Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  Omar had shown up the same day, in fact at the selfsame hour, that those two dozen remaindered buses were delivered to my parking lot. You couldn’t help but notice a resemblance. Like the buses, Omar was big and solid and mostly bright yellow: lots of blond hair and beard sticking out of a long yellow fisherman’s slicker, with white gloves suggesting headlights and boots roughly the color of tires. Also like most of the buses, he showed signs of impressive mileage. He too spent a lot of time out in the weather.

  He arrived as I was in the middle of an argument with the delivery driver who had been least successful at denying being the man in charge. I was in the process of explaining to him that I required buses in good running order, which at least some of these manifestly were not, and he in turn was explaining that he didn’t know shit about that and didn’t give a rat’s ass, that these was the buses they gave him, plus which they all had fresh valid state inspection stickers on them, and anyway they got here, didn’t they? Gradually we both became aware of the presence of Omar, standing nearby at the starboard forequarter of one of the more suspect buses. He had broken out the bus’s jack, and cranked its big tooth up to about four inches higher than the slot it was supposed to go into on the underside.

  “Hey,” the crew chief said, “don’t mess with that, okay pal?”

  Omar straightened from his work and smiled at him. “I just want to look at something.”

  People almost always underestimate Jim Omar. He doesn’t look like a Schwarzenegger, or even a Stallone. He’s built about like a normal, reasonably fit human being…about eight percent larger than normal in all dimensions, but you tend not to notice that until he’s up close. His face is quite pleasant, perhaps because he rarely needs to be anything else.

  “As soon as Skinny here signs these papers, you can look at anything you want,” the crew chief told him belligerently.

  Omar nodded and turned back to the bus. He stood the jack up flush against the side of the bus…then crouched slightly, picked up the front end of the bus with his hands, kicked the jack an inch closer to it, and set the bus down on the tooth. The jack promptly sank three inches into the snow and the blacktop beneath it, leaving the wheel with an inch of clearance.

  He saw us staring, and smiled pleasantly. “Quicker that way,” he said, and turned back to his work. He popped the wheel cover off, with his fist, undogged the lugs with his fingers—two at a time; he had no trouble starting any of them—took the huge tire off, and held it at chest height without apparent effort while he turned it to inspect it. Then he set it down in the snow, and squatted and squinted into the exposed entrails of the bus. He poked at the widget, checked the play on the thingie, tugged experimentally on the whatchamacallit. Then he stood up and came over to join us.

  “You should take this one back,” he said politely to the crew chief.

  You could see the guy become aware of the angle at which he had to hold his neck to look Omar in the eye. “Maybe so.”

  “Also that one there, and that one,” Omar said, pointing to two other buses. “Otherwise somebody will lose his state inspection license. For openers; after that it gets ugly. You yourself could lose civil service, union status, end up a civilian. And not a popular one.” His voice was soft, mild, inoffensive.

  “Yes,” the crew chief said.

  “I’ll put the wheel back on for you,” Omar offered.

  “Thank you,” the crew chief said.

  By the time Jim had dogged down the last two lugs machine-tight with his fingers, a small crowd of other delivery drivers had collected. A very quiet crowd. When he set his boot down on the plate of the jack to hold it, and lifted the bus up off it, setting the bus down on the ground so gently it didn’t bounce even once, the crowd transcended quiet, and began to actually absorb sound. The three drivers who now had to drive their rejected buses back to wherever they’d come from obviously resented it—they’d expected to spend at least the last half of the job riding home in something safe, in one of the two vans with the rest of the boys—but none of them made any protest when their boss gave them their orders.

  As one of them was about to board the bus Omar had just examined, Jim held up a hand to stop him. “With that front end,” he said, “and those tires, I wouldn’t take it over thirty-five.” The man just nodded, and boarded the bus still nodding, and drove away still nodding. At thirty.

  “The three replacements will be here this time tomorrow?” Omar asked the chief.

