Spider Robinson - C6 - The Callahan Touch

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The Callahan Touch Version 1.0
This e-text scanned, OCR'd and once overed by Gorgon776 on 15 May 2001. It needs some more
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1 - The Immediate Family
Opposites make good companions sometimes. The reason Irish coffee is the perfect beverage is that
the stimulant and the depressant play tug of war with your consciousness, thereby stretching and
exercising it. Isometric intoxication, opposed tensions producing calm at the center, in the eye
of the metabolic hurricane. You end up an alert drunk. I suppose speedballs-the cocaine-heroin
combination that killed John Belushi-must be a similar phenomenon, on a more vivid and lethal
level. Fear and lust is another good, heady mixture of opposites...as many have learned in war
zones or hostage situations.
But if you can get hope and pride and serious fear all going at the same time, balanced in
roughly equal portions, let me tell you, then you've really got something powerful.
You can turn your head around with a mixture like that, end up spinning like a top and
paralyzed, exhausted and insomniac, starving and nauseous, running a fine cold sweat. Like a car
in neutral, with the accelerator to the floor. It's exhilarating, in a queasy kind of way.
I'm embarrassed to admit I hinged on it for days before I realized that was what I was
doing, and then another day before I made up my mind to kick. Finally I admitted to myself that I
was being selfish, that other people's hopes- and cash-were involved in this too. They'd been
waiting a long time already. Besides, in a three-way tug of war, the chances of one side suddenly
letting go with a loud snap are doubled.
Hell, I'd already jumped. It was time to open my eyes and see where I was going to land...
So one fine day in May of 1988, I picked up the phone and made the call.
"Hello there, son," he said when they finally tracked him down. "I was just thinking about
you. Been too long. What's the good word?" His voice was strong and clear despite the lousy
connection. As always.
"I think I'm ready," I said.
Short pause. "Say that again. Like you believe it, this time."
I cleared my throat. "Well, I don't know if 1' 11 ever be ready. But I think it's ready. I
truly do, Sam. As ready as it's ever gonna be."
"Why, that's fine! Uh. . . want me to come over and take a look? Before you-"
"Thanks. But no. I'll take it all in one dose. Put the word out for me, okay? I open
Friday at nine. Just the immediate family."
"Friday, huh? Appropriate date. We'll all be there. I'm looking forward to it. It's been
awful too damn long. Good luck-wups, Code Blue, got to go!" The line was dead.
Friday was two days away. Time for one last binge of conflicting emotions before the
balloon went up. .
The thing is, I had accomplished a miracle-and I knew in my heart it wasn't good enough.
After two years of careful planning and hard work, I had produced something excellent. I
believed that, and I guess I should have been proud. Oh hell, I guess I was proud. But I was
trying to match something long-gone that, in its own backassward way, had been perfect. And it
seemed to me, in those last couple of days, that the distance on the scale between lousy and
excellent is nothing compared to the distance between excellent and perfect.
There was nothing I could do about it. Perfection exceeded my grasp. I didn't have the
tools. Nonetheless, I spent those last days like a frustrated cat, trying to bite myself on the
small of the back.
My staff was the first to arrive that Friday night, pulling in at about eight, but he
didn't count. He'd already seen the place, under oath of secrecy, because I'd needed his help in
finishing it. (If you can't trust a guy with his background to keep a vow, who can you trust?) But
I was glad to see him, and gladder when he was dressed for work.
It was the sheer familiarity of the sight of him in that getup, I think. So much about
this place was different from the old one, and he was a thread of continuity that I appreciated.
Some of those differences had been driving me crazy.
Getting ready to open took us a combined total of maybe five minutes. I'd been there all
afternoon-and we'd been essentially ready for a week. Then he had the grace to not only suggest a
game of darts, but fail to notice how badly I was playing. It took him some doing; at one point I
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actually threw one shank-first. It bounced halfway back to me. Terrific omen, for those who
believe in such.
At ten minutes to nine, I left him in command and went out into the big foyer, letting the
swinging door close behind me. Its breeze started all the empty coat hangers whispering. I felt
the need to wait out there, to talk to the whole crew, at least for a few minutes, before I
brought them inside and showed them the place.
At nine precisely, the outer door burst open and Doc Webster, Long-Drink McGonnigle, Fast
Eddie Costigan, Noah Gonzalez, Tommy Janssen, Margie Shorter, Marty Matthias and his new wife
Dave, all three Masers, Ralph von Wau Wau, Willard and Maureen Hooker, Isham Latimer and his new
wife Tanya, Bill Gerrity, Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, and both of the Cheerful Charlies all came
crowding into the foyer at once. Don't tell me that's physically impossible; I'm telling you what
I saw.
My head pulsed like a giant heart, and my heart spun like a little head. A couple of
fairly bad years began to melt away.
They advanced on me like a lynch mob, baying and whooping, arms outstretched, and then we
all hugged each other. Don't tell me that's physically impossible; I'm telling you what we did.
