Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  Wait a minute. What if the signal didn’t fail? Suppose it simply missed? Extend the dotted line…and what did he say the date was?

  “Holy, fucking, Christ—”

  Frowning like an Old Testament prophet, Nikola Tesla nodded at me. “That same day,” he said, “in central Siberia, there was a loud noise, and half a million acres of pine forest near the Stony Tunguska River all decided to lie down for a while.”

  “Jesus, Nikky!”

  Pixel was gone from my lap, taking several gobbets of my flesh with him; I would have to apologize to him later. I’d woken up Zoey, too; another apology due. I sat frozen, marinating in awe and horror.

  “The explosion was heard 620 miles away,” Tesla went on. “Whole herds of reindeer were destroyed. Several nomadic villages vanished utterly. To this day, no plausible explanation has ever been adduced.”

  My voice sounded funny to me. “Nikky…you’re telling me that you…caused Tunguska?”

  He hung his head. “I overshot by more than a thousand miles. Fortunately for Peary and his companions. Unfortunately for an indeterminate number of Siberian nomads. The beam was much more powerful than I had anticipated.”

  For many years, the officially accepted explanation for the stupendous destruction at Tunguska—the most powerful recorded energy event in history—had been meteorite impact. When a 1927 expedition failed to find an impact crater, or any trace of nickel-iron shrapnel (down to a depth of 118 feet!), they decided that a 100,000-ton fragment of Encke’s Comet, composed mainly of dust and ice, had entered the atmosphere at 62,000 mph, and exploded just above the surface, creating a 15-megaton shock wave. That story held up for decades, until somebody got around to working the figures—at which time they decided it hadn’t been a chunk of comet, but maybe a mini-black-hole, which just happened to dissipate just before it struck Siberia. As a layman, I’d never been much impressed with any of these theories…but had been forced to admit that the best I could come up with myself, a crashing alien spacecraft, was also low-probability.

  Somehow I’d never thought of a Nikola Tesla publicity stunt gone haywire…

  The implications began to sink in. “Oh my God, Nikky—is this to do with that stuff the feds supposedly took out of the hotel basement after you died, and then classified forever? Papers and working models? Your Death Ray?”

  Still looking down, he nodded. “A type of particle-beam weapon. Quite unconventional…and quite powerful.”

  “How powerful? After almost fifty years of secret government development, that is?”

  He shook his head, still declining to meet my eyes. “There is no way to say. I myself never made a second test.”

  I shook my own head. “Jesus, you must have freaked when you found out what had happened. How long did it take for the news about Tunguska to get around?”

  “Weeks,” he said. “Within two or three, I had a fairly clear idea.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had a nervous breakdown. I entered a state which would today be called clinical depression. I abandoned my business interests, my friends, even my correspondence, retired to my bed. Scherff continued to look after my interests for me, bless him, even filed my tax returns…but there was nothing he could do, and nothing I would do. Eventually I was forced to sign over Wardenclyffe to George Boldt, to cover my bills at the Waldorf…”

  “And now Wardenclyffe is a factory or something,” I said finally, just to break the silence. “I went over to take a look at it once, but there wasn’t much to see. The tower was gone.”

  He sighed and sat up straight, but he still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Not a single ounce of metal anywhere in that tower, and it still took three successive demolition crews over a year to bring it down. All three used dynamite, too. But only the third used enough.”

  The subject of demolition put me, at least, back on track. “Okay, so the government has a Tesla Death Ray, forty-odd years more advanced than the one you took out half of Siberia with. Why are you acting as though all this were your fault? You didn’t give it to them, for Chrissake.”

  “But I did,” he said, and now he looked up and met my eyes.

  “You did? How? Why?”

  “For the most ludicrous reason imaginable. Insufficient arrogance.”

