Callahan's Con

by Spider Robinson

  “Here,” I croaked, and kept going, and she and I arrived together.

  Everyone in Doc’s yard was on their feet, all still talking at once, and their volume rose sharply when they saw Erin pop into view. It took several more minutes of talking at cross purposes before everyone understood the misunderstandings that had occurred, and their terrible consequences.

  I had believed that Erin was going to zip home from Miami to Key West immediately—that is, as straight teleportation, with no time-hopping involved—so I’d concluded that there was no need to find a working pay phone and call Zoey collect: Erin would give her mom the good news faster than I could dial my phone number. Erin, on the other hand, hadn’t known I’d ruined the cell phone, and believed I was going to phone home at once—so she had decided to time-shift forward a little on the way, and arrive at the same instant I did, so we could all share the joy.

  So nobody had phoned, for longer than was reasonable, and then nobody would answer Doc’s phone, because I’d broken it, and finally Zoey had just snapped. She had strapped on the Meddler’s Belt, set the time dial for some near-future time by which she figured the situation would have to have resolved itself one way or another, and pushed the GO button.

  When the mutual explanations had gotten that far, my vision blurred, and I’d have gone down if Jim Omar hadn’t caught me.

  “She doesn’t know, does she, Daddy?” Erin asked me.

  “No, honey, I don’t think she does. We never discussed it. It never came up.”

  “Oh…my…God.”

  The man who called himself The Meddler had stumbled (will stumble) upon the historically first of three different methods of time travel, and used it only twice, and his discovery had died with him. Then later, I’d heard, there had been an interim method developed, about which I knew nothing except that it had seen limited use for a few centuries after its discovery, and involved much more esoteric technology than the Meddler’s Belt. And finally, the far-distant-future ficton from which the Callahans hailed had developed the ultimate, no-moving-parts kind.

  Only the second and third methods automatically compensated for the inconvenient nature of the universe.

  “What’s wrong, Erin?” Mei-Ling asked. “Why are you so upset? Your mom got her arrival time off by a little, that’s—”

  “No,” Erin interrupted. “I don’t think so. There are two dials on that belt, and I’ll bet Mom only used one of them. Isn’t that right, Uncle Eddie?”

  Eddie thought hard. “I seen her twist one ting, an’ push a button. I didn’t see her do nuttin’ else.”

  Erin groaned.

  “That tears it, then,” I heard my own voice say from a long way off.

  “What’s the second file door?” Doc Webster asked with gentle patience. “Excuse me. What is the…dial…for?”

  “Space,” Erin told him. “The first dial is for time, and the second is for space. You use it to compensate for the fact that everything in the universe is always in motion.”

  “Oh my God,” Doc said, turning pale. “Oh no.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Omar shouted.

  “Hell,” the Professor said.

  “Oh dear,” Mei-Ling murmured.

  I could not get enough air into my chest to make a squeak.

  “I don’t geddit,” Fast Eddie said mournfully.

  “Everything moves, Uncle Eddie. Always. The earth rotates at nine hundred miles an hour. It revolves around the sun at nineteen miles a second—which is itself moving through space, revolving around the center of the galaxy. The galaxy is rotating at half a million miles an hour, and it’s in motion itself, presently on a collision course with the Andromeda Nebula at about six million miles a day. Meanwhile the whole universe is expanding. Everything moves relative to everything else, and nothing stands still—ever.”

  “Okay—so?”

  Erin closed her eyes, and Mei-Ling took up the stick. “So let’s say Zoey decided to set the time dial on that belt to this very second now, Eddie. She pushes the button, and zip, she’s now. But she’s not here and now…because she didn’t make any compensating settings to the space dial. Instead, she’s…well, she’s at the point in space where this particular portion of the earth’s surface happened to be when she pushed the button. And we’re…well, not. We’ve moved. A long way.”

  “Hully Christ,” Eddie whispered. “You’re tellin’ me right this minute she might be somewhere in outer fuckin’ space?”

  “Without a pressure suit,” Omar said dully.

  “Ah, geeze,” Eddie said, and fainted dead away.

