Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  The last question raised that night was: What equipment would she need? That produced a technical discussion between her, Tesla, Omar, Tommy, and, of all people, Double Bill. Bill knew a guy named Gordon who lived just off Route 1 up in Titusville, and who could, he assured us, supply us with just about any conceivable tech gear. The guy was apparently a fanatic collector, specializing in esoteric radio and aerospace stuff, and his collection covered over a dozen acres. Bill called it The Surplus Store of the Gods: everything from eight-foot dishes on tracking mounts, to a complete three-story optical tracking station blockhouse, to—Bill swore on a stack of cocktail napkins—an honest-to-God Titan booster. The excitement this produced among Omar and the other techie types lasted long enough for everybody else to start noticing how late it was getting, and how long we had all been talking, and that there was no Irish coffee left. People began to drift away, a couple at a time, and by the time it was settled that Erin’s sabotaging needs could be met, there was pretty much nobody left but the people who lived in the compound.

  They all helped clean up, and then one by one they too made their excuses and wandered off to their own wickiups. And then there were just me and Zoey and Erin, sitting there in silence on the porch.

  With Tesla.

  “Nikola,” I said, “please accept my apology.”

  He looked up and met my eyes. “Jacob, I accept.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

  “I’m sorry, Nikola,” Zoey said. “I shouldn’t have—”

  He waved her off. “You had little choice, either of you. From an evolutionary standpoint, you both exist to be irrationally protective of your child. The part of you that understands the universe is more important than Erin is constitutes no more than eight million neurons, out of the hundred billion in your brain. It is hard to override 99.992% of yourself quickly, particularly when that part controls the adrenal glands.” He stood up suddenly. “You will all have much to discuss, and it grows late. Thank you for your hospitality.” He bowed to her, bowed to Erin, nodded to me, and turned to go.

  “Nikky,” I said.

  He turned back. “Yes, Jake?”

  “It isn’t your fault. What DoD is doing.”

  He looked at me. “Isn’t it?” he said softly.

  “It was a good scam, what you did. The ‘Purloined Letter’ bit was beautiful, if you ask me. It should have worked.”

  He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “I have often been a clever man,” he said sadly, “but I have rarely been a lucky one.”

  “Yeah, well—”

  “I had a responsibility to remember that.”

  “Shit, Nikky,” I said, “you lost the gamble, okay, but how many would have even taken it? Just about anybody else who’d invented what you did in 1908 would by now probably be the tyrannical Emperor of Earth.”

  He literally shuddered. “Of all the petty territorial squabbles on this sorry planet,” he said, “there is only one of the slightest interest to me…and I have absolutely no idea how I could resolve it even if I were the Emperor of Earth. I have always been equally proud of both my Serbian blood and my Croatian birth. But when I attended my own funeral in disguise, I found all the Serbs sitting on one side of the chapel, and all the Croatians across the aisle. Very soon, events will occur in my homeland that will tear the heart from my body—and the only thing I am even faintly grateful for is that there is nothing I can do about it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The pain on his face was hard to look at. For the first time I really understood that the upcoming collapse of the Soviet Union was not going to be an unmixed blessing. “Well,” I tried, “at least maybe you can preserve them a universe in which to kill each other, if that’s what they insist on doing.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Give ’em a chance, and maybe in another century or two they’ll wise up. Hell, give it another thousand years or so and who knows? Peace could even break out in Ireland.”

  “Imagine: a boring Ireland,” Zoey said.

  I nodded. “Their new slogan would be, ‘Erin go blah.’”

  My daughter pointedly did not groan or wince.

  Tesla smiled faintly. “Perhaps so. Thank you, Jacob. Good night.”

  “G’night, Uncle Nikky.”

  “Good night, Nik.”

  And he walked away, summoning up a small, softly crackling fireball out of nowhere to help him pick his way through the unfamiliar terrain in the darkness.

