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TIME TRAVELERS STRICTLY CASH

for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the

publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is

purely coincidental.

An ACE Book

First Ace printing: March 1981

Published Simultaneously in Canada

2468097531

Manufactured in the United States of America

FIVESIGHT-Copyright (c) July, 1979, Omni Publications International, Ltd. reprinted with

permission of copyright owner

SOULSEARCH-Copyright (c) December, 1979, 0mm Publications International, Ltd., reprinted with

permission of copyright owner.

GOD IS AN IRON-Copyright (c) May, 1979, Omni Publications International, Ltd., reprinted with the

permission of copyright owner.

SERPENT'S TEETH-Copyright (c) February 1981, Omni Publications International, Ltd., reprinted with

the permission of copyright owner.

Publications; reprinted by permission of the author

of the author

author.

1981, Spider Robinson

This one's for Jim Baen, of course.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forewords 1

Fivesight 6

Soul Search 27

Spider vs. the Hax of Sol III 47

Dog Day Evening 57

God Is An Iron 72

Rah Rah R.A.H. 95

Have You Heard The One 121

Local Champ 146

The Web of Sanity 155

Mirror/rorriM Off The Wall 161

Serpents' Teeth 184

FORE WORDS

TO NEW READERS:

If you have never heard of Callahan's Place before, a brief word of itroduction should be

read-since four stories in this book take place there.

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Don't worry! You're not late, nothing has started without you, there is no lengthy What-

Has~Gone-Before to digest before you can begin. The Callahan stories have appeared in several

different magaznes, and so I've done my best to make each individual story self-contained. All you

need to know going in is that Callahan's bar has a fireplace, and a chalk line on the floor about

ten meters away, and that patrons who are willing to give up the change from their drink are

welcome to toe that line, propose a toast, and eighty-six their empty glass in that fireplace.

(Callahan gets a bulk discount on glasses.) As a result of this custom, a great many strange

stories end up getting told in Callahan's Place, and you may, (f you wish, skip now directly to

the first one, "Fivesight."

TO FR1ENDS OF CALLAHAN'S PLACE:

All right, I give up.

I tried; God knows I tried: you'd think a professional liar could have pulled it off. But

you people are just too clever for me. My cover is blown; time to face the music and confess.

In the first collection of Callahan's bar stories, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (Ace

paperback), I maintained flatly that there is no such tavern. 'Callahan's Place," l said as that

time, "exists only between (a) my ears. (b) assorted Analog and Vertex covers, and of course (c)

the covers of this book. Lf there is in fact a Callahan's Place out there in the so-called real

world, and you know where it is, I sincerely hope you'll tell me."

In a fit of craftiness, I even went solar as to insert a few subtle contradictions in the

stories themselves. For example, on page 1O I stated that the Place is always crowded on holidays;

on page 162 I said it is usually empty on holidays. By this brilliant ploy I hoped I could

discredit myself, and appear to be an absent~minded fictioneer. Such details get noticed! I have a

hundred letters from readers who spotted that discrepancy, each convinced that they are smarter

than me.

Since it seemed to work so well, I continued the custom. To each of the Callahan yarns

Jake has told me since that first book was closed up I have added a tiny inconsistency with the

rest of the series (and an autographed cigar butt to the first reader who correctly names them

all). By this means I believed I could maintain the hoax forever.

But there are five letters on my desk that say that the jig is up.

The first four are from people who found Callahan's Place. All four had needed to believe

so badly that they ignored my disclaimer: they simply kept searching for the Place until they

found it. 1 should have known it would happen. The Place is like that. But those letters caused me

to reconsider the ethics of concealing the truth. How many people needed Callahan's, but gave up

because I told them the quest was hopeless?

Look: there is no restaurant so good that it can survive Being Discovered. If you know a

real nice place to hang out, the best thing you can do-for yourself and for the place-is to keep

your mouth shut about it, at least publicly. Close friends can sometimes be tipped off-but even

here care is required, as every friend has other close friends. It sounds selfish, but it's just

pragmatic. If five hundred people try to share an apple, nobody benefits. Especially not the

apple. So my inclination has been to play Callahan's Place close to the vest.

But there's that fifth letter I mentioned.

It is from Mike Callahan; Handwritten, of course; his pinkies are a typewriter-key-and-a-

half in width. The penmanship is superb; some long-ago nun's stern discipline has triumphed over

broken fingers and popped knuckles and a natural disposition to be easygoing in all things. The

ink is green. The paper is wrinkled and beer-stained, and smells faintly of cigar smoke-very cheap

cigar smoke.