  I hesitated, but decided to keep going with brutal honesty. “Nikky, I’ve heard you accused of a lot of things, but never—”

  He nodded. “I will try to explain. When Lady Sally McGee offered to rejuvenate me, to make me immortal, and required me to publicly appear to die first…I knew those papers were in the hotel safe. I could have destroyed them easily before staging my death. I thought it was safe to leave them there, for some hypothetical posterity perhaps.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had by then spent over thirty years trying as hard as possible to discredit myself, and believed I had succeeded.”

  I blinked at him several times.

  “Have you studied my biography, Jacob?”

  “Several of them,” I agreed.

  “Then perhaps you have noticed that during roughly the first half of my life, I produced a steady stream of novel discoveries and successful products…” Yeah, and Shakespeare wrote some interesting plays. “…and during the latter half, I essentially produced a steady stream of increasingly grandiose and wild-sounding pronouncements, concerning devices which I never actually offered for examination.”

  I had to admit he was right. Impenetrable city-sized force fields, broadcast-powered aircraft, antigravity, charging the ionosphere to a glow so it would never get dark again anywhere—all these had been publicly announced by Tesla at various times in his “last thirty-five years” of life, and none ever shown. By the time of his supposed death, it was true that most of the world considered him a loopy old bird who rated lip-service respect for half-remembered accomplishments in a prior century, but was not to be taken seriously anymore—basically, an especially entertaining eccentric.

  “The dividing point was Tunguska. By the time of my death, most of my true accomplishments were either misattributed to others, or largely forgotten. My eventual vindication by the Supreme Court, which awarded me primacy over Marconi in the question of radio—eight months after I ‘died’!—was almost universally ignored, and is forgotten today. The general consensus of the scientific community at the time of my death was that I was an old humbug, a mountebank who had for decades been coasting on a reputation achieved by luck, bolstering it occasionally with absurd, empty boasts. Everyone knew that Edison had invented electricity, and Marconi had invented radio; I was the man who had invented the special effects prop for the second Frankenstein film, the Tesla coil. Lady Sally had already informed me, as a wry joke, that I would not be inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame until 1975. It simply never occurred to me that I had enough credibility left to be taken seriously by anyone in authority.

  “I underestimated the desperation in Washington in January of 1943. The war was not going well; the Manhattan Project was not going well. It was decided to explore even wild-card alternatives—and so the FBI seized all my papers and equipment.”

  “But they didn’t do anything with them, then?” I had a sudden wild vision of Truman sitting in a room with his advisers, and saying, “Fuck it, let’s go easy on them. Start with the atom bomb…and if that doesn’t work, then get tough.”

  “No,” he agreed. “Not then. Even if they understood what they were reading, at that time it would have required another Manhattan Project merely to re-create Wardenclyffe, and without me that would not have been enough. Not within the time-frame they envisioned. My papers and artifacts were all inspected, classified, and set aside.” His face changed. “But not forgotten.”

  Zoey shuffled into the passenger area, wearing a passable counterfeit of her face, hair combed, silk robe tied. “Morning, Nikky. How’ve you been?”

  You would not think a man that long and tall could levitate from a reclining position on a bus seat t
o standing vertical in the aisle so quickly, without losing dignity. Especially not at age 133. He came erect with an almost audible click, and instantly bent at the waist to kiss the hand Zoey had no choice but to give him. “Well enough, dear lady—and yourself?”

  “Better than that,” she said. “Have you eaten?”

  “Perhaps later, thank you. I apologize for awakening you.”

  “I’m sure you had reason to.”

  “Thank you for taking it that way. May I pour you coffee? It is reasonably fresh.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and sat down to get out of his way. “So,” she added as he went by, “I take it all hell has broken loose?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not quite,” I said, getting up myself and heading for the door, “but you were barely in time, darling. There was about to be a catastrophic explosion in here. Chat with Nikky: he’ll bring you up to speed. I’ll be back in a flash.”

  “Jesus,” she said, “can’t you give me a quick synopsis? I gotta pee myself.”

