Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  “Dat makes sense,” Eddie agreed reluctantly.

  “I do, however, have a couple of suggestions,” the Doc went on, “one serious, and the other catastrophic.”

  “Better give us the catastrophic first,” Long-Drink suggested.

  “Well…” The Doc hesitated.

  “That bad?” Long-Drink asked, suddenly nervous.

  Doc decided to take the plunge. “You know how they give show dogs big long dopey official names, and then a short version? Like, the dog competes as ‘Snow Princess Magnificent,’ but she’s known around the house as ‘Maggie’?”

  “Sure,” Long-Drink agreed.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking about this for months, and I’ll grant you it’s horrible…but it may just be too horrible not to use. Bear with me, now: suppose this place was informally known as ‘The Stoop.’ ‘Let’s go down to The Stoop and get a beer’—how’s that sound, for short?”

  Long-Drink considered it. “Not too bad, I guess. What’s the full name?”

  “‘See Conchs to Stupor.’”

  Several seconds of awed, horrified silence gave way to a spontaneous outcry of horror and revulsion. People spat, held their noses, clutched their bellies. Long-Drink, pokerfaced, reached out a trembling hand and flushed Harry’s toilet. At last we had a name nobody liked.

  “All right, all right,” the Doc called over the tumult. “I said it was catastrophic. I know most of our customers probably won’t be Conchs, too. Now let me tell you my real suggestion.” And with that he began unbuttoning his shirt.

  Fast Eddie and I exchanged a glance. Call our new bar “Fat Stripper”?

  “You might have noticed on the way here,” Doc said as he worked his way down his ample belly, “a lot of the stores on Duval sell T-shirts. The general theory is, it’s some kind of Mafia money-laundering front. Anyway, they get distress consignments in all the time. This particular batch came from some science fiction convention huckster who went broke up north somewhere, and I have no idea what they meant to him…but they seem to work for us, and there happens to be enough shirts in the batch for all of us.” By now he’d undone the last button. He pulled his shirt open, to reveal a simple black T-shirt, unadorned except for words in white at the left breast:

  The Place

  …because it’s Time

  “Huh,” Long-Drink said.

  “Shit, Doc, dat ain’t bad,” Eddie said.

  “It’s right,” I said wonderingly. “This isn’t anybody’s place in particular. It’s just…The Place. I like it, Doc. I can live with that. How about the rest of you?”

  Without planning it, about a dozen people all said it aloud experimentally, at the same time—“The Place”—and then all of us chorused, “…because it’s time!” as one, and Long-Drink let out a rebel yell, and applause became general.

  It was agreed without dispute that the five cottages on-site would be occupied by 1) my household, 2) Doc and Mei-Ling, 3) Tom Hauptman and the Lucky Duck, 4) Long-Drink McGonnigle and Tommy Janssen, and 5) Fast Eddie by himself in the smallest one. Double Bill already had other homes lined up for most of the rest of the gang, working in cooperation with a friendly colleague/competitor of his named Joey Delgatto, and was confident that between them they could accommodate everybody. (There you go—that’s Key West right there: the realtors got along with each other.)

  Naturally, a party was held at Double Bill’s trailer park to celebrate, that night, and we let out all the stops. Conchs came from all over town to see what all the excitement was, and kicked in a little of their own. I met at least six first-rate musicians, and Eddie and Zoey and I succeeded in impressing them all a little, and in between sets I tasted my first piece of real Key lime pie (you can tell the difference easily: the crap they sell tourists is green; the real stuff is yellow), and what with one thing and another, fun got had.

  And didn’t stop just because the party finally did, either. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the phenomenon—I wasn’t—but when a woman has been on the road for a long time, and then she locates where home is going to be from now on, and finds it good…well, let’s just say she feels really celebratory. And so, shortly, does her lucky partner. Anticipating this syndrome somehow, Doc and Mei-Ling had graciously offered to take Erin for the night, and Zoey and I nearly finished off the suspension system on that noble old bus.