Mike writes, in part:

I appreciate your trying to keep the tourists and voyeurs out of our hair-if this Place

gets too crowded, I can't let people smash their glasses in the fireplace. By all means keep our

location under your hat, and keep your hat in a safe-deposit box. But I think you've gone just a

bit too far in that direction. If folks think your stones are fiction, they're liable to get the

idea that this Place is only imaginary, that a Place like this couldn't 'really' exist. They'll

miss the point that any bar can be Callahan's Place, as soon as responsible people start hanging

out there together. You'd be surprised how many sad sons of bitches believe people only care about

each other in books.

I don't think you've given too many clues to our location. 'Somewhere off Route 25A in

Suffolk County, N.Y.' covers a lot of territory-anybody who can track us from that is either

hurting bad enough to belong here, or resourceful enough to buy a round for the house.

So let's go public.

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P.S.: When are you coming down for a visit? The Doc has a new stinker for you, and Jake

and Eddie want to jam.

Which last brings me to a second confession:

This is NOT "just" a collection of Callahan's Place stories, and so it is not, strictly

speaking, a sequel to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.

It was supposed to be; that's how the contract reads. Yet Callahan stories occupy a little

less than half the total wordage, just over 60% of the fiction content. Why? Well, now that I've

revealed the truth-that Callahan's Place really exists-I can explain, it's absurdly simple,

really.

I don't live in Suffolk County any more.

I had so much success transcribing lake's yarns about Callahan's Place (somehow that way-

out stuff never seems to happen while I'm there) that I was encouraged to try writing real science

fiction on my own. It worked out rather well, and soon I decided I wanted to write for a living.

But the year I went freelance my annual income went from around ten thousand to around one

thousand, and the next year it took a sharp drop-it speedily became apparent that I would have to

live somewhere much less expensive than Suffolk County, Long Island. I chose the woods of Nova

Scotia's great North Mountain, and eventually made that province my home. I haven't been back to

Long Island but three or four quick visits since the flrst book of Callahan's stories was closed

up. Each time I wormed another yarn out of Jake; each time I sold the results to a magazine (and

my financial agreement with Jake is none of your business, thanks)-but the total wordage as of

last week was only 28,000, somewhat less than half a book.

That's where matters stood when Jim Baen, then editor of Ace Books, and my old chum,

called up to remind me that it has been along time since I contracted to supply a second

Callahan's book.

(Hell, it's been a long time since the deadline.)

I had failed, you see, to anticipate just how popular Callahan's Place would become.

Crosstisne Saloon was published almost four years ago; here I sit at my desk wearing a Callahan's

Place t-shirt (not my doing-an Ann Arbor entrepreneur saw a profit in them). On the desk is a

Callahan's Christmas card (again, private enterprise), three different lyric sheets for songs

written about the Place, and cassettes containing two more. Also on the desk is a copy of the new

hardcover edition of Saloon (available from Ridley Enslow, 60 Crescent Place, Short Hills, NJ

07078), which exists because the paperback was named a Best Book For Young Adults in 1977 by the

American Library Association. Funny stories almost never get nominated for Hugos, but "Dog Day

Evening," herein reprinted, is one of about five to make it in the last ten years. In 1978 The

Sydney (Australia) Science Fiction Foundation awarded me the Pat Terry Memorial Award for Hunwrous

Writing, for the Callahan stories. (It is one of the most practical awards I know: a silver-plated

beer mug.) Television and movie rights to the book have been optioned, radio rights are being

negotiated, I understand a tunnel in Boston has been named after Callahan...

In short, Baen had reason to believe he could sell another Callahan book. Furthermore, in

law, he owned one, half paid for, "Where," he inquired politely, "is it?"

I explained the situation, and assured him that a trip to Long Island was simply not

possible any time in the forseeable future.

He assured me that a trip to Sing Sing was inevitable If I didn't deliver.

So we compromised.

Herein be four stories from Callahan's Place. Herein also be four non-Callahan stories,

all written within the last year (NOT, in other words, out-takes from my other story collection,

Antimony [currently available from Dell books] but newer, even better stuff.) Finally, this book

contains three non-fiction pieces, two at the request of Jim Baen, and one on my own initiative.

The two Baen insisted on were the very first book review column I ever wrote (for reasons to be

discussed later) and an essay I wrote for his superb bookazine Destinies concerning Robert A

Heinlein. The one I threw in is a speech I made at the 1978 Minneapolis Science Fiction Convention

concerning the nature and value of fandom.

Put it all together, wrap it up with commentary, and it approaches 80,000 words, a pretty

good-sized book, of which I find I am inordinately proud.

Now, there will, someday, be a "second Callahan book," comprised exclusively of Jake's

yarns. Those contained in this book will form less than half of it. If you want to wait for it, by

all means, do so.

But one thing that would hasten the day of its arrival would be for this book to make a

bundle of money.

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-Spider Robinson

Halifax, 1980

FIVESIGHT

I know what the exact date was, of course, but I can't see that it would matter to you.

Say it was just another Saturday night at Callahan's Place.

