I glanced down at the jewel, and it seemed that all the glowing beads vanished a quarter-second after my eyes touched it. There was a collective gasp, and I looked up and The Genius himself was sitting at Eddie’s beat-up piano, big black glasses and the whitest teeth God ever made, rocking from side to side in that distinctive way and caressing the keys, singing “Georgia On My Mind” for the patrons of Callahan’s Place.
His finish was fabulous. I’m proud to say it was not one he has ever, to my knowledge, recorded.
As the applause died down, he modulated from G down to E and began the opening bass riff of “What I Say?” The original Raeletts appeared next to the piano, Margie Hendrix and Darlene and Pat. I shivered like a dog and threw the jewel at Phee, and artists and music vanished.
“Don’t get me started,” I said. “But thank you from the bottom of my heart. All my life I’ve wanted to do that. What is that thing?”
Phee did not reply vocally, but suddenly there was a flourish of trumpets and the word “VISUALIZER” was spelled out in the air in letters of cool fire, like neon without tubes, rippling in random air currents. They flared and bisected, wedged apart by a new group of letters all in gold, so that the new construct read: “VISUAL(SYNTHES)IZER.” It flared again, and the parenthetical intruder departed once more.
“‘Synthes,’ you’ve gone…” Phee sang, and Josie giggled. “It’s a dream machine, dear boy. An hallucinator. Anything you can imagine, it gives auditory and visual substance to. Je regrette that at the present state of the art I cannot give you tactile—but, if you act muy pronto and because I like your face, I’m prepared to throw in olfactory for not a dime extra. Freebie, kapish?”
Make no mistake: I wanted that thing. But I reacted instinctively, with the reflex-response of a Long Islander to high-pressure sales tactics. “I don’t know…”
“Schlep. Do you know what the olfactory mode can do for the porn fantasies alone?”
Eddie stared at his now-empty piano stool and shook his head. “How much?” he asked again.
Exasperated, Phee danced to the bar, grabbed up a funnel and took it back to Eddie. He stuck the business end in Eddie’s left ear. “JUST PENNIES,” he bellowed into it. “I’m telling you,” he continued conversationally to the rest of us, “it’s a steal. Good for fifteen minutes’ use every four hours, an optional headphone effect for apartment use, and there’s a fail safe that blows the breaker if you use it to scare people. Hoyoto! Banzai! Barkeep, more grog!”
“You ain’t paid for the last one yet,” Callahan said reasonably.
“Did I hear right through the roof earlier? On ce soir the teller of the tallest tale drinks gratis?”
“That’s so,” Callahan admitted.
Josie cleared her throat. “There’s…another advantage.”
Phee looked gallantly attentive.
She turned red. “Oh hell.” She went up and whispered in his ear. His left eyebrow rose high, and the propellor beanie doubled its RPM.
“Hoo ha,” he stated.
Josie looked around at us. “Well, it’s just…I guess I’m grateful for a good laugh. Maybe it’s an Oedipal thing: my dad is a brilliant jokester. And—and funny men are nicer lovers. They know about pain.”
Phee bowed magnificently. “Mademoiselle,” he said reverently, “you are clearly the product of an advanced civilization. Furthermore you are spathic. Geologists’ term: ‘having good cleavage.’ Alors, correct me now if I err: a truly great tall tale must, first, be a true story—or at least one which cannot be disproved. Second, it must be gonzo, phweet!, wacky, Jack. Third, it should conclude with a pun of surpassing atrocity, nicht wahr?”
There was murmured agreement all around. Folks ordered drinks and settled back in their chairs.
“Right. Dig it: a true story. I have witnessed this personally from my spacecraft and am prepared to document it. The toilet tanks on your commercial airliners often leak. This results in the formation of deposits of blue ice on the fuselage. The ice is composed of feces, urine, and blue liquid disinfectant. Now: occasionally, when a plane must descend very rapidly from a great height, especially near the Rocky Mountains, chunks of blue ice ranging up to two hundred pounds can—and do—break off and shell the countryside. This is the truth,” he cried, as we began giggling. “I have seen a UPI photo of an apartment in Denver which was pulped by a one hundred and fifty pound chunk of blue ice. The airline bought the tenants a house—and the landlord a judge.”