  He opened his mouth, left it open for a while, then nodded himself, once. He got into the nearest van of drivers without another word. It pulled away at once, spraying snow, and the other van wasn’t slow in following it. As I watched them both make the right out onto 25A, I realized that at least the bus invasion had managed to finally clean out my damn driveway.

  All the mahouts were gone now, leaving my parking lot extremely full of twenty-one shabby yellow elephants, steaming and ticking in the cold air. Omar’s black pickup truck was visible at the outskirts of the herd, like a shepherd dog keeping them all penned up. He and I stood side by side, regarding the peaceful scene together, enjoying the silence.

  “Hi, Jake,” he said after a while.

  “Thanks, Jim.”

  He bent and got a handful of slush, used it to wipe his hands clean of tire grease. “I hate long arguments.”

  “Welcome back to the States. What do you say we go in and get some Irish coffee in us and tell fibs?”

  “We’d be fools not to. Let me get my gear and I’ll join you inside.”

  “Need a hand?” I asked, and he smiled.

  Over drinks, after the obligatory small talk with Zoey and Erin, he told me a little about his grant. “It’s not much—but it’s a start. At last. It’ll allow me to begin systematizing the project, a little bit, anyway. Set up a facility, get a database started, maybe even hire a couple of field agents for a year or so. I’ve decided to start with writers.”

  I nodded. “Musicians after that, maybe.”

  “That was my thinking. Then if I get renewed next year; dancer/choreographers and so on from there.”

  “What is this project, Uncle Omar?” Erin asked. (She had decided, on what basis I cannot tell you, that “Uncle Omar” somehow sounded more right than “Uncle Jim.”) “I asked Daddy about it, but he made a joke I didn’t understand and changed the subject.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve always believed I have a shot at living forever. I think we’re going to lick immortality one of these days, and I think some of the first immortals are already alive now.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Well, last year Robert A. Heinlein died…and ever since, I feel just a little bit less like living forever. If there isn’t going to be a new Heinlein novel coming out every year or two…well, it just isn’t going to be the same, is it?”

  She shook her head no. So did her mother and I.

  “So okay, he’s gone and we can’t have him back. But what if we could have a little piece of him back? What if we could clone him, one day?”

  “How?”

  “Salvage his DNA. Before it’s too late.”

  Erin’s mouth dropped open. I was expecting it, and caught most of the drool in the barf-scarf I had ready. “You mrrm—Daddy!—you mean you want to dig him up and take a DNA sample?”

  He shook his head. “Too complicated, and I wouldn’t want to upset his widow. Besides, she had him cremated. Scattered his ashes on the water with full military honors.”

  “Then how?”

  “Several ways. Let me give you a for-instance. Mr. Heinlein was a writer. That means he was a reader. You probably haven’t noticed yet, at your age, but it’s just about impossible for a grown-up to read a book without shedding hairs into it, even if they’re careful.”

  “Oh, my God,” Erin said. “I thought it was just Daddy.”

  “No, honey—even people with a normal amount of hair and no beard at all do it. Likewise dandruff and assorted kinds of skin flakes. A lot
of people lick their fingers before they turn a page. Occasionally, other fluids get rubbed off on the paper, too. Some readers have the bad habit of using the corners of several pages at once to clean their fingernails, which are always full of dead skin cells. You’d be amazed how long you can keep a cell from deteriorating, if it’s sealed up in a book. Especially one printed on acid-free paper—like serious readers own. If you have a man’s books, the ones he actually read, you have his DNA.”

  Zoey gave me her cup to refill, and took over the job of keeping Erin’s chin dry. “So you want to go around to the widows and widowers of great writers,” she said, “and ask if you can vacuum out their late loved one’s books…so you can re-create them out of their dandruff flakes?”

  Omar beamed and nodded.

  Erin had that happy-baby grin that makes her look like an advertisement. “You still have a couple of big steps to go,” she said. “From DNA to stem cells, from zygote to embryo, then from infant to an adult weird enough to want to write books.”