Which is to say that the joint was merry as hell, as usual. Over in the corner Fast Eddie

sat in joyous combat with Eubie Blake's old rag "Tricky Fingers," and a crowd had gathered around

the piano to cheer him on. It is a demonically difficult rag, which Eubie wrote for the specific

purpose of humiliating his competitors, and Eddie takes a crack at it maybe once or twice a year.

He was playing it with his whole body, grinning like a murderer and spraying sweat in all

directions. The onlookers fed him energy in the form of whoops and rebel yells, and one of the

unlikely miracles about Callahan's Place is that no one claps along with Eddie's music who cannot

keep time. All across the rest of the tavern people whirled and danced, laughing because they

could not make their feet move one fourth as fast as Eddie's hands. Behind the bar Callahan danced

with himself, and bottles danced with each other on the shelves behind him. I sat stock-still in

front of the bar, clutched my third drink in fifteen minutes, and concentrated on not bursting

into tears.

Doc Webster caught me at it. You would not think that a man navigating that much mass

around a crowded rooin could spare attention for anything else; furthermore, he was dancing with

Josie Bauer, who is enough to hold anyone's attention. She is very pretty and limber enough to

kick a man standing behind her in the eye. But the Doc has a built-in compass for pain; when his

eyes fell on mine, they stayed there.

His other professional gift is for tact and delicacy. He did not glance at the calendar,

he did not pause in his dance, he did not so much as frown. But I knew that he knew.

Then the dance whirled him away. I spun my chair around to the bar and gulped whiskey.

Eddie brought "Tricky Fingers" to a triumphant conclusion, hammering that final chord home with

both hands, and his howl of pure glee was audible even over the roar of applause that rose from

the whole crew at once. Many glasses hit the fireplace together, and happy conversation began

everywhere. I finished my drink. For the hundredth time I was grateful that Callahan keeps no

mirror behind his bar: Behind me, I knew, Doc Webster would be whispering in various ears,

unobtnisively passing the word, and I didn't want to see it.

"Hit me again, Mike," I called out.

"Half a sec, Jake," Callahan boomed cheerily. He finished drawing a pitcher of beer, stuck

a straw into it, and passed it across to Long-Drink McGonnigle, who ferried it to Eddie. The big

barkeep ambled my way, running damp hands through his thinning red hair. "Beer?"

I produced a very authentic-looking grin. "Irish again."

Callahan looked ever so slightly pained and rubbed his big broken nose. "I'll have to have

your keys, Jake."

The expression one too many has only a limited meaning at Callahan's Place. Mike operates

on the assumption that his customers are grown-ups--he'll keep on serving you for as long as you

can stand up and order 'em intelligibly. But no, one drunk drives home from Callahan's. When he

decides you've reached your limit, you have to surrender your car keys to keep on drinking, then

let Pyotr-who drinks only ginger ale-drive you home when you fold.~

"British constitution," I tried experimentally. "The lethal policeman dismisseth us. Peter

Pepper packed his pipe with paraquat . .

Mike kept his big hand out for the keys. "I've heard you sing 'Shiny Stockings' blind

drunk wouthout a single syllabobble, Jake."

"Damn it," I began, and stopped. "Make it a beer, Mike."

He nodded and brought me a Löwenbráu dark. "How about a toast?"

I glanced at him sharply. There was a toast that I urgently wanted to make, to have behind

me for another year. "Maybe later."

"Sure. Hey, Drink! How about a toast around here?"

Long-Drink looked up from across the room. "I'm your man." The conversation began to abate

as he threaded his way through the crowd to the chalk line on the floor and stood facing the deep

brick fireplace. He is considerably taller than somewhat, and he towered over everyone. He waited

until he had our attention.

"Ladies and gentlemen and regular customers." he said then, "you may find this difficult

to believe, but in my youth I was known far and wide as a jackass." This brought a spirited

response, which he endured stoically. "My only passion in life, back in my college days, was

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grossing people out. I considered it a holy mission, andl had a whole crew of other jackasses to

tell me I was just terrific. I would type long letters, onto a roll of toilet paper, smear mustard

on the last square, then roll it back up and mail it in a box. I kept a dead mouse in my pocket at

all times. I streaked Town Hall in 1952. I loved to see eyes glaze. And I regret to confess that I

cOncentrated mostly on ladies, because they were the easiest to gross out. Foul Phil, they called

me in them-days. I'll tell you what cured me." He wet his whistle, confident of our attention.

"The only trouble with a reputation for rudeness is that sooner or later you run short of

unsuspecting victims. So you look for new faces. One day I'm at a party off campus, and I notice a

young lady I've never seen before, a pretty little thing in an off-the-shoulder blouse. Oboy, I

sez to myself, fresh blood! What'll I do? I've got the mouse in one pocket, the rectal-thermometer

swizzle stick in the other, but she looks so virginal and innocent I decide the hell with

subtlety, I'll try a direct approach. So I walk over to where she's sittin' talkin' to Petey

LeFave on a little couch. I come up behind her, like, upzip me trousers, out with me instrument,

and lay it across her shoulder."

