Robinson, Spider - Callahan 08 - Callahan' s Key

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This e-text was scanned from paperback, proofread, and double checked carefully by Gorgon776 in

early June, 2001. It was released 21 June 2001 for your reading pleasure in lit, rtf, html and

plain vanilla text format. Cover scans also by Gorgon 776. If you find any errors in this e-text,

please correct them, update the version number by .1 and post it to alt.binaries.e-books, with

Attn: Gorgon776 in the header. If you enjoy this book, buy it in dead-tree edition to support the

author. Better yet, go to Baen Books website and buy the electronic version of Spider Robinson's

books, or those of any other author with the balls to release their works in e-book format. If you

can't manage that, hunt down his address and send him whatever you think the book is worth.

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

CALLAHAN'S KEY

A Bantam Spectra Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bantam Spectra hardcover edition published July 2000

Bantam Spectra paperback edition/May 2001

SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed- "s" are trademarks of Bantam

Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Cover design by Jamie S. Warren Youll

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-051311

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property.

It was reported as "unsold and destroyed' to the publisher and neither the author nor the

publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

ISBN 0-553-58060-4

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark,

consisting of the words "Bantam Books' and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S.

Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway,

New York, New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

OPM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This one is for Guy Immesa

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD not have been possible without certain key speculations by cosmologists Alan Guth,

Sidney Coleman, and Sir Martin Rees, which I encountered in John Brockman's splendid book THE

THIRD CULTURE; my thanks to them for their unwitting assistance.

Possible or not, this book would have been much less plausible without the witting

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assistance of the following friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and kindly strangers: Guy Immega

(roboticist), Douglas Beder (physicist), David Sloan (physicist), Jaymie Matthews

(astrophysicist), Jef Raskin (interface expert; chief designer for the Macintosh), Douglas Scott

(cosmologist), Michael Spencer (blacksmith; philosopher), Bill McCutcheon (astrophysicist), David

Measday (astrophysicist), Joseph Green (writer; NASA alumnus), the uncredited creators of the NASA

website, Dean Ing (writer; auto designer/builder; military aviation expert) Laurence M. Jamfer

(writer; polymath), Ben Bova (writer; space travel expert), Douglas Girling (systems analyst;

aerospace expert), Ed Thelen (Internet Nike expert), and Ted Powell (programmer; cyberhistorian;

skeptic).

And those are just the people who helped with the science component of this story! (Any

errors arising from my misunderstanding of what they told me are, of course, all their fault, for

not explaining it better.)

Other invaluable assistance, advice, inspiration, or permission to quote was provided by

Spider John Koemer (musician), Don Ross (musician), the Beatles (the Beatles), David Gerrold

(writer; cat servant), Stephen Gaskin (hippie; writer; Head Judge for the first and second annual

International Cannabis Cup competitions in Amsterdam), Virginia Heinlein (retired naval officer;

biochemist; widow of Robert A. Heinlein), Lord Buckley (saint), Will Soto (tightrope-walking

juggler), the Key West Cultural Preservation Society and just about every Key West local I've ever

met. Special thanks must go to the superb Key West writer Laurence Shames, whose contribution to

this story (like those of Rees, Guth, and Coleman, above) was crucial, although quite unwitting.

And my ongoing gratitude goes to the alt.callahans Usenet newsgroup, for keeping me grounded.

All their efforts-and any efforts of my own-would have come to naught without the massive

ongoing love and support of my cherished wife Jeanne. . . or the acumen of my agent Eleanor Wood .

. . or the sagacity and kindness of my editor Patrick LoBrutto, who found several structural

defects and showed me how to fix them. And my friend Ted Powell deserves a second mention here,

for his work as volunteer creator and keeper of my website (which can be found at

http://psg.com/~ted/spider/).

Another second mention, and credit where it's due: the new name that Doc Webster suggests

for gamma-ray bursters, herein, is my own invention. . . but the exquisite topper Mei-Ling comes

up with was coined not by me but by Dr. Jaymie Matthews (who also came up with the title for my

triweekly Technology column in The Globe and Mail, Past Imperfect, Future Tenser).

Finally, my thanks to the late great madman Henry Morrison Flagler, without whom the whole

enterprise would not have been necessary-and to you, without whom it would have been pointless.

-Howe Sound, British Columbia 9 June, 1999

Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it...

-PHILIP K. DICK

If it ain't one thing, it's two things.

-GRANDFATHER STONEBENDER

CHAPTER ONE

Cold Reboot

"The future will be better tomorrow."

-J. Danforth Quayle

IT'S ALWAYS COLDEST before the warm.

Oh, it could have been colder that day, I guess-I hear there are places up north where

fifty below is considered a balmy day. But it could be a lot hotter than where I am now, if it

comes to that. This is just about as warm as I care to be-and the day the whole thing started, I

was as cold as I ever hope to get again in my life.