People were laughing helplessly, and Gentleman John’s face was so red I thought he’d burst. “My God,” he howled, “can you imagine them checking in at hospital? ‘Cause of injury, please?’” He caved in.
“Neither of them were hurt,” Phee said. “And for a while—until it began to thaw—they were grateful for the coolness it provided. It was summer, you see, and the impact had destroyed their electric fan…”
Callahan was laughing so hard his apron ripped. Doc Webster lay on his back on the floor, kicking his feet. Long-Drink laughed his bridgework loose.
“So,” Phee concluded, sitting down on thin air and crossing his legs, “even if you live where there are no strategic military targets, you can still be attacked by an icy B.M.”
Instant silence. A stunned, shuddering intake of breath, and then—the only group scream I have ever heard, a deafening howl of anguish insupportable. Somewhichway it turned, before it was done, into a standing ovation, and a barrage of glasses hit the fireplace. Josie ran over and hopped on Phee’s lap, renewing the applause. John and I beat our palms bloody.
Callahan came around the bar with a huge grin, a bottle of Bushmill’s and three glasses. He held the glasses up, raised an eyebrow inquiringly at Phee, and let go. They stayed there. He poured them full, took one and held it out. “Fee-free for Phee,” he boomed. “Keep the bottle.” He gave one to Josie, pulled up a chair and sat down next to the third glass.
Phee inclined his head in thanks. “God bless your ass. Caramba—is all that you? Comment vous appelez-vous?”
“Je m’appelle Mike Callahan, señor.”
“Sure an’ Gomorrah, the saints add preservatives to us, Michael, yer a foiner host than Jasus himself, and him with the free wine and all the fish you can eat. A toast, big cobber, a toast!”
“To Melba?” Callahan suggested.
“I hate Melba toasts. No. To interstellar commerce, kemo sabe.”
Callahan raised his glass, as did several others including myself. Oddly, Josie didn’t. The toast was echoed and drunk, and the glasses disposed of.
“What else you got for sale?” the big barkeep asked then.
“One more item,” Phee said. “Excuse me, Mama.” Josie shifted on his lap so that he could reach the nearby hyperpocket. He took out a fourth gem. This one was pink-tinted, more translucent than transparent, and within it were a spiderweb of metallic filaments that made me think of printed circuits. He tossed it to Doc Webster.
“By the bag at your feet you are a medicine man, rotund person. Have you patients in this room?”
“All of them,” the fat sawbones rumbled.
“Pick one sick one. That chap there, dear Hippo-crates. Brush him with the bauble.” He pointed out Chuck Samms, who all too obviously had recently suffered a bad stroke: Chuck’s left side was shot. The Doc frowned down at the pink jewel, and carried it to Chuck. A couple of tiny lights went on inside it as he approached.
“His thumb,” Phee suggested.
The Doc looked at Chuck. “Okay?”
Half the mouth smiled. “Sure, Sam.” Chuck held out his right thumb, the Doc lifted the jewel, contact was established.
The damned thing took a blood sample, flashed a few contemplative lights, and returned it. As his own blood flowed back into him, Chuck gasped, then yelped, and pushed the jewel violently away from him.
Using both hands.
He looked down at his left hand, and began to smile the first unlopsided smile he’d had in months. Doc Webster gaped at him.
“The price for all four items,” Phee said, “F.O.B., shipping and handling plus applicable tax, is pennies. Literally. Every penny in this room, and nothing else.”
“You mean you want all our dough?” Eddie asked.
“No, cochon! All your pennies!”
I happened to know that Mike keeps about a hundred bucks in pennies in a sack under the bar—we pitch ’em on Friday nights. Still, it sounded like a hell of a deal. Stranger bargains have been made at Callahan’s Place, and our sales resistance was smithereened. I started to check my pants—
“No!” Josie cried, and leaped from Phee’s lap, her face white with fury.
“Why, what is it, my pigeon?” Phee asked, still sitting on nothing. “What deranges you?”
