Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

“But it’s not powerful enough to destroy the universe by itself. Something else is involved too.”

  “And I do not yet know what,” Tesla agreed.

  “Then where the hell do you come up with this five-months-from-now figure for a deadline?” I asked, exasperated.

  “That is a minimum figure,” he said. “It could take much longer than that for…whatever it is…to occur. But that is the soonest it could happen. If it is possible for a universal destruction machine to be accidentally created, and if my weapon is a necessary component of that machine, then five months from now is when that machine will first be possible. That is when the doomsday clock starts ticking.”

  “Why?” I insisted. “What happens in five months?”

  “STS-28,” he said. “It is scheduled to lift off on August 8th, and return on the 13th.”

  STS-28? Hell, I’d just seen STS-29 launch myself, with my own personal eyeballs, only a few days ago. I did vaguely recall hearing that the Shuttle mission just before it, scheduled to go up in January, had been postponed indefinitely, for obscure reasons. I tried to remember what we’d been told about it.

  Oh my God…

  We’d been told almost nothing about it. Except that it would be a dedicated DoD launch, the fourth so far. Classified payload…

  “The Defense Department is going to orbit a Death Ray?” I greamed.

  Tesla nodded. “The news has just now reached me.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On the Case

  “We are all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  “BUT WHY?” I SCROANED.

  “In another year or two the fucking Cold War will be over…oh shit, they don’t know that, of course…”

  “Actually, the problem is that they do,” Tesla said. “Therein lies the irony. At this point, certain decision makers in the U.S. high command now know that the Soviet Union is in serious, fatal trouble. It is inconceivable to them that it could ever simply opt to peacefully dissolve itself. They cannot imagine the Evil Empire accepting defeat until it has sacrificed the last kulak. For many years now, the only real card the Soviet generals have had to play was the possibility that they were genocidal lunatics, and they bluffed a little too well. Key thinkers at the Pentagon and NSA believe that soon they may launch a desperate first-strike, while they still can. And so this summer—”

  “—they’re going to put one of your Death Rays in orbit,” I said again. I still couldn’t believe it.

  “A stealthed satellite, carrying an utterly top secret particle-beam weapon,” Tesla agreed. “Once they do, the universe-destroying trap must be considered armed. The final trigger, whatever it is, could occur at any time during the satellite’s expected twenty-five-year lifetime…but it could also occur in the second it reaches orbit. So we must plan on the assumption that it will. And it will probably occur before the Soviet Union dissolves, hence within two years.”

  “What’s the other thing?” Erin asked.

  “Beg pardon?” Tesla said, confused. He wasn’t used to the way Erin can veer, sometimes.

  “You said two things supported your belief that your particle beam is involved in the end of the universe. Then you told us one thing: namely, ‘how could it not be?’ What’s the other thing?”

  “Ah, I see.” His eyes widened slightly as he took her meaning…then they narrowed again. “The other thing…” For a long moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he sighed, and let his shoulders slump, and said it. “The other thing is that when Michael Callahan gave me this commission, charged me with the local defense of the universe, he stated that it was my ‘responsibility.’ That was the word he used. And he said it in Serbian, so he must have wanted his meaning quite clear to me. He did not actually use the word that corresponds to ‘redemption,’ but I felt it was implied. It was clear in his face: I, Nikola Tesla, must undo this thing…because it is at least partly my fault.”

  My head was starting to ache dully. “Where the hell is Mike, anyway?” I asked irritably. “Why the hell aren’t he and Sally here helping? This is more their line of work than ours.”

  Tesla sighed. “As Erin said a few minutes ago, even a Callahan cannot be in two places at the same time. At the moment, Michael and Sally are engaged elsewhere.”

  I stared at him. “In something of higher priority than the destruction of the universe.”

  He shrugged. “What can I say, Jacob? Some things I simply cannot discuss with you.”