It was only twenty below, that day. . . but for Long Island, that's unusually frosty, even

in the dead of winter. Which that winter surely was: dead as folk music. Dead as Mary's Place.

Dead as Callahan's Place. Dead as my life, or my hopes for the future. You've read Steinbeck's THE

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WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT? Well, 1989 was the winter of our despair...

It's the little things you remember. You know how snow gets into your boots and makes you

miserable? I had been forced to stagger through a drift of snow so deep it had gotten into my

pants. A set of long underwear makes a wonderful wick. The damp patches from above and below had

met at my knees almost at once.

Not that snow of yesterday's blizzard had fallen to a depth of waist height. Long Island

isn't Nova Scotia or anything. My long soggies were simply the result of my tax dollars at work.

Just as I'd been in sight of my home-driving with extreme caution, and cursing the damned

Town of Smithtown that should have plowed this stretch of Route 25A yesterday, for Chrissake-I had

seen the town snowplow, coming toward me from the east. I'd experienced a microsecond of elation

before the situation became clear to me, and then I had moaned and banged my forehead against the

steering wheel.

Sure enough, the plow sailed by my home at a stately twenty miles an hour, trailing a long

line of cars and trucks nearly berserk with rage . . . and utterly buried my driveway with snow,

to the aforementioned waist height.

I knew perfectly well that there was nowhere else I could possibly park my car along that

stretch of two-lane highway anywhere within even unreasonable walking distance of home in either

direction-except the one driveway that I knew perfectly well the sonofabitching plow was about to

stop and plow out, which it did. The one right next door to mine. The driveway of the Antichrist,

where I would not have parked at gunpoint.

Of course the traffic stacked up behind that big bastard surged forward the instant it

fully entered Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi's drive and got out of their way. Of course not one of them

gave an instant's thought to the fact that the road under their accelerating tires would now no

longer be cleared of snow and ice. And there I was, big as life, right in their way, with my

forehead on the steering wheel...

So by the time I got that snow in my pants, trying to clamber over the new dirty-white

ridge that separated my home from civilization, I no longer had to worry about parking the car. Or

fixing the damn heater, or putting gas or oil in it, or any such chores. Just paying for the final

tow-and, of course, the rest of the payments to the bank. Needless to say, the only car in the

whole pileup that had been totaled was mine; all the people who'd caused the accident drove away

from the scene. And of course they'd all agreed it had been my fault.

On the bright side, I was reasonably unhurt. Indeed, the only wound I had to boast of was

an extremely red face. Not from anger, or even from the cold. Those goddam air bags are not soft.

They never mention that in the ads.

So I was not looking forward to going through my front door. In the first place, I hated

having to tell Zoey that we were pedestrians again. A nursing mother does not often receive such

news gladly-and especially not when the temperature outside is twenty below and nothing useful

lies within walking range. And in the second place-

-in the second place I knew exactly what I was going to see when I walked-okay, hobbled-

through that door. And I just didn't know if I could take it one more time.

Is there anything sadder in all the world than a great big comfy superbly appointed

tavern. . . so unmistakably empty and abandoned that the cobwebs everywhere have dust on theme

I'd tried to keep up a brave front, and sustained it maybe six months. Then I'd gradually

slacked off on the mopping and dusting and vacuuming and polishing. By the end of a year, I wasn't

even fixing leaks. What was the point? No way in hell was Mary's Place ever going to reopen. We-I,

Jake Stonebender, its proprietor, and all of my highly irregular clientele-had made the single,

fatal mistake of pissing off Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi. Our Ukrainian next-door neighbor-and the

beloved only aunt of Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi.

Town Inspector Grtozkzhnyi...

Have you ever seen the total stack of paperwork required to legally operate a tavern in

the Town of Smithtown in the County of Suffolk in the great State of New York in these United

States of America~ I don't mean the liquor license: assume you have that. Let's just say if I'd

had that stack of paperwork-all of it six-point type, and consisting mostly of blanks for me to

fill in-in the trunk of the car with me that day, I could have just climbed up on top of it and

stepped over that goddam heap of snow left in my driveway by one of Inspector Grtozkzhnyi's

minions. In order to open Mary's Place at all, back in '88-in less than five years, for less than

half a million dollars-I had been forced to run it outlaw, counting on its isolation and the fact

that I made no effort at all to attract business to protect it from official attention.

But as Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky."

So it killed me, every time I walked through those swinging doors and saw my dream,

shrouded in spiderwebs. I always saw it, for a brief instant, as it had briefly been: full of

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warmth and life and laughter and music and love and magic. It re-broke my heart every time. It had

been much more than just my livelihood, far more than simply the only thing my wife and I owned

besides a Honda presently being dragged away for burial, two noble but battered musical

instruments, and a small fortune in baby gear.

