above it. Contrary to my expectation, it was not mushroom-shaped—the bomb hadn’t been big enough—but suddenly I was stopped in my tracks by the realization of what it represented. I’d known all along, of course, but I’d been too disoriented for it to sink in.
“Oh my God, no. Please—no!”
Callahan’s Place was gone. Not a particle of it was left, not the fireplace or the cigar box or Fast Eddie’s piano or Mary’s beautiful spiral staircase.
God’s golden gonads, Lady Macbeth had been in there!
Mary’s hand was clutching mine. “Jake, Jake! It’s all right—truly it is!”
“Oh, Mary, you don’t understand! I could stand losing you. I can survive—somehow—without Lady Macbeth. I could even stand a world without Mike Callahan in it. But a world that doesn’t have Callahan’s Place in it is a world I don’t want to live in. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I can’t!”
“Jake, listen to me now. Stop crying and listen! I know it’s dark, but try to watch my lips.”
I tried to stop crying, and watched her lips.
“Jake, dear Jake, you don’t need Callahan’s Place anymore. And I’ll tell you why. I couldn’t tell you before, or you might have stopped coming to the Place and Mom and Pop assured me you were going to be necessary. Jake, a lot of things about the past can’t be changed, even by us time-travelers. I can’t explain why in any terms you’d understand, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. But many things we can at least see—see them happening, see them have happened, call it what you like.” She paused and bit her lip.
“So what are you telling me?”
She hesitated, and blurted it out. “Jake, I’ve seen Barbara and Jessica die!”
“What?”
“I thought—there was just—I wanted to see if I couldn’t find some way to save them for you. I knew there wasn’t any way, but I just had to try—”
In my mind’s eye I saw it all again, the little piece of film that I’ve rerun in my head a million times, the way it must have looked to an outside observer on the scene. The last minutes before the crash are gone from my memory, forever if God is kind, but I have read the police reconstruction and I have a very good imagination.
The car approaches the intersection at slightly higher than legal speed. The light is just going yellow, and the driver decides to beat it. Barely in time, he sees the sixteen-wheeler approaching the intersection from the left, realizes the trucker has decided to gamble too, and slams on his brakes. He has an instant to congratulate himself on his excellent peripheral vision and superb reflexes, before he realizes that the rear brakes he installed himself the day before are failing and he will not stop in time after all. Then the vehicles collide, and the engine block enters the passenger compartment at an angle, trapping the woman and child who sit beside the driver, drenching them in gasoline. The car spins crazily, trips itself and rolls end over end, comes to rest upright. All three occupants are unconscious, and two of them are on fire…
Mary was shaking me by the shoulders, hard enough to crack my neck, shouting something that ended with, “—by the crash, you skinny stupid son of a bitch!”
“Huh?”
“I said, the springs the accident report says were found hanging loose in the rear brakes were snapped loose by the crash. It was the front brakes that failed—I saw it with my own eyes! Did you hear me that time?”
I was baffled. “But I didn’t put in front brakes, Mary,” I said mildly.
“Ah, you did hear me. That’s right, dopey, you didn’t! The front brakes were done by the dealer who sold you the car.”
I snorted. “Come on, Mary—the insurance investigator could never have missed something like that—”
“He missed it for two reasons. One, you were so damned insistent on hogging any guilt there was to be had. And two, he is related by marriage to the car dealer. That’s something you can check on, if you don’t believe me.”
Enough is enough. Even a certified hero such as myself has limitations. I did the only sensible thing: I fainted.
When I woke, all my friends were gathered around me, and I was snug and warm beneath a scavenged tarp. It was still dark, but I made out Doc Webster, and Long-Drink McGonnigle, and Tommy Janssen and Tom Hauptmann and the three Masers and Fast Eddie and the Cheerful Charlies and Ralph Von Wau Wau and all the rest of my family. For a moment there I swear I thought I saw Tom Flannery’s ghost.
I felt more peaceful than I ever had in my life.
“It’s time, Jake,” Fast Eddie said. “Dey’re leavin’.”
“Sure thing, Eddie,” I said. “Help me up.”
Callahan and Sally and Mary and Finn were standing by the base of the tower. Josie Bauer was with them.
“Hi, Josie,” I said. “You going too?”
“Hell yes,” she said. “Us time-travelers have to stick together. I can’t wait to find out how Mike’s people do it without hardware.”
Callahan cleared his throat. “Time to go,” he rumbled. “If we get started on hugs and good-byes we’ll all still be here when the universe winds down. There’s no way, even in my time, to thank you all for all the good times. You know I love you, so let’s just—”
“Just a second, Mike,” I said.
“Sure, Jake. What is it?”
“Am I correct in guessing that Michael Callahan is not your real name?”
“Of course it is.”
“Well, in this space-time, sure—but I mean, it isn’t the name you were born with, is it?”
“Naw. My folks named me after a remote ancestor they admired—except that we don’t use last names when I come from, so I only got half his name. But what’s the difference, Jake? You told me once you never look at the corpse during a wake, because you prefer remembering folks the way they were when they were alive. This is like that: why would you want to remember me as anything but ‘Mike Callahan’?”
“You’re right. I guess I was just being nosy.”
Suddenly he grinned. “Well, I shouldn’t indulge you—but I believe I will. Leave you jokers with one last pun, as bad as any you ever laid in my bar. Now I think about it, it’s too good to pass up.”
He spat his cigar onto the frozen ground, squared his big broad shoulders and looked slowly round at all of us. His twinkling gaze rested longest on me and the Doc and the Drink.
“When I was born,” he said, “I was known as Justin.”
I blinked. “You mean,” I said, “you were—?” and then I was laughing too hard to speak.
“You—,” Doc Webster began, and then he lost it, too.
Long-Drink McGonnigle never even got out the first syllable; his braying laugh reverberated in the chilly night air like the cackling of a lunatic.
And so it was left to Fast Eddie Costigan to say it.
“Jeez. You wuz Justin, de Mick o’ Time.”
And as the night rocked with laughter and cheers Mike Callahan and his family and Josie vanished. Gone to Harmony, somewhere up the line…
Even the greatest rocking, hooting, sidesplitting hundred-person goodbye-and-godspeed laugh has to end sometime, and when it did there was a silence that lasted nearly a full minute. We just stood there in the darkness, not ready to go yet, nothing to say, trying together to integrate the events of the evening. So much to encompass—too much.
Finally Doc Webster cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in a more subdued voice than usual, “in the instant before the balloon went up, I did the best I could.” He held up something that gurgled. “I clutched this here quart of Bushmill’s to my belly, around on the side away from the blast, and held on. Fortunately, it seems I landed on my back.” People started to work up a cheer, but the Doc silenced them with a raised hand and went on. “I estimate that we could clear a sip apiece, and so I am proposing a toast. I drink to Paul and James MacDonald.” He took a small sip and passed the bottle to me. “Their bodies died when The Beast did. I saw Mick cremate ’em.”
I felt a pang. We all did, I guess. I had mourned the MacDonalds in the moment of their dying and had not thought of them since. I had come to know them impossibly well in an impossibly short time, and know I knew all there would ever be to know of them. They had been good men, had never once yielded to the temptation to exploit their freak gift for personal gain, had devoted their lives to healing hurt minds, and had fought valiantly on behalf of a race that would probably have torn them to pieces if it had known their secret. Now they were dead, and it had taken us the better part of half an hour to remember them.
“To Paul and Jim,” I said, drank and gave the bottle to Eddie.
It went around the gathering, and every man and woman present toasted and drank, and by the time it reached the last man, Long-Drink McGonnigle, we pretty much all had tears frozen to our faces.