  It was hard for me to swallow. Okay, Mike wasn’t really a human being, he just played one on TV, as Erin had said—nobody knew that better than I. But he’d done so for over forty years! He came to this ficton in the first place and opened up his bar for the specific purpose of saving the human race from destruction. Hell, I’d been telepathic with the man: I knew he loved me, loved us, loved the human race—and loved Earth, ancestral home of his earliest forebears, too. It just didn’t seem reasonable that he’d see us through two major crises, and then when the really big one came along, bug out and leave us to our own devices.

  All I was sure of was that he must either have a damn good reason, or not have any choice. I tried, briefly and futilely, to imagine what it must be like to have problems more pressing than the End of Everything, and gave up. It made my head hurt to try. Mike and Sally were out of the picture; accept it and move on.

  Move on where? I cudgeled my brains.

  For a while, the only result was bruised brains. Then I got a glimmering. “Hey, Nikky—you say the Death Ray—”

  “Jacob,” he interrupted, wincing slightly, “could we not call it something else? Please?”

  “You say the Tesla Beam alone isn’t powerful enough to deflate the vacuum.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Suppose you aimed two of them at each other, and fired them both at once, at maximum power?”

  “But there is no other.”

  “Suppose the Russians have one, too.”

  For a moment his eyes widened. But then he shook his head. “No, they cannot.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Daddy,” Erin said patiently, “if the Soviet Union had something more powerful than H-bombs, which didn’t have to go by ICBM, couldn’t be seen coming, acted instantly, left no radioactivity, and probably couldn’t ever be positively traced back to its source…it wouldn’t choose to dissolve peacefully.”

  I sighed. No arguing with that. “Who, then? China?”

  Tesla and Erin both shook their heads firmly. “There is no other, Jacob,” Tesla said. “And even if there were, and you set them up facing each other and fired both simultaneously, you still would not produce enough energy to destroy the universe. Something else is needed.”

  “What?”

  “I do not know,” he confessed. “We must find out. Before 8 August—assuming STS-28 actually launches on that day as scheduled.”

  I got up and got some aspirin, washed them down with the last of my second cup of coffee. “Well,” I said, “I’ll put it to the group as soon as I can, and see if anybody has any ideas.”

  Tesla looked alarmed. “Jacob—only the group! And please make very sure each of them understands this is secret information—”

  “Jesus Christ, Nikky,” I said indignantly. “Do you think there’s one person in that bunch who’d betray a confidence? Considering what’s at stake? Besides, this is Key West: around here you could tell people the universe was going to end this summer and nobody’d even—”

  “You prove my point!” Tesla shouted.

  All three of us were frozen with shock. Nikky has a lot of voice in him, and a face admirably constructed to express anger. I had never seen him angry before, or heard him shout.

  “Always, you and your friends have kept clan secrets well,” he said. “And why not? All of you were weird in some way, in a place where weirdness is not well tolerated: that is what bro
ught you together. And the things that happened to you were so weird themselves that no one else who was not as weird as you would have believed them even if you had told of them. But now you are in a place where most people are weird. I fear that you will cease to fear.”

  I began to see what he was driving at. “Shit.”

  Tesla lost his anger all of a sudden, and only looked sad. “I hear my own words and see I am a fool. Of course you good people should cease to fear. If you want to let all your new neighbors know that Erin is not a normal infant, and Mr. von Wau Wau can talk, and Mr. Shea can roll sevens as long as he cares to, and so on—that is your affair. By all means tell them you know several time travelers and an alien cyborg, and have survived a nuclear explosion. If it suits you to charge tourists money to shoot you with handguns at close range, who am I to say you should not? Leave your doors unlocked if you enjoy the freedom to do so in safety.”

  He leaned forward in his seat, and somehow managed to look all three of us in the eye at once, spoke quietly but with great intensity. “But no matter how relaxed you become, you must never disclose to any stranger anything you have learned through anachrognosis, from a time traveler. The secrets of time must be kept. Or things could happen which…” He hesitated, then went on. “I cannot explain this so you will understand it…but there can be things worse than the destruction of the universe. And the tearing of the fabric of history is one such. Even in Key West, it is not safe to risk that.”