The coat hangers became Zen bells. The more physically demonstrative of us pummeled the rest of us
and each other, hard enough to raise bruises, and all of us grinned until the tears flowed.
Somewhere in there it occurred to me that the foyer now held every single soul who had been
present on the first night I ever had a drink in Callahan's Place-with the two exceptions of
Callahan himself, and of course Tom Flannery (it was the twelfth anniversary of Tom's death that
night). We stopped hugging when our arms stopped working.
There was a moment of warm silence. Then the combined pressure of them tried to back me
into the bar, and I stood my ground.
"Hold it a second, folks," I said, smiling ruefully. "There's something I want to get
straight before We go in, okay?"
"It's your place, Jake," Doc Webster said.
"That's the first thing to get straight," I said. "It's not. It's our place. I know I
hogged all the fun of putting it together, but that's because a design committee is a
contradiction in terms, and I had some strong opinions. And. . . well, I wanted to surprise you
all. But if there's anything you really don't like, we can change it."
"You're saying you want us to complain?" Long-Drink asked.
"I tink we c'u'd handle dat," Fast Eddie said helpfully.
"I hate the Jacuzzi," the Doc said promptly, and Ralph bit him on the ankle just as
promptly. In fact, the dog may have started to bite before the Doc had started to wisecrack. They
know each other.
"Come on, let's see de joint," Eddie said.
"One more thing," I said. "Before I show you all what Mary's Place is, I want to talk for
a second about what it is not." I could see that they all knew more or less where I was going, but
I said it anyway. "This is not Callahan's Place. This is Mary's Place. It will never be Callahan's
Place. No place will ever be that place again, and certainly no place we build. Even if Mike
should ever come back from the future and open another bar, it wouldn't be Callahan's Place, and
he wouldn't call it that if he did. We can all have some fun here-but if we try and make this be
Callahan's Place, it will all go sour on us."
"Hell, we know that," Long-Drink said indignantly.
"Relax, Jake," Tommy Janssen said. "Nobody expected you to work miracles."
"We're not fools," Susie Maser said. Then she glanced at her husband Slippery Joe and co-
wife Suzy. "Wait a minute, maybe I take your point. We are fools."
"Look," I pressed on, "I don't mean that the layout is different or the setup is
different. I don't even mean just that Mike is gone. He'll be less gone in this building than
anywhere else, I think, because he'll be in our collective memories, and maybe if we're lucky a
little bit of Callahan magic will linger on.
"But a lot of it won't. Some of the specific 'magic,' if that's what you want to call it,
that made Callahan's Place work is simply not available to us anymore."
Rooba rooba rooba. The Doc's foghorn baritone rose over the rest. "What are you saying,
Jake?"
"For one thing, I'm talking about whatever kind of magic it was that watched over that
Place like a door-checker. The Invisible Protective Shield-a selectively permeable shield. You all
know damn well what I mean. Did anybody ever wander into Callahan's who didn't belong there? And
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did anybody who needed to go there bad enough ever fail to find it?"
That stopped them. "I don't know about that last part," the Doc said. "There were suicides
on Long Island during those years. And I can remember one or two jokers that came in who didn't
belong there. But as Susie said a minute ago, I take your point. Those few jokers didn't stay. In
all those years, '48 to '86, we never seemed to get normal bar traffic. No bikers, or predators,
or jerks looking to get stupid, or goons looking for someone drunk enough to screw even them-"
"Hell, no drunks," Long-Drink said, looking thunderstruck. "Not one."
"No grabasses," Margie said.
"No brawlers," Tommy supplied. "No jackrollers."
Fast Eddie summed it up. "No pains in de ass."
"Was that magic?" the Doc asked. "Or some kind of advanced technology we don't savvy yet?
Like Mickey Finn's 'magic' raincoat?"
"What's the difference?" I told him. "We haven't got it- and so this is going to be a
different kind of joint. It doesn't matter what it was. For all I know, it was just a sustained
run of incredibly good 1-"
SCREECH!
I had been peripherally aware of rapidly growing automotive sounds from the world outside,
but before I could finish my sentence we all heard the nerve-jangling shriek of brake shoes doing
their very best (a sound I happen to find even more disturbing than most people do), much too
close to the door. We all froze, expecting a vehicle to come crashing in and kill us all. Just as
the noise reached its crescendo and died away, there was a violent, expensive-sounding clang!
crump!, and then a single knock at the door.
Silence.
There was a harsh emphatic crack! sound. Behind me, in the bar. And then a heavy, dull
thop! from the same place, followed by a gasp, and a faint, hard-to-identify sound that made me
think of a gerbil, curling.
Fast Eddie happened to be closest to the outside door. He opened it experimentally, and it
was a good thing it opened inward. The front grille of a Studebaker filled the doorway, faint
tendrils of steam curling out of it. The rest of a Studebaker was attached in the usual manner.
The only unusual thing about it was the pair of rumpled frayed blue jeans on the hood.
"Hi, guys," Shorty Steinitz's voice came hollowly from the passenger compartment. "Sorry
I'm late. Did I kill him?"