She towered over him in her wrath. “Damn it, Phee, damn you. I was going to wait until I got you home—but this is the Fourth of July, and that was the fourth jewel lie, and the lie is even more abominable than the pun. Screw you, and the reindeer you rode in on.”
He blinked. “Here? Now?”
“Damn straight.” She took a tube of toothpaste from an inside pocket of her vest, and before the traveling salesman could move, she had circled his knees where they crossed with a loop of toothpaste. He scrabbled at it with his fingers, and she added another loop, pinioning his hands. He began swearing fluently in several tongues—for the “toothpaste” had hardened at once into something that seemed to have the tensile strength of steel cable. Though he tried mightily, Phee could not break free. His command of obscenity was striking, and it might just have melted ordinary steel cable.
“—and may you fall into the outhouse just as a platoon of Ukrainians has finished a prune stew and six barrels of beer,” she finished, and she laughed merrily.
Callahan cleared his throat. If you engage the starter on an engine that’s already running, it makes a sound like that. “Josie darlin’,” he began, “if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Aw, you damned fools,” she burst out. “My father is right: people who don’t read science fiction are the most gullible people there are. Look at him, for God’s sake: does he look like an extraterrestrial to you?”
Josie had no way of knowing that Noah Gonzalez and I both read sf. Of course Noah works on the Fourth—he’s on the County Bomb Squad. “Well,” I said, “I guess we just figured his real appearance was too horrible for us to look upon. He’s obviously a master of illusions.”
“Too right,” she snapped, and snatched the propellor beanie from Phee’s head. The propellor stopped, and Phee’s invisible chair was yanked out from under him. Smiling Buddha hit the floor hard, and he howled indignantly.
We all blinked and looked around. The change was too subtle to perceive at once. All four jewels had gone opaque, and there was nothing—or rather, there wasn’t nothing—where the hyperpocket had been, but these things took time to notice. Even when Chuck Samms cried out, the reason was not immediately apparent, for both sides of his mouth were turned down…
“This is the illusion-maker,” Josie said, waving the beanie. “All it is is a hypnotic amplifier. The illusions are gone, now—and he still looks human. Not,” she snapped, “that I claim kinship with any pride!”
“Parallel evolution—?” I began.
“Don’t be silly. No, be silly: assume he’s really an alien who just happens to look human. Now explain to me why he came hundreds of light-years—past six other planets, a carload of moons and a million asteroids—to come in here and swindle you out of copper?”
There was only one other possible answer, then. I opened my mouth—and then closed it. I did not, for reasons I could not define, want Josie to know that I was a science fiction reader. You’re more talkative if you think your audience doesn’t understand you, sometimes.
“He’s a time traveler, you idiots!” she cried, confirming my guess. “Who else would need copper as desperately as your own descendants? With the couple of thousand pennies you morons were going to give him, he could have—well, quintupled his living space at the very least. And he would have left you nothing, except for four prop jewels and an admittedly great tall tale to tell.”
Isham Latimer is Callahan’s only black regular, and he knows his cue when he hears it. “Does dis mean dat de diamonds is worthless?”
Josie giggled, losing her anger all at once, and completed the quote. “Put it dis way: he is de broker, and yo’ is de brokee.”
All the tension in the room dissolved in laughter and cheers—leaving behind a large helping of confusion.
“So what’s your angle, Josie?” Callahan asked. “Where do you come in?”
“Time travel is severely proscribed,” she said. “The possible consequences of tampering with the past are too horrible to contemplate.”
“Sure,” Callahan said. He may not be a sf reader—but all of us at Callahan’s know that much about time travel. We had another time-traveler in here once, who was worried considerable about that very issue—whether it was moral and/or safe to change the past of a lady he loved, to keep her from being hurt.
“And precisely because it’s so tempting to ‘mine the past’ for all the precious things you wasted and used up on us, that is the most strictly prohibited crime on the books. Pennies are the best dodge for copper: you acquire a bunch in this era, bury them somewhere, then go back home and dig ’em up, properly aged and no way to prove it wasn’t a lucky dig.”
