Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  “I didn’t say it was going to be easy,” Omar said. “But has anybody got a better approach?”

  Everybody tried to talk at once.

  After considerable discussion, Tanya Latimer sorted it out. We ended up forming two committees. One to try and identify candidates for Other Contributing Factors. And the other to figure out a way to put that damn Deathstar out of operation, without being caught at it. Omar was right, it made sense. Maybe the first committee would come up empty. Or maybe whatever the other factors were, they would turn out to be even harder to influence. You work with what you’ve got.

  The sun was well down, by then—sad to say, we had been too distracted to fully appreciate the sunset—and we all left in a thoughtful mood.

  Most of us headed back to whichever of the two trailer parks was their present temporary home. Or in Double Bill’s case, his permanent one. But a few of us—my family, Doc and Mei-Ling, Fast Eddie, Long-Drink, Omar, and Pixel—decided to stay downtown and do the Duval Street Crawl. It was a Friday night, in the middle of March, between the main assault waves of college students: viewing conditions would never be better.

  And a colorful and interesting experience it turned out to be. In a way it was like a watered-down version of the French Quarter of New Orleans—watered down in that the Quarter’s ever-present spices of genuine danger and true sleaziness were missing. Duval Street was just as decadent and lively as the Quarter…but somehow more life-affirmingly so: the cops traveled solo, rather than in threes, and the hookers did not, in the presence of your wife, ram your hand down their pants and then under your nose. You walked two blocks outside the French Quarter unarmed, you were asking to die; walk two blocks off Duval and there are fearless chickens on the sidewalk and a stranger will come down off his porch to offer you a beer.

  Also, most of Duval’s funkiness was genuine, come by honestly, not painstakingly faked from old photographs the way it was in the Quarter or in Provincetown. It was just too mildewed, moldy, warped, and rusted to be a Disney re-creation. And an astonishing proportion of the things it had to sell tourists were actually worth the money. In particular, at that point in history Duval Street had not yet succumbed to the plague that within ten years would blight it beyond recognition: so far there were no more than one or two T-shirt shops per block. Today, in 1999, apart from bars and a restaurant or two there’s almost nothing else but T-shirt shops on Duval—many of them, oddly, owned by Russian immigrants—even though the market cannot possibly support half that many. It’s hard to figure. But back in ’89, the T-shirt emporia were still an admittedly gaudy minority, interspersed frequently with things like art galleries, jewelry stores, clothing stores, handicraft co-ops, sidewalk restaurants, head shops, bookstores, comic book shops, antique stores, record stores, no-taboos porn stores, massage parlors, a hundred different kinds of exotic fast-food outlets—and, of course, dozens of bars, including Jimmy Buffett’s original Margaritaville, which was not to burn down for years yet. The sidewalks were crammed, and not just with pedestrians: every available space seemed to hold some kind of vendor’s wagon or souvenir stand or blanket array of trinkets for sale; people walked past it all in a slow amble, most of them cheerfully tipsy, better than half of them smiling.

  Hustling went on, but it was good-natured, low key. Again, it wasn’t like the Quarter, where angry-looking black kids got in your face, demanding to “betcha dolla I know where you got them shoes,” and getting ugly if you didn’t want to play. (If you did, the answer was, “You got the lef’ one on your lef’ foot, right one on your right, gimme a dollar, chump!”) Instead, a grinning Cuban would catch your eye and call out, “Hey Cap’n—you can’t keep a woman as pretty as that without a opal like this here.” And when your wife answers, “If he had to buy me, he couldn’t afford me,” the Cuban just laughs and waves you on.

  Every twenty yards there was a bar. Three of them claimed to be the genuine original place where old Papa Hemingway used to get faced, and I later learned all three were lying. Just about every joint had some kind of music—in the space of three blocks, we heard rock, country, folk, jazz, reggae, heavy metal, salsa, blues, and R&B. And here at last was something the French Quarter had over Duval Street, head and shoulders over it, in fact: the music wasn’t as good. None of it actually sucked, nothing we heard was unprofessionally bad—but let’s face it, no place has music as good as New Orleans. There wasn’t anything to touch, say, the Famous Door.