  “Okay,” I said, considerably chastened. “I hear you. Family, only.”

  “What about new family?” Erin was bold enough to ask. “Aunt Mei-Ling? Uncle Bbiillll?”

  Tesla started to answer, then hesitated and looked pained. “I cannot tell you you may not expand your group,” he said. “But until you are sure a new member is discreet, please do not speak in their presence of the Tesla Beam, or STS-28, or the end of the universe, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. I do not know either of the people you mention, Erin…but I will trust anyone you and your parents trust. I only ask that you do not relax your vigilance in that regard, simply because you are now in a place where trust is more easily given.”

  I had to agree that was good advice.

  He stood up. “I am going to make certain investigations, and see what I can learn of the Defense Department’s intentions and capabilities. I will be back in a week, and we can share what we have all learned and conjectured.”

  “Okay,” I said, and was going to add some last-minute question, I forget what, but it doesn’t matter because all of a sudden he just…wasn’t there to ask. No sound, no flickering lights, no apparent disturbance of air currents, even. Zip, gone.

  “I love it when he does that,” Erin said.

  A sort of daytime party was already getting under way outside the bus when I emerged. I probably couldn’t have stopped it if I’d tried, and why try? The gang had been cooped up in buses forever, they were in the Promised Land, there was basically nothing for us to do until the various real estate deals closed and it was time to start unloading buses and moving in. Meanwhile their new neighbors were friendly and savvy, and everybody was in the mood to put out little roots of friendship. Food was made, beer was drunk, music was made, talk was talked, and so on.

  So what with one thing and another, it took me until late afternoon to cut the Inner Circle out of the herd and take them aside for a briefing.

  I use the term ironically of course; we have never been organized enough, or hierarchical enough, to have an Inner Circle—and if we had, none of us would have wanted to be in it. The group members I picked were pretty much just the first couple dozen I happened to run into that day whose opinions I really wanted. The oldest veterans of Callahan’s Place, mostly. The cover story I used was that we needed to plan the details of setting up our new bar, which of course we actually did.

  At Double Bill’s suggestion, we took everybody down to one of Key West’s best-kept secrets. It is kept secret by leaving it right in plain sight, big as life, right on Duval Street: the Holiday Inn La Concha. It’s plainly one of the tallest buildings in Key West, but there is no clear sign at street level to alert tourists walking past that its observation deck is open to the public free. Therefore it is seldom crowded up there—and it offers perhaps the best view to be had on the Rock. You can see everything from there, in all directions, walk around the building and take in the whole island—or sweep your eyes across the Atlantic, the Florida Straits, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico in one glance. They say on a clear day you can see Cuba. From up there the sunset is, if anything, even more beautiful than it is from Mallory Square; certainly more peaceful and quiet. Plus they serve booze.

  It was getting on toward sundown by the time we got there, too. The few people who were already present, mostly hotel guests and a few savvy locals, had already gravitated to the west side of the building. So we gathered on the south side, where we could have privacy but still get a fair shot at the sunset. By happy chance it was also the downwind side; Double Bill lit and passed around a handful of what looked like filter cigarettes but weren’t. Present were me, Zoey, Erin, Fast Eddie, Doc Webster and Mei-Ling, Long-Drink, the Lucky Duck, Tom Hauptman, Jim Omar, the Latimers, Josie Bauer, Tommy Janssen, Shorty, Slippery Joe and both his wives, Margie Shorter, Dave and Marty, Dorothy Wu, Ralph von Wau Wau, and two of our newest members, Acayib Pinsky and Pixel the cat.

  I began the discussion by stressing Tesla’s warning that all of this was Top Secret, Eyes Only material; then I went on to give them a summary of everything he had told me—starting with the news that the end of the universe was not ten years away, but something closer to five months. After I was done, they were all silent for a time, thinking.

