Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  Okay, perhaps it seems a little odd that he was going bar-hopping in the snow at age 133. Especially since he’d died forty-six years earlier, in 1943. But Nikky has more fiber than I do, I guess: he doesn’t let a little thing like death slow him down. “Hi, Nikky,” I called out. “What’s up?”

  “Jake!” he cried, in that memorable baritone. “Excuse me, Erin.”

  “Sure, Uncle Nikky,” my fourteen-month-old said, releasing his fingers.

  “Thank heaven you are here,” Tesla said to me, wiping his fingers off on Erin’s barf-scarf and handing her to the Lucky Duck…who reluctantly accepted her and held her at arm’s length. “There is little time to lose.”

  I sighed. Somehow I knew what he was about to say. It had been that kind of a day. “Go ahead. Tell me about it.”

  He took a deep breath himself, and those incredible eyebrows of his drew together. “Jake, Michael and I need you to save the universe.”

  I slammed my hat to the barroom floor. “God damn it. AGAIN?”

  “Jake—” Zoey began, coming out of our living quarters in the back.

  “No, I mean it, Zoey. I’m sorry, Nikky, but this is starting to piss me off.”

  He nodded gravely. “It is exceedingly aggravating.”

  “Jake, it’s not—”

  “Zoey, when the hell did I ever sign any recruitment papers? I would have been a conscientious objector for Nam, if I hadn’t already been 4-F.”

  “Jake, it’s not as if—”

  “Enough is enough, you know? You can go to the well once too often.”

  “Jake, it’s not as if you had—”

  “Do I have any training for this shit? Do I have my own tools? All I ever volunteered for in my life was going up on stage to make music, and running a bar, and helping you and Erin conquer the planet, and I’ve blown two out of three so far.”

  “Jake, it’s not as if you had anything better—”

  “No, I’m serious: twice is as much as any man ought to be asked to serve his…I’m sorry, love, what did you say?”

  “It’s not as if you had anything better to…oh, never mind, I won’t say it.”

  Well, if she’d decided not to say it, then it was probably something that would have stung like hell to hear, so I stopped trying to guess what it might have been. Besides, by then she was taking my clothes off, which is likely to distract me no matter how busy we are.

  “Jesus Christ, Jake,” the Lucky Duck snickered, “even considering it’s cold outside—”

  “Duck,” Zoey said, toweling me briskly with a huge bath towel, “would you like me to sit on you while Jake makes a snowman out of yours so you can compare?”

  He shriveled. Making two of us.

  “Out of his what, Mommy?” Erin asked. Zoey ignored her and kept drying me; I endured it with what dignity I could muster.

  “Nikky,” I said, “I appreciate the confidence you and Mike are placing in me—I’m really flattered, okay?—but—”

  “Are they talking about Daddy’s penis? That’s silly. It gets much bigger than that, I’ve seen it—”

  “—thank you, Erin, but excuse me, okay? Daddy has to tell Uncle Nikky he isn’t going to save the universe this time: after that we can discuss my penis.” Zoey pulled sweatpants up me to help change the subject. “Nikola, I would like to help you…but you have got the wrong man.”

  He looked somber. “There is no other, Jacob.”

  I went into my Lord Buckley imitation. “‘What’s the matter, Mr. Whale? Ain’t you hip to what’s goin’ down in these here parts? Don’t you read the Marine News?’” He didn’t recognize the quote, and I didn’t have the heart to sustain it anyway. “Nikky, let me explain it in words of one syllable,” I said in my normal voice. “It’s all over. The Place is dead. I got no crew.”

  “They yet live.”

  “Sure. Scattered all to hell and gone. Shorty and his wives are out west, Doc’s retired to Florida, Isham and Tanya went up to Nova Scotia, the rest are scattered all over the Island. I see Long-Drink once a month if I’m lucky, and he’s the one I still see the most. Christ knows what the hell ever happened to Fast Eddie. Like John Lennon said, the dream is over.”

