Spider Robinson - C3 - Callahans Secret

VIP免费

2024-12-15 0 0 269.22KB 75 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

This e-text scanned, OCR'd and once overed by Gorgon776 on 19 May 2001. I did a reasonably through

proof reading of this scan, but if you find it needs some more correction, then correct any errors

you may find, update the version number by .1, add your name here, and upload it to one of the e-

book newsgroups with ATTN: Gorgon776 in the header.

All the stories in this volume previously appeared in Analog Science

Fact/Science Fiction magazine; copyrights have been reassigned to the

author by Davis Publications.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual

persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

CALLAHAN'S SECRET

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with

the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley edition / July 1986

Third printing / December 1986

Ace edition / January 1988

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. (Scanner's Note: Fuck you.)

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

ISBN: 0-441-O~074-5

Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The name "ACE" and the "A" logo

are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Eleanor Wood, and Susan Allison

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword IX

The Blacksmith's Tale 1

Pyotr's Story 47

Involuntary Man's Laughter 89

The Mick of Time 105

FOREWORD

There's something we have to get absolutely clear right at the outset, and if you think

you detect a dangerous gleam in my eye, you are perfectly right.

Ordinarily I am rather a hard man to insult. This is partly because I am blessed with a

self-confidence so pervasive that it is frequently mistaken for smugness by less fortunate souls,

and partly because I am abnormally lazy even for a writer-if you're insulted, you're supposed to

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (1 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

do something about it, so I usually decline to take offence even when offered some.

I'm especially hard to insult professionally, as I am willing to shamelessly admit, having

practiced many of the most disgusting and heinous vices in literature-I freely confess here and

now that in the twelve years since I gave up honest work I have committed editorship (twice!),

agentry (also twice), and book reviewing (multiple counts), and at least one grand jury is still

considering allegations of literary criticism which I have given up denying.

To my own mild surprise, however, I discover that I do have some small shreds of literary

pride left, and I wish to preserve them. . . so there's something we've got to get straight. No

kidding around, now, God damn it; I'm serious. Pay attention:

Yes, this is a book of stories set in the tavern known as Callahan's Place.

Yes, it is the last such book.

Yes, there were others.

Okay, there were two such others.

All right, dammit, yes, Berkley is packaging all of them as a unit, with coordinated

covers and so forth.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, and we'd better be straight on this or there's gonna be

blood in the scuppers:

I have not written a trilogy.

Repeat: not. It just so happens, by chemically pure chance, that this series of stories

has reached its conclusion coincidental with the completion of the volume immediately following

the one that succeeded the first one. That does not make it a trilogy.

In the first place it is not booby-trapped like most trilogies are. Neither of those first

two volumes ended in the middle of a story, leaving you in midair in plot terms (although the

first one, admittedly, did leave Mike Callahan literally in midair). If you have never read a

Callahan's Place book before, you should find this as good a place to start as any since these

yarns were designed for magazine publication, each is self-contained, and you should feel no need

for any wordy What-Has-Gone-Before synopsis. If you have the first book but missed the second, it

won't cripple your appreciation of this one. If you feel you want to own all three volumes, whd am

I to tell you what to do with your money?-but I didn't plan this whole thing to sucker you into

laying out extra dollars, like Chico Marx with his "tootsie-frootsie ice-a cream" routine.

In the second place, it was not my idea to end this series or cycle or saga or whatever

you want to call it (and I don't care what you call it as long as you don't call it a trilogy).

That was, done for me, by events beyond my control, and believe me, nobody is sadder about it than

I am-no, not even my publishers, my editor, my agent, the people who currently own the TV and ifim

options, or my more substantial creditors, all of whom have been heard to express dismay.

Of course it's a financial disaster for me, but I don't care about that. (I also don't

much mind having red-hot bobbypins rammed up underneath my fingernails.) It's a professional

disaster as well, since now I'll have to think up all my own plots rather than simply dramatizing

the yarns that Jake tells me-but after all, I have published seven books in which Callahan's Place

is never mentioned, so the in. creased creative demand shouldn't prove too arduous. (I'U simply

give up eating on days ending in "y".),There's eves a vague feeling of something like relief in

leaving the nest of Callahan's and going out into the world to make my own way; twelve years is a

long time to spend in any bar.

And still a part of me wishes fervently that it didn't have to end this way.

I'm going to miss Mike a lot.

Association with Callahan's Place has certainly made life interesting this past dozen

years-and usually pleasantly so. It got me out of the sewer, for one thing (see the Foreword to

CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON). It has made me a great many friends I might not otherwise have met,

and one or two enemies I'd have acquired sooner or later anyway. And it has been responsible for

some memorable moments. (Catch me at a convention sometime, and ask me about the reader who

invited me aboard his nuclear submarine-or the one who called at 5 AM. threatening to commit

suicide if I didn't tell him how to get to Callahan's, right now.)

But fate has taken a hand, as they say, and the Callahan's Place saga/series/cycle (just

don't use that "T" word) seems to have reached its conclusion with this volume.