  I was terribly afraid I might do the same thing, and I didn’t have the time. Usually when you can’t seem to inhale it’s because you failed to exhale enough. I put both hands on my ribs and pushed hard, emptying my lungs, while trying to blow out an imaginary candle. Automatically they took a deep breath to refill. I did it again, and it worked even better. Blood reoxygenated, I found the nearest lawn chair, sat down, and put my head down between my knees. The dizzy feeling and greying vision receded. By the time I straightened up again I was only nauseous with terror.

  There’s a trick about nausea many people don’t know. If you can’t get medicine, or the medicine isn’t working, it can sometimes help to holler at a bunch of innocent bystanders. The less they deserve it, the more it seems to help. It’s a derivative of what Valentine Michael Smith learned in the monkey house, I think. Everyone was obliging me by all talking at once, so it was at the top of my lungs that I bellowed, “SHADDAP!”

  Silence. Sure enough, the nausea receded one step.

  A hundred things to think about at once—which one was first? Already a dozen people were opening their mouths to start talking again.

  Erin had already managed to bring Eddie around; he was sitting up and shaking his head. “Uncle Eddie,” Erin said, “Exactly what time did Mom leave?” She was using the same voice her mother uses to end arguments with me, half an octave higher in pitch, and recognizing that brought the nausea back a half step closer again. But I knew she had asked the right question.

  “Just after sunset is da closest I can tell youse,” Eddie said. “It was de dark got to her.”

  “Nobody felt like putting the house lights on,” Long-Drink said. “I guess we shoulda.”

  “Assign blame later, Phil,” Erin snapped. “Can anyone else pin the time down any closer? Anybody remember what was on the radio?”

  “I wuz playin’,” Eddie mourned.

  Pixel the cat was suddenly in my face. He materialized on my lap without warning, sublimely confident that I would instinctively cup my hands under him and make a lap in time to keep him from falling, like I always do—but then, most unusually, he leaned forward and poked his face right up against mine. The item he had in his mouth shielded me from tuna breath—and made me draw in a deep breath of my own. Back when I first opened The Place, if I had to leave during business hours for some reason, I’d leave a sign telling potential customers when we would reopen. Almost at once I came to realize that my clientele were perfectly capable of running The Place without me, for limited periods of time, at least, and put the sign in storage. Here it was after all these years—the words WE’LL BE BACK AT: and a yellow clockface with two movable hands.

  Pixel actually poked me in the nose with it twice. “I get it, I get it,” I said, and he backed off and turned it so Erin could see too. It read 7:03.

  “That’s it exactly?” Erin said. “You’re sure, Pixel?”

  He turned his massive head back, dropped the thing on my chest and held it there with one paw, moved the other with exquisite care. When he was done the minute hand was, by my estimation, just over a third of the way between the three and the four. “Bwrrrrtt!” he said.

  “Thank God!” Erin took in a deep breath, and let it out. Her exhale was a little shivery. “Okay,” she said, “that’s a good start. That’s a very good start. That helps a lot. Next question…Wait—” She closed her eyes tight for a few moments, the
n opened them again. “Okay, I presume Mom did not tell any of you how far ahead she intended to hop, or you’d have spoken up by now. No—don’t tell me your guess, Phil. Nobody speak—especially you, Daddy!” I shut up. “I want everybody to write down their guess. People tend to agree with whoever sounds the most positive, but that doesn’t mean he’s right. I want your subjective impressions.” Eddie and Omar were passing out bar napkins, and just about everybody turned out to have a writing implement on them. “You all know my Mom pretty well, you had a sense of her mood, just how frightened and impatient she was, maybe you got a look at her just before she disappeared. How far forward do you think she would have gone? Don’t say it; write it down.”

  Everybody did, and all the napkins were collected by Pixel and brought to Erin. She riffled through them quickly and lifted her eyes. “Most of you agree she would have hopped to the same time tomorrow night.”

  “She’d want to go far forward enough to be sure of getting an answer, one way or another,” Long-Drink said.

