Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  I could also use up twenty pages with the details of exactly how Erin went about hacking her way into the Deathstar’s computer without being caught at it, and what she did once she was in. I know because I have seen a written summary she wrote later; and it runs twenty pages. But I didn’t understand a word in them, and will not inflict them on you here. Let it stand that she was essentially done by the third day—and stuck around only against the possibility that the crew might perform one more redundant systems check before launching the thing into space, and catch her changes.

  Nor do I suppose you really need to be told the day-to-day details of how Zoey and I managed to get through those five days without quite going insane with fear, or with helpless boredom. If you ever find out your baby is going to go to orbit for that long, get hold of me and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. The best general advice I can offer in the meantime is, get an Artificial Intelligence to teach the kid hacking, and lay in a supply of Irish whiskey for yourself. Oh yes—and try and arrange to have about a hundred of the finest, most decent human beings alive as your good friends. And be in Key West at the time.

  Two small anecdotes from that week are perhaps worth telling.

  During the second day, Erin allowed her attention to focus a little too closely on her work for a crucial moment—turned away from a panel, and saw an astronaut gaping at her.

  She Transited at once—to a location where she could still see him, but he could not see her—and waited with bated breath to see how bad the disaster was.

  It was nonexistent. The astronaut—we believe it was the pilot, Richard Richards—blinked, rubbed his eyes…and dismissed the hallucination. I don’t think he said anything at all about it, to his shipmates or to Houston. Would you?

  The second noteworthy incident came late in the fourth day of the mission, when Erin suddenly reported that Pixel had just showed up.

  Fortunately, she was able to persuade him to go back home before anyone else up there noticed or heard him. A baby in orbit can be dismissed as an obvious phantom…but a cat is just barely possible enough to be taken seriously.

  A couple of hours later, the Deathstar left the payload bay and took up its station in orbit. Both NASA and DoD remained sublimely unaware that it had been neutered.

  The job was essentially done, then. But on the suspenders and belt principle, Erin remained there at her post until Commander Shaw actually began to deorbit the next day, against the faint remaining possibility of a final systems recalibration that would undo all her work.

  By then Zoey and I had relaxed to the point of allowing her to come home the way she wanted to.

  The original plan had been for Erin to ride the bird down. Zoey and I would take a commercial airliner out to the left-hand coast and wait somewhere near Edwards in a rented van. Once the orbiter came to a safe, smooth stop, Erin would Transit to the van, we’d all hug, and then fly home together.

  Instead, we sat tight where we were.

  At about 9 A.M. local time on the 13th, nearly all of us were gathered at The Place, staring up at the sky together. Zoey and I stood right in front of the bar with an arm around each other, and everyone had left a big cleared space before us.

  Here I come, ready or not, Erin announced.

  We all held our breath.

  Whoa!

  No sign of her. “Are you all right?” I screamed.

  Fine—way off target, but fine. Hang on—

  “Careful!”

  Suddenly I seemed to see a baseball very high overhead, to the east and heading east. Mighty Casey had finally caught a piece of one.

  That’s a little better. Once more—

  The baseball vanished; a stationary object appeared directly overhead, perhaps a hundred yards up, and began to fall. Then it vanished, reappeared at what looked like the exact spot where it had started, and fell again.

  Okay: ready…set…

  “Be careful!” Zoey and I both yelled.

  The falling object separated into two components, and both vanished. Erin’s laptop suddenly appeared on the porch. Erin herself appeared before us in midair…grinned…folded over into a perfect swan dive…and dropped headfirst into the pool, cutting the water with scarcely a splash.

  As we all gaped with surprise, she surfaced, grinned around at all of us, splashed water at Zoey and me, and cried, “God, I’ve been dreaming of that for days—I stink!”

  They may have heard our triumphant whoop of laughter and applause down in Cuba, unless Fidel was talking at the time.

