Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  We were closer now than we’d been that first time—because twice since then we had, briefly, been as close as it’s possible to get. But this time we built nothing, planned nothing, pushed nothing, and despite great temptation we did our level best not to interpenetrate and intimately explore each other.

  What we tried to do, actually, was as little as possible. Not even to think, or even to feel, more than we could help, but just to be, together—to know without the experience of learning. Nikola Tesla and Erin required the use of as many collective neurons as we could possibly spare. Even wondering how they were doing was an unwarranted waste of processing power. Even hoping they succeeded might screw up an algorithm somewhere.

  Perhaps I understood at the time, at least in part, the nature of the mental rewiring they did, the nature of the program they co-wrote, just what the hell it was they were computing and what factors went into it. If so, none of the knowledge came along with me when I eventually downloaded myself back into my own little individual skull. I think that I—that all of us—basically just trusted that they knew what they were doing, and tried to stay out of their metaphorical way, and cherished the precious moments we had to be all the kinds of naked and all the ways of touching there are together. The little fragment of volition that insisted on persisting, we put into singing “AAAOOOOOOOOOMMM” as cleanly as we could.

  In, that sense there was nothing “lesser” about it.

  It also chanced to be our objectively longest experience to date. The others were over in minutes. This time, from external clues I noted afterward, I would say we probably spent somewhere between half an hour and an hour standing there around the pool together, holding hands and Oming.

  Subjective duration is a different story. My memory firmly reports that the interval was both immeasurably long and indescribably short. It is perfectly aware of the contradiction, and apologizes for it, but stands stubbornly by its data. From my point of view, Nikola Tesla said Now!—

  (and several trillion years passed)

  —and at once Erin answered Okay! and the link dissolved and I was decanted back into my skull.

  I barely had time to notice that my arms and legs were very tired and my neck hurt and I had to piss something awful, and then I didn’t care about any of that because my eyes focused back from infinity to local features and I saw the broad smiles on the faces of both Erin and Nikola Tesla.

  “Got the answer?” the Lucky Duck asked.

  Tesla nodded.

  “Better,” Erin said. “We got the answer…and a plan.”

  A major cheer went up. The whooping, hooting, table-pounding sort, with outbreaks of the kind of dancing muddy men do in end zones.

  “There’s only one thing,” she called over the tumult. “It’s…uh…kind of outrageous. Even for us, I mean.”

  Another cheer, as loud as the first, and full of laughter. As it faded, Double Bill’s piercing quarterdeck baritone rose over it. “Straighten me, darlin’—’cause I’m ready.” And everybody quieted down and gave Erin the floor.

  “Actually, I got it from your head, Bbiillll,” she told him.

  He glanced at me. “I love it when she says my name.” He turned back to her. “You’re shittin’ me, Little Bit.”

  She giggled and shook her head. “While I was rummaging around looking for what neurons I could use, I got distracted by some of your memories. You’ve got some amazing stuff in there.”

  He grinned. “I’ve always thought so.”

  “Well, I found the one bit of useless information we needed.”

  “Cut ta da chase,” Fast Eddie said. “We safe or not?”

  Erin hesitated, and looked to Tesla.

  “Let me put it this way, Eddie,” Tesla said. “If the calculations Erin and I have just performed are accurate, and if together we can all do no more than two preposterous things…then, as you say today, we have a shot.”

  Erin winced. “No puns, okay, Uncle Nikky?”

  He sighed. “As you wish, dear.”

  “Come on,” Double Bill said. “There’s something in my head that might save the universe, and I don’t know what it is. Cough up, will you?”

  She looked around at all of us. “You were all just in rapport with Bbiillll. You know he’s lived here in Key West a long time, and had a lot of different occupations.”

  She was right. Most of the billion trillion things I had learned or relearned about myself and my friends just a few minutes ago were already fading away—for lack of brain room to store the information, I think—but I did retain a vague general impression of awe at how many different ways Double Bill had found to pass the hours in one lifetime.