  Zoey and I exchanged a long look, in which about ten gigabytes of compressed information were silently exchanged. And then we turned as one to Erin.

  It struck me, as I regarded my daughter, just how seldom I had ever seen her look defensive.

  “Look, you guys,” she said, “just because I happened to think of it first doesn’t make it ‘my’ idea, okay?”

  “Erin,” Zoey said, “do you want to do this?”

  Erin stared at her. “Are you nuts? Or do you think I am? That 99.992% of the brain Uncle Nikky talked about, mine is scared to death. I’ve never been away from you guys for one day, let alone five. I just can’t think of another solution. If anybody else does, believe me, I’d love to hear it.”

  Zoey looked at me.

  “This stinks,” I said quietly. “I mean, I am overjoyed to hear that you’re scared to death…and that stinks.”

  “I want to be sure you’re scared enough,” Zoey told her.

  “I am, Mom,” Erin assured hem solemnly.

  Zoey looked dubious. “We all know perfectly well that when you look all solemn and sincere like that, you’re probably full of shit. Part of you thinks this is going to be a fun adventure. I want you to promise me: no teasing the astronauts. This’ll be a DoD flight: they could stuff you out the airlock without it ever entering history, and they just might. And what would your father and I do about it, complain to the Miami Herald?”

  “It’d take a busy astronaut to stuff me out an airlock,” Erin said darkly…and I couldn’t help but agree with her.

  “Promise me,” Zoey insisted. “Or you can’t go.”

  Erin slumped and stuck hem lower lip out. “Aw, okay. No teasing.”

  “We mean it,” I said. “No weaseling, no sophistry. Stay out of sight. And sound and everything else. Or you won’t be allowed to Transit again.” I turned to Zoey. “Does this conversation seem to be getting at all surreal to you?”

  After a moment, all three of us giggled.

  “You mean I’ll be grounded?” Erin said, and cracked herself up.

  Zoey and I exchanged a glance. Three puns in a single night. Our daughter was changing.

  Around four A.M., I finally got to sleep. I don’t know if Zoey ever did, that night.

  Many things happened in the ensuing days and weeks and months. Just about all of them were good.

  A week later, for instance, we held the official, though absolutely informal, opening of The Place. It went as splendidly as any of us could have hoped, one of the more memorable parties even for us, who had more or less made a career out of partying together. Zoey had done a magnificent job on the decor and ambiance, with some help from Margie Shorter: everything really looked nice, tasteful, conducive to merriment. Nearly all of us were happy with our new living arrangements, pleased at our sagacity in moving here, in a mood to celebrate. In addition to our own ranks, we drew a small number of curious locals, most of whom seemed pleasantly surprised by what they saw and heard, and thanks to our discreet location and my fixed no-sign-no-publicity policy, the tourists never noticed our existence. It was a nearly perfect night, except for three things.

  One of them, of course, was the ongoing underlying awareness that in a few months my baby girl intended to go to space and try to outwit the Defense Department. A little thing like that can nag at your mind, if you let it.

  But the second thing that interfered with my joy a bit on opening night was an observation I made about halfway through the evening: the first evidence I’
d seen that Key West was perhaps not really the magical Disney paradise it appeared to be on first glance, but just a very nice place in the real world, inhabited by human beings. We were situated only a few short blocks from Bahama Village, which I had several times been assured was not the black/Cubano ghetto, but the black/Cubano district—and indeed, if it is a ghetto, it is one of the nicest, cleanest, happiest, most self-respecting ghettos I’ve ever seen in my life. Isham and Tanya had sort of opened diplomatic relations on our behalf with the B.V. community, whose leaders had been vaguely dismayed by yet another goddam bar opening in their vicinity, and we had succeeded in allaying their concerns well enough that a few of those community leaders came to our grand opening, and ended up enjoying themselves greatly.

  But about halfway through the evening, when it became clear that folks from Bahama Village were welcome there, some of the Caucasian locals drifted away, and did not return.