Does that mean, necessarily, that it has reached its completion? Will there never be

another story set in that splendid fiction?

Well, in a way, from a certain perspective, I hope so. I know I've always been rather glad

that Giovanni Guareschi stopped writing about Don Camillo when he did, and the recent explosion of

tourism has ruined the planet Arrakis for me forever. You can work a good thing to death, and

beyond. It may be time for Callahan's Place to tumble ovei the Reichenbach Falls...

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (2 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

On the other hand, I'm certain that there are Callahan's Place stories Jake has never told

me, things that happened in the past that he hasn't gotten around to reporting-he hints at a

couple in the pages that follow. Right now, however, for reasons that will probably become clear

before you've finished this book, he doesn't much want to talk about Callahan's-and besides, for

reasons that should also shortly become clear, he's too busy. But I'm at least intuitively certain

that there are still a few stories he could tell if he felt like it.

Just don't look to see them any time soon-if ever.

Last thoughts, before I go:

In the final chapter of this book, Jake reveals more than one "Callahan's Secret." One of

them-you'll know it when you get to it is, rather literally, I'm afraid, potential dynamite.

Consequently I must ask you to keep the secret, and above all to try and ensure that your copy of

this book does not fall into the hands of anyone above the rank of corporal in any military

establishment on Earth. Pethaps I should have suppressed the story altogether. But I've been

sleeping a lot easier since Jake told me, and so I'm going to take a chance and trust you. We

should be safe-if anyone in military planning circles read science fiction, we probably wouldn't

all have gotten into this fix in the first place. But keep it to yourself, okay?

And remember: no matter what anybody says, this is NOT a trilogy...

So long, Michael. It's been a privilege to know you. Thanks for the laughs. And, come to

think of it, for the tears, too. "Shared pain is diminished; shared joy is increased"-you taught

me that a long time ago.

I'll miss you, I will.

Halifax,

April 8, 1985

CHAPTER 1

The Blacksmith's Tale

ONCE I BOUGHT a watch whose battery was rated for one year. The next time I gave it a thought was

when it failed- four years later. Something familiar cannot be odd, until it stops.

Similarly. there is no set opening lime at Callahan's Place.

Once I came by at three in the afternoon, to talk to Callahan about something, and found that the

place had been open for ovór an hour; another time I arrived at 7 P.M. and Mike was just opening

the door. But somehow, for the better part

of a decade, it never struck me that the Place was always open when I arrived-until the night it

wasn't.

Nearly nine o'clock of a warm wet summer evening, and the door was shut tight. Only dim

light came thmugh the windows, nothing like the warm cheery glow the Place has when it's open, and

the only thing in the parking lot besides my own carwas a big beat-up van I didn't recognize.

The rain complicated things. I don't mind rain a lot, and I like it when it's warm-as it

was that night-but it had been coming down hard for the last fifteen minutes, and so the note

posted on the door was only partly legible, I could translate "empor rily losed f r enovat tins,"

and "doo pens at," but the time at which the doo' would open was three blurs, all rounded at the

top. Perhaps "900," perhaps "9:20" or "9:30." Or perhaps it read "8:30," and the job, whatever it

was, was running overtime. Worst, there was a big long blur after the time. It might have said

"9:00 sharp," but it could just as easily have been "3:00 Friday."

When that watch battery I mentioned earlier finally failed, I buried it in my backyard,

respectful of its magnificent

achievement. But that was after reflection. My first reaction was acute annoyance. I thought my

watch had failed me.

So it was now. I could think of several ways to go kill some time-but how much time?

Meanwhile I was getting soaked. So I did what I don't think I would have done under other

circumstances.

I opened the door and walked in.

I knew it wouldn't be locked, because there is no lock on that door. In the dozen years

I've been coming to Callahan's, there've been four attempted afterhours burglaries that I know of.

None of them used the front door; none bothered to try. (Callahan dealt with them situationally.

One is now a regular customer, and never mind which one; another, a hard-guy type, got two broken

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (3 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

elbows.)

But I should have knocked first, and waited for Mike to open the door or holler "Come in,"

and gone away if he didn't.

Which he wouldn't have-there was no sign of him when I had closed the door behind me. But

I failed to notice; once I'd wiped my glasses dry, I was too busy being thunderstruck.

Do you remember that time I told you about once, when I walked into Callahan's to find a

mirror behind the bar, where no mirror had ever been before? And it disoriented me so much that I

mistook my reflection for an approaching demon, with "horns" that were really the brim of my

Stetson hat? This was like that. Something as familiar as Callahan's Place is not supposed to

change. The watch battery is supposed to last forever. I may have actually twitched and squeaked,

I don't know.

The light was as bad as it had been that other time, with the mirror, and so once again my

brain, trying to resolve

unexpected data into a pattern, made a first approximation that vaguely matched something in its

files and served me up a trial hallucination. For a predator such as man, a wrong guess can be

preferable to a slow one.

