Callahan’s Secret, page 19
“To the MacDonalds,” he said. Then he looked up past the drifting cloud of fallout to the stars and he said, solemnly and most respectfully, “Lord, they deserve a break today.”
Those of us who were religious all chorused, “Amen,” and those of us who weren’t wished, for that moment, that we were.
A few moments of silence. Then a few more. Most of us were poorly dressed for the cold, but no one complained. No one even shivered.
We were all, I knew, thinking back to—Jesus, less than an hour ago!—to long ago and far away in another universe, when we had all, for a timeless but all too short interval, been one. It didn’t seem fair, somehow. We’d been on the trembling verge, at the threshold of something for which all the humans who ever lived have yearned in vain all their lives—it would have taken Armageddon to distract us, and sure enough that was what we had gotten.
So we had staved off Armageddon. Now the shining moment was past. The MacDonalds who had married us were dead. The Callahans who had raised us and given us away were gone. The nest, the brightly lit cave that had contained us, entertained us, and sustained us, was a radioactive hole in the ground.
We were still married. The thing we had forged while in telepathic rapport could not be undone—we knew each other too well, we had to be married. But like many newlyweds, we woke feeling oddly like strangers. Like many married people, we had gotten so close to one another that we had learned just how far apart we would always be.
I could no longer hear clearly in my head the music we had made…
“There’ll never be another night like that,” Tommy Janssen said wistfully.
Deep inside me somewhere, something that had been under strain for many years suddenly snapped clean through.
“The hell you say!”
“Jake,” the Doc began, “all the boy means is—”
“I know what he means, Sam. I know what you mean. Do you know what I mean?”
I whirled and addressed the group, in a voice that may have been unnecessarily loud.
“All right. We’re all locked back in our personal skulls again. We haven’t got a pair of trained telepaths to make it easy for us this time. None of us has whatever genetic mutation made Jim and Paul’s telepathic ability so powerful, made it so easy for them to access it—so easy that it nearly killed them before they got it under control, you may recall.
“But we know that we have telepathic potential too.
“We were one, damn it! Even after the MacDonalds died, right up until the instant the bomb went up, we were one. That wasn’t the roach doing that, or the inside of my head would feel slimy. Jim and Paul led us to that place, but we were able to stay there without them, for a time at least. Maybe Callahan helped us, maybe Sally and Mary helped us, but we were doing some of it ourselves. The damned roach wasn’t a telepath when it got here, but it sure-god learned the trick in less than twenty seconds. I know twenty seconds to it was like twenty years to us—but I’ve got twenty years I’m not using. What about you people?”
“How do you learn to be a telepath, Jake?” Marty Matthias asked.
“Hell, Marty, Callahan’s been training us for years! Now we’ve got to start figuring it out for ourselves, that’s all. To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it’s safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing.”
“How do we do that, Jake?” Isham Latimer asked.
“Everybody here makes enough money to get boozed regular, and some of us are flush. I say we pass the hat. Tomorrow night at my place—no, the night after, the banks won’t be open tomorrow. Then we take what’s in the hat, and we hunt us up a building, a big one back off the road somewhere where you have to look hard to find it, with a good fireplace and an upright piano, and we find out who you bribe to get a liquor license around here, and—”
I’m happy to report that at this point I was drowned out by cheers. A happy pandemonium took place under the stars, people shouting suggestions about buildings they knew, about how to appraise a building, about how the place should be furnished and how to get it done most cheaply. Finally Tom Hauptmann shouted everybody down.
“Hold it, hold it! Brothers and sisters, we’re going to need a place big enough to hold at least a hundred—I have the feeling we’re going to have a full house pretty regularly from now on. Now, before we get to the logistical problems of all that, there’s something I have to get straight. My feet hurt. Forty or fifty rummies a night, two or three nights a week, I could handle. But I am not going to take over full-time barkeeping. Who is?”
There was no hesitation at all. To my absolute astonishment, at least thirty voices chorused, in perfect synch, “Jake, of course.”
I turned bright red and stammered. “Why—why me? Why not—”
And paused. Who? The Doc had a practice to maintain. Long-Drink was a bit too slaphappy. Tommy was too young yet. Noah had responsibilities. Ralph couldn’t reach the fucking bottles. Eddie was needed at the piano, and Bill Gerrity could never get around fast enough in heels…
And while I was riffling the cards and coming up empty, Long-Drink answered the question I’d forgotten I’d asked.
“Because even in the times you were down, you were always the merriest of us, Jake.”
And by God, there was a chorus of agreement.
I took a very deep breath, held it until my chest ached, then let it out all at once. “All right,” I said. “I ain’t a guitar player no more, I’ve got to do something with my hands. I’m in.”
Cheers. “We’ll call it ‘Jake’s Place’!” Tony Telasco yelled.
“Hell no,” I yelled back. “We’ll call it ‘Mary’s Place.’”
More cheers—then suddenly silence, as we all heard sirens approaching from both ends of Route 25A in the distance.
“What do we tell them?” Doc Webster asked.
“We’ll discuss that together on the way to the highway,” I said. “If this crowd can’t come up with a suitable Tall Tale, no one can.”
The Doc chuckled. “I believe you’re right.” We all began picking our way across the rough terrain between us and the road.
“Hey, everybody?” Fast Eddie called out softly.
“Yes, Eddie?” I said.
“I know dere’s a couple hours ta go yet—but Happy New Year.”
Halifax,
Easter 1985
2 “Two Heads Are Better Than One,” in CALLAHAN’S CROSSTIME SALOON (Berkley).
3 see “Have You Heard The One…?” in TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH (Ace)…
AUTHOR’S FINAL NOTE
Thanks to the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Apple Canada, and the sagacity of my friend Bob Atkinson, this book was written on an Apple 512K Macintosh computer named Anne (after Jubal Harshaw’s secretary), using MacWrite 2.2 and 4.2 software by Randy Wigginton, Ed Ruder, and Don Breuner of Encore Systems.
I’d like to thank editors Ben Bova, Don Pfeil and Stanley Schmidt, who bought the Callahan stories for magazines; editors Jim Frenkel, Ridley Enslow, Jim Baen and Susan Allison, who bought them in book form; agents Kirby McCauley, Eleanor Wood, and Ralph Vicinanza, who sold them in book form; Alfred Bester, who supplied the titles for all three books; and all of you who bought the books.
Spider Robinson, Callahan’s Secret