  Zoey had finished dressing me (fuzzy slippers, sweatshirt, bathrobe), and picked that moment to yank the bathrobe belt tight around my middle, hard enough that I made a little peep sound. “There,” she said contentedly. “Erin, Bless your father.”

  The Duck had set Erin down on the bar; in a shot she crawled down to the far end, down onto the counter and over to The Machine, studied the combination, and pushed the go button. The conveyor belt hummed into life, and dragged an empty mug to its fate.

  Nikky watched this soberly until he was sure Erin did indeed have sufficient coordination to be safe where she was. (She could walk great, at fourteen months, but was far too smart to attempt it on top of the bar.) Then he turned back to me. “How many could you assemble, if you sounded the tocsin?”

  Warm clothes and the prospect of coffee were beginning to mollify me a trifle; my voice came out perhaps two tones lower and ten decibels softer than before. “Aw, hell, Nik. I guess…shit, I guess all of ’em. Sooner or later. Everybody that’s still alive. If I started working the phones right now, I could probably muster fifteen or twenty by this time tomorrow—all the ones that are still close by. But where?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You can’t have a club without a clubhouse. If twenty people all showed up here, tomorrow—even if they showed up on foot, in the dead of night, from different directions—fifteen minutes later the town, county, state, and feds would all come in the door right behind ’em, waving warrants to dry the ink. We tried. Several times. Old Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi over yonder never sleeps. That’s why everybody’s scattered. There’s no place to meet.

  “For a while a few of us tried taking over some existing bar and turning it into our place—and it was a disaster. We even tried declaring ourselves a religious group and renting meditation space, but we kept getting caught drinking and tossed out. A couple of folks even tried it without booze or music, but it didn’t work: I knew it wouldn’t. And I am never going to be allowed to put alcohol and a large group of people in the same room again—not in this state. Probably not anywhere: I’m marked lousy with the feds, too. Some sister-in-law of Inspector Grtozkzhnyi has one of those triple-digit GS numbers, wouldn’t you know?” I trailed off, distracted by the scent that promises surcease of pain.

  By now The Machine had finished producing a mug of God’s Blessing: Irish coffee. “Would you come get it, Mommy?” Erin called.

  Zoey went and got the cup, and brought it to me. It was snowcapped and warm to the hands, and now that it was closer I could detect that second, subtler scent that promises surcease of care. “Nikky,” I said, “I don’t have a crew, I don’t have a place to put one, and the machine you want was disassembled for parts long ago. You’ve got more chance of building a new Titan booster. I’m sorry.” I closed my eyes and took a long deep pull from my Irish coffee.

  “Suppose a suitable place could be arranged?”

  Warmth and goodness flowed into me, radiated slowly outward from my esophagus to bring solace to every discontented cell. I was out of the stormy blast, in warm dry clothing, and my two beloveds had put the caffeinated Water of Life into my hand, and there was more. What problems? Things slowly began to soften and shift inside me.

  All right, I said to the inside of my skull. I won’t be fifty for another eight-point-four-but-who’s-counting-years yet. If I can have Irish coffee, and Zoey and Erin, then I guess maybe I could get back on the damn horse one more time.

  Time to start negotiating the fee…

  “Nikky, we’re going about this all wrong. We’ve skipped ahead to question three or four. Question one is: What is the deadline? You’re talking about a major operation—and the last two times we only had a few hours’ warning before the roof fell in. Literally. How much time have I got to assemble the string a
nd get ’em plugged in this time?”

  He frowned—and the sight of Nikola Tesla frowning can be disheartening, if you haven’t got Irish coffee in your hand. Those eyebrows, you know. “I am not sure, Jake. But I do not see how it could be more than…say, on the order of ten years.”

  I did a spit-take, which fortunately fell short of him. It is a terrible thing to do a spit-take with Irish whiskey. Grandfather Stonebender used to say that after you die, Saint Peter will suspend you head-down in a barrel containing all the whiskey you’ve ever wasted, and if you drown, to hell with you. But I was so relieved at Tesla’s words that I almost didn’t mind. “Ten years? Jesus, for a minute there I thought we had a problem.”