It had been the home and the nucleus of an experiment so grand and important and urgent

that I know of no parallel in human history, an experiment that, had it succeeded, might

conceivably have brought an end to much human misery. And on the very verge of success, at the

moment of its greatest triumph, the critical mass it had brought together and fanned to ignition

temperature had been smashed, scattered like glowing gravel across the countryside by the most

destructive force man has unleashed in the last two millennia: bureaucracy.

So it was with maximum reluctance and a deep sense of failure that I entered my home and

former workplace that day. I lurched through the outer door, stopped in the foyer, called, "Hi,

Homey, I'm Hun," to Zoey, and stomped my boots together to knock off a few shards of snow before

pushing open the swinging doors to go inside. Unfortunately, someone had entered just before me

and done the same thing, leaving a slick I had failed to notice.

Which is why I lost my footing and slipped and fell flat on my ass.

Now I had snow under my shirt, that had migrated up from my pants. (You see the little

things you remember?) I said a few words that could have gotten me ejected from the cheapest

brothel in Manila, and sat up. Thank heaven for the thick furry hat that had partially protected

my skull when it whanged against the floor. I took it off and felt my head with my hand, was

relieved to confirm that I probably wouldn't raise a lump. My ass was a different matter. I got

wearily to my feet-

-well, I started to. I got just far enough to raise my entire, already inflamed face up in

front of those swinging doors before they burst open.

The Big Bang. The slow, slow expansion. The Heat Death. Empty cold eternity. Someone

slapping my fucking face-

"Jesus Christ, Duck, knock it off! What the hell are you doing back?"

"Nap later," the Lucky Duck said. "You're working."

Ernie Shea is known to one and all as the Lucky Duck because around him the laws of

probability turn to Silly Putty-which combined with his short stature explains and may even excuse

an irascible sourpuss personality reminiscent of Daffy Duck. He is a mutant, the bastard offspring

of a pookah and a Fir Darrig, two creatures commonly thought to be mythical (everywhere except

Ireland), and strange things always happen around him. It's sort of a paranormal power.

I was too groggy to think through the implications of his presence.

"The hell I am," I snarled. "I haven't worked in over a year. The goddam bar is as dead as

Nutsy's Kells . . . and the Folk Music Revival developed ice crystals in the brain from the

defrosting process, they had to put it back to sleep again. There is no work, you dumb pookah!"

"You're working," he repeated. "Nikky's here. Come on."

"Huh?"

I levitated, then looked down and stuck my feet firmly to the floor. This was too weird

not to be true. At my gesture, the Lucky Duck went back inside, and I followed him. And there,

standing at my bar, impeccably dressed as always and wiping drool from the chin of my baby

daughter Erin, was indeed and in fact Nikola Tesla.

Perhaps the name rings a bell? Forgotten Father of the Twentieth Century? Father of alternating

current. . . the condenser . . . the transformer . . . the Tesla Coil...the very induction motor

itself...the remote control... radio . . . the crucial "AND-gate" logic circuit. . . and all the

essential components of the transistor? (Tesla held patents on all of these. . . and literally a

hundred more.) Friend of Mark Twain and Paderewski, sworn enemy of the evil Edison and treacherous

Marconi? Perhaps the single most outrageously shafted and dishonored man in the history of the

human race, screwed out of more credit and money than anyone since the guy who invented sex? That

Nikola Tesla? Okay, perhaps it seems a little odd that he was going bar-hopping in the snow at age

133. Especially since he'd died forty-six years earlier, in 1943. But Nikky has more fiber than I

do, I guess: he doesn't let a little thing like death slow him down. "Hi, Nikky," I called out.

"What's up?"

"Jake!" he cried, in that memorable baritone. "Excuse me, Erin."

"Sure, Uncle Nikky," my fourteen-month-old said, releasing his fingers.

"Thank heaven you are here," Tesla said to me, wiping his fingers off on Erin's barf-scarf

and handing her to the Lucky Duck . . . who reluctantly accepted her and held her at arm's length.

"There is little time to lose."

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I sighed. Somehow I knew what he was about to say. It had been that kind of a day. "Go

ahead. Tell me about it."

He took a deep breath himself, and those incredible eyebrows of his drew together. "Jake,

Michael and I need you to save the universe."

I slammed my hat to the barroom floor. "God damn it. AGAIN?"

"Jake-" Zoey began, coming out of our living quarters in the back.

"No, I mean it, Zoey. I'm sorry, Nikky, but this is starting to piss me off."

He nodded gravely. "It is exceedingly aggravating."

