Callahan’s Secret, page 5
Mary got it dead-bang perfect the first time. “Txffu,” she said, “weren’t you just as lonely, or lonelier, when you worked for the Roaches? It must be a long time between star systems.”
Finn blinked at hearing his name on another’s lips for the first time in—how long?—but was distracted by her question. “For one thing, there was always the tiny but measurable possibility that the…the Roaches might have reactivated others of my race to become scouts, that I might, if I lived long enough, chance to meet such a one eventually, that we might—” He broke off and did more damage to his fifth. “There was hope. Microscopic hope, perhaps, but hope. But now I must stay here, and no other of my race will ever come, and there is no hope.”
He looked at the bottle. It was almost empty. Perhaps he sympathized with it; he put it down unfinished. “And when I worked for the Mas—for the Cockroaches, I had a job. A function. A purpose. A less than totally desirable one, admittedly. But I was part of something greater than myself, and I had a role to play. What is my role here on Earth? I have tried to anchor myself to this planet, to ‘put down roots’—I have pursued farming and fishing and hunting and several other most basic trades. I can imitate a terrestrial organism in general and a human in particular.
“But I am alien. I have no purpose here, no job which needs me to do it. This makes my loneliness all the sharper. Perhaps I could stand loneliness if I were not useless; perhaps I could stand uselessness if I were not lonely.” His voice was eerily calm and flat as he finished, “The two together are more than I can bear.”
The silence that ensued then was a familiar one. Someone names a problem—an act similar in many ways to giving birth—and then the rest of us sit around a while in respectful, sympathetic, contemplative silence, admiring the newborn little monster and meditating ways to kill it. Although it’s difficult to read a man who has facial and vocal expressions and body language only when he remembers to, I felt that Finn had completed his birthing, and I put my mind on solutions for his problems. This was going to be one of the longer silences.
I’ve triad my hand at matchmaking a few times, and learned that you should approach it like walking into a chemistry lab and mixing two unidentified beakers of chemicals: you might luck into a stable compound, or you might blow your hands off. I’m willing to take the risk for a good enough friend, and Finn qualified—but where do you find a mate for someone as uniquely alien as him? And in today’s job market, how much demand was there for a fellow whose principal prior job experience involved locating and sterilizing planetary systems? I came up with a few dozen trial solutions, rejected them all, realized how little chance I had of finding one that Finn had not considered and rejected months or years ago.
But I was being premature. “Txffu,” Mary said, “that isn’t all of it, is it?”
He spun his head to look at her. Those eyes of his seemed to smolder.
“Mary,” Callahan said reproachfully, “That’s all he chose to tell us. We don’t pry in here, you know that.”
“He’s asking us to fix two legs of a three-legged stool, Mike. I don’t do work like that.”
“Then sit this one out. But no pryin’ questions in my joint. It’s up to him whether to show you his legs or not.”
She turned back to Finn. “As a card-carrying Sophist, I will now proceed to make some prying statements, and if you choose to react to any of them it won’t be my place to stop you.
“The third leg of your stool, you stool, is called fear. I don’t mean your fear of the Cockroaches, you’ve learned to live with that. Something else has you scared, and for some reason you don’t want to talk about it. Not because you’re afraid to admit you’re afraid, like human males; it’s something else. I for one would certainly like to hear about it.”
Finn tilted his head slightly to one side. “I see further into the infrared than humans, hear an extra octave on either side of human range. Do you see emotions others cannot perceive?”
She ignored the question. “You’re stalling.”
He closed his eyes briefly—I welcomed the momentary respite—and made his decision.
“Very well. I am afraid of the same thing that everyone in this room is afraid of.”
Long-Drink McGonnigle nodded. “Death.”
“No, Drink my friend. I do not fear death. Neither do some others in this room. I fear Apocalypse. Armageddon. Ragnarok and Fimbulwinter. I fear nuclear holocaust.”