  “Sure,” he agreed, absolutely unfazed that a fourteen-month-old might know such things. Some folks can take in stride the fact that Erin is able to talk articulately…and still unconsciously expect her to be as ignorant as most people her size. “And it’s possible some or all of those problems will never be solved—not even in my anticipated long lifetime. But meanwhile, just in case they get solved, the important thing is to start preserving the database, before it’s too late. That part can’t wait. Hell, it’s probably already too late to save Frank Herbert, and I’ll have to move fast to get Theodore Sturgeon.”

  “What did you do before you got this grant, Uncle Omar?”

  He shrugged. “Basically the same thing. Except not for people. For the last twenty years I’ve been wandering around the planet trying to establish a genetic library for as many endangered or extinct species of plants and animals as I could. All that’s changed now is, I’ve expanded the definition of plants and animals to include writers.”

  “Fair description of some of them,” I said, just to be saying something.

  “How does it work, Uncle Omar? How do you do it?”

  He shrugged again. “Go to some remote corner of the earth where a lot of species are circling the drain. Jungle up and get to know them. Collect DNA. When I either have all there is to get there, or get really homesick for indoor plumbing, I come back to the States and spend some time cataloguing and arranging for preservation and so on. Then when I get sick of civilization I find a new remote corner of the earth.”

  “Wow. What a great job. Working for whom?”

  He smiled. “For me. Freelance.”

  More drool to be mopped up. “How did you pay for it, all these years?”

  He spread his hands. “Scuffled. Hustled. Once in a long while, a small grant or stipend from someplace. Not much, not often. Aren’t many funding agencies that consider the biodiversity of Gaia to be part of their mandate. And the job can’t be done without stepping on political toes…which is better done by a private individual with no affiliations and no fixed address. I can slip in under the radar.”

  “A guerrilla, you mean,” Erin said.

  He nodded. “Sort of,” he said. “Except a basically nonviolent type. You know those Greenpeace guys, call themselves ‘eco-warriors’? I’m kind of an eco-medic.”

  “Is it fun?”

  His smile was a beautiful thing to see. “Yes, Erin. It is.”

  I put my oar in. “Let me get this straight,” I said. “For twenty years hardly anyone would fund you to try and preserve thousands of vanishing species…and now you got a fat grant to try and preserve a handful of dead writers?”

  He nodded. “Ain’t humans a pisser?”

  I shook my head at the wonder of it, gave Erin her bib, and went to The Machine to draw myself another Irish coffee. “If there is a God, I know why He hasn’t been answering His phone lately: He’s helpless with laughter.”

  “Look, Jim,” Zoey said, “now that you’ve got this grant, can you really take time off to help a bunch of loonies move to Florida? We really appreciate the help, but what you’re doing is important.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “No sweat. It’s not even out of my way: the cold-storage site where I have my DNA library stashed is down in the Keys. Besides, one of the first targets on my acquisition list is John D. MacDonald. Plus Mrs. Heinlein lives down that way now.”

  The empty mug I had set on the conveyor belt emerged from the far side of The Machine filled with Kenya AA and Old Bushmill’s and snowcapped with whipped cream. The aroma was angelic. Jim caught my eye and made a hand signal; I nodded and put a second mug on the belt for him.

  “Wait a minute,” Zoey said. “I heard you were down in Central America, this last trip.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “Belize.”

  “So if your facility is in Florida, how come you overshot so far? What brings you this far north, in winter? Just homesick for where you used to live?”

  He laughed out loud as I set his Irish coffee in front of him. “Nostalgia for Long Island?”

  “Then what?”

  He looked up at me. “Word reached me down there that Mary’s Place had closed.”

  I stared at him. “You never set foot in Mary’s Place in your life.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. Always meant to; put it off. Wanted to see if there was anything I could do about that.”

  “Jesus.” I shook my head wonderingly. “Of course. It’s your thing. Preserving endangered species.”

  “That’s part of it, maybe,” he said, and took his first sip of coffee.

  “What’s the rest?” Erin asked.

  He wiped whipped cream from his upper lip, gestured with his coffee mug, and said, “This is it right here, Erin.”