  “Well,” Erin went on, “at one point he did a couple of years as a wino. Right, Bbiillll?”

  He nodded. “Good years,” he said. “Finally got some thinking done.”

  “And you found a great place to sleep rough.”

  “Sure.” Suddenly his jaw dropped, and his pipe dropped into his sarong. “Jesus Christ.” He began to laugh, then chopped it off. “How much time do we have?”

  “A little over three hours.”

  He started laughing again. “Son of a bitch, we might could just pull it off. Oh, that’s funny! Their own petard…” He held his ribs and roared until his face turned bright red.

  The rest of us were standing around looking at one another.

  “Erin?” Zoey called. Her voice was soft, gentle; the mortal threat was all in the undertones.

  “Sorry, Mom. You tell them, Bbiillll; I don’t know if they’ll believe me.”

  Bill wiped his eyes. “My pleasure,” he said. “Folks, over by the airport, just past the end of the runway, is about the last sizable patch of real, undeveloped wilderness left in Key West. Nothing but mangroves and scrub and poison ivy and wheat grass and Christ knows what all, wild and overgrown. Pretty good drainage, mostly, so the bugs ain’t too bad. Hop a fence and burrow your way in there, it’s a terrific place to sleep off a drunk, or lay low till a warrant expires, or just get the hell away from everybody and everything and get a little peace.” He laughed again. “That’s the part I always found ironic.”

  “Keep cockteasin’ us like this,” the Lucky Duck said through clenched teeth, “and I swear to God a bolt of lightning is gonna come out of the clear sky and—”

  “What’s out there in the scrub?” I asked quickly.

  Double Bill grinned like a pirate. “Half a dozen Nike-Hercules missiles.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Great Balls of Fire

  “It’s time for the human race to enter the solar system.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  ROOBA ROOBA ROOBA.

  “Left over from the Cuban Missile Crisis days,” Bill went on. “Abandoned for more than twenty years. They flang ’em up in a hurry, and forgot about ’em fast.”

  “I tried to look them up on the Internet,” Erin confirmed, “and I couldn’t find much information about them, not even how many there are. If information on those particular missiles still exists, it was never digitized. The government has forgotten they’re here.”

  “Everybody has,” Double Bill said. “I’m telling you, I used to sleep under one to keep the rain off.”

  “Hercs, you say?” Omar asked. “Not Ajaxes?”

  “Said ‘Hercules’ on the side,” Bill assured him.

  Omar began to grin as big as Bill. “Solid fuel,” he said. “If they were Nike-Ajaxes we’d be S.O.L.—they were fueled with red fuming nitric acid, which we are not equipped to handle. But the Hercs run on…well, basically on solidified nitroglycerine.” Tesla frowned, but let it pass. “Doesn’t leak, doesn’t boil off, doesn’t go bad. Twenty years is nothing to that stuff. Light the candle today, that puppy’s gonna go someplace.” Suddenly his face fell. “Wait a minute. It’s corning back, now. I was really into this stuff when I was a kid, and one figure stuck in my head because it was easy. A Nike-Herc has a max range of about a hundred miles.” A good dozen of
us said shit or some variation. “Even with a little payload like you, Erin, there’s no way in hell we’re gonna get one as high as even Low Earth Orbit—”

  Erin started to answer, but Fast Eddie overrode her, waving his hand like the pupil who knows the answer. “How ’bout Erin just Transits more fuel up as she goes?”

  There was a moment of silence as that sunk in. What a concept for space travel! Leave the fuel behind, and order it up as you need it—

  But I was too busy being horrified to appreciate it.

  Bad enough to send your baby daughter up on a Space Shuttle, which you have advance notice is not going to crash. A can of solidified nitroglycerine that’s received no maintenance for two decades, has no ground support, and was never designed to carry anything more delicate than a bomb—or to land at all—is a whole different story.

  “That’s a really smart idea, Uncle Eddie,” Erin said admiringly. “Except for one problem. I’m not going.”

  “You’re not?” Zoey and I said together, both of us suddenly greatly relieved.