  I danced in the doorway. But it had been hard enough to drag it out of Tesla the first time. “You know about Tunguska?”

  She furrowed her brow. “Siberia? Long time back? Big boom, big mystery?”

  I nodded vigorously. “Very big, both. Eighty years ago. Nikky did it, by accident, testing his Death Ray.”

  “Okay.”

  Before coffee. What a woman! “The feds have it now. They’ve been upgrading it for forty-six years. That’s as far as I got. I’ll be back as fast as I can. Entertain Nikky.”

  She caught the change in my tone on the last two words. Her eyes widened slightly, and she nodded just perceptibly. “Sure. Go.”

  With a wife like that, anything is possible. I hated to leave her to make small talk with a full bladder of her own…but I did not want to leave Nikky alone just now. I could tell we were only partway through this story, and the rest of it wasn’t going to be any easier to tell than the first part had been. I don’t even remember whose bathroom I borrowed, or much of what I did there, save that it was energetic and comprehensive; I was too busy thinking.

  How were we well-intentioned civilian goof-offs and misfits supposed to assault the federal government of the United States? Where the hell would they keep their Death Ray—anywhere near Key West? It seemed unlikely. Though you could time it for sunset at Mallory Dock, and maybe nobody would notice the slight increase in pyrotechnics. I couldn’t seem to make myself believe it. I knew Tesla made mighty magic; Tunguska said so. But it still seemed a big jump from something that simulated a 15-megaton explosion to something that could seriously threaten to zap the entire universe. You’d think that if the numbers were anywhere within five or ten orders of magnitude of that kind of power, even the Defense Department would have the sense to see this was a weapon too powerful to have any conceivable use.

  Come to think of it, I’d seen a Tesla Death Ray once, briefly. He’d produced it that final night at Mary’s Place, at Mary Callahan-Finn’s request, for use in the firefight we anticipated with The Lizard…though fortunately it had not proved necessary for him to actually fire it. Had he really been prepared to incinerate the universe if necessary that night, and just forgotten to mention it? Or did his have a low-power setting that the government model omitted as a cost-saving measure?

  I didn’t stop to wash my hands until I was back on my own bus and had relieved Zoey to…well, to relieve herself. (I made a mental note to see about replacing our toilet—then remembered I was moving out of this bus soon. The new owners, the school district, probably wouldn’t want their schoolbuses to incorporate facilities that might inspire a young man to drop a cherry bomb down them.) Before she left Zoey told me she and Tesla had worked it out that what he was really feeling was not so much guilt as frustrated anger. (My wife is capable of amazing things before coffee.)

  “It was by far the hardest thing I have ever done,” he explained to me. “Certainly the most galling. I have a large ego, Jacob. For me—me, who powered the world!—to spend the last half of my life playing the part of a blowhard…never again to publicly demonstrate another of my achievements—” He broke off and looked down at his lap. “And worst of all,” he went on in a softer voice, “to have all that humiliation and self-abasement turn out to have been useless, wasted…and all because I was arrogant enough to believe it was sufficient protection…” He shook his head, looked back up at me, and smiled one of his rare smiles. “It is infuriating.”

  I shook my head. “I think it’s one of the most heroic things I ever heard of, Nikky.”

  “It did not work.”

  “It kept the Death Ray off the world stage for eighty years,” I insisted. “Imagine what that would have done to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction! From what you tell me, in another year or two the Cold War is over. I say you done good.”

  “But not good enough,” he said.

  “Something else to think about,” I said. “You ever wonder why Lady Sally made you immortal?”

  He blinked at me.

  “Because you’re a genius?” I said, and shook my head. “A lot of geniuses passed through Lady Sally’s House at one time or another, and to the best of my knowledge, she never made any of them immortal, let alone taught ’em how to time travel.”

  “Then why—”

  “You’ve got an ego as big as your talent; the combination could have destroyed civilization; you saw that, and subordinated your ego, for the good of your species. That’s heroism, Nikky. Unprecedented in history, as far as I know. I think you succeeded in impressing Lady Sally. Genuine heroism gets ladies wet.”

