Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  “So let me summarize,” Tanya Latimer said, cutting off the rumble of chaotic talk. “We have not one, not two, not even three, but four possible factors for our catastrophe trigger. One: Tesla Beam. Two: especially energetic cosmic ray. Three: solar storm. Four: hurricane gamma-ray cannon. Question: Is there any way for us to pin down just which ones, or which combination?”

  “They’re all good!” the parrot shrieked. Pixel padded out of the house, and stared at him. Harry backed up a few steps, and ruffled his feathers.

  “They’re all nuts,” Long-Drink said. “I’m not buying any of this.”

  “Do you science guys,” Tanya went on, ignoring him magnificently, “know a way to assign relative probabilities for any of them, so we’ll know which ones to study first?”

  Several people all began to speak at once. Acayib, Jim Omar, Long-Drink, Doc Webster. But Tesla held up a hand, and all of them yielded the floor. His expression was strange: solemn, somber, but with a wry ironic twist at one corner of his mouth.

  “I do not anticipate that this will be a popular suggestion,” he said. “But Mrs. Latimer, I think that Harry the parrot is correct.”

  “Huh?”

  “With regard to your first question, ‘which are the operant factors,’ I believe the only possible answer is…all of them, in combination.”

  “Huh!”

  He was right. It wasn’t a popular suggestion. I myself, for one, thought he was nuts. I mean, I knew perfectly well he was nuts—but for a moment there, I wondered if he had ceased to be usefully nuts. Again, everyone tried to talk at once. This time Doc Webster won, as he usually does in such cases. “Nikola, with all due respect…I know there’s no better hunch-player in the world, not in this century anyway, but—”

  Tesla shook his head. “Here at last I am working with something other than intuition, Sam.”

  “Aw shit, Nikky,” Long-Drink said. “Are you serious? I’ve been sitting here letting you jokers pull my leg for a long while now, but it just disconnected completely from my hip. Look, here’s the most plausible scenario I can construct out of what you science types have given me. Mir happens to pass over Hurricane Erin—just as it sends up a gamma-ray fountain. Just then, it gets bollixed by sunspots. The Deathstar’s targeting computer, seeing all this, goes Hal 9000 and decides to fire on Mir. Just then, a cosmic ray hits the detector on Mir—which even the Russians don’t really expect to happen. Not just a cosmic ray, mind you, but a Giant Wamba cosmic ray. And it happens to come in at precisely the right angle to oppose the arriving Tesla Beam, at just the right microsecond, and so the universe ends.”

  He was right. Put that baldly, it sounded ridiculous. A gazillion to one five-cushion shot. Our faces fell.

  “I mean, I believe in bad luck…but Jesus Christ, Nikky, have you calculated the odds—”

  Tesla nodded.

  “They’ve got to be infinitesimal!” he said almost indignantly.

  Tesla nodded again.

  Long-Drink was baffled by his serenity. “That’s the most unlikely…not one chance in…I mean, even Hollywood sci fi wouldn’t ask you to swallow something like…” He trailed off. All of a sudden, he got it.

  The rest of us stared at him, waiting for him to explain. And then one by one we all started to get it. You could see it in our faces, like wind passing over a large field of wheat: the sudden dawning of comprehension.

  This once, the Cosmic Author was not only permitted, but required, to stack absurd coincidences one upon another.

  “Oh shit, of course,” Doc Webster said for all of us. “In this case, the more unlikely the answer…the more likely it is to be correct.”

  “Substantially true,” Tesla agreed.

  “I don’t get it,” Fast Eddie complained.

  “Try harder, asshole!” Harry screamed. Pixel stirred, but did not—quite—look in the parrot’s direction. Harry subsided.

  “Think of what we are talking about here, friend Eddie,” Tesla said. “We are discussing the end of the universe. The universe is…well, for now, let us say it is something on the order of twelve billion years old. It contains uncountable trillions of stars. It must, by now, have produced at least dozens of intelligent species—perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

  “So?” Eddie said stubbornly.

  Tesla spread his hands. “If it is possible for the universe to end, Eddie—if there is any combination of circumstances which can accomplish that—then plainly it must be an extremely unlikely set of circumstances. Else the universe would have ended long ago. By definition it must require conditions so rare that they only occur a few times in billions of years.”