  As we drifted off to sleep sometime around two in the morning, my last thought was, Nine more years or so of this, and then I gotta start gearing up to save the universe? I guess I can handle that…

  So I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to wake the next morning and find Nikola Tesla standing over me, frowning prodigiously. Some days you’re the pigeon; some days you’re the statue.

  “Morning, Nik,” I said, speaking softly so I wouldn’t wake Zoey. “I was expecting you sooner or later, but—”

  “I made a serious error,” he said.

  I blinked up at him, still only half-awake. “Oh, really?”

  “In my estimate of the lead time you would have before the crisis.”

  Now I was awake. “How big an error?”

  “Nearly ten years, I think.”

  Wide awake, now, and ready to shit the bed. “How near, Nikky? How long have we got?”

  “Perhaps as little as five months, Jacob. I am sorry.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Because It’s Time

  “I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle to Sam Donaldson, August 17, 1989

  I DISCOVERED I WAS

  holding my breath, and let it all out in an explosive sigh. “Christ, you had me worried for a second there.” I shook my head. “That could have waited until after breakfast. You have woken a man for insufficient reason, Nik: prepare to die.”

  “I apologize, sir—but I felt you should know at once.”

  Deep breath. Maybe it wasn’t absolutely necessary to try and assassinate the most dangerous man alive before coffee. He had apologized. “Well, I’m probably not going to be able to get back to sleep now anyway, so killing you is pointless. Okay, put the coffee on. In fact, fire up the urns outside—I’m going to have to call a council.” I sat up and put my legs over the side of the bunk.

  “No!”

  His voice was pitched low, but so urgent that Zoey stirred in her sleep. “Whibbis? Hib sommel?”

  I hesitated. Tesla shook his head and made frantic no, no motions with his hands. “Go back to sleep, baby,” I murmured to Zoey. She made a little nickering sound like a horse and went back under at once. Tesla shot me a grateful look.

  I eased to my feet and led him out of the sleeping area, pulling the curtain closed behind us and switching on the coffee machine as I went past it. I pointed Tesla to a seat, got my sunglasses from the dashboard and put them on, and slid into the seat across the aisle from him. The bubbling sounds of coffee being made reminded me that even pain is transitory. It helped.

  “Nikky,” I said, “as I understand it, the point of this exercise is for us all to eventually get telepathic. Anything you tell me, you’re telling everybody. So why don’t I call a council, and get it over with?”

  Tesla looked uncomfortable. “For one thing, Jacob, there are strangers present in this trailer court.”

  “Okay, so let me go quietly round up the inner circle, at least: Doc, Eddie, Long-Drink, the Duck, Omar, Tom, Josie, Tommy Janssen, a couple of the others. We’ll button up this bus, tyle the lodge, and discuss the fate of the universe in privacy.”

  “Eventually, of course,” he said.

  “Come on, Nikky, how many times do you want to tell this story? If it was worth waking me up, it’s worth waking them up too.”

  He did not answer.

  Light dawned. “Jesus.” Nikky was embarrassed. He didn’t want to tell this story at all. Forced to, he wanted to tell as few people as necessary. I felt a sudden burst of empathy. Nikola Tesla was a proud and accomplished and profoundly weird ma
n, and what he had to say was not going to make him look good. I could relate. “Okay, Nikky, have it your way. Run it by me first. If I don’t think I’m competent to relay it to the rest of the gang, I’ll tell you.”

  “Thank you,” he said, relief apparent on his craggy face. “First, you must understand Coleman’s crucial observation regarding Guth’s inflationary universe theory—”

  “Christ, not yet!”

  “Oh. I beg your pardon.”

  A few minutes later, my caffeine level finally rose up out of the red zone, and I felt safe in removing my sunglasses. “Okay. Now. Slowly.”

  He nodded, took a long sip of his own coffee, and began. “Alan Guth’s theory of the inflationary universe requires, at a fundamental level, the assumption that very early on in the history of the Big Bang, empty space itself, what physicists call ‘the vacuum,’ had some very unusual properties for a short time, and then underwent what is called a ‘phase transition’—something like what happens when water freezes, a radical change of state—into its present form. Are you with me so far?”