  He colored slightly. “Jacob, I hardly—”

  “Now it turns out your heroism was ‘only’ sufficient to protect us all for eighty-one years, and earn you immortality. Okay, fine. Being immortal, you’re still on the case, and being intelligent, you have wisely hired the most experienced world-savers around to help you. You have led us to the Promised Land, where working conditions seem ideal, and we have five months. Why don’t we just get on with it?”

  His face went blank, his eyes dulled. He “went away,” I guess to that place inside his head where his visions came. He was gone maybe half a minute. When he came back, his eyes were less haunted, his brow did not refurrow; his shoulders relaxed slightly. “Thank you, Jake,” he said.

  “You’re welcome, Nikola.”

  Zoey reboarded the bus, carrying Erin. “He over being pissed at himself?” she asked me, gesturing at Tesla.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I held out my arms and she put Erin in my lap. “Have a seat: we’re just getting to the good part.”

  “Mommy told me about your Death Ray, Uncle Nikky,” Erin said, “but you couldn’t blow up the whole universe with that, could you?”

  It had taken me several minutes’ thought to get that far; Erin leaped there instantly. Smart, my kid.

  He smiled at her sadly and shook his head. “No, Erin. Even the most powerful variant theoretically possible could not come close. The event we are threatened with must be the result of a combination of causes. My weapon can be only one of them—necessary, but not in itself sufficient.”

  She nodded. “What are the other factors?”

  Tesla’s face slowly changed. At no time so far had he looked anything remotely like happy—but now he looked desolate.

  “I do not know,” he admitted.

  None of us said anything for a minute or so.

  “Can’t you cheat?” Erin asked finally. “You know, time travel ahead five months, and peek?”

  He shook his head with great finality. “No.”

  “Not permitted?” We had always gathered from the Callahans that there were certain fundamental restrictions of some sort on time travel, but they’d carefully left the matter as vague as possible.

  “No,” he said. “Not possible.”

  “How come? Oh, wait—I get it.”

  I sure didn’t. “Expla
in it to old dad.”

  “Remember, Daddy? You can’t time travel to a ficton where you already exist. There can’t ever be two of you at once.”

  True. I had been told that. Suddenly I saw what she meant.

  And Nikky confirmed it. “I could never abandon my post during a crisis. I will surely be there when…whatever it is happens. So I cannot peek.”

  I was beginning to boggle again. “Nikky, wait a minute now. You have no real idea what’s going to cause the crisis—but you’re sure your Death Ray will be involved. Why?”

  He sighed. “Are you familiar with Heinlein’s felicitous phrase, ‘I could be wrong, but I’m positive,’ Jacob? I cannot prove, in the scientific sense, that my weapon will be a factor in this. But I am intuitively certain.”

  “Well, look,” I said, “nobody has more respect than I do for your intuition, Nikky, but—”

  “Two things support my conviction,” he interrupted. “First, I theorize universal disaster must require human action of some kind—”

  “Why?” I interrupted.

  Erin looked up at me to see if I was kidding. “Daddy,” she said gently, “the universe is old. If it was possible for it to destroy itself naturally, without human intervention, it would have done it a long time ago.”

  That made sense. I remembered Tesla telling me earlier that nothing in the universe had ever been colder than 2.7 degrees above absolute zero until humans came along. “Okay, I got you. Say for the sake of argument that you’re right, that destroying the whole universe probably requires the special talents of human beings or equivalent. But not necessarily you, Nikky. Granted, you’re the greatest Mad Scientist we’ve ever produced. But you’re not the only one.”

  “But my weapon is, to the best of my knowledge, the single most powerful energy-producing utensil of which the race is presently capable, by a wide margin. And will be, well into the next millennium. Nothing else comes close, not even H-bombs. It must be involved.”