"Jake, it's not-"

"Zoey, when the hell did I ever sign any recruitment papers? I would have been a

conscientious objector for Nam, if I hadn't already been 4-F."

"Jake, it's not as if-"

"Enough is enough, you know? You can go to the well once too often."

"Jake, it's not as if you had-"

"Do I have any training for this shit? Do I have my own tools? All I ever volunteered for

in my life was going up on stage to make music, and running a bar, and helping you and Erin

conquer the planet, and I've blown two out of three so far."

"Jake, it's not as if you had anything better-"

"No, I'm serious: twice is as much as any man ought to be asked to serve his . . . I'm

sorry, love, what did you say?"

"It's not as if you had anything better to. . . oh, never mind, I won't say it."

Well, if she'd decided not to say it, then it was probably something that would have stung

like hell to hear, so I stopped trying to guess what it might have been. Besides, by then she was

taking my clothes off, which is likely to distract me no matter how busy we are.

"Jesus Christ, Jake," the Lucky Duck snickered, "even considering it's cold outside-"

"Duck," Zoey said, toweling me briskly with a huge bath towel, "would you like me to sit

on you while Jake makes a snowman out of yours so you can compare?"

He shriveled. Making two of us.

"Out of his what, Mommy?" Erin asked. Zoey ignored her and kept drying me; I endured it

with what dignity I could muster.

"Nikky," I said, "I appreciate the confidence you and Mike are placing in me-I'm really

flattered, okay?- but-"

"Are they talking about Daddy's penis? That's silly. It gets much bigger than that, I've

seen it-"

"-thank you, Erin, but excuse me, okay? Daddy has to tell Uncle Nikky he isn't going to

save the universe this time: after that we can discuss my penis." Zoey pulled sweatpants up me to

help change the subject. "Nikola, I would like to help you...but you have got the wrong man."

He looked somber. "There is no other, Jacob."

I went into my Lord Buckley imitation. "'What's the matter, Mr. Whale? Ain't you hip to

what's goin' down in these here parts? Don't you read the Marine News?" He didn't recognize the

quote, and I didn't have the heart to sustain it anyway. "Nikky, let me explain it in words of one

syllable," I said in my normal voice. "It's all over. The Place is dead. I got no crew."

"They yet live."

"Sure. Scattered all to hell and gone. Shorty and his wives are out west, Doc's retired to

Florida, Isham and Tanya went up to Nova Scotia, the rest are scattered all over the Island. I see

Long-Drink once a month if I'm lucky, and he's the one I still see the most. Christ knows what the

hell ever happened to Fast Eddie. Like John Lennon said, the dream is over."

Zoey had finished dressing me (fuzzy slippers, sweatshirt, bathrobe), and picked that

moment to yank the bathrobe belt tight around my middle, hard enough that I made a little peep

sound. "There," she said contentedly. "Erin, Bless your father."

The Duck had set Erin down on the bar; in a shot she crawled down to the far end, down

onto the counter and over to The Machine, studied the combination, and pushed the go button. The

conveyor belt hummed into life, and dragged an empty mug to its fate.

Nikky watched this soberly until he was sure Erin did indeed have sufficient coordination

to be safe where she was. (She could walk great, at fourteen months, but was far too smart to

attempt it on top of the bar.) Then he turned back to me. "How many could you assemble, if you

sounded the tocsin?"

Warm clothes and the prospect of coffee were beginning to mollify me a trifle; my voice

came out perhaps two tones lower and ten decibels softer than before. "Aw, hell, Nik. I guess . .

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. shit, I guess all of 'em. Sooner or later. Everybody that's still alive. If I started working

the phones right now, I could probably muster fifteen or twenty by this time tomorrow-all the ones

that are still close by. But where?"

"Beg pardon?"

"You can't have a club without a clubhouse. If twenty people all showed up here, tomorrow-

even if they showed up on foot, in the dead of night, from different directions-fifteen minutes

later the town, county, state, and feds would all come in the door right behind 'em, waving

warrants to dry the ink. We tried. Several times. Old Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi over yonder never

sleeps. That's why everybody's scattered. There's no place to meet.

"For a while a few of us tried taking over some existing bar and turning it into our place-

and it was a disaster. We even tried declaring ourselves a religious group and renting meditation

space, but we kept getting caught drinking and tossed out. A couple of folks even tried it without

booze or music, but it didn't work: I knew it wouldn't. And I am never going to be allowed to put

alcohol and a large group of people in the same room again-not in this state. Probably not

anywhere: I'm marked lousy with the feds, too. Some sister-in-law of Inspector Grtozkzhnyi has one

of those triple-digit GS numbers, wouldn't you know?" I trailed off, distracted by the scent that

promises surcease of pain.

By now The Machine had finished producing a mug of God's Blessing: Irish coffee. "Would

you come get it, Mommy?" Erin called.