  Erin swam to the side, pulled herself up and out, and Zoey and I found ourselves in a three-way hug with a wet kid. We held it, rocking back and forth together, while waves of cheering washed over us. I don’t ever remember being happier.

  As the applause died away, Erin broke away from the hug and went over to stand in front of Nikola Tesla. She looked up at him with those big eyes, and without a trace of parody whipped off an extremely snappy salute. “Mission accomplished, sir,” she reported.

  Oh, it was a treat to see that famous sad face light up like that. His smile took at least a hundred years off his age. For just a moment I saw, not the most screwed man of the twentieth century, but the optimistic young preacher’s son from Smiljan he had been when the century began. He returned her salute with a flourish. “Well done, Erin Stonebender. And thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  More applause. I felt proud enough to bust my buttons.

  Tom Hauptman was already busy at The Machine, turning out Irish coffees as fast as they could pour, and Fast Eddie was serving anyone who wanted to drink something else. By the time Columbia touched down at Edwards, half an hour later—the only Shuttle ever to return to Earth with a passenger missing—the celebration was in high gear, and neighbors were starting to fall by to see what all the excitement was about.

  An Irish coffee drunk that begins at nine o’clock Monday morning, in Key West? Brother, that’s a good day. Forget the saving-the-universe and only-child-not-dead parts…

  It pretty much petered out by Wednesday. Some of us had jobs.

  That was basically it. Our task was over…except for the tedious, boring, suspenders-and-belt detail of continuing to monitor DoD communications, on the slight off chance that those assholes might take it into their heads to flush and reload the Deathstar computer for some reason. But the chances of that comfortably approached zero. It was, for instance, electronically “hardened” against the imminent solar storm.

  And, again mostly for form’s sake, we kept track of the other converging events that, but for Erin, would have been components of the cosmic billiard shot that doomed the universe.

  Five days later, for example, Tropical Storm Erin did indeed appear on schedule, way the hell out in the Atlantic, and by the 22nd it had been upgraded to Hurricane Erin. Many toasts were drunk to it at The Place. (We could afford to admire it. It would never come within a thousand miles of us—or of land, for that matter.)

  And Nikola Tesla, by doing a very little bit of very careful Transiting to laboratory coat closets and washroom stalls in his old homeland—then still called Yugoslavia—was able to overhear enough scientist scuttlebutt to confirm that the Soviets had indeed made some sort of breakthrough in solar activity prediction, and believed they had found a way to use a transient magnetic lens to increase their chances of gathering extremely energetic cosmic-ray particles in the Kvant-1 trap on Mir.

  The sun’s acne flared up on schedule, too: the Aurora Borealis did indeed make another rare and historic appearance in the southern skies of America, scrambling phone calls and activating garage-door openers from San Francisco to Miami. And, we learned from a new acquaintance at Boca Chica, toasting a couple of Navy satellites less well protected than the Deathstar.

  Everything, in short, was going along in pretty close accordance with Tesla’s original prophecy of doom. If my two-year-old hadn’t taken out America’s Deathstar, I’d have been pretty worried.

  Excuse me. I j
ust want to admire that last sentence a minute. I’ve had an interesting life.

  It was an odd psychological position for all of us to be in, simultaneously exciting and frustrating. I mean, we were the only ones alive who knew the end of the universe wasn’t going to happen…but then, we were the only ones who even suspected it had ever been going to in the first place, so there was nobody to amaze with our secret. The greatest news story of all time was unhappening before our eyes—and it did so with an unexpected element of anticlimax. The dog that didn’t bark in the Big Night.

  We responded characteristically. We pitched a ball.

  On the evening of Friday the 25th, the day Tesla had tentatively predicted to be Der Tag, we all gathered at The Place. Zoey and Erin had made up a huge sign out of a sheet and hung it over the gate to the street, so that everyone had to pass under it on their way in. It read: “Today is the first day of the rest of your universe.”