There were some howls of outrage, from the men as much as from the women, and some

giggles, from the women as

much as fmrnthe men. "Well, I said I was a jackass," the Drink Said, and we all applauded.

"No reaction whatsoever do I get from her," he went on, dropping into his fake brogue.

"People grinnin' or growlin' all round the room just like here, Petey's eyes poppin', but this

lady gives no sign that she's aware of me presence atall, atall. I kinda wiggle it a bit, and not

a glance does she give me. Finally 1 can't stand it. 'Hey,' I sez, tappin' her other shoulder and

pointing, 'what do you think this is?' And she' takes a leisurely look. Then she looks me in the

eye and says, 'It's something like a man's penis, only smaller.'

An explosion of laughter and applause filled the room.

". . . wherefore," continued Long-Drink, "I propose a toast to me youth, and may God save

me from a relapse." And the cheers overcame the laughter as he gulped his drink and flung the

glass into the fireplace. I nearly grinned myself.

"My turn," Tommy Janssen called out, and the Drink made way for him at the chalk line.

Tommy's probably the youngest of the regulars; I'd put him at just about twenty-one. His hair is

even longer than mine, but he keeps his face mowed.

"This happened to me just last week. I went into the city for a party, and I left it too

late, and it was the wrong neighborhood of New York for a civilian to be in at that time of night,

right? A dreadful error! Never been so scared in my life. I'm walking on tippy-toe, looking in

every doorway I pass and trying to look insolvent, and the burning question in my mind is, 'Are

the crosstown buses still running?' Because if they are, I can catch one a block away that'll take

me to bright lights and safety-but I've forgotten bow late the crosstown bus keeps running in this

part of town. It's my onJy hope. I keep on walking, scared as hell. And when I get to the bus

stop, there, leaning up against a mailbox, is the biggest, meanest-looking, ugliest, blackest man

I have ever seen in my life. Head shaved, three days' worth of beard, big scar on his face, hands

in his pockets."

Not a sound in the joint.

"So the essential thing is not to let them know you're scared. I put a big grin on my

face, and I walk right up to him and I stammer, 'Uh. . . crosstown bus run all night long?' And

the fella goes . . . " Tommy' mimed a ferocious looking giant with his hands in his pockets. Then

suddenly he yanked them out, clapped them rhythmically, and sang, "Doo-dah, doo-dah!"

The whole bar dissolved in laughter.

". . . fella whipped out a joint, and we both got high while we waited for the bus," he

went on, and the laughter redoubled. Tommy finished his beer and cocked the empty. "So my toast is

to prejudice," he finished, and pegged the glass square into the hearth, and the laughter became a

standing ovation. Isham Latimer, who is the exact color of recording tape, came over and gave

Tommy a beer, a grin, and some skin.

Suddenly I thought I understood something, and it filled me with-shame.

Perhaps in my self-involvement I was wrong. I had not seen the Doc communicate in any way

with Long-Drink or Tommy, nor had the toasters seemed to notice me at all. But all at once it

seemed suspicious that both men, both proud men, had picked tonight to stand up and

uncharacteristically tell egg-on-my-face anecdotes. Damn Doc Webster! I had been trying so hard to

keep my pain off my face, so determined to get my toast made and get home without bringing my

friends down.

Or was I, with the egotism of the wounded, reading too much into a couple of good

anecdotes well told? I wanted to bear the next toast. I turned around to set my beer down so I

could prop my face up on both fists, and was stunned out of my self-involvement, and was further

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ashamed.

It was inconceivable that I could have sat next to her for a full fifteen minutes without

noticing her-anywhere in the world, let alone at Callahan's Place.

I worked the night shift in a hospital once, pushing a broom. The only new faces you see

are the ones they wheel into Emergency. There are two basic ways people react facially to mortal

agony. The first kind smiles a lot, slightly apologetically, thanks everyone elaborately for small

favors, extravagantly praises the hospital md its every employee.

The face is animated, trying to ensure that the last impression it leaves before going under the

knife is of a helluva nice person whom it would be a shame to lose. The second kind is absolutely

blank-faced, so utterly wrapped up in wondering whether he's dying that he has no attention left

for working the switches and levers of the face-or so certain of death that the perpetual dialogue

people conduct with their faces has ceased to interest him. It's not the total deaniination of a

corpse's face, butit's not far from it.

Her face was of the second type. I suppose it could have been cancer or some such, but

somehow I knew her pain was not physical. I was just as sure that it might be fatal. I was so

shocked I violated the prime rule of Callahan's Place without even thinking :about it. "Good God,

lady," I blurted, "What's the matter?"