  This was good news to Zoey. The longer we strolled, the happier she got. It was clear there would be plenty of work in this town for a really good, versatile bass player who could play any style and sing. And although I’d only be available to join her one or two nights a week, our trio act with Fast Eddie was easily better than anything we heard on Duval that night.

  Erin had a ball, too. She spent most of the walk on Long-Drink’s shoulders, he being the tallest of us, and from time to time she would demand that we pass her up a mango ice cream or a bite of Cuban sandwich or a sip of peach juice or a forkful of Key lime pie or a bite of pizza. Whenever her mouth was empty, she drove Zoey crazy demanding explanations of the obscene jokes and mottoes on the T-shirts in the shop windows.

  Finally we ended up at an open-air Cuban joint at the far north end of Duval. A competent trio pumped spicy salsa out of a synthesizer, congas, and an accordion, and because the house knew gringo tourists were usually timid and ignorant, it employed shills: a pair of pro dancers who alternated exciting demonstrations of salsa with patiently persistent importunings of the audience to get up and join them. The girl was so beautiful Zoey found her attractive, the boy was so handsome I found him attractive, and both were really good dancers.

  And really persistent proselytizers: the next thing I knew, I was dancing with Rita.

  I do not, repeat, do not dance—and if I were going to, would certainly not choose salsa. But Zoey does dance, and an opportunity to dance with a pro like Enrico—as stunningly handsome as Enrico—was just too good for her to pass up; she didn’t even pretend to resist when he took her hands and pulled her up out of her chair. So I let Rita draft me too. My feeling is, I’m perfectly willing to make a fool of myself in public, if it’ll get me a good seat when my wife is dancing. Rita found it hilarious and touching that I kept looking past her splendid bosom to get a glimpse of my wife, and forgave me my ineptness. And turned out to be very good at leading a dumb Anglo with two left feet through at least a few of the intricacies of beginner salsa; by the time the tune mercifully ended, I was doing well enough to garner a smattering of applause (enthusiastically led by Erin) for my courage. The applause for Zoey was a lot louder, and included me. Rita kissed me soundly, on the forehead, and Enrico bent low over Zoey’s hand and kissed it, and then the two of us, both bright pink, collapsed back into our chairs and sucked piña coladas until we had enough breath back to kiss each other for a minute or two. Other volunteers took our place on the dance floor eagerly.

  We left Duval well before midnight, just as things were going into high gear, and the walk back home was glorious. Dark, quiet streets, for one thing, even when we were still only a block or two from Duval. It was still Friday night; we passed places where parties were going on. But Key West locals didn’t seem to party as frantically as the tourists did. You’d hear laughter, but not the kind of desperate hyena laughter that signals a party back in New York, which sounds as if the participants are having fun at gunpoint. Even the party music hadn’t been turned way up to make the people laugh louder. The air was no temperature at all. Soft warm breezes came and went, bearing smells of jasmine and coral and frangipani. A star-spangled sky soared over us.

  That last especially impressed Erin. “I never saw so many stars,” she kept saying. “So clear.”

  “Too much crap in the air back on Long Island,” I told her.

  “You should have been here a couple of weeks ago,” Double Bill said.

  “How come?” Erin asked.

  “We had Northern Lights.�
��

  We all stopped walking and stared at him.

  “No, really,” he said. “Swear to God. Sheets of fire in the sky. Mostly green, but a lot of red, and a little purple even.”

  To our surprise, Doc Webster backed him up. “He’s not pulling your leg, Erin. Genuine Aurora Borealis. Old Stan Wedermyer, this astronomer I know, said something about the biggest solar maximum in three hundred years. Didn’t you guys see any up New York way? It was reported all over the South.”

  “Hell, maybe we did get Northern Lights,” Long-Drink said. “How could we tell, through the smog?”

  “True enough,” the Doc conceded. “Pity; it was something to see.”

  “Well, this sky is spectacular enough for me,” I said.

  “Me too, Daddy!”

  We walked another block or so, all craning our necks to look up at the stars. It was worth a stiff neck. The difference between what you could see in the night sky back on Long Island and this was like the difference in sound quality between a 1965 monaural transistor radio and a modern CD player. It made me think of the first time in my life I’d ever heard high-fidelity stereo, on headphones: that astonishing, almost frighteningly beautiful moment when Paul McCartney suddenly appeared, magically right in the very center of my own personal skull, and began singing.

