As Zoey and I were tucking Erin in that night, way past her bedtime, I stroked her hair and said, “Pumpkin, you did a real good day’s work today.”
She nodded. “It was okay,” she said.
“Okay?” her mother said. “Honey, you saved the universe! You and Uncle Nikky.”
“And Uncle Omar and Daddy and everybody else, sure.”
“Well, what more do you want?”
Erin shrugged her little shoulders. “I don’t know, exactly. But just preserving the universe, the way it is, doesn’t seem like enough.” She closed her eyes and rolled over. “I’m more ambitious than that,” she said, and put her thumb in her mouth, and was asleep at once.
Zoey and I stood there together watching her sleep, and holding each other very tightly, for over half an hour before we tiptoed out together.
You could say the story ended there. But for me, at least, there was still one event needed to bring things full circle, to supply closure.
It was months in coming. I had almost forgotten I was waiting for it by the time it finally occurred.
The only one of us missing that night was Nikola Tesla, off God knows where, doing God knows what, as usual. It was a hot Friday evening in March of 1990—the first anniversary of our arrival in Key West!—and a celebration was in full swing. Literally, in some cases: at Erin’s insistence, we had hung swings from about half the trees in the compound. (One of her favorite hobbies, or perhaps charities, was reminding us dopey grown-ups how to have fun.) Those on their feet were doing some swinging of their own: Fast Eddie was in rare form, and the only earthbound toes not tapping were those of Chuck Samms, who’d had an unfortunate experience with frostbite in his youth. Not that everybody was actually dancing: we being us, there were several conversations going at once, in various locales.
One of them being the bar. I was as busy as Dan Quayle’s spin doctors back there, but I’m never too busy to listen—especially when Doc Webster is perpetrating a pun. You can always spot it coming: his face gets very straight.
“Well, poor Artie’s first job as a freelance hit man, some guy hires him to kill his wife—and Artie’s so dumb, he only asks for a token dollar in advance. That night he waits in the parking lot outside the supermarket where she works, and she comes out alone…but just as he’s strangling her, a witness comes along…and while he’s strangling that guy, the cops show up. They were so impressed with his stupidity, the next day all the newspapers had the same headline…”
Unfortunately, the Doc paused for effect just a hair too long: Mei-Ling beat him to the punch line. “‘Artie chokes two for a dollar at Safeway.’”
There was a roar of outrage, and both Websters nearly disappeared under a blizzard of peanuts. Harry the parrot felt moved to hop over to the top of the fireplace and flush his little commode.
Doc secretly likes being outpunned…if his wife does it. But he has his pride too. When the tumult had died down a bit, he called out to me, “Hey; Jake! What kind of computer did Erin use to fire off that missile last year?” And his face was even straighter than ever.
I had to think a minute. “An analog computer, I believe Omar said it was. I didn’t see a brand name. Why?”
“You’re sure she didn’t use her Macintosh?”
“No, the missile was too primitive to savvy zeros and ones. Again, why?”
He shrugged elaborately. “No reason. It just would have been a nice twist, that’s all.”
He waited for Mei-Ling…but she said nothing this time, as puzzled as the rest of us.
“What’s that?” I asked finally.
“For Jobs to export Nike, for a change.”
I follow Callahan’s custom of keeping a seltzer bottle under the bar for moments like this, and I got it out and was just preparing to fire…when suddenly I was distracted by a vision. Hardly anyone else at the bar noticed it at first; a pun that rotten tends to wrinkle up your nose so bad that your eyes either close or squirt tears. But elsewhere in the compound, others saw the apparition at the same moment I did. Which reassured me that it wasn’t just wishful thinking on my part. It was in midair, at poolside, about ten feet above the water, startling but unmistakable.
A naked man…
I dropped the seltzer bottle.
A big naked man, with thinning red hair. An instant after we saw him materialize, he dropped eight feet, landed on the diving board, rebounded back upward, executed a very impressive swan dive—deliberately spoiled it at the last moment—and belly-flopped hard enough to splash everyone near the pool, and soak my shirt behind the bar.
That got the attention of everybody but Fast Eddie; everything but his piano fell silent.
As we gawked, the naked man reached the side of the pool with three powerful strokes, and pulled himself out. He stood there implausibly bone dry, grinned past a smoking cigar that hadn’t been there a second ago, put his hands on his hips, and laughed out loud at our expressions.
The sound of that booming laugh silenced Eddie too. We heard his stool squeal as he whirled around. And then silence fell.
I broke it—and about a second late; just about everyone else present shouted the same thing, like the Raelettes.
“MIKE!”
Michael Callahan located me, took his cigar from his teeth, waved it at me, and said, “Howdy, stranger. Nice Place you got here.”
A cheer went up that shook coconuts out of their trees.
“You got that right, darling,” said another unmistakable voice.
Three more naked newcomers stood beside the pool, all three familiar and two of them beautiful. Lady Sally McGee, Mike’s wife…Mary Callahan-Finn, their daughter…and Mary’s husband Mickey Finn, the cyborged Filari warrior who’d once rendered us all bulletproof.
The cheer redoubled. And then the party really got started.