  Omar, the only other one of us present who had studied the Meddler’s Belt at any length, said, “And twenty-four hours is an especially easy setting to make on that dingus.”

  “I think she would have picked midnight,” said Mei-Ling, sounding fairly sure about it.

  “I hope to God you’re wrong,” Erin said. “Why do you think so?”

  “We were talking, about ten minutes before she did it…and I said to her, ‘Don’t worry, I guarantee by midnight you’ll know the good news.’ I’m pretty sure she heard me.”

  Erin groaned. “Doc, check me: what’s the maximum amount of time she could survive in hard vacuum?”

  “I’m not sure. Twenty seconds, would be my guess. Thirty at the outside.”

  She slumped and sat down hard on the grass, just like an ordinary two-year-old would. For her, the effect was comical…until she pooched out her lower lips just like an ordinary two-year-old who was thinking of bursting into tears.

  “If Mom picked midnight,” she said, “she’s dead.” Just about everybody gasped or groaned or said no or spoke some sort of obscenity. “I picked midnight—and I’ve been here for at least five minutes, nearly six.” She has an excellent sense of time, and we knew it; still I checked, and so did others. My watch, an uncommonly accurate one, said it was 12:05:47.

  “So ya time-hop back a few minutes—what’sa problem?” Fast Eddie said.

  “I can’t, Uncle Eddie!” she cried, and did burst into tears. “Don’t you get it? There was a me here in the universe from midnight on. There can’t be two-hoo-hoo—” She was crying too hard to form words now.

  I had never seen my daughter cry as a baby—not once. Maybe she made it a point of pride, I don’t know. I had seen her cry, twice by that point, but only after age seven. Seeing my superbaby, theoretically the most competent of us to deal with this emergency, sobbing like an ordinary infant now—well, it came close to unhinging me.

  So I got out my mental power-screwdriver and tightened those fucking hinges down machine-tight, and I got up from my chair and I picked my baby up in my arms and I held her as tight as I could. And said in her perfect little ear, with my very best imitation of serene confidence, “So we will assume that Mom did not pick midnight, since that assumption gives us things we can do besides go apeshit. Okay, princess?”

  She hugged me back, harder than I would have believed possible, and in five or ten long seconds she had stopped crying. “Okay, Daddy.”

  “Attagirl. What are the other possible times she could have picked?”

  She squirmed in my arms, and Mei-Ling handed her a tissue just before she would have wiped her face on my shirt. “Well, like I said, most of us voted for twenty-four hours.”

  “Who didn’t? Besides Mei-Ling.”

  “You and me, Daddy. We both guessed one hour.”

  “Huh!” I said. “Why did you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Just everything I know about Mom. She takes small steps until she’s sure it’s safe. Then she takes a big stride. Why did you pick an hour?”

  “Because I was the moron who put the whole idea in her head,” I said bitterly. “Just before I left to come after you, as we were getting ready to go, half-kidding I said I was tempted to use the Meddler’s Belt to cheat, and peak ahead to the back of the book. And Zoey said something about what’s so bad about cheating, not kidding at all. I talked her out of it—I thought I had, anyway, damn it. I pointed out what she already knew: that every act of time travel threatens paradox, imperils the whole universe. I said that was just too much risk to take for a case of nerves, and she agreed, God damn it, she agreed it was—oh, shit.” I sat back down heavily in my chair.

  “What, Daddy?”

  “I just realized—that was just before she found out she wasn’t coming with me and Bill. Before she realized she was going to be sitting here by herself with nothing to do but go out of her mind with worry for an unknown number of hours.”

  “She wasn’t by herself, Jake,” Mei-Ling said.

  “Whatever. The point I was making was, Zoey had recently had it impressed on her what a dangerous thing using that belt would be. I think even if she got worried enough to use it anyway, she would have tried a short hop, first, and if that didn’t k—If that was successful, then maybe she’d have leaped ahead as far as midnight, or even tomorrow.”

  “Why an hour?” the Professor said. “Why not a minute? Or even a few seconds?”