  Would people still be willing to live in cities, I wondered, if they fully grasped the extent to which they’re turning down the brightness, contrast, and color controls and minimizing all the equalizer settings of their lives by doing so? Now that I came to think about it, they accepted the muffling of all their senses. Not just sight and sound. Few of them ever got to taste really fresh food: to them, fresh meant “only three days old and never frozen.” Their senses of smell had to shut down, in self-defense—I once read a great science fiction novel, I forget the author’s name, where a mad scientist increased everyone’s sense of smell, and civilization fell overnight. And as for the fifth sense, the one Theodore Sturgeon says is the most fundamental, touch (“…all the other senses are only other ways of touching…”)…well, city people just didn’t. Not even with their eyes, if they could help it.

  Was that why they seemed to need to stimulate themselves so strongly and so relentlessly? Do filters on all your senses make you need to party hearty, just to be feeling something?

  No. Key West was an anomaly. Even people in rural areas of North America tended to be manic these days, to pursue pleasure like it was the six-fingered Count who’d killed their father Domingo Montoya. City people just had better utensils. And a bit more anonymity in which to safely disgrace themselves. The night skies had probably been clear and crisp over the Spahn Ranch when the Manson family lived there…and I bet they had an excellent stereo, grew tasty carrots, and could smell a cop a mile away. By all accounts, they did a lot of touching. So much for simplistic insights. I gave up philosophy and just dug the stars, until my neck made me quit.

  When we got back to Double Bill’s trailer park, I invited everybody aboard my house for God’s Blessing, and they all had the sense to accept. Seven adults, a baby, and a cat packed into a third of a schoolbus made a nice intimate conversational group. We chatted surface pleasantries while I whipped the cream and brewed the coffee and poured in the Irish whiskey. But once I’d served us all (except Erin, who contented herself with the whipped cream), within a couple of sips the conversation had turned serious.

  “Jake,” Doc Webster said, “you contracted with Nikky to get the whole gang telepathic again within ten years. You really think we can pull it off in five months? Without Callahan or the McDonald brothers around to help?”

  “In a place like this, maybe,” Long-Drink said. “What do you think, Jake?”

  I shook my head. “I think that’s the wrong question.”

  “What’s the right one?” the Doc asked.

  “I don’t know anything about telepathy,” I said. “I’ve been telepathic three times now—each time with assistance from a special talent, and for a period measurable in minutes. I honestly have no idea if we can all figure out how to find our way back there again by ourselves…in five months, or ever. I strongly suspect we can, if we try hard enough, but I don’t know. That ain’t what’s worrying me.”

  “What is?” Zoey asked.

  “Say we pull it off—come this August, we all achieve telepathic rapport again. Say for the sake of argument we figure out how to do it anytime we want, for as long as we like. How does that help us take out a satellite?”

  There was a startled silence. Two or three people started to answer, but none of them got as far as producing an actual word. Instead we all put our faces in our Irish coffees.

  “You know,” Omar said thoughtfully after a while, “engineers have a saying. When the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s amazing how every problem that comes along seems to look like a nail.”

  “What are you saying?” Long-Drink asked.

  “Just that maybe we’ve got carpal tunnel vision.” The Doc winced slightly. “We saved the world twice using telepathy, so we assume that’s the way you save the universe, too—like it’s our only parlor trick.”

  “Jim,” I said, “it is our only parlor trick. We’re a bunch of rummies, far from home. Our time travelers are gone. Our alien cyborg is gone with them. Our cluricaune hasn’t been seen in over a year. As far as Special Talents, we’re down to a pookah, a talking dog, and a computer genius—”

  Erin hugged my leg for that last one and said, “—plus we’re mostly all bulletproof, Daddy.”

  “Granted,” I said. “Nonetheless, I don’t see us taking on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and winning, because we’re all telepathic with each other. I just don’t see our role in this.”

  “I’ve never been telepathic,” Mei-Ling said, “so pardon me if this is a silly question. But is there any possibility that if the whole group were in rapport, you’d be able to…reach out, to another mind?”