The next happy hour or two were full of general conversation. We introduced Erin to Lady Sally, who had never met her before. We introduced Pixel, and Harry the parrot, and Mei-Ling and Double Bill and Marty Pignatelli. (Marty did a lot of blinking, but maintained his aplomb; all the others seemed to take meeting legends in stride.) Doc and Mei-Ling’s wedding was reported and raucously toasted.
And of course we all took turns showing the Callahans around the new joint, and filling them in on everything that had happened since the last time they’d seen us. I don’t know whether any of it was news to Mike, but he acted as if it was, and appeared gratifyingly impressed with our achievements and our new home. I’m pretty sure everybody else wanted as much as I did to ask Mike and his family just what they had been doing lately, himself…but none of us was that indiscreet. It would have been a snoopy question. And we all knew that if he could have told us, he would have without prompting.
Anyway, what with six things and another, it was nearly midnight by the time I had a chance for a more or less private conversation with him. We sat on chaise lounges beside the pool and watched the moonlight dance on the water together for a few minutes in silent companionship. No Aurora that night. That thought sent my memory back to the events of a year earlier, to what had brought us all down here from the frozen north.
Did he read my mind? Or just seem to? What difference? “I’m sorry to have had to put you and the others to all this trouble, Jake,” he suddenly said. “I hope it wasn’t too much of a pain in the ass for you.”
I thought about my reply. “Of the many Lord Buckley riffs I’ve memorized,” I told him finally, “there is one I’d like to recite for you now.”
He nodded. “Go for it.”
“It’s especially apt, because this one is supposed to have been written from Florida. It’s Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca—The Gasser!—writing home to King Ferdinand.”
He raised an expectant eyebrow.
“‘Your most royal swingin’ majesty,’” I quoted, “‘I been on a lot of sad tours…I been on a lot of mad beat bent-up downgradin’ excursions…I been on a lot of tilted picnics and a lot of double-unhung parties…
I’ve suffered from pavement rash…I been bent, twisted, spent, de-gigged, flipped, trapped, and babapped…but I never was so drug in my life as I was with this here last gig you put me on…’ You get The Gasser’s drift, Mike?”
He nodded.
I smiled suddenly. “Well, that is the backwards of how I feel.” I saw him relax slightly. “And the same goes for the crew. This was probably the best thing that ever happened to me—or any of us. If you hadn’t laid this trip on Nik and us…well, regardless of how the universe made out, everything you spent forty years building here on Terra might have come apart, forever.”
“I doubt it,” he said. “But I’m glad I didn’t make things any worse for yez, at least. I had no choice. Thanks for understanding.”
I could see, over on my own front porch, Erin and Lady Sally deep in a private conversation of their own. So were Zoey and Mary, over near the parking area—and to my relief they were both laughing. “The only thing I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you didn’t situate Callahan’s Place down here in Key West in the first place. I mean, I’m glad you didn’t…but…well, if it’s not a snoopy question, why not?”
He took a puff on his cigar—God, the stench of it brought back years of happy memories!—and blew smoke to the winds. “Well, for one thing, they didn’t need me down here.”
“Yeah, I can’t argue with that,” I agreed.
“But that’s not the main reason,” he added. “I had to locate up on Long Island.”
“How come?”
He turned and looked at me, a strange sort of smile playing at his lips. “You really don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“Because you were there, Jacob,” he said softly. “Because you were there.” And he patted me on the shoulder and got up and wandered off somewhere.
A while later Zoey and Erin found me sitting there staring at the water, a cold Irish coffee on my lap, a big grin and a lot of tears on my face. Erin climbed up on my lap and hugged me, and Zoey knelt beside us, joined the hug, and kissed me for a long, long time.
The rest of that evening is a happy blur. Mike and his family were gone when I woke up, but I’m not sure just when they left.
Since this story is as much about our move as it is about the cancellation of Doomsday, I will report in passing, just for the sake of symmetry, that a little over eight years after all this happened, on a slow Tuesday in midsummer, sometime between 2:07 and 2:08 P.M., I found myself missing Long Island. I had a drink, and the feeling passed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since he began writing professionally in 1972, Spider Robinson has won three Hugos, a Nebula, and numerous other awards, and published twenty-eight books, eleven of which involve Mike Callahan and his family and friends.
Spider was born in New York City in 1948, and has been married for twenty-five years to Jeanne Robinson, a Boston-born writer, choreographer, former dancer, and Soto Zen Buddhist. The Robinsons collaborated on the Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus-winning Stardance trilogy, which created the concept and basic principles of zero-gravity dance.
Spider’s Op-Ed column “The Crazy Years” ran from 1996–99 in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper; his Technology column, “Past Imperfect, Future Tense,” now appears there every third Thursday.
The Usenet newsgroup alt.callahans, inspired by the Callahan series, was rated the 151st largest newsgroup by bits posted, 172nd by messages posted (placing it in the top 1 percent of non-porn sites), and propagates to over 60 percent of all Usenet sites. Spider has never dared visit it, lest it swallow him whole. A website is maintained for him and Jeanne by volunteer friend Ted Powell at http://psg.com/~ted/spider/.
The Robinsons have lived for the last eleven years in British Columbia, where they raise and exhibit hopes. But they visit Key West every chance they get.
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