  Well, at least the problem was self-correcting. I consoled myself that we had found a cheap supply of asshole-repellent.

  It was the third invisible worm in the apple I found hardest to get past.

  As Tesla had requested, we’d all thrashed it out in a special meeting I’d called the day before Opening. The discussion had been spirited and lengthy, but finally we had all reached consensus, if not agreement, on one difficult but important point: security. Here we were in Key West, suddenly surrounded with a plethora of people just as weird and whimsical as ourselves, and the temptation was to drop all shields and welcome in as many as were interested. At the same time, we were engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defy the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in order to prevent the destruction of the universe, and every new person we allowed into the conspiracy sharply raised the odds of something going catastrophically wrong. Any local who walked in was already wired into a superb grapevine that we had no way to control. Reluctantly, but necessarily, we concluded that we must never speak of the situation when an outsider was present, even if he or she seemed to be “our kind of people.” At least until it was all over, anyway, and possibly forever if something went sour.

  So there was, for the time being and for the first time in our history, a strong, if thin, invisible wall up between us and anyone we didn’t know who walked in our gate. For the first time, we were not wide open to new recruits. I knew it wouldn’t last forever: if the universe was still here in six months, we could all relax again. But in the meantime it…well, not “spoiled” but it colored things a little, for me at least. I’ve never been comfortable keeping secrets from people I like.

  But there was no choice, so I did it, and managed to transcend it and have a good time at my opening. Zoey and I played two sets with Fast Eddie, one in the early evening and one at the end, and both were gratifyingly well received. There was no shortage of music the rest of the time, either, as rumor of my house policy had gotten around: anyone Eddie was willing to tolerate as an accompanist drank free, for as long as they were on the stand. An ever-changing cast took advantage and they ranged from good to scary. My favorite was a fat Bermudan kid from Bahama Village with a cheap Harmony Sovereign guitar who had obviously studied the work of Joseph Spence very carefully, then built on it: he could have made a statue tap its toe.

  At the very end of the evening, I identified at least one respect in which The Place was clearly superior to its predecessor. Back at Mary’s Place, if you took a drunken notion to look at the stars and think deep thoughts, you had to put on your overcoat, climb the stairs to the roof, find a vacant chaise lounge, and be prepared to cope with cold winds. At The Place, all you had to do was fall down.

  Over the next few weeks, Zoey and Erin and I spent our nights presiding over the festivities at The Place, “keepin’ our good friends high,” in Joe Dolce’s memorable phrase, and our days bicycling around Key West, getting to know the place. It’s full of fascinating spots. Hemingway’s old place, now a reasonably tasteful museum, still patrolled by descendants of his original seven-toed cats. Houseboat Row. Harry Truman’s Little White House. The splendid sleepy streets of Old Town. The famous, oft-photographed marker at The Southernmost Point…which is not. About a dozen really first-rate bookstores. A great aquarium where Erin was permitted to feed a shark. The gardens at Audubon House. Several good beaches—Smathers, Higgs, South Beach, Fort Taylor—though none approaching the Platonic Ideal we’d found back up on Bahia Honda Key. A day trip out for snorkeling on the Reef. An entire fascinating day at the City Cemetery, examining generations of aboveground mausoleums—necessary for the same reason they are in New Orleans: because the local water table lies about a foot below the surface. And, of course, the Shipwreck Museum. Shipwrecks loom large in the early history of Key West: they say the first local industry of any real economic consequence was the systematic use of false lighthouses to lure passing ships onto the reefs, where they could be conveniently salvaged.

  In addition to the plethora of interesting things to see, there were so incredibly many good cheap restaurants that four months was just about long enough for us to complete the census, and enough good bars that I still haven’t visited them all.

  And of course, you didn’t need to do any of that stuff to have a fine time. A day spent in your shorts lying in the shade in a rope hammock reading a book is a day well spent. The weather was not always perfect. Every so often it would rain for as much as an hour. Some nights you’d need a sweater. Some days were too hot.