Her head turned toward me with such elaborate care that I knew her car keys must be in the

coffee can behind the bar. Her eyes took awhile focusing on me, but when they did, there was no

one looking out of them. She enunciated her words.

"Is it to me to whom you are referring?"

She was not especially pretty, not particularly well dressed, her hair cut wrong for her

face and in need of brushing. She was a normal person, in other words, save that her face was

uninhabited, and somehow I could not take my eyes off her. It was not the pain I wanted to take my

eyes from that it was something else.

It was necessary to get her attention. "Nothing, nothing, just wanted to tell you your

hair's on fire."

She nodded. "Think nothing of it." She turned back to her screwdriver and started to take

a sip and sprayed it all over the counter. She shrieked on the inhale, dropped the glass, and

flung her hands at her hair.

Conversation stopped all over the house.

She whirled on me, ready to achieve total fury at the slightest sign of a smile, and I

debated gvng her that release but decided she could not afford the energy it would cost her.

"I'm truly, truly sorry," I said at once, "but a minute ago you weren't here and now you

are, and that's the way I wanted it."

Callahan was there, his big knuckly hand resting light as lint on my shoulder. His

expression was mournful. "Prying, Jake? You?"

"That's up to her, Mike," I said, holding her eyes.

"What you talkin' about?" she asked.

"Lady,"! said, "there's so much pain on your face! just have to ask you, How come? If you

don't want to tell me, then I'm prying." She blinked. "And if you are?"

"The little guy with a face like a foot who has by now tiptoed up behind me will brush his

blackjack across my occiput, and I'll wake up tomorrow with the same kind of head you're gonna-

have. Right, Eddie?"

"Dat's right, Jake, "the piano man's voice came from just behind me.

She shook her head dizzily, then looked around at friendly, attentive faces. "What the

hell kind of place is this?"

Usually we prefer to let newcomers figure that out for themselves, but I couldn't wait

that long. "This is Callahan's. Most joints the barkeep listens to your troubles, but we happen to

love this one so much that we all share his load. This is the place you found because you needed

to." I gave it everything I had.

She looked around again, searching faces. I saw her look for the prurience of the accident

spectator and not find it; then I saw her look again for compassion and find it. She turned back

to me and looked me over carefully. I tried to look gentle, trustworthy, understanding, wise, and

strong. I wanted to be more than I was for her. "He's not prying, Eddie," she said at last. "Sure,

I'll tell you people. You're not going to believe it anyway. Innkeeper, gimme coffee, light and

sweet."

She picked somebody's empty from the bar, got down unsteadily from her chair, and walked

with great care to the chalk line. "You people like toasts? I'll give you a toast. To fivesight,"

she said, and whipped her glass so hard she nearly fell. It smashed in the geometrical center of

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the fireplace, and residual alcohol made the flames ripple through the spectrum.

I made a small sound.

By the time she had regained her balance, young Tommy was straightening up from the chair

be had placed behind her, brushing his hair back over his shoulders. She sat gratefully. We formed

a ragged half-circle in front of her, and Shorty Steinitz brought her the coffee. I sat at her

feet and studied her as she sipped it. Her face was still not pretty, but now that the lights were

back on in it, you could see that she was beautiful, and I'll take that any day. Go chase a pretty

one and see what it gets you. The coffee Seemed to help steady her.

"It starts out prosaic," she began. "Three years ago my first husband, Freddie, took off

with a sculptress named, God help us, Kitten, leaving me with empty savings and checking, a

mortgage I couldn't cut, and a seven-year-old son. Freddie was the life of the party. Lily of the

valley. So I got myself a job on a specialist newspaper. Little businessmen's daily, average

subscriber's median income fifty kay~ The front-page story always happened to be about the firm

that had bought the most ad space that week. Got the picture? I did a weekly Leisure Supplement,

ten pages every Thursday, with a. . . you don't care about this crap. I don't care about this

crap.

"So one day I'm sitting at my little steel-desk. This place is a reconverted warehouse,

one immense office, and the editorial department is six desks pushed together in the back, near

the paste-up tables and the library and the wire. Everybody else is gone to lunch, and I'm just

gonna leave myself when this guy from accounting comes over. I couldn't remember his name; he was

one of those grim, stolid, fatalistic guys that accounting departments run to. He hands me two

envelopes. 'This is for you, 'he says, 'and this one's for Tom.' Tom was the hippy who put out the

weekly Real Estate Supplement.

So I start to open mine-it feels like there's candy in it-and he gives me this look and

says, 'Oh no, not now.' I look at him like huh? and he says, 'Not until it's time. You'll know

when,' and he leaves. Okay, I say to myself, and I put both envelopes in a drawer, and I go to

lunch and forget it.