  It was Long-Drink who broke the silence. “Jesus Christ,” he said, so softly it was almost a prayer. “The man who gave the human race just about everything it’s got—and got nothing in return—spent the last half of his life deliberately making himself look like an idiot. For their benefit. A proud guy like Nikky.”

  “God damn,” Tanya Latimer said. “That’s a man.” There was a general murmur of agreement.

  “What I can’t believe,” Zoey said, “is that even that sacrifice wasn’t good enough. He still got bit on the ass…by his own genius.”

  “So we gotta fix it for him,” Fast Eddie said. Another rumble of common agreement.

  “Okay,” Doc Webster said. “Let’s get down to business. What do we know?”

  “Not much,” Zoey said.

  I said, “We know that Ragnarok is coming. We know the Tesla Beam is involved—”

  “Do we know that, Jake?” the Doc asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, Doc. Do you doubt it?”

  “No,” he said, “I’m just pointing out that our certainty is intuitive rather than empirical. We’re expecting a high-energy event, and the Tesla Beam is the highest-energy utensil we know of. Besides, if we assume it isn’t involved, we’re left with nothing much to think about. But we ought to remember we could be all wet. For all we know, on August 9th an alien god will appear out of a hole in the tenth dimension with something that makes a Tesla Beam look like a firecracker, and use it to clear this annoying universe out of his way.”

  “Fine,” I agreed. “But I am intuitively certain. I intend to assume that the trigger for Ragnarok, whatever it is, involves the Tesla Beam—plus other factors yet to be identified. Therefore we know that whatever happens, it could come any time after August 8th, and won’t be sooner. What I don’t know is where the hell to go from here.”

  Tanya Latimer spoke up. “We have to try and figure out what the other factors are.”

  “If Nikola Tesla doesn’t know and can’t guess—” the Lucky Duck began sourly.

  Acayib Pinsky cut him off. “Dr. Tesla is an intelligent and heroic man, and very learned. But he is not an expert in the present state of human science or technology. It seems to me to be a simple problem of research. We investigate high-energy technologies
, and rank them in order of the probability of their interacting somehow with the Tesla Beam—”

  Omar cut him off. “Why not save that until after we’ve solved the problem?”

  Several people asked at once what the hell he was talking about. I was one of them.

  He stared around at us, honestly puzzled. “Look, I appreciate the theoretical beauty of this situation as much as anybody. I’d love to know what combination of circumstances could destroy the universe. But first I want to stop it from happening.”

  Margie Shorter exclaimed, “How the hell can we do that unless we find out what we’re trying to stop, Jim?”

  He held out his hands palm upward. “Are we all agreed that Tesla’s weapon is not sufficient, but is necessary, to destroy the universe?”

  Nobody disagreed.

  He turned his palms over. “Then we just take it out of the equation, and all is well. We can figure out what the other factors would have been at our leisure.”

  “Huh?” is sort of the vector sum of all our exclamations.

  “Kill that satellite, or disable it, or keep it from being orbited in the first place.”

  Brief silence.

  “Jim,” I said, “we’re a bunch of barflies. Furthermore, at the moment we’re barflies from out of town, about as local as a fish in a tree. I don’t even know where the Post Office is. Are you seriously suggesting we should try to take on the U.S. Defense Department?”

  “Why not?”

  I had trouble framing my answer.

  “Jake, look,” he said, “Take a worst-case. Say we fail, big-time. What’s the worst that could possibly happen?”

  “They could shoot us!” I said. Then I heard what I had just said, and had to grin. “Oh. Well…put us in prison for the rest of our natural lives, then.”

  “For interfering with the secret Death Ray they put into orbit?” he asked gently.

  It did sound like a hard headline to sell.

  “This is nuts,” Shorty said. “We couldn’t even beat a town inspector on Long Island. How the hell are we supposed to take on DoD?”