  I exaggerate slightly here. The heat was very agreeable for me—but then, I’m six-one and weigh 140. Zoey, who weighs more than that, sometimes found the temperature a bit oppressive. On the other hand, the longer she lived in it, the less she weighed, which pleased her. And didn’t bother me too much, though I’d liked those extra pounds. I would rather have a wife who feels good about herself than one whose frame conforms to my precise fantasy ideal.

  And whatever her weight, anything that encourages my wife to walk around in a minimum of clothing is a good thing, whether it be climate or self-image. I routinely got to see a lot more of Zoey’s surface area than I had been able to back on Long Island—often all of it—and I enjoyed it, and she enjoyed that, and often enough we did something about it. Amazing how much more romantic a moment can be without gooseflesh and the constant white noise of a space heater roaring away.

  Me, I’ve always been a nudist by inclination, on grounds of sheer laziness if nothing else—and I was living in a former nudist colony. Zoey finally had to put a sign up beside the door on the way out of the house, reading, “Did you remember to dress?” just like the one back in my old commune.

  We filled in the time, is what I’m trying to say. We did not spend every hour of those months constantly worrying about what was going to happen in August.

  No more than half of them, maybe.

  One night Tesla and I found ourselves alone together on my porch, and I tried to get him to agree with a theory I had been working up: that our success was guaranteed. I liked the theory a lot—and like all new lovers, I could discern no flaw in it.

  “It stands to reason, Nikky. You try not to commit miscegemation if you can help it—but you’ve already told us several things about the future that imply we simply can’t lose. The Soviet Union collapsing, for instance: that’s supposed to come months after August. So logically, if you’ve been to points in time after August, the universe isn’t going to end then. Right?”

  He sighed deeply, and shook his head. “Logically you are correct. But logic was never built to handle such matters. I cannot explain this in any terms you will find meaningful, but I ask you to take my word for it: if the universe ends this August, what will be destroyed is not only its present, but also its past, and its future. It might be said that even a paradox requires a universe in which to exist.”

  “Aw, Jesus,” I said.

  “I am sorry, Jacob,” he said. “I do not wish to alarm you. I think there is every chance we will be successful. Truly I do. But there are no guarantees.”

  I w
as sorry I’d brought it up.

  The worst part about the actual preparations for the event was that nothing went wrong. There were no hitches, no glitches, no problems identified that we weren’t able to solve. There was nothing for worry to get a purchase on. It started to feel as if all the bad luck was saving itself up.

  Erin studied details of Shuttle layout with Jim Omar and Shorty, ran endless computer simulations with Tesla and Tommy Janssen, and discreetly practiced Transiting under Tesla’s tutelage. She soaked it all up like a sponge. Actually more like a flower; which proceeded to bloom. I slowly began to realize that for most of her short life, her adult-sized brain had really had very little more challenging to do than play Baby for me and her mother. It made me feel old. But then, I was.

  She also did some physical training with Margie Shorter and Maureen Hooker, but less than you might think. In zero gee, strength can actually be a handicap. One of the most common gripes of the Skylab astronauts was that they wished they weren’t in such damned great shape: over and over again they would push off too hard, and crack their skull when they reached their destination, or bash their knees on the way through a hatch. Erin’s exercise regimen aimed at increasing coordination and flexibility, rather than strength or muscle mass.

  We never did manage to fake up a really satisfactory way for her to practice moving in zero gravity. Underwater just ain’t the same thing, and neither is balancing on an air-blast column. But we did, twice, drive her back up to the Cape, so she could take the Shuttle Simulator tour—she drove the tour guide crazy—and do a little discreet, highly unauthorized, and massively illegal inspection of certain other parts of the Kennedy Space Center that were decidedly not open to the general public, using her…uh…letter of Transit.