  “A Nike-Hercules boosts at twenty-five gees, Daddy.”

  “Oh.” A little more than six times what she’d experienced aboard Columbia. A home run leaves the bat at about twenty-five gees.

  “For less than four seconds, and then it drops—but that’s enough to kill a person, even with padding.”

  “So what is the payload?” Acayib asked. “And how do you get it high enough?”

  Erin giggled and shook her head. “You’re all missing the beauty of it. We don’t need any payload.”

  I finally got what she was driving at—and my heart began to race. This might just work.

  Say you’re the Deathstar. You’re scooting along in orbit, frazzled by sunspots, scanning the sky for threats. You’re just about to mistake Mir for a threat and fire on it, just in time to hit a superenergetic cosmic ray coming in the opposite direction head-on and annihilate the cosmos.

  Suddenly a column of fire unexpectedly rises, from a place on the map where your instruction set says there are no friendlies…that anybody remembers.

  You will assume the thing has either a payload or orbital capacity or both—since anyone who lacked both would have no militarily rational reason to launch in the first place. And you won’t wait around long enough to see it start to peter out about ninety miles up; long before that, you’ll take it out.

  And to do that, you’ll have to take your attention off Mir.

  “I get it,” Doc Webster said. “A missile be as good as a mile.”

  Erin glared at him, and he pretended to look apologetic.

  “Are you sure the Deathstar can’t handle more than one target at a time?” Omar asked.

  “With its Tesla Beam, no,” Tesla said. He chewed his lip briefly and continued. “But it does have a very fast recovery time between shots. This will call for nice timing.”

  Rooba rooba rooba.

  “This is nuts,” the Lucky Duck said. “Sparky, you told us we had to stay out of the history books, right? Don’t you think somebody’s liable to notice if we set off a fucking Nike?”

  Tesla shrugged. “It is a risk. Surely there will be visual sightings…but I do not expect they are likely to be believed without radar confirmation.”

  “So what about radar?”

  There was not a hint of smugness or boasting in Erin’s voice. “I can hack NORAD, NATO, the FAA, and the DEA. I’ve done it before. They’re not going to record anything I don’t want them to.”

  Does anyone ever really know his own child?

  “How do we start?” I asked.

  “We go out there and look over the Nikes,” Omar said.

  That sounded good to just about everybody.

  “Okay, look,” Tanya Latimer said, “the first thing we’ve got to do is pick a committee. No way we’re going to sneak a hundred people onto the airport grounds, even at night. Erin, Nikola, who do you want?”

  We weeded it down to me, Zoey, Omar, Acayib, Shorty, Isham, the Duck, and Tommy—and of course Double Bill, our colorful and canny native guide.

  “Come as quickly as you can,” Tesla said. “I will go on ahead, and wait for you there.” He disappeared like a promise the morning after Election Day.

  “I’ll go on ahead too, Daddy,” Erin said, and vanished too.

  Not for the first time, I heard Mr. Zimmerman in my head, singing that my sons and my daughters were beyond my command—and had to grin at how the ideals of my youth had come back to bite me on the ass. Any “parental authority” I’d ever had, or ever would have, was just a politeness on Erin’s part.

  We all used the john, then caucused briefly and chose bicycles rather than cars, since both would be about equally fast in Key West, and it’d be easier to conceal a bunch of bikes outside the airport fence. With Harry the parrot shrieking obscene invective at us, Zoey and I and the others got our bikes, walked them through the gate, and pedaled like hell.

  The journey should have passed in a blur. But it is oddly difficult to bicycle through Key West in a blur. I kept seeing things that tugged at my attention, or at my heart. Lovely old houses, some a hundred years old or more. Gorgeous blooms and blossoms, a riot of growth everywhere. Peaceful streets (once we got past the Duval corridor) full of palm trees and sleepy fat cats and a few slowly strolling people. People who nodded back as we passed, even the tourists.

  I kept thinking that it sure would be a shame if we fucked this up. This was too nice a universe to lose.

