Callahan's Con

by Spider Robinson

  Her target radar locked onto me. “I see. Is your wife present?”

  “Uh, no, she’s at a rehearsal.”

  Somewhere on her console a red light came on. “She is an actress?”

  I hastened to deny the slander. “A musician.”

  I could tell from her expression I had added another amber light and a warning buzzer. “I see.”

  I was wishing I’d thought to lie. Now she was going to ask what instrument, and I was going to have to say bass. Bureaucrats are not likely to be impressed by bass players. Perhaps you’ve heard the one about the difference between a bass player and a large pepperoni pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four. I wondered if I could phrase it so as to imply that Zoey bowed a bass, for a symphony orchestra. Would Field Inspector Czrjghnczl know Key West has no symphony? Maybe I should—

  “And where is Erin herself now?”

  Cerebral meltdown.

  “,” I said, not very loudly. How could I have not anticipated this question?

  “She is nearby, I presume?”

  “Ye-e-es,” I agreed cautiously, crossing my fingers hard enough to raise bruises. In a certain sense, Erin is always nearby. And it would not be good to admit that I had no clear idea where—or even when—she was, and that she could easily be thousands of miles away…or for that matter, thousands of years. This woman believed, as an article of faith, that anyone Erin’s age was by definition a PINS, a person in need of supervision, and that it was my responsibility to keep tabs on the kid every second.

  “Pursuing some sort of educational project, at this time of day, no doubt?” she said skeptically.

  Here I was on less shaky ground. “Absolutely. Anthropological research.”

  “Fetch her, please.”

  “Look,” I said desperately, “I don’t see any need to—”

  “Kindly produce her at once,” the Field Inspector said. “If in fact you can.”

  A couple of people went woooo. She had issued fighting words. I considered feigning offense, as a stalling tactic. But stalling until what?

  Damn it, I might as well bite the bullet.

  I sighed deeply and brought my watch up. I pressed the mode button on the lower left and the display changed to a dormant stopwatch labeled CHRONO. I pressed it again and the watch became an alarm clock awaiting instructions. Another press, and the watch offered to tell me the time in some other time zone, arbitrarily designated “T-2.” On most watches, the fourth press would have reverted it to default, the current-time readout. On mine, the fourth press caused it to display a crude but recognizable picture of a ladybug.

  I hesitated for several more seconds, trying to think of a good way out of this. Then I pressed the button on the upper right, once. The ladybug began flashing—

  Erin materialized, immediately between me and Field Inspector Czrjghnczl. “Hi, Papa!” she said cheerily. “What’s up?” Her pitch dropped several notes. “Why are you holding your face in your hands like that?”

  Behind her, there was a large, loud splash.

  Part of it, of course, was that Erin was hovering about a foot and a half over the bar, with no more visible means of support than a bass player. Another part of the problem was probably that she had just Transited—traveled home from some other ficton, some other place-and-time. For technical reasons I don’t understand, living and dead matter can’t Transit in the same load…so those who travel that way necessarily arrive stark naked.

  But I think the icing on the cake must have been that whatever ficton Erin had just been visiting, they had a war going on there—well, that doesn’t out rule many, does it?—and she was soaked with blood, apparently so recently spilled that it still qualified as living matter. Even I found the sight unnerving, and I knew for sure that none of the blood was hers.

  Small wonder Field Inspector Czrjghnczl suffered system crash and fell over backwards into the pool.

  Other people hurried to pull her out. I was way too busy. I had five or ten seconds max to bring Erin up to speed. This was going to get ugly, now, and fast.

  Fortunately my little girl has always had a tendency to hit the ground running. “Tell it, Papa.”

  “That splashing behind you is a government employee—”

  “Which agency? NSA?”

  “No, no, state educa—why would you expect the NSA?”

  “Later, Pop, later. She’s here about homeschooling, then?” She got the hose, adjusted the sprinkler head to hold still, and began sluicing blood off herself. “But why? We’re current with the state.”

  I shrugged. “Beats me. You know I don’t speak Bureaucrat.”