One mystery solved. Shorty is the worst driver alive. But how had he managed to punch
someone through that door and through all of us and into the bar, without any of us noticing it
happen?
I turned and pushed open the swinging door, just as tentatively as Eddie had opened the
outside door.
A stranger was sitting at my bar, in one of the tall armchairs I use instead of barstools.
Kindling lay in the sawdust at his feet, and there appeared to be either more sawdust or heavy
dandruff on his hairy head. He was just finishing a big gulp of beer. Tom Hauptman, my assistant
bartender, was gaping at him. This seemed understandable, for the stranger had no pants on.
He caught my eye, looked me up and down briefly, and pursed his lips as if preparing to
sneer. "Evening, stringbean," he said. He gestured toward the fireplace. "Mind if I warm myself at
your fire?"
"Na dean fochmoid fainn," I heard myself say, and wondered what the hell that meant. It
sounded a little like Gaelic- and I don't speak Gaelic.
"What choice have I got?" he replied.
He was short and hairy. His eyes and nose and lips and the upper slopes of his cheeks were
the only parts of his head that were not covered with tight curls of brown hair. As far as I could
see, they did not share that distinction with any other part of his body except his fingernails.
He made me think of hobbits. Surly hobbits. He wore a brown leather jacket, a long scarf, a black
turtleneck, basketball shoes, and white jockey shorts. There were a motorcycle helmet and a pair
of leather gloves on the bar beside him.
"How did you get in there?" I asked, as calmly as I could, aware of people gawping over my
shoulder.
He looked at me as if I had asked a very stupid question, and pointed silently upward.
Like Callahan's Place before it, Mary's Place had an access hatch to the roof. Or rather,
it had had. I hadn't rigged up a ladder to it yet, because it was awkwardly placed, almost
directly over the bar. Now there was no longer a hatch there- just a yawning hole where the hatch
had been. The hatch cover was the kindling around the stranger's feet.
"You broke in from the roof?" I said.
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He grimaced. "Not voluntarily," he assured me. "I could have done without the last eight
feet or so of that little journey. But I didn't get a vote. This is good beer." He made the last
part sound like a grudging admission.
"Rickard's Red," I said, seeing the color. "From Canada."
"No," he said, frowning as though I'd called an automatic a revolver, or spelled
"adrenalin" with an e on the end. "From Ontario. Americans always make that mistake."
Shorty came bustling up behind me. "Is he alive?" he asked.
"Are you alive?" I asked the stranger.
"No, I'm on tape," he said disgustedly, and gulped more beer.
"Honest to God, Mister," Shorty said, trying to push past me, "I never saw you. Be honest,
I wasn't looking-it just never occurred to me anybody could be on my tail at that speed-"
"I was in your slipstream, Andretti, saving gas; are you familiar with the concept or
shall I do a lecture on elementary aerodynamics? Even a rocket scientist like you will concede
that there's not much point in doing that unless the guy is going at a hell of a clip, now is
there?"
"Well, I never seen ya," Shorty said uncertainly.
"That's because you weren't looking," the stranger explained.
"One of you want to tell me what happened?" I asked. To my pleased surprise I heard my
voice come out the way Mike Callahan would have said it in my place. A quiet, polite request for
information, with the explicitly mortal threat all in the undertones.
The stranger looked up at the ceiling again. No, at the sky. Apparently God signaled him
to get it over with. He sighed. "I was following that maniac at a-"
'Idiot,' " Long-Drink interrupted. "If they're in front of you, they're idiots."
The stranger glared at him, and decided to ignore him. "-hundred and twenty when he made
an unsignaled left into your parking lot without slowing. On a Suzuki at that speed, you don't
want to bust out of the slipstream at an angle, so I swallowed my heart and cornered with him-
better, of course-and there we both were, bearing down on a brick building at a hundred and twenty
together, and I would like to state for the record that I would not, repeat not have hit him if
his God damned brake lights had been working!"
"Are they out again?" Shorty asked mournfully.
The stranger looked at him. "Or if his brakes hadn't been so God damned good."
"I hafta get new shoes every couple of months," Shorty said.
"No shit, Sherlock. How did I magically divine this information before you told me? I
don't know, I must be psychic."
"You ploughed into the back of Shorty's car on a motorcycle?" I asked.
"That," he agreed, "was the very last moment I was on a motorcycle this evening. A
microsecond later I was airborne."
"Jesus," Doc Webster said, and pushed Shorty aside to take a turn at trying to get past
me. But even he couldn't manage it.
The stranger finished his beer and signaled Tom Hauptman for another. Tom didn't move,
kept staring at him. "So I hit the trunk like a flat rock, up the rear window, and into the wild
blue," he pointed upward, "yonder. Somewhere along the way my trousers left me. The next thing I
know I'm sitting here with a draft in my jockeys and a glass of Rickard's in front of me. Snappy
service."