  “What, and take it over, like?” Long-Drink asked.

  “Not necessarily. Could you all…could we all perhaps plant suggestions in certain key minds? Without their realizing it?”

  All of us who had been telepathic—everybody except Mei-Ling and Double Bill, that is—exchanged a long look. Finally I spoke for all of us.

  “I don’t know—but I doubt it. I doubt it a lot.” The others murmured agreement.

  Omar settled his big shoulders. “I think you’re right, Jake. I don’t think telepathy can help us just now, even if we get it. Maybe we will, someday, if the universe doesn’t end first. I hope so, since I missed the last time. But I don’t think we should focus on it.”

  “But what the hell else have we got?” I said.

  “Brains,” he said simply. “Guts. Good intentions. Hell’s own luck.”

  “Against the Department of Defense,” I said.

  “Hardly seems fair, does it? All they got is a lousy Tesla Death Ray.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Devil’s Luck

  “I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  THE NEXT WEEK WAS

  very eventful for all of us. A million things had to get done, in an environment where your natural instinct was to curl up in the hammock with a margarita. Double Bill took me by the hand and led me through the closing on the property, business license, transfer of the liquor license, and similar rituals and formalities of commerce. I looked upon it as my penance, for fucking up the last time and costing us all Mary’s Place. And at that I got off easy. The stack of paperwork required to sell booze legally in Key West was no thicker than the Manhattan phone book. The corresponding heap back on Long Island had literally been taller than me—and I’m six one.

  Zoey meanwhile ran around at various speeds, none of them low, performing a variety of tasks and moving gracefully between them. While setting up the utilities, phones, and cable TV, she also arranged everything from furniture to flowers. She even managed to scrounge an ISDN
fast Internet connection for Erin, through a friend of Doc’s and Mei-Ling’s—a real godsend, as it allowed her to access the Net at 128,000 bps on our Mac as well as on her Teslafied laptop.

  Erin herself used that connection to prowl NSFnet, ARPANET, MILnet, and a few other networks with our highly modified, massively souped-up Mac II—and on the side she voluntarily organized several small but important group projects, such as compiling all the now-useless overcoats, gloves, fur hats, and snow boots we’d all brought with us, and packaging them to take out to Mount Trashmore. Ever since we’d decided to move here, she’d seemed to relish finding physically challenging things to do, even on the long trip down, and now that we’d arrived, Key West was perfect for the purpose, warm and safe. She was already much stronger and more coordinated than she’d been back on Long Island, roughly equivalent to a normal four or five-year old.

  A lot of us were busy with similar moving-in tasks of their own, and the rest were busy helping them, while waiting for their own house negotiations to close. Every day was like a barn-raising party. Much like the weeks we’d spent fixing up and loading all those buses in the first place, only in better weather. You fell into bed each night utterly exhausted and totally exhilarated—and woke every morning starving and eager to get started again.

  All of us, and a couple of dozen sympathetic locals, spent all day Thursday at The Place, unloading. Incredibly, we managed to empty all five relevant buses before collapsing—despite considerable harassment from Harry the parrot. It helped a whole lot that most of the bar equipment we’d fetched south with us had, by happy chance, ended up distributed among those same five buses. Having the Lucky Duck on your packing crew is a good idea.

  (One moment memorable enough to be worth reporting was the first meeting of Harry and Pixel. When we first arrived, Harry waddled forth to greet us, squawking—and stopped dead in his tracks when Pixel got off the bus. Pixel approached slowly, stopped a few yards away. Harry stood his ground, feathers ruffling slightly. Erin looked to me and I shrugged helplessly, already mentally composing Harry’s eulogy. Pixel lowered his ears, made a noise deep in his throat, and crept closer. When he was a foot or two away, without any warning Harry suddenly screamed, “Oh, what a gorgeous PUSSY!” right into his face. Pixel did a sudden back-flip…and glared around at all of us. Nobody laughed—then—and everybody found something else to look at. Harry turned his back on Pixel and strutted away, and after a moment’s consideration, Pixel visibly decided parrots were beneath notice and turned away himself. From that point forward, the two of them maintained a stiff, uneasy truce. Most of the time, anyway.)