"About three o'clock I wrap up my work, and I get to thinking about how strange his face

looked when he gave me

those envelopes. So I take out mine and open it. Inside it are two very big downs-you know,

powerful tranquilizers. I sit

up straight. I open Tom's envelope, and if I hadn't worked in a drugstore once, I never would have

recognized it. Demerol. Synthetic morphine, one of the most addictive drugs in the world.

"Now Tom is a hippie-booking guy; like I say, long hair and mustache, not long like yours,

but long for a newspaper.

So I figure this accounting guy is maybe his pusher and somehow he's got the idea I'm a potential

customer. I was kind of fidgety and tense in those days. So I get mad as hell, and I'm just

thinking about taking Tom into the darkroom and chewing him out good, and I look up, and the guy

from accounting is staring at me from all the way across the room. No expression at all, he just

looks. It gives me the heebiejeebies.

"Now, overhead is this gigantic air-conditioning unit, from the old warehouse days, that's

supposed to cool the whole building and never does. What it does is drip water on editorial and

make so much goddamn noise you can't talk on the phone while it's on. And what it does, right at

that moment, is rip loose and drop straight down; maybe eight hundred pounds. It crushes all the

desks in editorial, and it kills Mabel and Art and Dolores and Phil and takes two toes off of

Tom's right foot and misses me completely. A flying piece of wire snips off one of my ponytails.

"So I sit there with my mouth open, and in the silence I hear the publisher say, 'God damn

it,'from the middle of the room, and I climb over the wreckage and get the Demerol into Tom, and

then I make a tourniquet on his arch out of rubber bands and blue pencils, and then everybody's

taking me away and saying stupid things. I took those two tranquilizers and went home.".

She took a sip of her coffee and sat up a little straighter.

Her eyes were the color of sun-cured Hawaiian buds. "They shut the paper dOwn for a week.

The next day, when I woke up, I got out my employee directory and looked this guy up.

While Bobby was in school,I went over to his house. It took me hours to break him down,

but I wouldn't take no answer

for an answer. Finally he gave up. 'I've got fivesight,' he told me. 'Something just a little bit

better than foresight. 'It was the only joke I ever heard him make, then or since."

I made the gasping sound again. "Precognition," Doc Webster breathed. Awkwardly, from my

tailor's seat, I worked my keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Callahan. He caught them in

the coffee can he had ready and started a shot of Bushmill's on its way to me without a word.

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"You know the expression 'Bad news travels fast'?" she asked. "For him it travels so fast

it gets there before the

event. About three hours before, more or less. But only bad news. Disasters, accidents, traumas

large and small are all he ever sees."

"That sounds ideal," Doc Webster said thoughtfully. "He doesn't have to lose the fun

ofpleasant surprises, but he

doesn't have to worry about unpleasant ones. That sounds like the best way to . . . " He shifted

his immense bulk in his chair. "Damn it, what is the verb for precognition? Precognite?"

"Ain't they the guys that sang that 'Jeremiah was a bullfrog' song?" Long-Drink murmured

to Tommy, who kicked him hard in the shins.

"That shows how much you know about it," she told the Doc. "He has three hours to worry

about each unpleasant surprise-and there's a strictly limited amount he can do about it."

The Doc opened his mouth and then shut it tight and let her tell it. A good doctor hates

forming opinions in ignorance.

"The first thing I asked him when he told me was why hadn't he warned Phil and Mabel and

the others. And then I

caught myself and said, 'What a dumb question! How're you going to keep six people away from their

desks without

telling them why? Forget I asked that.'"

"'It's worse than that,' he told me. 'It's not that I'm trying to preserve some kind of

secret identity-it's that it wouldn't do the slightest bit of good anyway, I can ameliorate to

some extent. But I cannot prevent. No matter what. I'm not. . . not permitted.'

"'Permitted by who?' I asked.

'By whoever or whatever sends me these damned premonitions in the first place,' he said.

'I haven't the faintest

idea who~

" 'What exactly are the limitations?'

'If a pot of water is going to boil over and scald me, I can't just not make tea that

night. Sooner or later I will make tea and scald myself. The longer I put off the inevitable, the

worse 1 get burned. But if I accept it and let it happen in its natural time, I'm allowed to, say,

have a pot of ice water handy to stick my hand in. When I saw that my neighbor's steering box was

going to fail, I couldn't keep him from driving that day, but I could remind him to wear his

seatbelt, and so his injuries were minimized. But if I'd seen him dying in that wreck,I couldn't

have done anything-except arrange to be near the wife when she got the news. It's. . . it's

especialiy bad to try to prevent a death. The results are...I saw him start to say 'horrible' and

reject it as not strong enough. He couldn't find anything strong enough.

"'Okay, Cass,' I said real quick. 'So at least you can help some. That's more than some

doctors can do. I think that was really terrific of you, to bring me that stuff like that, take a

chance that I'd think you were-hey, how did you get hold of narcotics on three hours' notice?'