  The Place has very nice lighting, thanks to Zoey and Margie Shorter, but we’d killed most of it that night, except for a few lava lamps and the soft red service lights at the bar. There was just no competing with the sheets of neon fire in the sky.

  Green they were, mostly, but rimmed in scarlet, and shot through with tendrils of rich violet. The water in the pool made a shimmering mirror copy, as if the Northern Lights were trying to beam down but the transporter was malfunctioning. Faintly colored reflections danced everywhere, especially on perspiring drink glasses and on the faces of swimmers. The overall effect was magical.

  In a spot that didn’t really need any artificial help to be magical. It was another perfect summer night in Key West, just hot enough to encourage thirst and laziness. The air was redolent of sea salt and coral dust and lime and fine reefer and Cubano cooking from our neighbors to the west. There was plenty of booze and beer in stock, and The Machine was working well (now that Omar had adjusted it for tropical conditions). Fast Eddie was in rare form, doing particularly interesting Mind Melds, in which, for instance, his left hand summoned up Oscar Peterson while his right hand became Harry Connick, Jr., and showed no signs of tiring. Harry the parrot was banished indoors early on, when he showed a lamentable tendency to sing along. Obscenely, of course.

  When a lull finally came in the traffic, I took a break, left the stick to Tom Hauptman, and came out from behind the bar to join a group of folks lying on their backs next to the pool, gazing up at the Aurora Borealis and lazily conversing. I stretched out beside the Lucky Duck and accepted the joint he passed me.

  “You’re just in time, Skinny,” he said. “I was just proving that Jesus was Irish.”

  Pass me a joint, I’ll play straight man. “How’s that?”

  “Just think about it. He never got married, he never held a steady job, and his last request was a drink. Case closed.”

  A few folks chuckled. Marty Pignatelli, the ex-trooper from New Jersey, said, “I think he was Italian. Talked with his hands a lot…seemed to have wine with every meal…worked in the building trades…” More chuckles.

  “You’re not looking at it right,” Tanya Latimer said. “He called everybody ‘brother,’ had no fixed address, and got crucified for preaching without a permit—I figure the man had to be Soul Brother Number One.”

  “You’re crazy,” Noah Gonzalez told her. “Everybody knows he was Latino.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Hell, his first name was Jesus!”

  That brought us from giggles to outright laughter. And with perfect timing, Acayib jumped in. “I’m sorry, but there can be no disputing this point: Jesus was a Jew.”

  He said it with a straight face, and Double Bill didn’t yet know him well enough to realize his tongue was in his cheek; for a moment Bill thought maybe Acayib really was some sort of humor-deficient zealot. “Look,” he said, “nobody meant to—”

  “The evidence is clear,” Acayib went on. “He went into his father’s business. He lived at home until the age of thirty-three. And to his dying day, the man was convinced his mother was a virgin, and she believed he was God.”

  We all broke up, nobody louder than Double Bill. I had another hit, and passed the joint to Susie, and lay back and stared up at the fiery sky for a moment. It reminded me of an After Dark screensaver module Erin had found for our Mac, called “Psycho Deli,” shimmering and psychedelic and hypnotic. And all of a sudden, it was as if some bug in After Dark had caused a second screensaver to superimpose itself over the first. The one called “Starry Night.” One after another, three tiny pinpricks of white fire appeared in different parts of the night sky, left tracer tracks through the Aurora at high speed, and vanished. Then another—then another two.

  Oh, right, I thought to myself, letting out smoke. It’s August. Meteorites. Leonids? No, they’re in November. Perseids, that’s it.

  Maybe two or three seconds later, the penny dropped. Did you ever just sense a disaster coming, without knowing quite how you knew? Suddenly I just knew…

  Pick your own cliché for heartstopping horror. Blood into ice water—spine into Jell-O—toes into cupcakes, whatever. You know the ending to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”? That’s what happened with my voice. The “Oh…” started off at normal conversational level; the “…holy…” rose sharply in both pitch and volume; and by the time I reached “…SHIT!” I was at the top of my lungs and perilously close to falsetto.