  Eventually we reached the Atlantic Ocean, and hung a left onto A1A just before the Reynolds Street Pier. Higgs Beach went by, then the road straightened out and widened into something as close to highway as Key West ever gets. Out of the residential area now, we put our heads down and our rumps in the air and rocketed east along A1A, Smathers Beach on our right now, all the way until we passed the East Martello Tower museum and could see the road ahead begin to curve north. At Double Bill’s advice, we left our bikes at Houseboat Row, chained to the front gate of a friend of his, and went the rest of the way on foot.

  Key West Airport isn’t much: most of its scant traffic is small stuff. Security measures consisted of an unprepossessing appearance and a chain-link fence. We waited for a moment when no headlights were on us and slipped over the fence where Bill told us to. Almost at once we were in deep forest cover. We followed him through the woods on a path only he could see, collecting the expected amount of scratches, bruises, and bug bites.

  It was dark in there, with enough canopy to hide the Northern Lights, and we had flashlights but didn’t want to use them yet, and also I was preoccupied. So I cannot tell you exactly how those woods differed from the ones I’d known up north—but they were a lot closer to jungle. Bushes didn’t behave the way I expected them to, roots went in weird directions, trunks and branches took strange turns, and the most unexpected things turned out to have thorns. Also it smelled kind of funky in there, a redolence of tropical rot and decay—with an oddly strong overlay of woodsmoke that got stronger as we went.

  “How often do planes fly out of here?” I asked Double Bill.

  “This time on a Friday night, maybe once an hour, maybe less. It ain’t exactly O’Hare.”

  Eventually the tangle began to thin out, and then there were small clearings, and finally a largish, meadow-sized one—“clearing” meaning that nothing much grew much more than head high, and rough paths through it could be picked out by moonlight and Auroralight. In the approximate midst of it I could see Nikola Tesla from about the waist up, and all of Erin, though I couldn’t make out what she was standing on.

  Erin waved, and I squelched the impulse to call out to her and waved back.

  As we wended our way closer through the undergrowth, I began to see that there really was an actual rectangular clearing around Tesla and Erin. A new clearing. It explained the woodsmoke smell. Apparently Tesla had made judicious use of his Death Ray at its lowest setting to clear away our work area for us.

  A long
narrow concrete platform lay perpendicular to us as we approached, roughly fifty yards long, five or ten yards wide, and a foot high. On top of the platform was a pair of steel trestles running its length like twin bridges to nowhere, their tops at about belly-button height. Erin was standing on one of them. Laid across the trestles, pointing toward us, were six launching racks.

  And on each rack lay a Nike-Hercules missile.

  I first thought it when I was a kid, but having seen them as an adult I have not changed my mind: a Nike-Hercules is a fucking beautiful thing. Even disfigured by a quarter of a century of malignant neglect and tropical tarnishing. They were about forty feet long, a little less than three feet in diameter at their widest point, and looked like God’s darts, sleek and slender and elegant, the four raked fins on the upper body contrasting pleasingly with the cantilevered wings at the base.

  “I don’t believe it,” Isham said as we tramped the last few dozen yards. “They’re really there. The assholes actually went off and forgot ’em.”

  “They left Nikes scattered all to hell and gone around Florida,” Double Bill said. “There’s some on Fleming and Geiger Keys, some in Boca Chica, some up in Key Largo. A stew bum I used to know told me they still got some in Homestead, in the ’Glades—all kinds of places. That Cuban Missile Crisis was big business for Florida.”

  “Thank you, Fidel,” Isham said.

  “Not just Florida either,” Omar told Isham. “Back on Long Island there’s plenty of old Nike sites. Huntington, Oyster Bay, Amityville, Zahn’s Airport in Farmingdale used to be one—hell, there’s one pretty near where Callahan’s used to be, in Rocky Point, that’s still in halfway decent shape; I was there once.”

  “Kinda makes you wonder,” the Lucky Duck said sourly.

  “What’s that?”