Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

“Where the nukes they got now are gonna be in twenty-five years.”

  That shut us all up for a few steps. Finally Omar said, “Well, to be fair, Duck, I don’t really suppose they actually left the warheads in those birds.”

  The Duck snorted. “Wait and see,” he suggested.

  We kept going, and shortly we were there, being greeted in low voices by Tesla and Erin.

  “Yeah,” Omar said, “this is a lot like the site I saw.” He pointed east. “Over there in the scrub you can kind of make out the concrete bases that used to hold the acquisition and tracking radars. The alignment mast was over there.” He pointed to a spot just west of us. “That’s where the assembly and service shed was; you can see the foundation and some other crap. And right here where we’re standing is probably where they had the launch control van. See, there’s the blast berm.”

  “Fascinating,” the Duck said, and Omar shut up.

  “Nikky,” I asked, “are there any warheads?”

  “No,” he said. “Erin and I have been researching, and we believe these used to carry thousand-pound W31 warheads, with a switchable yield of either two or forty kilotons—but they were salvaged long ago.”

  The Lucky Duck looked sour, and Omar grinned.

  “Of course,” Tesla went on, “just what was done with them I could not say,” and Omar stopped grinning.

  Before the Duck could comment, I jumped in. “So that’s good, right? Without the half-ton payload, the bird goes higher, faster, looks more like a credible threat to the Deathstar.”

  Tesla nodded.

  “The big question is,” Omar said, “can we get one to fire?”

  “That is the first big question,” Tesla agreed. “I was just about to inspect them individually.”

  A small fireball materialized in his hand, and by its soft blue light he began studying the missile nearest him. Omar, Shorty, Tommy, and Acayib each picked a missile and began examining it by flashlight. I tossed Erin my own flashlight, and she scampered off to inspect the sixth Nike.

  “Tools,” Omar said almost at once. “I need tools.”

  “Behind you, Uncle Omar,” Erin called.

  Jim turned around, and there on the ground behind him was his own toolbox—the one he hadn’t brought with him. “Thanks, honey,” he called back, and selected a wrench. The others discovered their own tools suddenly close at hand, and called out thanks of their own.

  “How about specs?” Tommy said jokingly.

  “They’re just ready now,” Erin said. “Would you pass those around, Daddy?”

  I looked down at my feet, and saw a stack of printouts. Zoey shone her penlight down at them, and I saw that the sheet on top was a schematic for the Nike-Hercules booster section. “How the hell did you get these?” I asked—but as I spoke I picked them up and began distributing them.

  “A guy named Ed Thelen has put tons of general Nike information on the Net,” Erin said.

  “Yeah, but printouts?”

  Two-year-olds can be very patient in explaining the bleeding obvious to grown-ups. “I scanned his site with my laptop over there, downloaded what I wanted, put it on a floppy, Transited the floppy to Tommy’s Mac back at The Place, and printed everything out on his laser printer while you guys were pedaling here. Then I Transited the printouts here.”

  I sighed. “Of course. Excuse me.” Zoey and I exchanged a wry glance, found reasonably comfortable seats, and settled back to let the techies work.

  A rare plane took off and passed over us, but the noise warned us in plenty of time to take cover. It seemed to be about Piper Cub size. The moment it was past, everybody went back to work.

  A little while later Tommy called out, “This one’s’ fucked. Crack in the booster nozzle.”

  “This one’s no good either,” Acayib reported. “Igniter looks shot.”

  “Some idiot managed to breach the liner on the upper stage here,” Shorty said. “She might get a few miles up, but then she’d do a Challenger.”

  “All the wiring looks lousy on mine,” Omar said mournfully. “And the gyro’s gone.”

  The Lucky Duck snickered. “The suspense mounts.”

  “Shut up, Duck,” I said. “Nikky? Erin? Any joy?”

  Tesla grunted and straightened up from what I could not help but think of as Nikky’s Nike. “The gas generator in the upper stage sustainer appears inoperative.”

  We held our breath.

  “I think maybe we’re in good…oh rats,” Erin said. “Sorry, I just noticed: one of the booster fins is about to fall off.”