  “I don’t get it. You came to Long Island for the coffee?”

  He looked up at me again. “Jake, how long has it been since the last time we saw each other?”

  The calculation took some time. “I make it three years and ten months.”

  He gestured with the mug again. “This,” he said with the certainty of an expert, “contains Ethiopian Harrar and Tullamore Dew with double cream, a dash of nutmeg, and no sugar.”

  “Well, sure,” I said. “You still like it that way, I hope.”

  He turned to Erin. “You see what I mean? He remembers my prescription. He hasn’t laid eyes on me in almost four years, and he remembers how I take my coffee. I know he’s got something different in his own mug, but for the life of me I can’t remember what he likes, except that the whiskey will be Bushmill’s. I can’t remember how my sister takes her coffee, for Christ’s sake.” He turned back to me again. “When a friend like you needs help, Jacob, I’d come from a lot farther away than Belize.”

  What a fine thing to have somebody say in front of your wife and daughter. If I really deserve the friends I’ve got, I must be one hell of a fellow.

  A little while after that, people of mechanical inclination began showing up, and when there seemed to be enough of us and we seemed to be sufficiently fortified with antifreeze, we all went outside together and began giving those buses a fairly close inspection. After an hour of that, we spent time going around to everybody’s ride and inspecting the tools and materials they had fetched, and then there was an extended conference in the bar, most of which I missed through being busy constructing a makeshift toolshed outside in the parking lot with Omar and Shorty Steinitz. (Nails being about the only things on earth Shorty isn’t terrible at driving.)

  Shortly before midnight, consensus was reached. The job could be done. Guesstimated time, two weeks. Guesstimated budget, within parameters. Doc Webster being known to be a night owl, we placed a speakerphone call to him, and told him to expect us all in a month or so. I will not reproduce the conversation, as most of the puns were substandard—the Doc was just too happy to do his best work. He agreed to alert his real estate broker friend and apprise him of our needs: a property suitable f
or a discreet nontourist tavern, and temporary accommodations for about two dozen house hunters and their families, who would be arriving in a posse. We broke up in high spirits, and the next day we went to work.

  Thank God I had spent the week we waited for the buses to show up in dismantling and packing most of my own household and bar. Not only was there no longer any time to do so—we needed the room! For cots and sleeping bags, to accommodate the ever-changing cast of those who were working too hard to drive back home again every night—and, during the day, as a makeshift day-care center for the kids and grandkids of those outside working on buses.

  It was a very busy and very happy couple of weeks. Like I said, I’ll skip over the, uh, nuts and bolts details…except that I must state for the record we would never have met either our deadline or our budget without Shorty Steinitz. Not to disparage the efforts or skills of Dorothy, who was also invaluable—but Shorty had special qualifications that proved crucial for our unique circumstances.

  Maybe it seems paradoxical that the man generally acknowledged as the world’s worst driver made his living restoring classic cars. Well, gunsmiths aren’t necessarily crack shots, and some luthiers can’t play an E minor chord. Shorty had carved himself out a fairly unique niche market: he would undertake to restore any automobile whatsoever to absolute mint condition…as long as it was at least thirty years old. All parts guaranteed authentic and chronistic: if you brought him a ’57 Thunderbird with a broken headlight, Shorty would refund your money before he’d try and fob off a ’58 T-bird lamp on you. He charged a medium-sized fortune, of course—but the 1980s were heavily populated with people who had more money than they knew what to do with: Shorty had all the work he could handle and a long waiting list. He claimed he was into it for political and artistic reasons, saying there could be no more socially subversive act than selling something utterly useless and horrifyingly expensive to a capitalist oppressor. I think he just liked the gig. And doubtless the money.

  Anyway, the point is that his experience in restoring old clunkers, and his encyclopedic knowledge of sources for obsolete parts, came in more than handy in refurbishing all those creaky old schoolbuses. Even though they were a little out of his usual line, most of them were at least of a vintage Shorty was familiar with, and he enjoyed the creative freedom of being allowed to fudge and improvise a little for a change.