There was a murmur in Callahan’s Place.
“Finn,” Doc Webster said, “do you have reason to believe that it’s coming?”
“No more reason than anyone else here, Sam,” Finn assured him. “Is that not sufficient?”
“What’s it to you, Mickey?” Mary asked suddenly.
“Mary!” I said, scandalized—no, shocked and dismayed.
If was her tone of voice, you see, the way she was coming on strong with Finn. If Callahan had said those words, in that tone, it would have been different. Lots of times I’ve seen him appear to bully someone into solving their own problem, adopt a gruff, belligerent manner as a way of getting through their self-involvement. The rest of us are a mite too sympathetic sometimes. But when he does it, we all know that it’s just Callahan, that he’s simply using rudeness, as a way—an effective way—of loving.
But Mary was a stranger here. In a sense she had not yet earned the right to talk that way in here, to a friend of ours. Perhaps if she herself had already opened up to us in some way, aired some problem and been adopted by us, it would have been different. (But that sounded silly even as I was thinking it: what, did people have to show a scab at the door to get admitted to Callahan’s Place?) All I knew was that it wasn’t right for her to be using that harsh, challenging, almost cruel tone of voice with my friend Finn. And that dismayed me, because it was my first suggestion that maybe I did not know Mary as well as I thought I did.
“I just want to get it straight,” Mary insisted. “Mick, Jake told me earlier you’ve studied a few stars—from inside. If you can survive in the heart of a fusion furnace, what do you care about a little thing like Armageddon?”
“It would destroy you and all your kind!” Finn said.
“So? You told us just a few minutes ago that the Cockroaches left you unable to hate or love.”
“They left me unable to hate or love them!” he said forcefully. “I can love. I can love humankind. I do.”
“Uh-huh,” she said nastily, and Finn’s face twisted and my heart turned over within me.
“Mary,” I said quickly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Shut up, please, Jake,” she said. “Mick, why—”
“No, you shut up,” I snapped. “He betrayed his Masters for us, he exiled himself here to save us, he proved his love—and again when the Krundai came, he fought for us! You don’t know, you weren’t here, you have no right, you don’t know him—”
“Mick is your friend, and you told me about him for fifteen minutes—if you forgot to tell me the important parts it’s not my fault. Now I asked you to shut up, and I said ‘please’. Look here, Finn, you noble spaceman—”
I shut up and let her browbeat my friend. I was busy trying to fall out of love.
(A rotten little voice in the back of my head was asking, are you sure you want to lose a body like that just to keep your self-respect? and I had to admit it was a good, if swinish, question.)
“—if you claim you quit your job out of love for humanity, and you claim to be scared of Apocalypse on our account, then why the hell is it that you haven’t done one goddamn thing to prevent it?”
Finn opened his mouth.
“And if you give me the Star Trek Prime Directive,” she cut him off, “I’ll spit right in your eye. Nobody who really cared about the ethics of interfering in the destinies of primitive cultures could ever have worked as an interstellar hit man—conditioning and counterprogramming be damned!”
“It is not that I would not prevent nuclear catastrophe,” Finn said. “I cannot.”
“Bullshit.”
“I can destroy nuclear weapons easily. But I cannot destroy everyone, simultaneously, and anything less would only trigger the calamity.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mick—you’re not that dumb. You could think your way around the problem in about thirty seconds flat…if you weren’t hamstrung by guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“That’s right. Resolve the conflict in your conscience, and everything else will fall into place, you wait and see.”
“—‘conflict?’—”
“For years, now, ever since you first walked into this dump, you’ve been taking credit for saving the world out of love of humanity—and these chumps here bought it.” She glared around at all of us, ignored the glares she got in return, and turned back to Finn. “Why don’t you tell us the real reason?”
And she got him! I was watching his face, and Finn may not have much human expression, but I know a direct hit when I see one. She knew something, she’d seen something we hadn’t. I tried to do an emotional one-eighty, and got so disoriented I nearly missed Finn’s reply.