  My heart sank. We all made little wordless sounds of disappointment and frustration.

  “I think Acayib’s is the one to work on,” Erin went on, and disappeared, leaving us blinking at each other.

  “Where’s she going?” the Duck said. “Work on it how?”

  After a moment’s thought, I got it. “That guy up in Titusville—what’s his name, Gordon something? You know, the guy with God’s own aerospace junkyard.”

  “Y-y-yes!” Omar said happily. “If there’s a Nike-Hercules booster stage igniter assembly left anywhere in the world, Gordy’ll have one.”

  “I will help her look,” Tesla said, and vanished himself.

  The rest of us stood around and looked at one another for a moment or two. “Damn,” said Omar, “this is fun!”

  “What do we do until they get back?” the Duck asked.

  “Okay,” I said, “assume we have at least one functional missile. What else do we need?”

  Omar closed his eyes. “Let’s see…heavy-duty batteries…a shitload of big cable…we can forget the radars, all four kinds, we’re not trying to actually hit anything…so we don’t need to throw up a radar alignment mast…”

  Tommy Janssen suddenly said, “Oh hell.”

  “What?”

  “The computer.”

  “What about it?”

  “They didn’t get PDP-8s until the Seventies.”

  Omar groaned.

  “In English, Tommy!”

  “I don’t think Erin’s going to be able to interface her laptop with the Nike. It’s expecting to get its orders from an analog computer.”

  “What does that mean?” Zoey asked.

  “It doesn’t savvy digital bits,” Omar explained. “It savvies voltage values—from a computer so ancient it has about five hundred vacuum tubes in it.”

  My roller-coaster heart began to sink again.

  “Like that, you mean?” the Duck asked.

  We followed his pointing arm. About ten feet away, just behind the blast berm, there now stood a silhouette not unlike the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, rising out of the mangrove scrub. I aimed my flashlight at it—

  —and flashed back to my childhood, when a teacher had showed us a beast somewhat like that and proudly informed us that it was capable of storing sixty-four thousand bits of information…at one time! It was huge, about the size of the largest Ikea bookshelf unit, studded with a bewildering variety of dials and gauges and switches and display lights.

  “Yeah,” Tommy Janssen said gently. “Like that.” He wandered over to examine it, whistling softly to himself.

  As he was crowing over the manual he found in a drawer, another object appeared beside the computer, about the dimensions of a portable TV—followed by Tesla. “Give me a hand wiring this in?” he asked Tommy.

  “What is it?”

  Tesla hesitated. “A kind of battery.”

  “We’re gonna need more than the one,” Omar said.

  “I designed it myself,” Tesla told him.

  “I stand corrected,” Omar said.

  Tesla and Tommy fiddled around behind there awhile, then Tesla said, “All right: try it.” Tommy came around in front of the computer, slapped a few switches—and the damn thing lit up and started to hum!

  I decided not to get elated again just yet. The mood swings were killing me.

  But a few moments later, Erin arrived with a broad grin and a load of gea
r. Omar and Shorty fell on it with cries of glee, and went to work on the missile we’d selected. Apparently it was necessary, among other things, to disable a circuit that would cause the Nike to self-destruct if it didn’t get targeting data every two seconds…from the tracking radars we didn’t have.

  As they tinkered, I decided to simply assume they would succeed, and looked for other things to worry about. “Erin, are you sure you can put blinders on NORAD and all the other sky-watching agencies at the right moment? What about private university facilities? The local Navy aviation people?”

  “They’re all on-line,” she said. “No sweat. It’ll take me about an hour to set it up.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Maybe you better get started.”

  Zoey nodded. “Whenever you’re at the computer and you tell me you’ll be done in an hour, that means next Thursday, honey. And we only have about two hours left.”

  “You’re right,” Erin agreed. She went to her laptop and began typing furiously.

  An hour went by. Another plane took off. From the occasional murmurs the repair crew made, things seemed to be going reasonably well. For our part, Zoey and Isham and I killed quite a few mosquitoes. Without gunfire.

  “I still say people are going to see this,” the Duck said.