Zoey went and got the cup, and brought it to me. It was snowcapped and warm to the hands,

and now that it was closer I could detect that second, subtler scent that promises surcease of

care. "Nikky," I said, "I don't have a crew, I don't have a place to put one, and the machine you

want was disassembled for parts long ago. You've got more chance of building a new Titan booster.

I'm sorry." I closed my eyes and took a long deep pull from my Irish coffee.

"Suppose a suitable place could be arranged?"

Warmth and goodness flowed into me, radiated slowly outward from my esophagus to bring

solace to every discontented cell. I was out of the stormy blast, in warm dry clothing, and my two

beloveds had put the caffeinated Water of Life into my hand, and there was more. What problems?

Things slowly began to soften and shift inside me.

All right, I said to the inside of my skull. I won't be fifty for another eight-point-four-

but-who's-counting-years yet. If I can have Irish coffee, and Zoey and Erin, then I guess maybe I

could get back on the damn horse one more time.

Time to start negotiating the fee.

"Nikky, we're going about this all wrong. We've skipped ahead to question three or four.

Question one is: What is the deadline? You're talking about a major operation-and the last two

times we only had a few hours' warning before the roof fell in. Literally. How much time have I

got to assemble the string and get 'em plugged in this time?"

He frowned-and the sight of Nikola Tesla frowning can be disheartening, if you haven't got

Irish coffee in your hand. Those eyebrows, you know. "I am not sure, Jake. But I do not see how it

could be more than. . . say, on the order of ten years."

I did a spit-take, which fortunately fell short of him. It is a terrible thing to do a

spit-take with Irish whiskey. Grandfather Stonebender used to say that after you die, Saint Peter

will suspend you head down in a barrel containing all the whiskey you've, ever wasted, and if you

drown, to hell with you. But I was so relieved at Tesla's words that I almost didn't mind. "Ten

years? Jesus, for a minute there I thought we had a problem."

Those mighty eyebrows rose again, to the top floor. "You feel that might be adequate?"

"To get the bunch of us telepathic again? Yeah, I think that's probably doable-if you can

really deliver a place, and maybe a little expense money. Tell you the truth, that's about the

kind of time scale I was thinking in when everything went to shit."

"Really?"

"Hey, I don't want to sound cocky. What the hell do I know? This is blue-sky R&D. But we

were telepathic three times-twice with help, and the last time by ourselves. You know yourself;

once the software runs two or three times, you're practically ready to ship product. I allowed a

ten-year fudge factor because. . . well, let's face it, we're a bunch of lazy drunken goof offs.

Hell, I was prepared to let twenty years go by without another success before I would have started

to worry. But if we're under the gun.. . well, we saved the world twice before, with a hell of a

lot less warning. What's the matter?"

Tesla was looking even more grave and somber than usual, if you can imagine that. "Jake,

you know that I rarely employ hyperbole."

"Well, hey, Nikky-you've never needed to."

"And I never use scientific terminology with imprecision."

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"Not that I've ever caught you at. Make your point. I can see it's bad news. How bad?"

His brows lowered even further, until he looked like Jehovah brooding over what He'd done

to poor old Job. "I do not wish to dishearten you, now that you are feeling optimistic. But I

cannot allow you to accept this responsibility in ignorance of the stakes."

"I haven't accepted yet. We're still two steps away, talking about whether I can deliver.

After this we discuss what I'm being offered. Rut by all means, let's be clear on the stakes

first. We're talking about the end of the world, right? What could be imprecise about that?" The

coffee began to kick into second gear. "Oh, I get you. Right, okay. Doubtless old Mother Gaia will

endure, whatever happens: technically we're only talking about the end of the human race or

something like that, is that it?"

I had not thought he could look any more uncomfortable, but now he looked like Jehovah the

day of the Assumption, trying to explain to the Virgin Mary why He'd never called her since that

night. "I am sorry, Jake. The second time you and your friends became telepathic, the stakes were

indeed, as you doubtless meant to imply, only the fate of humanity. . . and all the other forms of

life in this solar system down to the last virus. The third and most recent time, you were

fighting to save both all terrestrial life and all the members of the nonhuman civilization called

the Filarii: Mr. Finn's people, and their attendant subspecies."

"And this time?" It wasn't me who said it, it was Erin.

"This time the stakes are so much higher that a ratio cannot be formulated. My first words

to you were most carefully chosen, Jake."

I had absorbed enough caffeine now for my short-term memory to be functional. Those words

came back-and suddenly I understood him.

"Oh, my stars."

"Precisely," he agreed.

"You need me to save the universe."

"In its totality. Every last derivative of the Big Bang. All of creation."

"From what?"

"The quest for knowledge," he said sadly.