  “For an indescribably short time, nothingness was indescribably weird; then it settled down into nothing at all, and has been that ever since. Am I close?”

  Tesla nodded. “Close enough. But we may be hasty in assuming it is nothing at all. Sidney Coleman was one of the first to make the point that there is no way for us to be sure our present vacuum is in the lowest possible energy state. It might, in theory, be possible for space to undergo a further phase transition, to a different, lower-energy vacuum state.”

  “Things can always get worse, in other words.”

  He nodded. “Indeed.”

  I tried to imagine a lower-energy vacuum. “Let me guess what a lower-energy vacuum is like. Everything really sucks, right?”

  Nikky likes puns, but he didn’t care much for that one, didn’t crack a smile. “In a different vacuum state,” he said, his voice flat and harsh, “all the laws of physics would be changed. All particles as we know them, and everything we see around us, would be destroyed. Instantly.”

  I could think of absolutely nothing to say except, “Uh-hunh.”

  “Do you know what supercool water is, Jacob?”

  I nodded at once. “Irish whiskey.”

  Again he ignored my feeble levity. “If you have very pure water, you can cool it to below freezing temperature and it will not freeze. Then, if you introduce a single speck of dust, the whole mass freezes over in an instant. Cosmologist Sir Martin Rees speculates that our universe could be in such a state, its vacuum ‘supercooled’—and that, given the proper trigger, a bubble of ‘new vacuum’ might be accidentally created, which would expand at the speed of light to engulf the universe.”

  “And something that human beings do could cause that?” I shook my head. “Nikky, I’m going to try very hard throughout this discussion to avoid saying, ‘This sounds fucking crazy,’ but that sounds fucking crazy. Humanity just isn’t that powerful. Hell, not even close.”

  “Jacob, humans have already produced conditions that never existed naturally anywhere before.”

  “Name one,” I challenged.

  “Refrigeration. So far as present human knowledge extends, there was never anything in the universe colder than 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, the present temperature of the microwave background—until we made refrigerators.”

  “Huh.”

  “And in the other direction, we are equally ambitious. The kind of thing that might create dangerous conditions with regard to the vacuum would be a collision between very high-energy particles in a big accelerator. Such a collision could conceivably create a large local energy density of just the kind that might trigger a phase transition in the vacuum.”

  “Whoa.” I got up and refilled my coffee, then his. “I mean, I’m second to none in my admiration for the high-energy physics boys, but if you’re trying to tell me those guys with the big racetrack in Texas have something powerful enough to destroy the universe ready—”

  Tesla frowned ferociously. “No. I thought that was going to be the trigger—that is where I got my original ten-year parameter—but I was mistaken. The Superconducting Super Collider is not only incomplete, I have just learned that it will never be completed. It will be canceled by Congress in just a few years.”

  That sidetracked me. “What? How could they possibly pull the plug on the SSC? They’ve already spent gazillions, and the damn thing’s like 75% built already!”

  Tesla shrugged irritably. “There is no rational reason. That is why I overlooked the possibility in my thinking. Trust me: it will be aborted four years from now, 80% complete.”

  I felt the same frustration I’d felt a little over a year earlier, when Tesla had told me flatly, again from his authority as a time traveler, that shortly the Soviet Union was going to cease to exist. I knew I could believe him, but it just didn’t seem conceivable.

  Still didn’t, in fact: at that time, in March 1989, the Soviet Union was still there, still apparently healthy and vigorous—finally out of Afghanistan, having a little trouble in outlying provinces perhaps, but pressing on with glasnost and perestroika. Nobody knew the game was over yet but Callahan’s gang…and maybe Mikhail Gorbachev. Certainly not the CIA.

  “Second time, Nikky: ‘That sounds fucking crazy.’”

  “It is fucking crazy,” he said irritably, “but it is true nonetheless.”

  I waved the distraction aside. If I couldn’t trust the facts Nikola Tesla gave me, there was no point in going any further. And all he was asking me to believe was that the U.S. federal government could be monumentally stupid. “Okay, so the trigger won’t be the SSC. How about that international Linear Collider I read about?”