At first it didn’t look like there was going to be one. He froze up like a computer that’s lost its cursor. People speak of someone “turning to stone”—but I don’t think any human being could have come as close as Finn to doing that literally. Three or four seconds went by like zeppelins in a desultory breeze…and then suddenly he was shouting:
“All right, damn it: I am not immortal!”
The volume made the windows ring and people wince. Motorists may well have heard him out on 25A, rain and all. As the echo of his shout died away, Mary said, quite softly, “I figured it was something like that. You’re going to be needing maintenance pretty soon, aren’t you?”
Finn sighed and spoke in his normal voice. “If I do not receive fairly extensive maintenance within approximately two hundred and twenty years, I will experience critical systems failures. I will die. It is a trick of the Masters, another way to prevent their scouts deserting as I’ve done. When I arrived on this planet, I estimated that humanity could possess the necessary technological sophistication within a century or two…if it survived that long. If you had been less advanced, you would have been no use to me; more advanced, and you would have detected my approach and perhaps fired upon me. The ‘window’ was open. Your political immaturity made you a most dangerous gamble—but you were the best chance I had seen in countless millennia. I staked everything on you.”
Callahan poured himself a shot of Bushmill’s and tossed it back. “What kind of maintenance, Mickey? Organic or cybernetic?”
“Both, Michael. And one other kind for which your people do not yet have a name.”
“Why’n’cha just teach it to us?”
Finn shook his head. “Could you have taught Leonardo Da Vinci to build a railroad before it was railroading time?”
“So that first night you came in here, all of that was a charade?”
“No, Michael! Not at all. I meant it when I asked you to…well, you say you don’t remember that. In any case, you refused to do it then. I was in agony. I realized that I had a chance to survive on this world—but I was programmed to transmit my observations of humanity to the Masters at a preset time, and I knew that when I had I would receive orders to sterilize your planet. I could not countermand that programming. The irony was crushing. It was only when you asked me my name that the idea came to me: if I could give you enough hint, you could drug me unconscious and prevent my transmission for me. And I managed to do so, and you took the hint.”
“But I mean, you didn’t defect and save us for the reason you said, because you learned here that humans have love? You did it because we might get smart enough one day to keep your motor tuned for you? Is that the size of it?”
Finn didn’t hang his head; his people must not have had that custom. “My decision was predicated solely on self-interest, Michael. I was pleased to find that you had love—because it would make it easier to get you to help me, when one day you could.”
Shorty Steinitz was wearing the same look he’d had the day he broke Weasel Wetzel’s face-bone—and Shorty knows that Finn could outpunch an F-111. “Let me get this straight, Finn,” he said darkly. “You don’t love the human race?”
“Oh hell, Shorty,” Long-Drink said, “I don’t love the human race, comes to that. There’s an ever-dwindlin’ percentage I can tolerate.”
“All right,” Shorty insisted, “this place, then, these people…Finn, are you sayin’ you got no love for Callahan’s Place here? For us?”
Finn started to answer, and paused as Tommy Janssen shouldered his way forward. The kid’s voice was low and soft and dangerous. “You came in here the night these guys got me off smack,” he said, “and you watched them save me, watched while they sewed my balls back on, and then you got up and did your little dance because you figured it was cheap medical insurance? I’m the youngest guy here, twenty-five, if I quit smoking I might live another fifty, sixty years—if the goddam bomb doesn’t go off tomorrow. Some of the other people here…hell, Tom Flannery’s died since the night you came in here. And you’re worried about Apocalypse because it might cut you back to another two or three centuries of sunrises? Now, where did I put my violin?”
God help me, I spoke up. “Finn—all these years we’ve been knockin’ our brains out trying to make you feel at home in a strange land, helping you get papers and teaching you about baseball and trying to teach you how to sing and all that…all that time you were just using us?”