Tom shook off his stasis. "I'd just drawn myself a beer when he came crashing in. I was so
startled I just-" He made a sort of pushing motion away from himself with both hands. "And it went-
I mean, right smack dab-as if I'd-" He pantomimed
sliding a schooner down the bar like you see in old movies. "Bang into his hand."
Dead silence.
"Are you all right, son?" the Doc asked finally.
"Dad," he replied sarcastically, "I was only all right up to about age six. After that I
was more or less consistently fantastic up until about twenty-five, and since that time I have
been world-class. How are you?"
'On my best day,'" the Doc quoted, " 'I'm borderline.' You know what I'm asking, and I'll
thank you to answer. No cuts? No sprains, bruises, contusions?"
The stranger only shrugged.
The Doc sighed. "Mister, I've seen a few things. I can manage to make myself believe, just
barely, that you survived that experience-but without so much as a scratch? How could you?"
The stranger shrugged with his mouth. "Just lucky, I guess." There was another short
silence, and then the Doc tapped me on the shoulder. (I could tell by the girth of the finger.) I
turned and looked at him.
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"Jake," he said softly, "weren't you saying something just a few minutes ago about a
'sustained run of incredibly good luck'?"
I took a deep breath. "Ladies and gentlemen," I said, "I believe we are ready to open.
Please come in."
Amazing stranger or no, I watched my friends' faces closely as they filed in. Upstaged or
not, this was my premiere...
Noah was the first one who glanced around as the gang galloped inside, and he couldn't
help it: Noah can't enter a strange room without looking around to try and guess where the bomb
is. The rest either stared at the pantsless stranger or talked to each other or called out
greetings to Tom. But as the stampede crested at the bar, folks remembered where they were:
everybody picked a spot and began spinning in slow circles on it with expectant faces.
I held my breath. That's how I know that the silence couldn't have lasted as long as it
seemed to: I was still alive when it ended.
It was Fast Eddie who broke it.
"Jeez, Jake, dis place is okay."
In the time it took me to exhale, Doc and Long-Drink had nodded agreement, the Drink
judiciously and the Doc vigorously. Maybe others did too, but they were the two I was watching
closest, the experts whose opinion I most feared. About half of a great weight left my shoulders
when I saw those two nods. A buzzing sound in my ears, of which I had not previously been aware,
diminished in volume.
"'Okay'?" Susan Maser said. "Eddie, I bet if you ever saw the Grand Canyon up close, you'd
say, 'Nice ditch.' Jake, this place is great! You really did a job on it."
That was nice to hear too. Susan was the only one present besides Tom who'd ever seen the
place before, back when I'd first bought it. She's an interior decorator, so I'd sought her advice
before signing the papers-then thanked her and thrown her out, doing all the work myself. If she
liked it, I knew the others all would.
And they did. "This is just the way I hoped it would look," Merry Moore said, and Les, her
husband and fellow Cheerful Charlie, said, "Me too!"
"Nice size," Long-Drink said judiciously. "Huge, but it feels comfy. Good lighting. Nice
tables, too-and I really like those couches-"
"Nice fireplace," Doc Webster said.
There was a chorus of agreement that warmed my heart. I'd worked hard on that fireplace.
Do you have any idea how hard
it is to chisel a bull's-eye into firebrick?
"It ain't exactly like the old hearth," Ndah said, "but it looks to me like it'll work
just as well. That won't throw glass."
"It's pretty," Maureen said, as though Noah had missed the point.
The stranger looked at Noah. "The fireplace won't throw glass?"
"We like to deep-six our glasses in the fireplace sometimes," Noah explained.
"A lot," Long-Drink said, and a general murmur ratified the amendment.
"Really." For the first time the stranger looked mildly impressed. "But you're just
opening tonight?"
"Re-opening," I said.
"De old place got nuked," Eddie explained.
"Nuked?" The stranger looked at us, decided we weren't kidding, lowered the raised eyebrow
and nodded. "Nuked. You people obviously don't believe in omens. Wait a minute. . . I think I
heard about that. Pony nuke, back in '86? Some Irish joint on 25A? Terrorists?"
Now I was impressed. "Not a lot of people know about it. Know that it was nuclear, I mean.
There was a kind of major news blackout on that part."
The stranger nodded. "I'll bet. Come to sunny Long Island, where terrorists take out
recreational facilities with nuclear weapons. That would have looked swell in Newsday."
"Well, the Place was pretty isolated," I said, "and it wasn't much of a nuke, as nukes go,
and the fallout pattern was out onto the Sound and east to no place in particular, so they decided
what with one thing and another they'd pass on starting God's own stampede off the Island. I kind
of think they made the right decision."
"'-and the truth shall make you flee,' "the stranger said. "I'd like to have seen it.
Millions of terrified suburbanites,
everything they treasure strapped to the roofs of their station wagons, pour into New York City-
and find themselves in the Traffic Jam From Hell, surrounded by street kids and derelicts with
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great big smiles. Talk about a massive transfer of resources. Like cattle stampeding into the
slaughterhouse." He chuckled wickedly.