I couldn't help it. I fell down laughing.

And kept laughing, even though I had Just added the precious last mouthful of whiskey to

my afterlife hazard. The Lucky Duck roared along with me, and so did Erin, he an octave lower and

she two octaves higher. Zoey did not. Neither did Nikky.

But he did wear a small rueful smile. How could he help it, and be an honest man?

You meet people all the time who believe, deep down in their hearts, that "madscientist"

is one word, that most scientists are weird warlocks willing to risk all our lives by playing with

forces they don't really understand. You want, if you have half a brain, to smack such people. And

then you remember Oppie and Teller and the boys sitting around back at Trinity before Zero Hour,

taking bets on whether or not they were about to ignite the atmosphere-or Taylor, using a hydrogen

bomb to light his cigarette-and you change the subject. But in your heart you know that while

individual humans may be fallible or quirky, science itself-the search for truth-is holy.

And now the Father of Twentieth-Century Technology himself, a man who had dedicated his

life-both his lives-to the pursuit of knowledge, had told me with a straight face that the team to

which he had sworn allegiance was going to destroy not just the solar system, not merely the

Lesser Magellanic Cloud or even the whole Local Group, but everything. Can there be a funnier

joke?

Well, yes. To fix the situation, he was depending on a widely dispersed bunch of-barflies.

I don't know how long I might have kept on laughing. I was just beginning, in fact, to

realize that I might have a small problem in stopping, when the two men with guns came in. That

did it. Instinct, you know.

I don't know how it is everywhere else, but in the New York/Long Island area, common disaster

generally tends to bring out the best in people-the first time.

During the first great East Coast Blackout, for instance-what was it, 1965?-we responded

magnificently. People helped one another, sometimes heroically; there are hundreds of stories.

Then some of them sat around and thought for a year or so about what chumps they'd been. The

second time the grid went down, there were still heroes. . . but there were also many incidences

of looting, vandalism, rape, and general mischief.

Well, the snow I had so recently trudged through was that of the second road-blocking,

Island-paralyzing blizzard that winter...

It's funny, the little things you notice. The first gun was a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum

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hand-cannon. It wasn't even the most powerful handgun in the world back when Dirty Harry made that

claim for the .357 Magnum, and there are some today that would give it a permanent case of barrel

droop, but I knew it would have no trouble killing a truck. The other gun was a collector's item,

a .455 Webley that had probably seen service in the Argonne Forest. . . but threw a bigger slug

than the Magnum. It was only after I assessed both weapons that I took in the guys holding them,

even though they were much more interesting. Old habits die hard.

The Magnum was being steered by a skinhead. He had covered every other square inch of his

body with furred garments like something out of Road Warrior, right up to his nose, but apparently

just could not bear to cover his shining statement to society. His scalp and ears were reddening

as circulation returned to them. Nonetheless, he was bright-eyed. Too bright-eyed for adrenalin,

drugs, or madness: it had to be a combination of at least two.

The Webley was held by a sour-faced guy who looked like a Vermont storekeeper, dressed

like a Long Island wannabe-survivalist, and had eyes like a serial killer with a toothache.

In this weather, neither of them had been able to locate a ski mask. No professionalism

anymore. Maybe they planned to leave no witnesses. Maybe they just didn't plan.

Baldy pulled fur down with his free hand to display a broad vulpine grin and swastikas

tattooed (wrong way round) on each cheek. "Surprise," he cried. "We're collectin' for Good Will!"

"You, Skinny," Rambo said, meaning me, "get the till. Everybody else, turn out your

pockets on this table here. Now." He gestured with the Webley for effect, and began shaking out a

sack.

I sighed and stood up. "Boys," I said, "ordinarily I'd be happy to play with you, but I'm

a little busy right now, I have to save the universe. Here's the very best deal I can cut you: you

lose the iron, you clear the door within thirty seconds, you can live. You don't even have to

apologize, okay?" I spread my hands. "What could be fairer than that?"

Baldy looked to Rambo for guidance. "I think he said 'no,'" Rambo explained. Baldy nodded

and shot me twice. In the chest first, and then low in the belly. He started to look away to savor

the shock and horror on everybody else's faces, and then did a double take.

I shook my head wearily and walked toward him.

Behind me, Zoey growled once, and subsided.

Baldy's eyes were like golf balls, and his skull had stopped reddening, but his grin got

even bigger. Obviously I was wearing some kind of Kevlar vest. Figure out why later. He shot me

three times in the face.

Zoey growled again. I stopped a couple of feet from him and folded my arms across my

chest. "Now you're going to have to apologize," I said.

He looked at the gun, then me, then the gun, then me, then the gun- Erin piped up from

over on the bartop. "Can I have his mittens, Daddy? They look just like woofy dogs."