  Those mighty eyebrows rose again, to the top floor. “You feel that might be adequate?”

  “To get the bunch of us telepathic again? Yeah, I think that’s probably doable—if you can really deliver a place, and maybe a little expense money. Tell you the truth, that’s about the kind of time scale I was thinking in when everything went to shit.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey, I don’t want to sound cocky. What the hell do I know? This is blue-sky R&D. But we were telepathic three times—twice with help, and the last time by ourselves. You know yourself; once the software runs two or three times, you’re practically ready to ship product. I allowed a ten-year fudge factor because…well, let’s face it, we’re a bunch of lazy drunken goof-offs. Hell, I was prepared to let twenty years go by without another success before I would have started to worry. But if we’re under the gun…well, we saved the world twice before, with a hell of a lot less warning. What’s the matter?”

  Tesla was looking even more grave and somber than usual, if you can imagine that. “Jake, you know that I rarely employ hyperbole.”

  “Well, hey, Nikky—you’ve never needed to.”

  “And I never use scientific terminology with imprecision.”

  “Not that I’ve ever caught you at. Make your point. I can see it’s bad news. How bad?”

  His brows lowered even further, until he looked like Jehovah brooding over what He’d done to poor old Job. “I do not wish to dishearten you, now that you are feeling optimistic. But I cannot allow you to accept this responsibility in ignorance of the stakes.”

  “I haven’t accepted yet. We’re still two steps away, talking about whether I can deliver. After this we discuss what I’m being offered. But by all means, let’s be clear on the stakes first. We’re talking about the end of the world, right? What could be imprecise about that?” The coffee began to kick into second gear. “Oh, I get you. Right, okay. Doubtless old Mother Gaia will endure, whatever happens: technically we’re only talking about the end of the human race or something like that, is that it?”

  I had not thought he could look any more uncomfortable, but now he looked like Jehovah the day of the Assumption, trying to explain to the Virgin Mary why He’d never called her since that night. “I am sorry, Jake. The second time you and your friends became telepathic, the stakes were indeed, as you doubtless meant to imply, only the fate of humanity…and all the other forms of life in this solar system down to the last virus. The third and most recent time, you were fighting to save both all terrestrial life and all the members of the nonhuman civilization called the Filarii: Mr. Finn’s people, and their attendant subspecies.”

  “And this time?” It wasn’t me who said it, it was Erin.

  “This time the stakes are so much higher that a ratio cannot be formulated. My first words to you were most carefully chosen, Jake.”

  I had absorbed enough caffeine now for my short-term memory to be functional. Those words came back—and suddenly I understood him.

  “Oh, my stars.”

  “Precisely,” he agreed.

  “You need me to save the universe.”

  “In its totality. Every last derivative of the Big Bang. All of creation.”

  “From what?”

  “The quest for knowledge,” he said sadly.

  I couldn’t help it. I fell down laughing.

  And kept laughing, even though I had just added the precious last mouthful of whiskey to my afterlife hazard. The Lucky Duck roared along with me, and so did Erin, he an octave lower and she two octaves higher. Zoey did not. Neither did Nikky.

  But he did wear a small rueful smile. How could he help it, and be an honest man?

  You meet people all the time who believe, deep down in their hearts, that “madscientist” is one word, that most scientists are weird warlocks willing to risk all our lives by playing with forces they don’t really understand. You want, if you have half a brain, to smack such people. And then you remember Oppie and Teller and the boys sitting around back at Trinity before Zero Hour, taking bets on whether or not they were about to ignite the atmosphere—or Taylor, using a hydrogen bomb to light his cigarette—and you change the subject. But in your heart you know that while individual humans may be fallible or quirky, science itself—the search for truth—is holy.