"How'd you happen to hear about it being nuclear?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I have sources."
"I said," Doc Webster said with a long-suffering air," 'Nice fireplace.'
I nodded. "Thanks, Doc. The way I-"
"What I mean," he interrupted, "is when are we going to give it a field test?"
"Oh!" My friends had been in my bar for several minutes, and still had empty hands. I
blushed deeply and ran around behind the bar, nearly trampling Tom Hauptman.
"I'm buying," the Doc said, and a cheer went up.
I shook my head. "Sorry, Doc. You can buy the first round bought-but this one's on the
house. My privilege."
He nodded acknowledgment, smiling at me like a proud uncle, and another cheer went up.
Rickard's turned out to be okay with everybody; Tom and I became briefly busy drawing and
passing out glasses. No one drank until everyone had been served. I noticed that Shorty was
missing; he'd stepped out to see if his car was movable. I hoped he could, for once, find reverse
on the first try. Finally every hand was full. "Your privilege, Jake," the Doc said, gesturing
toward the hearth.
I nodded, stepped out from behind the bar and walked up to the chalk line on the floor,
facing the fireplace. I lifted my glass. Something was wrong with my vision, and my cheeks felt
cool.
"To Mary Callahan-Finn, brothers and sisters," I said solemnly.
There was a nice warm power to the chorus. "To Mary Callahan-Finn!"
I drained my glass, and hit that bull's-eye dead center. As it had every time in
rehearsal, the shape of the fireplace contained all the shards beautifully.
A staggered barrage of empty glasses rained into the hearth, like fireworks filmed in
reverse, flashing colors as they tumbled, sparkling as they struck and burst. When the last of
them had landed-Ralph's: he had to move in kind of close and flick it with his muzzle-I noted
happily there still were no fragments on the floor of the bar proper.
Then I took a closer look, and blinked.
All the smithereened remains of those eighteen glasses were still in the fireplace, all
right. And they had arranged themselves on the hearth floor in the shape of the word "MARY." In
glittering italic script. It was nearly perfect, except that each letter had a small gap in it.
I turned to stone. "Hully Jeeze," Fast Eddie said. There were grunts and exclamations all
around as others saw the phenomenon. That reassured me somewhat; if others saw it too, at least I
wasn't crazy. Maybe that was good...
"Sorry," the stranger said.
I turned very slowly to face him. So did everyone else.
His expression was of mildest apology, as though he'd just committed some very small and
unintentional faux pas.
"You did that?" I asked, pointing behind me at the fireplace.
"Not consciously, no." He got up-tugging at the seat of his jockey shorts and tossing his
motorcycle scarf jauntily over his shoulder-and came over to me at the chalk line. He had one of
those small man's jaunty strides, just a touch of rooster in
it. But it wasn't like he was overcompensating for his size; it was simply that he had a total
self-confidence. You can tell the genuine article from even the best fake, every time. He turned
his back to the fireplace, finished the last sip of his beer, and tossed the empty glass backwards
over his shoulder. It hit the bull's-eye as squarely as my throw had.
And when its little musical smash had ended, all four letters in Mary's name were filled
in.
After a moment of silence, Long-Drink McGonnigle spoke up. "Mister, I'd like to buy you a
drink."
The stranger looked him up and down carefully. "Let me think about it."
The Doc was looking thoughtful. "Stuff like that happen around you a lot? If you don't
mind my asking?"
The stranger stuck out his hairy jaw, sublimely comfortable at the center of attention in
his jockey shorts. "To the best of my knowledge, only while I'm awake. The rest of the time I lead
a normal existence."
The door swung open and Shorty came back in, looking thunderstruck. "What's the matter,
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Shorty?" Doc Webster asked. "Damage bad?"
Shorty blinked at us all. "I went to look. See how bad it was, you know?" He gestured with
his hands, looking a little like a man playing an invisible banjo.
"That bad?" I asked sympathetically.
He shook his head. "When I left the house tonight, I had this ding in the rear bumper from
a hit-and-run two days ago. I'd been meaning to report it to my insurance company. That
motorsickel fixed it."
"Huh?"
"Fixed it nice as you please. The ding is gone. Popped back out. Near as I can figure,
chrome from the bike fender plated itself everywhere there was chrome scraped off. You can't tell
there ever was a ding. And my trunk light works now."
He shook his head. "Never did before. Not even when she was new."
Rooba rooba rooba.
The only one in the room who did not seem to need the services of a wig-tapper was the
hairy stranger. He looked quite unsurprised and unimpressed by Shorty's news.
"Friend," I said to him, cutting through the buzz of conversation, "I am Jake Stonebender,
and this is Mary's Place. These here are-" I introduced all my friends, one after another.
"Welcome to our joint."
For the first time he smiled. Well, it had aspects of a smile to it, and for a second
there teeth actually flashed in the undergrowth. "Usually I get more reaction. You people are all
right." He looked at us all a little closer. "You've seen some shit, haven't you? All of you."
"That we have," Long-Drink said solemnly.