  “That,” he agreed, “will be able to reach collision energies even higher than the SSC…and it will be built, eventually. But not for—” He frowned again, and stopped speaking.

  I sipped coffee and waited.

  “Nikola,” I said softly after a while, “if I’m following you, you believe that sometime this coming August, something is going to trigger a phase transition in the vacuum, or, as I would phrase it in layman’s terms, Fuck Up Everything. It won’t be the big ring at Waxahacie, and it won’t be the Linear Collider they haven’t even drawn up plans for yet. Fine, I got that. So what’s going to do it?”

  He looked up at me from under those craggy brows, his eyes full of pain. “I fear it will have been me,” he confessed.

  He got up and began pacing up and down the aisle, absentmindedly juggling small balls of electric-blue fire—a nervous habit of his for over a century, which had delighted Mark Twain. I shut up and watched him and waited.

  Outside, I could hear people stirring, exchanging sleepy morning greetings. Smells of sea and mildew were borne on a steady warm breeze. Parts of the old bus creaked and ticked as sunlight found holes in the shade that shielded it. Pixel the cat either had been aboard undetected all night, or now pulled his trick of walking through walls; all at once he was on my lap, quietly but firmly demanding attention. I scratched him behind the ears and under the chin without taking my eyes off Tesla, and Pixel seemed willing to tolerate this perfunctory service; he settled firmly in place and began to purr just audibly. We waited together.

  Finally Tesla stopped pacing and made his blue fireballs disappear. He resumed his seat across from me, slid back against the wall of the bus, and put his legs up on the seat, crossing his ankles. He folded his hands on his lap and addressed a point about a foot above my head.

  “Eighty-one years ago,” he said, “I sent a message to Robert Peary at the North Pole.”

  I nodded sagely, as if this made any sense to me at all, and kept my mouth shut.

  He lowered his gaze briefly to meet mine. “You must understand, Jacob: at that time I was perhaps as frustrated and desperate as I have ever been in my life.”

  I nodded again. He looked back up at the ceiling behind my head again.

  “I had been trying to c
omplete Wardenclyffe for eight years. The crowning accomplishment of my life, and it was like chasing the horizon: as I approached, it receded. The world was hailing that treacherous fop Marconi as the inventor of radio, and I was determined to show him up as a dilettante, but I could not seem to get my feet under me. J. P. Morgan completely abandoned his support, when he learned that my real purpose was the broadcast transmission of power. A financial panic five years earlier had ruined me personally—and just about any investors I might have hoped to find. I was being sued by several creditors back in Colorado Springs. Even my friend George Westinghouse, who had become rich from my patents for alternating current motors and generators, declined to help me. Like the SSC in Texas today, Wardenclyffe was 80% completed, needing only the 68-foot dome itself to be placed atop the tower—it had been for five years! But the workers would not work unless I paid them, and I could not. Then the architect, Stanford White, was murdered by Harry Thaw, his lover Evelyn Nesbit’s husband…” He broke off.

  “So you sent a message to Peary,” I prompted gently.

  “On June 29, 1908,” Tesla agreed. “He was then in the midst of his second, ultimately successful attempt on the North Pole. I told him I knew he was quite busy, but that I would appreciate it if, the next day, he were to take special notice of the sky, and report any interesting observations he might make.”

  I was still puzzled, but hanging on gamely. “Okay. And the next day, Peary reported…”

  “Nothing,” Tesla said flatly. “He and his team saw nothing at all. They never guessed how very fortunate they were.”

  He clammed up again.

  My first impulse was to be irritated with him for dragging this out. I squelched that and thought hard instead.

  Let’s see. Nikky is trying to signal Peary somehow, and for some reason it doesn’t work. Visualize the geometry. Here’s Wardenclyffe—about twenty minutes from where I used to live, on Long Island’s North Shore, at Shoreham. There’s Peary, somewhere damn close to the Pole. Connect them with a dotted line representing the failed signal…