  Some of the wrinkles smoothed from Eddie’s simian face as he absorbed the point.

  Then they returned…and he turned slowly. To stare at the Lucky Duck. Soon we were all staring at him.

  He was absolutely unperturbed. Under the weight of our combined gaze, he blew gently on the fingernails of his right hand and buffed them on his shirt, the picture of nonchalance.

  And slowly we all relaxed too. We knew perfectly well Ernie can’t help what he does, what he is. He doesn’t control Luck. The other way around, if anything. Furthermore we knew that while things could get decidedly chaotic in his vicinity, the safest place to be while it was going on was always standing right next to him.

  “I don’t buy it,” he said.

  “I sympathize, Ernie,” I said. “It does go against the grain. If I came across a stack of coincidences like this in a story, I’d just figure the author was making it easy on himself. But like Nikky says, in this one special case—”

  He shook his head. “You ain’t hearing me, Stringbean.”

  “You must not be speaking clearly, then,” I said. “Try again.”

  Quick flicker of a grin. The only way to get to see that is to insult the Duck right back. It can get wearing, but I’m willing to indulge him to a point. “I know a little more than most of you science whizzes do about probability. I ain’t got the book learning, but I got a feel for it.”

  “You won’t get an argument out of me,” I agreed. “So?”

  “So I just don’t buy an unstable universe that collapses once every twelve or fifteen billion years. It just doesn’t feel right. If it can happen at all, it’s already happened. A thousand times, maybe. And the universe seems to still be here. So, no offense, Nik, I say it can’t happen. We can all go on vacation now.”

  We all looked to Tesla for his rebuttal.

  He had nothing to say. He looked like he wanted to, but his expression was as clouded and sealed as if Thomas Edison had been in the room.

  I was shocked. Was it even remotely possible that the Duck’s intuition was right—that Nikola Tesla was wrong—that we had all left our homes and come a couple of thousand miles on a wild-goose chase? The silence stretched, and still Tesla said nothing.

  Harry must have sensed the tension. “Eat my pussy!” he screamed helpfully. Then, suddenly—instantly—he was four feet above his previous location, flapping frantically, and on the exact spot where he had been sitting was Pixel, staring fixedly up at him, clearly inviting him to come back down and discuss his choice of words. Harry flapped harder, achieved escape velocity, and took refuge on Omar’s shoulder. Pixel started in that direction. Then he and Omar locked eyes for a long moment…and Pixel remembered something he had to do in another part of the forest.

  Nobody laughed. We were too busy waiting for Tesla to answer the Lucky Duck.

  “Nikky—” I began, and I’ve often wondered what I’d have said next. But before I got to find out, Mei-Ling sat bolt upright and said, “Gamma ray bursters!”

  I had no idea what that meant, but she had said it in an aha! voice, and Tesla’s expression told me she had hit a bull’s-eye of some kind.

  She and her fiancé were exchanging a look, now, and slowly the Doc lost his frown of incomprehension. “Oh,” he said, and then, “Oh!” and a few seconds after that, “Oh wow.”

  Until that mom
ent I’d have bet cash that I would never in this life hear Doc Webster say, “Oh wow.” I cleared my throat, and caught his eye, and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  He glanced back at Mei-Ling, and then both of them looked at Tesla, and then back at each other. Mei-Ling nodded just perceptibly. He turned back to me, and although he addressed me, his voice was pitched to reach everyone, and did.

  “Back in the Sixties,” the Doc said, “DoD put gamma-ray detectors in orbit, to look for clandestine nukes. As far as I know, nobody thought to aim them at the eyes of hurricanes—but they did notice something they didn’t expect or understand. Stan Wedermyer and Mei-Ling and I talked about it once. Gamma ray bursters.” He glanced over to see how Tesla was reacting.

  “What’s dat?” Fast Eddie prompted, to keep things moving.

  “Think of ’em as God’s Flashbulbs, Eddie. Sudden, short, and very bright. Powerful photons, up at the gamma end of the scale, lots of them in a burst. They last a few seconds at most…then there’s a sort of faint afterglow of X rays that can go on for minutes, even hours sometimes. And then they’re gone.”