He nodded. "That's gonna save a lot of time. My name's Ernie Shea-but people generally
call me the Duck."
An unusual name for a small man to choose. But there was just a touch of duck in his walk,
and a trace of nasal honk to his voice, and he certainly could have given either Daffy or Donald
points for attitude. Then I got it. "The Lucky Duck!"
"The proverbial," he agreed, and quacked twice, nasally, without quacking a smile. "But I
sometimes think of myself as The Improbable Man. It's less misleading. 'Lucky' implies that the
luck is always good."
"You mean-," Long-Drink began.
"How was the bike?" the Duck asked Shorty, interrupting.
"Well, that's the other funny thing," Shorty said. "I never in my life seen a piece of
machinery so fucked up. I mean, every single piece of gear I could see on it was wrecked or ripped
loose or mashed up some way or other. Even things you wouldn't think would-Mister, I'm sony. I
don't think you can salvage as much as a bolt out of her."
The Duck nodded. "There you go. Don't worry about it. The best bargain you can get today,
the Russians'!! charge you $187,000 to loft you into orbit. Your rates are more reasonable."
"I should have been more careful," Shorty said. "Look, I'm insured-"
"I'm not. And I hate cashing checks. Forget it."
"Huh?"
"It happens all the time. When I need transportation, something will come along. Don't
worry about it. You, I'll let buy me a drink. After the Doctor there buys his round for the house.
That'll square us, okay?"
"Sure thing," Shorty agreed dazedly.
"Wait a minute, Duck," Long-Drink said, doggedly pursuing his point. "Are you trying to
tell me-"
The Duck's eyes flashed. "Okay, I'll show, not tell," he said. "That's how to handle the
third-grade mentality. Watch, Sir Stephen Hawking: I'll try again." He glanced around, and saw the
dart board. "You got darts for that thing?" he asked me.
I went back to the bar and got the compact little tube for him. Plastic darts, good ones,
with snug little plastic tail-sockets so you can nest six of them in a tube that small, or carry
them around out of the tube in comparative safety. He took them out and separated them, set down
all but one of them on a nearby table, looked up and snatched Long-Drink's night watchman's cap
from his head. Drink blinked, and then glared, and for an instant I thought, That duck' 11 have to
be lucky to survive now, but the hairy man returned his glare with a look of such total confidence
that Long-Drink decided to let it go.
"Thanks," the Duck said insolently. He held the cap up over his face, completely obscuring
his vision, and let go with one of the darts.
It was a rotten shot. It just barely hit the target, wedging its way in precisely between
the target proper and the surrounding rim.
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I guess we'd all been expecting a bull's-eye. We giggled. Well, some of us guffawed.
Relief of tension and all that.
Without looking at the results of his shot, he glared around at us from behind the hat
until silence descended again. He took another dart, and let fly.
It socketed neatly into the first dart, with a suck-pop sound like kids make by plucking a
finger out of their cheek.
No laughter this time.
He shifted hands. His view of the target still blocked by the hat, he threw a third dart
lefthanded, quite clumsily.
It homed in on the second dart like a Sidewinder up a MiG tailpipe. Thop!
Dead silence.
He turned around and threw the fourth dart over his shoulder, the way he had his glass. It
spun like a Catherine wheel as it flew.
Fap! Bull's. . . uh, nether receptacle. Four darts stuck out from the target as one,
drooping slightly.
He turned back to face the board, put Long-Drink's hat on his head backwards, picked up
the fifth dart, balanced it on the point on his index finger, and let it fall. It fell tumbling,
and when he drop-kicked it, it chanced not to be point-down. It rose in an arc across the room,
and slammed into dart number four with an upward angle, correcting the droop.
Silence so complete that I could hear my digestion.
He turned around again, back to the board, and threw the last dart directly at me, hard.
As it left his hand, a last piece of debris dropped from the hatchway overhead and fell in
front of me. The dart ricocheted off it, WOK! and then off a beer tap, CLANG! and then off the
ceiling, BOK! and then off the edge of the bar, TOK! And joined the daisy-chain at the target,
THUP! The piece of wood caromed off the bartop at an angle and ended up in a trashcan behind the
bar, adding KDAP! and FUSH! to the sound effects. I contributed "Eep," the best I could come up
with on the spur of the moment, in a fetching soprano.
And this silence was so complete I could hear myself think.
Now, you could think about that and say to yourself, he's the best dart-thrower I ever
saw. But that first shot had been lousy. A good shooter would have planted them all at the center
of the target. It hadn't been extraordinary skill, but extraordinary coincidence . .
The silence lasted a little under ten seconds. Then Doc Webster said, "Nice form. So show
us around the place a little, Jake. Is that over there in the corner what I think it is?"
2 - The Fount of All Blessings
"Yeah, Doc," I said at once. "It's a TV."
"Jeeze," Fast Eddie said. "You watch TV, Jake?"