  Everything chopped off. Conversations, laughter, party sounds, Fast Eddie’s piano, splashing in the pool, everything but the barely heard background chuff-sssssh of The Machine turning common ingredients into God’s Blessing.

  Nikola Tesla’s voice was like a whipcrack. “What is it, Jacob?”

  I lay where I was, helpless to rise. With an effort, I managed to lift my arm and point at the sky. It’s a safe bet just about everybody looked up.

  When nobody said anything after a few seconds, I said, “Meteorites. Perseid group. August, every year. They peaked at least a week ago, but they’ll still be coming for days.”

  “The Perseids run on a four-year cycle,” Acayib said. “And this is a jackpot year.”

  I nodded. “Naturally. We never thought to factor them in. What’ll you bet—?”

  Tesla was the first to get it. He flung his drink to the ground and said something in Croatian, as if he expected it to wither flowers within a forty-yard radius. “Erin, to me, quickly!”

  “Yes, Uncle Nikky!”

  Some equipment I didn’t recognize and couldn’t understand materialized out of thin air before him. He and Erin put earbeads in their ears and started doing things either with or to the equipment. Quickly, at first, and then progressively slower. The longer they worked, the unhappier they looked—and by the time they were done, they were both miserable.

  “Aw, shit,” Erin said.

  “Did I call it?” I asked, knowing the answer from their faces.

  Tesla nodded, frowning thunderously. “The Deathstar took a glancing blow from a meteorite late last night. No public announcement. Minor damage. Just enough to make them do a total software dump/reload…”

  “The Deathstar is armed again,” Erin said. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  In the horrid silence, the Lucky Duck’s angry mutter was clearly audible. “Don’t one of you sons of bitches so much as look at me.”

  I didn’t. I knew perfectly well it wasn’t his fault. Instead I looked to my two brightest hopes: the pair of heroes who’d saved us all the last time. Erin and Tesla. The brilliance of youth and the insight of age. One of the smartest and most intuitive men who ever lived, and the smartest girl ever born. Designated agents of Mike Callahan, time-traveling immortal and professional universe-saver.

  And they both looked back at me, and at the same time they both said the same words, the last words on earth I wanted to hear just then. Worse: said them to me:

  “What the hell do we do now?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Symphysis

  “We ar
e ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle, September 22, 1990

  SOME DAYS YOU’RE THE

  pigeon, some days you’re the statue. I wished I had time to panic. Since I didn’t, I thought of Mike Callahan. How would he have handled this? It helped. I felt some of his monolithic strength and calm enter me.

  “Let me just run through the obvious and get it out of the way,” I said. “You two can’t do a remote dump-and-reload yourselves?”

  Tesla shook his head. “Physical contact would be required.”

  “They just did it but you can’t?”

  He sighed. “I can explain why not,” he said, “if you think we have half an hour to spare.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say. Erin, can you Transit back up there with your laptop and ‘twist again, like you did last summer’?”

  For once she looked like a normal two-year-old. They find the world that dismaying a lot of the time. “You saw me on the way down, Pop. My first hop, I missed the arrival point I wanted by more than a mile, and the vector I was trying for by almost a hundred miles an hour. It’s not like hopping from a stationary bus to a stationary Space Shuttle.”

  “You got better with every jump.”

  “Sure—but they weren’t three-hundred-mile hops. And even the others I never got perfect, even that last hop. I was planning to arrive standing on the water, like Peter Sellers. The swan dive was improv.”

  I bit my lip. She’d only been off by maybe six feet or so. But of course, an error of six feet in matching with the Deathstar could get her killed. And who knew how many hops it would take her to get even that close—breathing vacuum between each of them? What would she do for life support once she was aboard?

  “Suppose,” Omar said, “we steal a spacesuit—”

  “I’m sorry,” Tesla said, “but that is not a good idea. The Deathstar has anti-meteorite defenses.”