I shut up then, because Finn’s feelings had become so violent as to reach the surface of his face. One thing apparently all humanoid life forms have in common: the grimace of extreme anguish.
“This is not fair,” he roared, and flung his bottle of rye into the fireplace.
SMASH! Cracks appeared in some of the bricks.
There was a general murmur rising in the room now, but Mary’s soft laughter cut right through it, deflating it. I turned, to look at her with new eyes. I resented her for being privy to this intimate matter, for having provoked this hassle, for being cruel to my friend the rotten son of a bitch…Pushy, and nasty, and castrating, and fat…
I transferred to her all my conflict; as I had on the roof, I poured my need into her.
And this time she didn’t accept it. I opened my mouth to say something or other that would end our affair, and she ignored me, spoke directly and only to Finn.
“Now you’re getting it,” she said, smiling. “It isn’t fair. Enjoying it, Mick? Have I given you enough, now? Have you got a way to store it digitally and play it back later? Can you put it on a loop and run it continuously or something?”
He blinked at her.
“You marinate in guilt soup for enough years, you suck all the juice right out of it, have to go get some new vegetables to throw into the pot, that’s understandable. But eventually you’ll use up this bag. What’ll we do next—spread the news around, put you on the Phil Donahue Show? Sooner or later, somebody’d figure out a way to kill you, and you know it, too, you big dumb jerk. Can’t you make this last you for a while?”
These were hammer blows she was landing, from a distance of about a foot and a half. I opened my mouth to say something, and suddenly she whirled around to face us. Finn’s got a more efficient speaker than any human, but she certainly had an impressive bellow onto her—we jumped further than we had when he let go.
“Will you clowns stop indulging him now?”
The dust settled, Callahan picked his cigar butt up off the floor and blew sawdust off it, and she cut back to about Force Eight and went on:
“What is the matter with you morons? A mutt comes in here, a guy you claim is your friend, with a sign on his forehead says, ‘Masochist’, and you people get out the whips and chains, is that it? Txffu’s committed the cardinal sin, eh? He doesn’t love humanity: hang him. And Handsome over there, too, and half the people in this bar, probably…what the hell is so special about humanity that not loving it is a sin? Finn said his people loved sentient life: I respect that a lot more, and I’m not at all sure that humanity qualifies, on average—”
(By “Handsome,” she referred to Long-Drink, whose name she didn’t know, and I found time to wonder if Mary was a pervert, too, queer for scrawny men. Long-Drink is even taller and skinnier than me—put him and me and Finn side by side and we look like a pine mountainside…)
“—How about an analogy: will that strain your brains too much? Say you work for a South American real estate developer; he has you go out into the bush and exterminate tribes of monkeys where he wants to build new condominiums. You don’t like the work, you’d rather quit and jungle up, but the boss has thoughtfully planted a booby-trapped transceiver on you. To make matters worse, you’re a diabetic, and he only gives you a limited supply of insulin for each trip.
“One day you run across a tribe of monkeys clever enough to disable the transceiver. It may even be possible to train them to manufacture insulin. Is it necessary that you love them before you can accept their aid? I could maybe, given time, learn to get attached to three or four individual monkeys, maybe as many as a dozen or so—be amused by them, grow fond of them, even respect them in certain ways. I could see being concerned if I learned that their tribe was locked into some kind of suicidal behavior pattern—really concerned, not just on my own account. But love them? Or their kind in general?
“And should I be ashamed for wanting insulin so that I can live another forty or fifty years—when the monks can only hope for ten or twenty? Oh, you jackasses, I can understand HIM being that dumb, he’s smarter than any of us—but how could you morons be so stupid?”
Many feet were shuffled. She had opened up our friend’s hidden wound…and we had all picked at it. I was belatedly beginning to realize her technique. Sometimes a mocking voice whispers vile things in a man’s ear, things he can’t shut out because he half-believes they’re true. But if you can personify that voice, and get him to fight it, to reject it…