  “Fuck ah dey?” Eddie asked.

  The Doc glanced at Tesla again, and then shrugged. “At this point, nobody’s even absolutely positive where they are.”

  Eddie looked baffled. “I t’ought ya said dey could see ’em.”

  “Sure. Pinpoint them on a star map, no sweat. But the map is two-dimensional.” He pointed to the canopy of stars overhead. “Say you spot one right there, right now, bright as hell…and then it’s gone again by now. Okay?” Several of us nodded. “Now: what did you just see? A bright light somewhere in or around the solar system? A very bright light somewhere else in the galaxy entirely? Or a Jesus big light way out on the other ass end of the universe? How can you know?”

  There was a short silence while we considered that. I could tell from Acayib’s expression that he knew the answer to that question, but wasn’t going to volunteer it because he was too busy thinking about something else. Bubbling noises came faintly from inside the house, and I wondered how Erin was doing with the coffee, but decided not to offer help unless she asked. Omar was just about to venture a reply when the Doc continued.

  “First thing you do is plot them. Do they cluster around the plane of the ecliptic, like just about everything else in the solar system but comets and dust? No. Do they cluster around the plane of the Galaxy’s ecliptic, like just about everything else in the Milky Way? No. The damn GRBs are randomly distributed throughout the sky.”

  “So they’re cosmologically far away.”

  “Probably,” the Doc said. “People with pocket protectors will keep arguing about it for at least another ten years, Stan tells me—but yeah, the smart money says whatever gamma ray bursters are, they happen all over the universe. But do you see what that implies?”

  I was tired of sitting like an English major. “If they’re coming from that far away, then they’re really, like, incredibly powerful.”

  “Let me put it this way,” the Doc said. “They make supernovae look like sparks. Stan told me a couple of them were observed to outshine the entire visible universe. Okay, for only a quick flash. But think of that! Think of the energy involved. To suddenly outdo the combined results of at least a dozen billion years of sustained fusion. And then vanish in an instant, with a brief faint echo. I think of ’em as Cosmic Pop Stars.”

  There was a smattering of applause.

  “Or perhaps ‘Warhols,’” Mei-Ling said softly.

  The applause redoubled, and included a few “Oooh”s.

  “Oh, lovely, darling,” Doc said joyfully, taking both her hands and kissing her on the forehead. “That’s just beautiful! Black holes, brown holes, wormholes, and warhols.”

  I admired her pun better than his myself. Doc had chosen his mate well.

  “And also,” I went on, since I hadn’t made a fool of myself the first time, “if they’re at cosmic distances, and the light’s just getting here, then whatever they are, it happened millions or billions of years ago.”

  “Very good, Jake,” the Doc said approvingly.

  “Doc?” Fast Eddie said.

  “Yeah, Eddie?”

  “Fuck do we care?”

  “Oh.” The Doc recalled himself and let go of one of Mei-Ling’s hands. “Well, Eddie…we’ve seen about a thousand of these damn things so far. I think Stan said they come at a rate of roughly one a day. Mind you, they vary greatly: some GRBs are just little blips, some are monsters. Nobody has any idea what the hell they are, but all kinds of guesses have been made, some of them fairly science fictional. Black holes colliding. Star drives switching on. Wormholes eating galaxies.”

  “Doc?” Eddie said patiently. “Fuck we care?”

  Doc Webster exchanged another uneasy glance with Tesla. “I got to wondering,” he said, “where the hell Mike and Sally were, just now”

  Rooba rooba rooba. A lot of us had been wondering that, in our idle hours, for a long time now.

  “Just why they’re too busy to attend the end of the universe,” the Doc went on. “I wondered if maybe…” One last glance at Tesla, and he took the plunge. “…if maybe that’s what they’re already doing.”

  ROOBA ROOBA.

  “Suppose,” he boomed over the noise, “that warhols—some of them, anyway—suppose that’s what you see when there’s a sudden phase shift in the vacuum, and the universe starts to end. Suppose they’re the muffled death cries of the plenum. Fossil evidence of past disasters—hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Which were snuffed out within instants of their occurrence.” The longer he talked, the more people shut up and listened; he was able to lower his voice to normal level by the time he got to, “I think maybe I finally figured out, after all these years, exactly what Mike and Sally and all their immortal, time-traveling colleagues from the distant future do for a living, when they’re not slumming on backwater planets for sentimental reasons.” And there was dead silence as he finished softly, “Maybe they’re Cosmic Firemen.”