  In another year or two, long hair would become very important to her, but at thirteen she was keeping hers cut short enough that rinsing it took no time at all, and afterward all she needed to do was shake her head and let the sun do the rest. Clothes appeared next to her, Transited from her nearby bedroom; she began dressing. “How bad is it?”

  “She started out by talking about maybe removing you from our custody. From there, the situation deteriorated.”

  Erin grinned, visualizing it. “She demanded that you produce me forthwith, and then when she suddenly found my bare bum in her face, she went for a swim.”

  I nodded. “You have the thing in a nutshell. Be careful: surprises frighten her.”

  “You said she’s a bureaucrat. What’s her name?”

  I told her.

  Erin frowned. “Accent on the rjgh?” she asked, and I nodded. “Aha,” she said.

  I heard her, but it didn’t register right away; I was distracted.

  God damn it.

  I really don’t want anyone but friends in my pool.

  No, I mean I really really don’t want anyone but friends in my pool—and certainly not enemies.

  “There’s a corpse down there,” she screamed as she broached. “A dead bod—” and by then she had fallen back below the surface of the water again.

  See what I mean?

  No friend would leap to a conclusion like that. Not even a fair-minded stranger. The only corpselike thing about Lex at all is his custom of taking naps at the bottom of the pool. And why shouldn’t he? Perfectly normal thing for a merman to do, especially at that time of the day.

  All right, he doesn’t look much like someone raised on a diet of movies and cartoons would expect a merman to look. Specifically, he has no tail. Unlike Daryl Hannah in Splash, even when he’s immersed in water, Lex has two legs, just like thee and me—they’re just a lot scalier, that’s all. Well…and they bend in a few directions ours don’t. And the toes are webbed. Other details of his lower anatomy I leave to you to imagine for yourself, except to say that while he may not have a tail himself, my understanding is that he gets plenty of it.

  Also unlike Daryl Hannah, he is not amphibian. If you kept him out of the water long enough to dry off, he would not metamorphose into a smooth pink human being; he would die. And would probably soon smell like dead fish.

  Lex has lived in the waters around Key West for most of his life. Most of the old time Conchs know him, especially the fishermen, guides, charter boat skippers, divers, the Houseboat Row gang, and other water people. Nobody actually discusses him at any length, you understand; the word just went around a long time ago that if you got into trouble out there on the briney, and you weren’t an asshole, help might just come to you if you were to lean over the side and slap the water in a certain manner. And that if that did happen, the next time you went out, it would be a good idea to toss a large sack of saltwater taffy overboard at the same spot. Then there was the fishing boat skipper who accidentally dropped a waterproof Walkman with a cassette of Rubber Soul in it over the side, and from that day forward could not go out without catching large, sought-after fish in great quantity. For years afterward the word was that leaving a cassette tape on a buoy on your way to sea was good luck. Word of another kind also went around about Lex from time to time, but only in the scuba community, and only among the ladies.
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  I’d been hearing about him since I moved to the Rock, and wanted to meet him, but I’m not any kind of a boat guy, and my wife is crazy about me, and anyway hates to scuba, so there was no occasion for our paths to cross. Then a few weeks ago my friends William Williams and Doc Webster (you’d expect a doctor and a guy called Double Bill to get along, wouldn’t you?) came to me and asked if it would be all right if Lex moved into The Place’s pool for a while, while the Doc experimented with a couple of possible treatments. It seems that in recent years, the water around Key West has finally become so befouled by the crap we dump into it that Lex had developed a really serious rash on his upper half, and some sort of scale infection on his lower half. If The Place is about anything, it’s Welcoming the Weird, so I agreed at once to help. I had the pool filled with salt water and raised a volunteer crew to help transport him, and one dark Tuesday night we did it.

  Double Bill lined the back of his pickup truck with plastic, filled it with seawater, and we transported Lex in that. At one point Bill stopped a little short at a traffic light on Truman Street, and I guess Lex bonked his head back there, because he let out a bubbly shout loud enough to be heard in the cab. A couple of tourist college boys standing nearby came over and looked in the back of the truck, and the last I saw of them they were still standing there, solemnly assuring each other in hushed voices that the stuff definitely was worth three hundred an ounce.