"'I had three hours' warning for the last big blackout,' he told me. I took two suitcases

of stuff out of Smithtown General while they were trying to get their emergency generator going.

I. . . have uses for the stuff.'"

She looked down into her empty cup, then handed to Eddie, who had it refilled. While he

was gone, she stared at her lap, breathing with her whole torso, lungs cycling slowly from

absolutely full to empty.

"I was grateful to him. I felt sorry for him. I figured be needed somebody to help him. I

figured after a manic oppressive like Freddie, a quiet, phlegmatic kind of guy might suit me

better. His favorite expression was, 'What's done is done.' I started dating him. One day Bobby

fell out of a tree and broke his leg, and Uncle Cass just happened to be walking by with a hypo

and splints." She looked up and around at us, and her eyes fastened on me. "Maybe I wanted my kid

to be safe." She looked away again. "Make a long story short, I married him."

I spilled a little Bushmill's down my beard. No one seemed to notice.

"It's. . . funny," she said slowly, and getting out that second word cost her a lot. "It's

really damned funny. At

first. . . at first, there, he was really good for my nerves. He never got angry. Nothing rattled

him. He never got emotional the way men do, never got the blues. It's not that he doesn't feel

things. I thought so at first, but I was wrong. It's just that living with a thing like that,

either he could be irritable enough to bite people's heads off all the time, or he could learn how

to bold it all in. That's what he did, probably back when he was a little kid. 'What's done is

done,' he'd say, and keep on going. He does need to be held and cared for, have his shoulders

rubbed out after a bad one, have one person he can tell about it. I know I've been good for him,

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and I guess at first it made me feel kind of special. As if it took some kind of genius person to

share pain." She closed her eyes and grimaced. "Oh, and Bobby came to love him sot!"

There was silence.

"Then the weirdness of it started to get to me. He'd put a Band-Aid in his pocket, and a

couple of hours later he'd cut his finger chopping lettuce. I'd get diarrhea and run to the john,

and there'd be my favorite magazine on the floor. I'd come downstairs at bedtime for vitamins and

find every pot in the house full of water, and go back up to bed wondering

what the hell, and wake up a little while later to find that a socket short had set the living

room on fire before it tripped the breaker and he had it under control. I'd catch him concealing

some little preparation from me, and know that it was for me or Bobby, and I'd carry on and beg

him to tell me-and the bcst of those times were when all I could make him tell me was, 'What's

done is done.'

"I started losing sleep and losing weight.

"And then one day the principal called just before dinner to tell me that a school bus had

been hit by a tractor-trailer and fourteen students were critically injured and Bobby and another

boy were. . . I tbrew the telephone across the room at him, I jumped on him like a wild animal and

punched him with my fists, I screamed and screamed. 'YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY!' "she screamed again

now, and it rang and rang in the stillness of Callahan's Place. I wanted to leap up and take her

in my arms, let her sob it out against my chest, but something held me back.

She pulled herself together and gulped cold coffee. You could bear the air conditioner sigh and

the clock whir. You could not hear cloth rustle or a chair creak. When she spoke again, her voice

was under rigid control. It made my heart sick to hear it.

"I left him for a week. He must have been hurting more than I was. So I left him and

stayed in a crummy motel, curled up around my own pain. He made all the arrangements, and made

them hold off burying Bobby until I came back, and when I did, all he said was...what I expected

him to say, and we went on living.

"I started drinking. I mean, I started in that motel and kept it up when I went home. I

never had before. I drank alone. I don't know if he ever found out. He must have. He never said

anything. I...I started growing away from him. I knew it wasn't right or fair, but I just turned

off to him completely. He never said anything. All this started happening about six months ago. I

just got more and more self-destructivç, more, crazy, mere. . . hungry for something."

She closed her eyes and straightened her shoulders.

"Tonight is Cass's bowling night. This afternoon I. . ." She opened her eyes. ". . . I

made a date with a stockboy at the Pàthmark supermarket. I told him to come by around ten, when my

husband was gone. After supper he got his ball and shoes ready, like always, and left. I started

to clean up in the kitchen so I'd have time to get juiced before Wally showed up. Out of the

corner of my eye I saw Cass tiptoe back into the living room. He was carrying a big manila

envelope and something else I couldn't see; the envelope was in the way. I pretended not to see

him, and in a few seconds I heard the door close behind him.

"I dried my hands. I went into the living room. On the mantel, by the bedroom door, was

the envelope, tucked behind the flowerpot. Tucked behind it was his service revolver. I left it

there and walked out the door and came here and started drinking, and now I've had enough of this

fucking coffee. I want a screwdriver."

Fast Eddie deserves his name. He was the first of us to snap out of the trance, and it

probably didn't take him more than thirty seconds. He walked over to the bar on his banty little

legs and slapped down a dollar and said, "Screwdriver, Mike."