  After a while Omar spoke up. “So then—”

  “So the reason they left this particular warhol to Nikky and us to deal with is, they must be busy somewhere else, just at this moment. Guarding some other hot spot, that is for some reason at least as dear to Mike and Sally as Old Home Terra. Even a time traveler can’t be in two places at once, and they had to choose.”

  I was watching Tesla. “And Nikky,” I said, “told them, ‘You go ahead. It’s covered. This was my mistake; I’ll fix it.’ I won’t ask you to confirm that, Nikky, because I know a lot of this constitutes miscegemation, information people in 1989 aren’t supposed to have—and I know you hate that, so I won’t ask. But if I’m wrong, fart in B flat.”

  Nikky met my eyes…and grinned briefly in spite of himself. But he said nothing, and the grin vanished quickly.

  “So now,” I said gently, “I begin to understand why you’re so tense lately, Nik. Shit, I don’t blame you. You stuck your neck out, sent the cavalry away, and now it’s five months to zero hour and you haven’t got a plan. Well, don’t worry, we’re gonna put our heads together and…what’s the matter?”

  Tesla had been looking unhappy since he arrived. Now he looked positively stricken.

  “What is it, Nikky?” Zoey asked, alarmed.

  “I don’t need any help,” Erin called as she came through the doorway.

  And by God, she didn’t. She was carrying a metal tray that held Bushmill’s 1608, a sugar bowl, a large bowl of fresh-whipped cream, and a mess of spoons, and was having no trouble at all with it. I spotted how much concentration it cost her to pull it off, but I’ve been living with her all her life; a stranger might easily have taken her for a short six- or seven-year-old. All the exercise and training she’d been doing on the trip south was paying off. She set the tray down on a small porch table, scurried back inside, and came out again pushing ahead of her a wheeled trolley on which were all the coffee machines and enough glass mugs for everybody. It
took everything she had to move it, but she steered it pretty well.

  Well, I thought, maybe a short recess will help Nikky decide to open up and tell us whatever’s bothering him. I got up and began making Irish coffees and passing them out—pausing first to put my hand on the top of Erin’s head and tell her what a good job she’d done. I was quite pleased to find that I could still effortlessly recall everybody’s individual prescription: which whiskey they preferred, how much sugar, and so on. Tending bar must be like riding a bicycle: after a year out of action, I was ready to go again.

  Suddenly that washed over me. After more than a year out of action, I was ready to go again. I looked around me and saw all my friends, my oldest friends, reaching out to me for cups of black magic healing potion, and it was as if I suddenly clicked into place. Into The Place. Into my new life. As of this minute, The Place was open, however long it took me to get the napkins stacked and the taps drawing right. All at once I was quietly, sublimely happy.

  Finally everyone had been served, and I realized they were all waiting for me to propose the first toast. I couldn’t think of a thing. Mike Callahan told me once, if you’re stuck for a toast, think of the person in the room that’s hurting worst, and try for a toast that will make them feel better. So I did.

  “To Nikola Tesla,” I said. “Guardian of Terra.”

  “To Nikola Tesla,” came the chorus, and we all acquired whipped-cream mustaches.

  “Now then, Nikky,” I said when I’d wiped mine off, “now that we’ve drunk to you, why don’t you have a gulp yourself and tell us what you’re looking so worried about?”

  He tried to answer—three times—but couldn’t seem to get the words out.

  “It’s what you said wrong before, Daddy,” Erin said.

  I glanced down. “What was that, honey?”

  “Uncle Nikky has a plan. He’s had it for a long time. Weeks.” She blinked up at me gravely. “Only you’re really really gonna hate it.”

  I looked at her. I looked at Zoey. I looked at Tesla. I looked back down at my daughter. I thought like mad, reviewed everything I knew. And all of a sudden, in one of those blinding gestalts of insight that Nikola Tesla was famous for getting all the time, I got it. The whole thing, complete and fully formed. Unimaginable in one moment…and then, once you knew, inevitable.