  “Ernie,” I said, “it’s a Friday night, in summer, in Key West.”

  “Yeah? Well, what about those guys? They’re professionals.” He was pointing at the airport tower visible in the distance.

  I bit my lip. He had a point. “I guess we’re gonna need a diversion.” I thought about it, and had nearly settled on a plan when I heard Omar cursing.

  “What is it, Jim?”

  “We underestimated the Army. They weren’t quite complete and total idiots, after all. Before they walked away and forgot these toys, they did exactly one responsible thing. They physically cut the hydraulic lines for the launch racks. See here? We were so busy looking at the birds, we never thought about the racks.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’ve almost got this thing ready to fire…but we have no way to lift it up into launching position. For all I know we could skip it like a flat-rock all the way to Cuba, but that won’t make the nut. It’s gotta go up.”

  Zoey turned to me and quoted a John Cleese movie we’d both seen a couple of years before called Clockwise. “It’s not the despair,” she said. “I can take the despair.”

  I nodded and completed the quote. “It’s the hope that’s killing me.” I turned back to Omar. “Can’t you fix it? There must be hydraulic-whatever parts up there in Titusville.”

  “Sure,” he said heavily. “But even with the parts, it’s more than a one-hour repair job. And a welding torch out here is going to get us noticed.”

  “So what do we do?”

  After some discussion, Tesla went back up to Titusville, and returned with a heavy-duty block and tackle tripod, the tallest we dared use, which he placed just in back of the Nike. The line was made fast to its nose, and everybody but Erin grabbed on and heaved. Then we planted our feet better and heaved again. And, with increasing dismay, again.

  That rack had not moved an inch for at least twenty years of tropical weather; it was frozen solid. We tried greasing it, hammering on it (as loudly as we dared, and then louder), and cursing at it (likewise), without useful result.

  “Can’t you and Nikky Transit it upright?” I asked, already guessing the answer.

  Both shook their heads. “Transiting doesn’t work like that, Daddy,” Erin said. “I can Transit a pair of scissors, but I can’t make them open up by themselves.”

  “How about, screw the launch rack: just Transit the missile itself upright.”

  “It wouldn’t stay standing,” she and Tesla and Omar all said together. “We need that rack,” Tesla finished.

  Omar straightened up from where he was crouching, squared his shoulders, and took a couple of deep breaths. He walked round to the nose end of the Nike. “Nikky, Erin,” he said, pointing to a spot beneath it, “Transit me something solid right here, about this high.” He held a hand at about crotch level.

  Erin stopped typing for a moment. She and Tesla exchanged a glance, and decided not to question the request. They closed their eyes together and a concrete rectangle of the specified height appeared in the spot Omar had indicated. I believe I saw where they got it: one of the radar mounts Omar had pointed out in the underbrush earlier.

  He climbed up onto it, squatted down, and squeezed himself in under the Nike. There was just room for his big frame. He settled his back against it, braced himself, and placed his hands carefully.

  “Jesus Christ, Jim,” I said, “you’re nuts! That thing weighs a fucking ton.”

  “Closer to five, actually, with the rack,” he said, took a deep breath, and then made a HUNH! sound and began trying to straighten up.

  His arms and legs swelled up to about twice their normal size, splitting his pants and shirt. Sweat literally flew from him. We stood paralyzed with awe for a moment. Then Isham said, “Holy shit,” clambered up on the concrete slab behind him, slithered under the Nike, and added his own mighty back. The rest of us ran back to the block and tackle, and heaved until we saw neon pollywogs. Ish and then Omar began to roar with effort.

  For a long moment I thought it wasn’t going to work. Then the rack let go with a sound like a brontosaur passing a kidney stone, and the nose of that damn missile rose about a foot.

  Those of us on the tackle rope did a little dance, then regrouped and heaved again, and the Nike came up another foot and stopped.

  “Belay!” Omar grunted.

  Directly ahead of me was the foundation of the old assembly shed; I left the group (which made no perceptible difference), managed to warp the end of the tackle rope around it and tie it off. “Okay,” I screamed.