  I thought hard. Why was I sure of an hour? “Because,” I said, thinking the words as I heard myself speak them, “if she jumped forward one minute, or two, or five, then she’d have taken all the risk, with virtually no chance of reward. If she’d believed the news she wanted would be available within minutes, she’d have just waited for it. One hour feels to me like the compromise she would have picked: the largest increment she would think of as small…but that might actually be enough to learn something.”

  Doc Webster the diagnostician was shaking his head gently. “Jesus, Jake…that’s awful thin.”

  “It sounds right to me,” Erin said. “We were talking once, about how terrible it must be to be clairvoyant, and never have a surprise in your life. And she said, ‘Yes, but sometimes I think it’d be nice if every now and then you could peek ahead for just an hour or so, just to get your bearings.’ I remember I agreed with her.”

  “An hour or so,” Long-Drink repeated thoughtfully.

  “You can’t dial an ‘or so,’ Drink,” Omar argued. “She’d probably have picked one hour. The two people who know her best both share that intuition—that’s good enough for me.”

  My heart was hammering so loud I could barely follow the discussion, much less contribute any more. It was dawning on me that, under the scenario I was proposing, my beloved had been dead for hours by now—boiled and burst and terribly cold…

  Unless we did something about that.

  “Okay, Erin,” I said, loud enough to get the floor. “Let’s start with those two assumptions. Zoey left at 7:03 and—” I glanced at Pixel’s clock again to confirm my memory. “—and twenty-two seconds. And her intent was to hop forward exactly one hour. Is that enough information for you to figure out exactly where she ended up, and rescue her?”

  Her face twisted up so bad that for a moment I thought she was going to cry again. I guess she wanted to. “Oh God, Daddy, I don’t know. Let me think—” She closed her eyes, bit down hard on her left thumbtip, and with her right hand tugged rhythmically at the hair at the back of her neck. I hadn’t seen the mannerism in years; it meant she was concentrating very hard. Ten seconds went by. When she opened her eyes I could see dismay in them. “I doubt it,” she said. “It’s a really hairy problem. I don’t think the NSA could handle it. And our window, our margin of error is so incredibly miniscule—we can’t be off by more than a few thousand yards or we’ll never find her in time. So everything has to be calculated out to a humungous number of decimal places—”

  Her voi
ce was rising in pitch, speed and volume; time to interrupt. “Yeah, but didn’t you tell me you had some way to steal as much computer power as you’d ever need, honey? Something about word processors on bicycles?”

  The feeble attempt at humor did not go down well. “Jesus, Daddy! Yes, Solace taught me a way to access just about all the unused processor cycles of nearly any computer that’s connected to the Net, without being caught at it. That’s basically what she did to live. Yes, in theory that’s more computing power than the US federal government has, or anyway knows it has—”

  Again I tried to interrupt her climb toward panic. “There you go—we’ll take our best shot, and—”

  She was shaking her head. “You don’t get it. Raw computer power isn’t enough, not nearly enough. Every step of the way you have to make assumptions, ones that could introduce whopping errors if they’re wrong—”

  “You’ll make the right assumptions. Your intuition has always been good; you’re good at this stuff.”

  She shook her head harder. “I’m terrible at it. Mike or Lady Sally could do it, no sweat—they solve trickier problems all the time. Uncle Nikky would probably just get the right answer in a flash of light, like always. But my brain isn’t like theirs.”

  “Come on—I saw you hop from an orbiting Shuttle to that pool over there—”

  Her glare was withering. “Daddy…I haven’t done that yet. Not from my point of view.”

  Shit. “Yeah, well, you will.”

  She grimaced. “Fine. Okay, by now you’ve lived with me for, how long? Eleven years?”

  “Close enough,” I agreed.

  “You tell me. In all that time, do you ever remember me Transiting any further away than High Earth Orbit?”

  “Well…I remember one admittedly short visit to the Moon when you turned ten.”

  “Big whoop. Daddy, Mike and Uncle Nikky hop across the baryonic universe whenever they happen to feel like it! I’m out of my depth. God, I wish one of them was around!”