Callahan shook his head slightly. He drew on his cigar and frowned at it for having gone

out. He flung it into the fireplace and built a screwdriver, and he never said a mumblin' word.

Eddie brought her the drink. She drained half at once.

Shorty Steinitz spoke up, and his voice sounded rusty. I service air-conditioning systems.

The big ones. I was over at Century Lanes today. Their unit has an intermittent that I can't seem

to trace. It keeps cuttin' in and out."

She shut her eyes and did something similar to smiling and nodded herhead. "That's it, all

right. He'll be home early."

Then she looked me square in the eye.

"Well, Jake, do you understand now? I'm scared as hell! Because I'm here instead of there,

and so he's not going to kill me after all. And he tells me that if you try to prevent a death,

something worse happens, and I'm going out of my

mind wondering what could be worse than getting killed!" Total horror flooded through me; I

thought my heart would stop.

I knew what was worse than getting killed.

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Dear Jesus, no, I thought, and I couldn't help it. I wanted very badly to keep my face

absolutely straight and my eyes holding hers, and I couldn't help it. There was just that tiny

hope, and so I glanced for the merest instant at the Counterclock and then back to her. And in

that moment of moments, scared silly and three-quarters bagged, she was readng me clearly enough

to pick up on it and know from my face that something was wrong.

It was 10:15.

My heart was a stone. I knew the answers to the next questions, and again I couldn't help

myself: I had to ask

them.

"Mrs-?"

"Kathy Anders. What's the matter?" Just what I had asked her, a few centuries ago.

"Kathy, you. . . you didn't lock the house behind you when you left?"

Callahan went pale behind the bar, and his new cigar fell out of his mouth.

"No," she said. "What the hell has that-"

"And you were too upset to think of-"

"Oh, Christ," she screamed. "Oh, no, I never thought! Oh, Christ, Wally, that dumb cocky

kid. He'll show up at ten and find the door wide open and figure I went to the corner for beer and

decide it's cuts to wait for me in bed, and-" She whirled and found the clock, and puzzled out the

time somehow, and wailed, "No!" And I tore in half right down the middle. She sprang frbm her

chair and lurched toward the bar. I could not get to my feet to follow her. Callahan was already

holding out the telephone, and when she couldn't dial it, he got the number out of her and dialed

it for her. His face was carven from marble. I was just getting up on my hindlegs by then. No one

else moved. My feet made no sound at all on the sawdust. I could clearly hear the phone ringing on

the other end. Once. Twice, Three limes. "Come on, Cass, damn you, answer me!" Four times. Oh dear

God; I thought; she still doesn't get it. Five times. Maybe she does get it and won't have it. Six

times.

It was picked upon the seventh ring, and at once she was shrieking, "You killed him, you

bastard. He was just a jerk kid, and you had to-"

She stopped and held the phone at arm's length and stared at it. It chittered at her, an

agitated chipmunk. Her eyes

went round.

"Wally?" she asked it weakly. Then even more weakly she said to it, "That's his will in

that manila envelope," and

she fainted.

"Mike!" I cried, and leaped forward. The big barkeep understood me somehow and lunged

across the bar on his belly and caught the phone in both hands. That left me my whole attention to

deal with her, and I needed that and all my strength to get her to the floor gently.

"Wally," Callahan was saying to the chipmunk, "Waily, listen to me. This is a friend. I

know what happened, and-listen to me, Wally, I'm trying to keep your ass out of the slam. Are you

listening to me, son? Here's what you've got to do-"

Someone crowded me on my left, and I almost belted him before I realized it was Doc

Webster with smelling salts.

"-No,screw fingerprints, this ain't TV. Just make up the goddamn bed and put yer cigarette

butts in yer pocket and don't touch anything else-"

She coughed and came around.

"-sure nobody sees you leave, and then you get your ass over to Callahan's bar, off 25A.

We got thirty folks here'll swear you been here all iiight, but it'd be nice if we knew what you

looked like."

She stared up at us vacantly, and as I was helping her get up and into a chair, I was

talking. I wanted her to be involved in listening to me when full awareness returned. It would be

very hard to hold her, and I was absolutely certain I couid do it.

"Kathy, you've got to listen carefully to me, because if you don't, in just another minute

now you're going to try and swallow one-giant egg of guilt, and it will, believe me, slick in your

throat and choke you.. You're choking on a couple already, and this one might kill you-and it's

not fair, it's not right, it's not just. You're gonna award yourself a guilt that you don't

deserve, and the moment you accept it and pin it on, it'll stay with you for the rest of your

life. Believe me, I know. Damn it, it's okay to be glad you're still alive!"

"What the hell do you know about it?" she cried out. "I've been there," I said softly. "As

recently as an hour ago."

Her eyes widened.

"I came in here tonight so egoceotrically wrapped up n my own pain that I sat next to you

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