  Anyway, I’d had Lex as a houseguest (well, poolguest) for a few weeks now, and he’d been no trouble at all. He spent a lot of his time at the bottom of the deep end, listening to his Walkman, and unfortunately, while engaged in that harmless pursuit he bore a slight but persuasive resemblance to a waterlogged corpse.

  Which is why Field Inspector Czrjghnczl left the pool very much like a Trident nuclear missile leaving an atomic sub: straight up, and with a great deal of foam, fuss and noise.

  Folks hauled her out of the pool—fun new game: Bobbing for Bureaucrats—and set her on her feet, and passed her a few towels, earning not a particle of gratitude from her. Her mouth opened and she gestured with her hands, but she was so terrified and enraged, words failed her.

  “God, I love it when she’s wet!” Harry the Parrot shrieked, flying in a circle around her head.

  She swiveled her head to glare at him, raised a hand—

  Suddenly there was a cat on her head.

  She removed Pixel’s tail from her mouth, spit a fine spray of orange cat hair, and tried very hard to hit him, very hard. Slow learner. She very nearly knocked herself back into the pool when he vanished just before her fist arrived.

  “What a knockout,” Harry squawked.

  When it comes to mollifying monumentally pissed-off women, any man alive can use some advice. “What should I do?” I asked Erin.

  She shrugged. “Survive.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but she was right. Nothing I could possibly have said or done would have been of the slightest possible use.

  The soaked civil servant did say things, a number of them—and I’m pretty sure they were in English—but since her voice had gone hypersonic by that point, I’m not sure what they were. It doesn’t matter, because she said them over her shoulder on her way to the gate, and she probably summarized them effectively with the violent slam that cracked the gate itself down the center and knocked it off its hinges.

  Not one of my best days, so far. Zoey wasn’t going to think so, anyway.

  The sudden departure left a silence.

  It seemed a shame to break it. But Long-Drink McGonnigle managed to find the right words.

  “I’m not going in that pool again until it’s been drained and scrubbed.”

  He brought the house down.

  “Oughta get Nikky to oil it with his breath day,” Doc Webster said.

  “Huh?”

  “I say, we ought to get Nikola Tesla to boil it with his death ray.”

  I blinked at him, wondering if he was pulling my leg or my ears were starting to go—then got distracted by the sudden recollection of what Erin had said to me just as the Field Inspector had emerged from the water.

  “You said ‘aha!’” I said to her.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  I like to think I’d have thought of it myself, in time. Erin has often told Zoey and me that she isn’t really any smarter than we are, just quicker at it. I’ve never been sure if the distinction means anything. “Aha what, honey?”

  “Well, I can’t be sure, of course,” she said. “But how much do you want to bet that she’s a relative of either Nyjmnckra or Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi?”

  Thunderbolt.

  2

  LITTLE NUTS

  Some recap may be useful here.

  I met most of my friends while we were all patrons of a tavern on Long Island, New York, named Callahan’s Place, owned and operated by a man who called himself Mike Callahan. It was an unusual tavern in many ways—customers were permitted to make their own change, for instance, and were welcome to smash their glasses in the fireplace…if they were willing to propose a toast, first. Enough interesting things happened there that I’d need three books this size just to hit some of the highlights—and then, one fateful night, it fell to us to defend the planet from destruction by hostile extraterrestrials. In the course of that evening, Mike found it necessary to reveal to us all that he was a time traveler named Justin from the far-distant future…and we all found it necessary to enter telepathic rapport together…and I found it necessary to set off an atom bomb I was holding in my hand at the time. Busy night.

  When the dust settled, Mike Callahan was gone back home to his own ficton, Callahan’s Place was a radioactive hole in the ground, and I had started another bar for us all to hang out in just down the road: Mary’s Place, named after Mike’s daughter. There we all spent an almost indecently happy year together, during which I met and successfully wooed my Zoey.