"Yes, honey," I told her.

That unstuck Bàldy from his loop. He yanked his gaze toward Erin-then began quartering

that section of the room for whoever had actually spoken.

"You're really stupid," she told him.

He stared at her, slowly worked out that he was in fact being addressed, and dissed, by an

infant. Even with all he had to think about already, this outraged him. Or perhaps he was just

panicked, operating on drug logic. In any case, he plumbed new depths of stupidity: he lifted his

gun and shot Erin.

She giggled. "That tickles," she informed him.

Nikky, the Duck, and I all leaped at the same instant, and were barely in time. Between

us, we were just able to restrain Zoey. My wife is a large lady; it took everything we had, and we

might not have managed it if her forebrain had been functioning at the time. She bit me on the ear

and drew blood without realizing it. I got hold of her face and held it a couple of inches from

mine until her eyes focused and I could see she recognized me, and then I said very urgently, "We

do not have time to dick around with disposing of bodies just now."

She closed her eyes momentarily-then nodded and slumped. We let her go at once, and I

turned back to my guests.

They were backing away, very slowly-but froze once I was looking at them again. Rambo

wasn't even bothering to gesture talismanically with his Webley; it hung forgotten at his side.

Baldy's scalp was so pale, it seemed to glow, and his swastikas blazed like embarrassment on his

white cheeks. He snapped out of his trance, cracked his piece, took a speedloader from some

pocket. . . then saw my expression and dropped both on the floor.

"I am very, very sorry," he said sincerely.

"So am I," Rambo said, "even though he did it."

"I got excited, you know?" Baldy said. "I thought it was a midget."

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"You're an asshole," his partner told him.

"No argument. And I really am very very very sorry."

"Not yet," I told him. "But you will be."

"You're gonna take our souls now, right?"

Beside me, the Lucky Duck emitted that wonderful, honking laugh of his. "What do you

figure the market value of these two souls might bee"

"Two rubles?" I hazarded.

He looked at me. "There's no need to insult them."

I shrugged. "Do I need a reason?" I turned back to the cowering pair. "Your souls 1

condemn you to keep. But we'll have your clothes."

They gaped.

"All of them."

Both of them, as one, looked to Zoey. Whatever they saw in her eyes made their knees start

to tremble. Baldy turned to Rambo. "Shoot me," he begged.

"Me first," Rambo said, and lifted the Webley toward his own head.

Erin got him square in the eye with a jet of high pressure hot water from the hose in the

sink behind the bar. He dropped the gun and started tearing at the fastenings of his coat, crying,

"I'msorryl'msorryl'msorry-" After a moment Baldy followed his example.

After a while I moved forward to collect the guns. The pair backed away as I approached,

shedding items of clothing as they went.

"Can I look at the guns, Daddy?" Erin asked.

"Sure, honey," I said, and brought them to her, reloading the Magnum for her before

setting it down within her reach.

Even half naked in the midst of total confusion and terror, this got to Rambo. "You'd give

a loaded gun to an infant"" he asked me.

"Somebody gave one to you," I said. "Keep going."

He glanced at Erin, who was struggling to lift the Webley-fumbled with shirt buttons-said

the hell with it and tore the thing open.

It was reasonably safe, would have been even if Erin had been a normal baby. Everyone in

the room-except the two stripping penitents, Tesla, and the Lucky Duck-was bulletproof. The rest

of us had all long since been impact shielded by Mickey Finn, that cyborged Filarii warrior I

mentioned earlier. I myself had once personally tested the shielding by setting off a nuclear

weapon at arm's length, and it worked just fine. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little: it was only a

homemade pony-yield nuke, strictly kiloton-range stuff. But I wasn't worried about stray .44

slugs.)

A little while after that, we sent those fellows on their way, traveling considerably

lighter than when they'd arrived. When we last saw them, they had none of the stuff they'd arrived

with-not even Baldy's nipple rings. But since it was twenty below out there, and the sun was

setting by now, we didn't send them out totally naked. Each was tastefully attired in a little

strip of plastic, locked very tightly around his thumbs behind his back, doing just what it was

designed to do: secure a bag of garbage. And, of course, each now wore a label as well: the word

"LOOTER" in large capital letters, written across his belly in indelible laundry marker. No idea

what ever became of either of them.

"Erin," Tesla said later, as we were all refreshing ourselves after the rude interruption, "I owe

you an apology. Intellectually, I am perfectly aware that you are of high normal adult

intelligence. After all, I was present on the night of your birth: I myself helped you interface

with Solace, with the Internet, so that we could defeat the Lizard's dark side and save humanity.