  And now the Father of Twentieth-Century Technology himself, a man who had dedicated his life—both his lives—to the pursuit of knowledge, had told me with a straight face that the team to which he had sworn allegiance was going to destroy not just the solar system, not merely the Lesser Magellanic Cloud or even the whole Local Group, but everything. Can there be a funnier joke?

  Well, yes. To fix the situation, he was depending on a widely dispersed bunch of barflies.

  I don’t know how long I might have kept on laughing. I was just beginning, in fact, to realize that I might have a small problem in stopping, when the two men with guns came in. That did it. Instinct, you know.

  I don’t know how it is everywhere else, but in the New York/Long Island area, common disaster generally tends to bring out the best in people—the first time.

  During the first great East Coast Blackout, for instance—what was it, 1965?—we responded magnificently. People helped one another, sometimes heroically; there are hundreds of stories. Then some of them sat around and thought for a year or so about what chumps they’d been. The second time the grid went down, there were still heroes…but there were also many incidences of looting, vandalism, rape, and general mischief.

  Well, the snow I had so recently trudged through was that of the second road-blocking, Island-paralyzing blizzard that winter…

  It’s funny, the little things you notice. The first gun was a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum hand-cannon. It wasn’t even the most powerful handgun in the world back when Dirty Harry made that claim for the .357 Magnum, and there are some today that would give it a permanent case of barrel droop, but I knew it would have no trouble killing a truck. The other gun was a collector’s item, a .455 Webley that had probably seen service in the Argonne Forest…but threw a bigger slug than the Magnum. It was only after I assessed both weapons that I took in the guys holding them, even though they were much more interesting. Old habits die hard.

  The Magnum was being steered by a skinhead. He had covered every other square inch of his body with furred garments like something out of Road Warrior, right up to his nose, but apparently just could not bear to cover his shining statement to society. His scalp and ears were reddening as circulation returned to them. Nonetheless, he was bright-eyed. Too bright-eyed for adrenalin, drugs, or madness: it had to be a combination of at least two.

  The Webley was held by a sour-faced guy who looked like a Vermont storekeeper, dressed like a Long Island wannabe-survivalist, and had eyes like a serial killer with a toothache.

  In this weather, neither of them had been able to locate a ski mask. No professionalism anymore. Maybe they planned to leave no witnesses. Maybe they just didn’t plan.

  Baldy pulled fur down with his free hand to display a broad vulpine grin and swastikas tattooed (wrong way round) on each cheek. “Surprise,” he cried. “We’re collectin’ for Good Will!”

  “You, Skinny,” Rambo said, meaning me, “get the till. Everybody else, turn out your pockets on this t
able here. Now.” He gestured with the Webley for effect, and began shaking out a sack.

  I sighed and stood up. “Boys,” I said, “ordinarily I’d be happy to play with you, but I’m a little busy right now, I have to save the universe. Here’s the very best deal I can cut you: you lose the iron, you clear the door within thirty seconds, you can live. You don’t even have to apologize, okay?” I spread my hands. “What could be fairer than that?”

  Baldy looked to Rambo for guidance. “I think he said ‘no,’” Rambo explained. Baldy nodded and shot me twice. In the chest first, and then low in the belly. He started to look away to savor the shock and horror on everybody else’s faces, and then did a double take.

  I shook my head wearily and walked toward him.

  Behind me, Zoey growled once, and subsided.

  Baldy’s eyes were like golf balls, and his skull had stopped reddening, but his grin got even bigger. Obviously I was wearing some kind of Kevlar vest. Figure out why later. He shot me three times in the face.

  Zoey growled again. I stopped a couple of feet from him and folded my arms across my chest. “Now you’re going to have to apologize,” I said.

  He looked at the gun, then me, then the gun, then me, then the gun—

  Erin piped up from over on the bartop. “Can I have his mittens, Daddy? They look just like woofy dogs.”

  “Yes, honey,” I told her.

  That unstuck Baldy from his loop. He yanked his gaze toward Erin—then began quartering that section of the room for whoever had actually spoken.