  “Ish, you roll right, I’ll go left.”

  “On three,” Isham managed. “One, two, go!” They both bailed out and dropped to the ground.

  The Nike shuddered, the line hummed—and held.

  Omar and Ish got up slowly, worked their shoulders, rotated their necks in their sockets, shook hands, and came over to join the rest of us at the block and tackle. Maybe ten minutes later, we were all spent, panting and running with sweat…but that goddam missile was within about five degrees of vertical.

  It was doing a lot better than I was. It seemed to take everything I had left to bring my watch up into view. Twenty minutes to go.

  “Erin,” I panted. “Need Nikky…help you fire…that thing now?”

  “No, Daddy. Uncle Omar and I can do it.”

  “You ready…in time?”

  “I’ll have to be.”

  Somehow I lurched to my feet. “C’mon, Nikky. Ev’body. Follow me.”

  Twenty minutes late; the folks up in the tower, who had been lazily admiring the Aurora Borealis, were startled by a brilliant ball of blue fire that suddenly appeared at ground level, swelled, and began to rise skyward.

  To the west of them.

  Turning hastily away from the runway and looking in that direction, they saw a tall thin man with leonine hair and a ferocious mustache, dressed in an archaic black suit, standing out in the middle of the nearly empty parking lot, facing their way. The parking-lot lights all seemed to have just failed; they saw him only by the light of another fireball he held up in his left hand. This one was twice as bright as the first, and green instead of blue. He flung it skyward, and the tower crew tracked it with their eyes until it seemed to reach and blend into the Aurora.

  They looked quickly back down to the tall man, and saw that now he had two more fireballs, brighter than the first two: one in each band, one yellow and one red. This time he held them long enough for the tower crew to realize he was now surrounded by five other people.

  They all appeared to be mooning the tower.

  The tall man flung his fireballs into the sky, turned around, and dropped his own pants. The fireballs burst into noisy crac
kling showers of rainbow pyrotechnics, illuminating six pale asses, five rotating clockwise and one counterclockwise.

  I venture to guess that everyone present at that airport was staring, transfixed, in that direction, when the Nike went up behind them.

  It made less noise than I’d expected, easily mistaken for a trick echo of Tesla’s fireballs, and was too high to see in only moments. There are very few photos of launching Nikes in existence; they tended to outrun the shutter.

  I didn’t see it go. I was too busy pulling up my pants and fleeing through the darkened parking lot with the others, and praying that Erin had timed things just right. I’m sorry I missed it; however brief, it must have been a sight to see. A Nike-Hercules, rising up into the Aurora Borealis, sent by a two-year-old to challenge its generational successor…

  Star Wars, indeed.

  Epilogue

  “We don’t want to go back to tomorrow; we want to go forward.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  I GUESS THAT’S PRETTY

  much the end of this tale. I mean, you have noticed that the universe is still here, right?

  The Nike went up without being noticed…by anyone who was able to prove it afterward. Thirty seconds after it left the ground—at the top of its range, less than three seconds before it would have run out of fuel—the Deathstar took it out with ease, so totally that there was no flash visible from the ground. The light and then the cosmic ray from the supernova, and the gamma rays from Hurricane Erin below, had all hit Mir on schedule, just as Erin and Tesla had predicted. But the Nike had even more closely and urgently matched the Deathstar’s parameters for a target—and by the time the Tesla Beam was pumped up to fire again, Mir no longer did. The Moment of Cosmic Danger passed—forever, one earnestly hopes—and the universe rolled on.

  And I like to think that somewhere out there in the big dark vastness, Mike Callahan smiled.

  The folks at DoD doubtless had shit-fits…but what with one thing and another they never got around to issuing a press release about shooting down a missile from Florida with a classified Death Ray. The tower crew at Key West Airport made, as I had expected, no incident report at all.

  As for us, we made our way back from the airport to The Place without incident (except for a broken nose Double Bill incurred in trying to run with his sarong around his ankles), spread the good word, restarted the party, and basically all lived happily ever after. And peacefully—nothing else remotely that exciting happened to us all for another good ten years or so.