I know Solace accelerated the maturation of your cortex, and I'm aware that you've been raised

with the help of an Al kernel she left behind when she died. But I confess that emotionally, I

have continued to think of you as merely a very precocious infant-perhaps because your strength

and coordination lag somewhat behind your intellect. Yet you acted more quickly and more rightly

than any of the rest of us, just now, with that water hose. I thought we had lost the one in the

camouflage gear." He bowed and kissed her hand. "I shall not make the same mistake again."

When my kid dimples, she dimples. "Thank you, Uncle Nikky. When I'm sixteen, I plan to

start having sex- would you like to take a number? I can squeeze you in the single digits if you

hurry."

Tesla was a virgin until shortly after he died. But he's made up for it since, and he was

always a hard man to faze, and besides I think he was born gallant; he took it without blinking,

and did not even glance at Zoey or me. "I would be honored, dear lady. You have my phone number,"

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he said, and bowed again. Then he glanced at Zoey and me...and returned our grins.

"Okay, that little sideshow just now was fun, but let's get back to business," I said.

"Nikky, I was going to ask you to explain exactly how the quest for knowledge is going to doom the

universe, next, and then what the hell you expect us to do about it-but we can get to all that

crap later Right now, let's cut to the important part: what's in it for me?"

This time Tesla blinked.

"My standard fee for saving the universe," I said, "is a bar, and enough money and clout

to run it."

"Yes, of course, Jake. I told you, all these things will be arranged."

"I want 'em now. All of a sudden I've had enough of this dump. Enough of Long Island. Hand

me the keys to my new cash register, and we can sit around and spend the next ten years figuring

out what to do about Armageddon."

His mustache went back and forth a few times, as if to scrub something off his lower lip.

"I, uh, do not exactly have a site for you, yet."

I nodded and held out my hand. "Okay. How about enough money to buy one?"

He looked pained. "Jake, you know I don't use money."

I sighed. "I'm supposed to save the universe on credit. Didn't you bring me anything for a

down payment?"

"Yes." He gestured. "Mr. Shea. Ernie. I brought him back here from Ireland."

I felt like an idiot. In all the confusion, I had failed to think through the

implications. The Lucky Duck was back!

The Duck gave me his most insolent grin. He held up his hairy right hand, its hairy

fingers clenched in the makings of a fist. A shiny quarter rested atop them. "Call it," he told

me, looking me in the eye, and snapped the coin straight up in the air with his thumb without

looking at it.

As if I needed the demonstration. "On its edge," I said automatically, kept looking at his

mocking grin, and waited for the sound of the coin hitting the floor. After a while I got tired of

waiting and looked up. The quarter was neatly wedged into a small crack in the ceiling.

"I win," I said.

He spread his hands and bowed, a rude imitation of Tesla's bow to Erin. "Exactly."

I turned to Nikky. "This is all you bring me, to save the universe with. A half-breed

pookah with the luck of the devil."

"Yes, Jake."

I nodded judiciously. "Should be enough. Okay, I guess the first-oh damn, again?"

Someone else was coming through the swinging doors, trailing snow.

Like any sensible person, he was swathed in clothing, including a ski mask, only his eyes

showing and those in shadow. In stature and stance he rather resembled an orangutan, with slightly

overlong arms, reminding me of a guy I knew. He carried a large, very old, very battered suitcase.

"We're closed, friend," I called out.

"And we're busy," the Duck added. "If you want to rob the joint, see the kid with the

Magnum over there."

Without setting down his luggage, the newcomer shook off his other glove and reached

upward. That's when I recognized him, before he even got the ski mask off: I saw the hand.

I glanced around and saw that everyone else recognized him too; they were all waiting for

me. I took a deep breath, nodded a silent three-count, and we all chorused, at the top of our

lungs: "EDDIE!"

Fast Eddie Costigan nodded, looking more like an orangutan than ever now that his face was

visible. "Hiyez," he said, and waved.

We swarmed him. Well, all of us except Erin, who had to be content with dialing him up an

Irish coffee (she knew his prescription) while the rest of us hugged and pounded and kissed him.

He accepted all this stoically.

Fast Eddie is the greatest piano player alive. Of somewhat lesser importance, he is also

the oldest member of the original Callahan's Place, save for Mike Callahan himself, and after

Callahan's was destroyed by the nuclear weapon I mentioned earlier, he continued to fill the piano

chair for me during the short happy life of Mary's Place. But I hadn't seen or heard a word of him

since the day Inspector Grtozkzhnyi shut us down, almost a year and a half ago.

When the greeting rite was done, I said, "So what've you been up to, Eddie?." and before

he could answer, turned to Zoey and mimed the words four words, tops. She looked dubious.

He didn't let me down. He brushed past me, heaved his suitcase up onto the bar next to

Erin (nodding to her; she grinned back), popped the latches, and flung the lid open. "Got it,

Boss," he said.

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