"It's like China, Eddie," I told him. "If you don't pay any attention to it, it just gets
worse. I've got it hooked up to cable, for news and weather and Rockford Files reruns-but its main
purpose is to serve that laser disc machine. Up to eight people can watch a movie together if they
want-and it can't be turned to face the rest of the room."
I snuck a glance at the Duck-who seemed quite pleased to be ignored. The Doc's instincts
were sound. A guy like the Duck must get tired of being gaped at and marveled over.
"Zpeakerss or headphonez?" Ralph asked.
"It's rigged for both. But the speakers are directional, and they can't be turned up loud
enough to bother the serious drinkers."
"Zlick," Ralph said approvingly.
The Duck almost displayed interest when Ralph spoke- one eyebrow quivered as if it might
rise-but he got it under control within a second or two. Talking dog, big deal. I went on with my
spiel. "The house sound system is a Technics CD, a Kenwood logic-controlled cassette deck with
Dolby B and C, an AR turntable, Dynaco SCA-35 tube amp with Van Alstine modifications, and
Cambridge Soundworks speakers by old man Kioss himself-the woofer's built into the bar."
"Jesus," said Shorty, who sells and installs custom audiophile gear for a living, "that's
money damn well spent."
"And not much of it," I agreed.
"That's what I mean. I've sold systems for eight times the price that weren't as good. No,
ten times."
"Well, the KX-790-R is the first perfect cassette deck ever made, so naturally hardly
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anybody bought one, and Kenwood discontinued the model almost at once. I got the AR table twenty
years ago for seventy-eight dollars, and in another twenty years it'll probably need some
maintenance. Lots of people are stupid enough to throw away tube amplifiers these days, and old
Santa Kloss sells those speakers direct from the factory at a price so low you wouldn't believe it
if I told you. I've set it up so everybody can reach the controls-but I get to settle any
squabbles."
"Let's hear a taste," Tommy said. "Crank it up, Jake."
"Sure." I switched on the Dynakit, and waited.
"What are you waiting for?" Tommy asked.
I smiled. "Back at the dawn of time," I explained, "they used to make amplifiers with
tubes. They used to take time to warm up. It was worth the wait. Now listen." I turned up the
volume. I already had a CD in the player; I punched the button.
A horn section vamped three notes, and was answered by a piano. People jumped at the
fidelity. Again, the piano answering differently this time. A third time, and then a fourth,
completed the intro . . . and then Betty Carter told us she really couldn't stay.
And there was respectful silence as she and Ray Charles sang "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
Digitally remastered from the original 1962 master tapes by the Genius himself. Do you know that
track? It'll make you smile, and sigh wistfully, and nod...
When Ray and Betty were done, people were smiling and sighing wistfully and nodding. Both
the sound system and the track were praised extravagantly. I killed the disc and removed it, put
in background music and turned the volume way down. "Now, over there, of course," I said, pointing
to the piano in the corner, "is Fast Eddie's upright, so we don't have to live entirely on canned
music. I've rigged a switch so you can turn the sound system off from there any time you like,
Eddie. The box has been tuned, and there's a pack of thumbtacks on it for the hammers."
His monkey face split in a grin. "Tanks, Jake."
"In that corner," I went on, "is the house computer. It's a
Mac II. It's got 5 megs of RAM, and a 40-meg hard disk. A crazy friend of mine named Jon Singer
gave it to me; all I had to put into it was the extra RAM, the hard drive and the monitor. I've
got software in it for both beginners and power
users."
"Modem?" Tommy asked. He fancies himself a power user.
I nodded. "Pay as you go. That cigar box next to the mouse is for settling up; same policy
as the one on the bar." Which meant, honor system: no one would watch with beady eyes to make sure
people paid for time used. "Which brings up an important matter, jadies and lentilmen. Uh. . ."
This was one of the parts I had fretted over for days; I braced myself for the storm. "I'm still
accepting nothing but dollar bills, like always-but I'm afraid the price of a drink has tripled,
and the change-back has only doubled."
A few nods, a few shrugs; not one protest. "Three bucks a drink, a buck back if you don't
bust the glass?" Les asked, but he was just making sure he understood me. I nodded, and he nodded
back. "Like we figured," he said philosophically.
I ought to have known my friends would understand inflation.
But the Duck was finally showing mild surprise. "You mean to tell me drinks used to be a
buck apiece at that other place? And you got fifty cents back just for turning in your empty?" A
talking dog, okay-but cheap drinks?
There was a chorus of agreement.
"Jesus," he said. "No wonder the place got bombed. Excuse me-'got nuked,' I mean."
"No apology necessary," I told him. "We tolerate punning in here."
"As a matter of fact, we encourage punning in here sometimes," Noah Gonzalez said. There
was a rumble of general agreement.
"Not all the time," Maureen hastened to assure the Duck. "Only on days ending in '-y.'"
He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. "Naturally. My luck."
"As a matter of fact," I said, "in honor of your arrival, I've been giving some thought to
changing the name of the place-"
"-to the Dude Drop Inn, right, I've been holding my breath praying that nobody would think
of that one since I sat down."