  Then the night our daughter was being born, there was another of those annoying alien-destruction-of-Earth attempts—don’t you hate when that happens?—and we managed another of those group telepathic hookups to stave it off…only this time our group included Solace, a silicon person. Solace was, in fact, the Internet itself, become alive and self-aware…and that night, just before she sacrificed her own life to save the human race that had unknowingly birthed her, she took the opportunity to interface directly with my baby Erin’s brain, as Zoey was in the act of birthing her. Erin emerged from Zoey’s womb with an IQ and vocabulary better than those of a university graduate. Hell, a university professor, these days.

  Unfortunately, under the stress of saving the world and birthing a supergenius, my friends and I—well, mostly I—managed to mortally offend our next-door neighbor, Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi, an infected pimple of a human being and a finalist in the Ugliest Person That Ever Lived sweepstakes. The problem with offending her was her nephew Jorjhk. By evil chance, he was a Town Inspector…for our town…and there turned out to be some deficiencies in my liquor license, business license, operating permit, and fifty-’leven other required forms; namely, their nonexistence. In establishing Mary’s Place, I had seen no reason to waste anybody’s time, particularly my own, on paperwork. This turned out to be a fatal mistake. Bureaucracy, I ended up proving, is way more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

  In 1989, after a year of sulking, I was seized by either inspiration or madness—you pick—and moved my family and myself out of Long Island, all the way down the coast to Key West. To my astonishment and joy, just about every one of my former customers opted to follow me, in a caravan of school buses, and I ended up opening yet another tavern, a little south of Duval Street, which I called simply The Place.

  My mistake was in assuming that the entire Eastern seaboard was enough distance to place between my bar and the vindictiveness of a pissed-off petty official. There was, it appeared, an unofficial Old Pricks’ Network—as slow as a glacier, maybe, but just as deadly. The long arm of Clan Grtozkzhnyi had finally reach
ed all the way down to the ass end of the Florida Keys.

  And fallen into my pool.

  “Oh shit—of course.”

  “Ukrainians have long memories,” my daughter said.

  From the pool came a splash, and then a series of sounds familiar to me but probably not familiar to you. In order for Lex to speak, in air, it’s necessary for him to empty his windpipe of whatever water is in it at the time, and then dry out his larynx by flexing his gills and breathing in and out—as quickly as possible since breathing air hurts his lungs. The net effect is that conversations with him generally begin with the sound of a man vomiting, and then hawking and swallowing extremely juicy boogers for ten or twenty seconds. The resulting tone poem has driven tougher people than the Field Inspector to depart the premises at high speed, even before they saw Lex’s legs. In a weird way, it’s been a boon for Lex: not one of his friends is a silly, shallow person, distracted by trivia.

  Perhaps in consequence, he speaks with a distinct Bahama Village accent—a strange lilting creole that borrows quirks from Jamaica, Bermuda, Cuba, and other places I don’t know. “I beg your humble pahdon, Jake—but who was dat gray-yut styoupid harse? She look like a jumbee, bahd ting to see wakin’ from a nap.”

  “Sorry about that, Lex. I wish she were a jumbee; a simple charm’d get me off the hook then. She’s a bureaucrat.”

  Sploot. He was gone.

  You wouldn’t think someone like Lex would know enough about bureaucrats to be properly afraid of them. But he knows the movie Splash real well—I believe that’s why he chose the name Lexington, actually—and there are several bureaucrats in that.

  “Well,” I said to Erin, “I guess the first thing to do is try and get hold of your mother.”

  “The first thing to do,” Erin said, double-knotting a shoelace, “is make a few phone calls and find out what the hell’s actually going on, how much trouble we’re actually in. Mom’s better with clearly defined problems.”

  I refrained from comment.

  She straightened up from tying her shoes. “Okay, the first—damn.” She had just noted the position of the sun in the sky. “It’s after three P.M. Every state employee in Florida has gone home by now. Ah well, that’s why they invented the Net. Excuse me, Papa.” She left, and went in the house. On foot: Zoey and I have impressed on her that teleporting is not something to be done casually, especially not in public. (Sure, only family were present in The Place at the moment—but at any time a really tall tourist standing up on the seat of a bicycle could glance over our hedge.) Our house is less than fifty yards from my bar, and the windows are pretty much always open in the daytime, so I could hear the chiming chord of the Mac booting up in the study.