“And you—”
“Temporal agents approached my father twenty years ago, and convinced him to sign up as a kind of local way-station for authorized time-travelers, on a part-time basis. He’s a science fiction writer—who else would they dare trust to understand the terrible dangers of time travel? He kept it from Mother and us kids—but about five years ago I found out. I blackmailed his employers into giving me a job on the Time Police.”
“Why?” Callahan asked.
“Because it’s the most exciting job I can think of, of course! You know my nature—I love jokes and paradoxes.” She grinned. “I’m not sure, but I have a hunch I’m going to grow up to be Mom.”
There was a stunned silence.
“So if I understand this,” I said diffidently, “Phee here came for the coppers, and you came here for the coppers?”
She whooped with glee, and tossed the beanie into the fireplace. “Jake, are you busy tonight?”
I tingled from head to toe. “Aren’t you?” I asked, indicating Phee.
I knew it was a silly question, but I didn’t want her to know I knew. Aside from the most obvious benefits of her offer, as long as she didn’t know I read sf there was a chance I could pump her for her father’s name—and I was curious as hell.
“It won’t take me any time at all to deal with him,” she said. “Not yours, anyway.” I made oh-of-course noises.
“What happens to him?” Chuck asked, and his voice was harsh.
“I’d like to cut him in half,” Doc Webster said darkly. “Wouldn’t be the first Phee I’ve split.”
“He will be dealt with. Not punished—punishment accomplishes nothing. Nothing desirable, anyway. He is a brilliant man, a master hypnotist: he can be of service to his own era. He will simply be surgically implanted with a tiny device. If he ever again makes an unauthorized time-jump, he will acquire a massive and permanent case of B.O.”
Chuck broke up. “Fair enough.”
Phee spoke for the first time since his torrent of profanity. “I apologize, sir, for what I did to you. That last lie was the crudest—and perhaps unnecessary. I…I never could resist a good dazzle.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Chuck was taken aback. The half of his face that could hold expression softened. “Well…it was kind of nice to be whole again there for a minute. I dunno; maybe the havin’ of that minute was worth the losin’ of it. I’m sorry I laughed at you, mister.”
Sitting there in his shorts on the floor with his hands toothpasted to his knees, Phee managed to bow.
&
nbsp; “I don’t get it,” Long-Drink complained. “If this guy wanted pennies, why not just time-travel into a bank vault and take a million of ’em? Why go through all this rigamarole?”
Phee looked elegantly painted. “What would be the fun in that? That’s the only thing about being busted that really bothers me: she was here waiting for me. I hate being predictable.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Josie told him. “You couldn’t have known. This place is a probability nexus. Why, this was the priori terminus for the first-ever time-jump.”
Why, sure—when I thought about it, our previous time-traveler’s brother had invented the first time machine. His had been a bulky belt—these people were more advanced.
Phee’s eyes widened. He stared around at us. “By Crom, I’m impressed. What did you do?”
“We took up a collection for him,” Eddie answered truthfully.
Phee shook his head. “And I took you for yokels. Take me away, officer.”
In a way it was a little saddening to see the great Al Phee bestered.
Josie picked him up effortlessly and slung him over her shoulder. With her free hand, she reached into the purse that hung from her other shoulder.
“Uh,” I said, and she paused. “You’ll be right back?”
She grimaced. “Soon for you. Not for me. I’ll be back as quick as I can, Jake—honest! But first I’ve got to take him in and make out the report and do all the paperwork, and then I promised Dad I’d drop in on him for a quick visit about twenty years from now. But I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Why twenty years from now?”
“I hate to bother him when he’s working. By then he should be done with the Riverworld ser—” She broke off. “I’ll be right back,” she said shortly, and fumbled in the purse. She and Phee vanished.
And I fell down howling on the floor.
What made it twice as funny was that my ethics forbade me to share the joke with everybody else—I don’t think I could have stopped laughing long enough, anyhow. Gentleman John almost killed me when he understood I wasn’t going to explain it.
But hell, it was so obvious! I shouldn’t have needed that last hint. I didn’t even need to know enough German to know what “Bauer” means. I know that there’s a kind of delirious logic to the way things happen at Callahan’s Place, a kind of artistic symmetry.
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