"Nobody had," I told him. "I'd been thinking of the Fall-In Shelter. But yours is rotten
too."
He shrugged with his mouth. "Thanks."
"Wait, let me introduce you to the champ. Hey, Doc!"
"Yes, Jake?"
"How bad did you say that movie was?"
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The Doc knows a straightline (the shortest distance between two puns) when he hears it.
Glancing ceilingward in perfunctory apology to Johnny Mercer, he sang, "Mack Sennet ate the
positive, and Jack Lemmon ate the negative-"
Groans arose, and several handfuls of peanuts or pretzels bounced off the Doc, who ignored
them. "Talk about a movie that turned to shit," Long-Drink said, grinning.
The Duck regarded the Doc. "Say," he said, "have you read the new Tony Hillerman novel?"
"Which one?" the Doc asked cautiously.
"THE HEMMING WAY," the Duck said. "Or was it THE SEG WAY. . . ? Anyway, Officer Jim Chee
becomes a Navajo narc-and plants a recording device on a pot smoker."
"So?" the Doc asked incautiously.
The Duck buffed his nails. "Makes him the first policeman to wire a head for a
reservation."
I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Every single morsel of food thrown at him
happened to bounce into one of the free-lunch bowls it had come from.
"Stop the presses: Duck Decks Doc!" Long-Drink crowed. The Doc smiled with genuine
pleasure, and made a little bow of respect as the general groan subsided. But his eyes were
sparkling, and I knew this contest was not over yet.
"Hey Jake, what the hell is that?" Tommy Janssen asked, pointing behind me. "It looks like
that thing Alec Guinness built in The Man in the White Suit."
"It looks like a stereo makin' love to a soda fountain," Eddie said.
"It looks like something in the Science Museum in Boston," Marty said.
"Someday it will be," I told him. "But not until we're done with it. Tommy, you asked, so
the honor is yours." I looked Tommy over, checked my memory, made one small adjustment of a dial,
touched three solenoids, and pushed the go-button. There ensued a curious sequence of sounds. The
overall effect was indeed vaguely reminiscent of the Guinness
movie gadget Tommy had mentioned. First a brief soft rattling noise. Then for about twenty seconds
the softer sounds of a small fan and a tiny turntable. Then another short rattling, slightly
louder and higher in pitch than the first. Then a much louder rattling for twelve seconds,
followed by a chuff, a huff, and what sounded like someone blowing bubbles in mud. As if cued by
that last sound, a small conveyor belt started up at the bottom of the device, entering on the
left and exiting at the right, and briefly visible in a cereal-box-sized alcove in the center. An
oversize mug slid into view, stopped when it was centered in the alcove-just in time to catch the
dark fluid that began to drip from above.
Nostrils flared all along the bar. "Holy shit," Eddie breathed. ''It's-''
"-the Ultimate Coffee Machine," I agreed. "Notice how fast it's dripping. The brewing
module is mildly pressurized. Not enough for espresso, but enough to speed things up. Watch, now."
The mug had filled enough for its weight to restart the conveyor belt. The mug slid to the
right and disappeared into the machine again. . . reemerged at its right side with a lumpy white
hat on. I picked up the mug and handed it to Tommy. He stared at it, looked around at the rest of
us, and took a tentative sip.
Then he took a big gulp.
Then he drained the mug, and looked up at me with an oddly stricken expression. He groped
for words.
What he finally came up with was, "For this Blessing, much thanks." And then his features
relaxed into a blissful grin. "That was the best goddam Irish coffee I ever drank in my life."
The Doc broke the silence that ensued. "Jake, what did we just see?"
"The apotheosis of technological civilization," I said. "At
least until someone invents a good sex robot. Watch." I leaned over and reset the parameters,
pushed the go-button again. I pointed with my index finger to the source of the first rattling
sound. "That's the raw coffee beans dropping into the roaster. Wet-processed. Hear that fan?
Microwave dryroasting. Default setting is American roast, but I can do anything from pale to
Italian. Now the roasted beans are dropping into the grinder-hear it? Ground, not chopped: a
chopper heats them too much too soon. Now the grinder's cleaning itself. And there's the water
entering the brewing chamber at just the right temperature and pressure-and there's the preheated
mug, just in time." A second mug of coffee appeared, filled, and whisked away to be adulterated to
taste. It too emerged snow-capped with whipped cream, and I handed it to the Doc.
He took a sip-then held it away from him and gaped at it. "Yours isn't brewed as strong as
Tommy's," I said, "and I gave you a darker roast, and you've got half as much sugar, just the way
you like it."
"God's Blessing, indeed," he said reverently, and finished the mug in one long slow
savored draught. He licked his lips.
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file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%206%2\0The%20Callahan%20Touch.txtTheCallahanTouchVersion1.0Thise-textscanned,OCR'dandonceoveredbyGorgon776on15May2001.\Itneedssomemorecorrection.Ifyoucorrectthistext,updatetheversionnumberby.1an\daddyournamehere.1-TheImmediateFamilyO...

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