What I thought I saw, off to my left, a few yards away, was a giant ebony snake, maybe

three feet in diameter, coiled around a tree, scales shimmering in the semidarkness. Tree and

snake appeared to extend up through the ceiling without rupturing it.

I blinked and it wasn't a snake, it was an immense DNA double helix clinging to a bather

pole, pulsing dully with life. So I blinked again.

(First the predator brain searches the file of Dangerous Things. If that doesn't work, it

tries Nondangerous Living Things. Only then does it calm down and search all the other files. Two

seconds, tops.)

It was a spiral staircase up to the roof.

"Cushla machree," I said soffly.

What had made it seem to be a double helix was the heavy railing which paralleled the

stairs. The "scales" were the-spaces between the railing supports. The apparent shimmering and/or

pulsing was because one of the very few lights in the room, a small flourescent behind the bar,

was flickering rapidly.

I said (prophetically enough) that I would be dipped in shit, but I relaxed. I was

beginning to understand.

Mike Callahan lets his customers take their drinks up on the roof if the weather's

agreeable. There's a dumbwaiter to ferry cash down and drinks up. But until now the only access

for humans and most other customers had been a vertical ladder and hatch. Some of the regulars had

trouble getting up the ladder due to age or infirmity. Certain others could get up just fine-but

found that the added ballast of four or five drinks seriously disrupted their balance on the way

down. Something about the center of gravity shifting, Dcc Webster said. Just a few days before,

Shorty Steinitz had broken an ankle-and here was Callahan's response.

"Hey, Mike," I called out, and got no answer. The curtain behind the bar was closed. I had

gall enough to enter Callahan's bar uninvited, but not his living space. I called his name once

more and wandered over to inspect the new staircase.

It was a cast iron joy to behold. I'm totally ignorant about such things,. but I could

tell that it was old, and beautiful, and very well designed. You could not fall down that

staircase,. You couldn't even bark your shin. It was so well installed that it looked like it'd

been there for years - except for the odd bits of welding spatter in the sawdust on the floor-and

indeed it fit right in with the atmosphere of Callahan's Place. Ornamented rather than starkly

functional, subtly and ingeniously worked in ways I was not competent to appreciate even if the

light had been adequate, it would not have looked out of place in a cellar jazz joint or a

monastery, might have done time in both. It invited one to climb it.

So I did.

The footing was secure, the risers precisely the right height, the treads precisely the

right depth. It had to be a modular assembly. A single giant staircase, even if it had happened to

fit through the front door, would have required trucks, cranes, dollies, rollers, block and tackle

and much time-whereas an assembly job this size could conceivably have been installed in a single

day by two or three big skilled men. But it was so cunningly assembled that it was hard to be

sure. This had to have cost Callahan a bundle.

I wound my way around and up until I stood in a sort of hut with a door opening onto the

roof. I thought about rainwater spilling down into the bar below, but when I experimentally opened

the door a crack, there was no flood. I pushed it open and the everpresent sound of rain went from

bass rumble to treble hiss. It seemed to be easing up.

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (4 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

The rain did not spill indoors because the floor of the hut. was slightly higher than the

roof. But you did not have to remember to step down; there was a short ramp. I know little more

about carpentry than I do about iron work-but I know good design when I fail to trip over it. It

figured that-Mike Callahan would hire the best man available to do surgery on his Place.

The door closed quickly; some unseen damping mechanism kept it from slamming; in the rain,

it made no sound at all. I walked around the hut once, admiring it.. .then walked around it again,

admiring the countryside.

I'm sure you know the strange, special magic of high places. Have you ever been on one at

night? In the warm rain?

To be sure, Callahan's roof is a wonderful place 'from which to view the world in nearly

any' weather. The land falls sharply away to-the north and east, amid incredibly for Long Island

(even for Suffolk County) it is largely undeveloped, raw trees as far as you can make out. To the

south and west, beyond the parking lot, runs Route 25A, sparsely lined with garishly lit sucker

traps. (Fairly heavy traffic, but Callahan doesn't get a lot of transient trade. The parking lot

is hid by tall hedges, the driveway is inconspicuous; the only sign is the one over the front

door.) Beyond the highway you can -just make out one of the more expensive subdivisions, well

zoned, landscaped and cared for; on Christmas Eve, with a couple of Irish coffees warming your

belly and all the lights blazing in the distance, it locks. . . well, Christmasy.

Tonight the roof was a warm flat rock on which many large somethings were peeing, from a

great height. The highway looked glorious-people who wear glasses are lucky, we have stars on

rainy nights-but my clothes were getting- wet. Wetter. I considered ducking back inside... but as

1 said, I like warm rain. I particularly like to be naked in warm rain, and don't get a lot of

opportunities. Mike wouldn't mind, and anyone else I would see drive up.

So I stripped and looked about for the driest place to stash my clothes.

The dumbwaiter seemed like the best bet; I could wedge its door open with something to

keep it up here at roof level. I padded barefoot toward its tall housing-and discovered that it

was already ~so wedged, with a chisel. Inside was a pile of clothing. Big man's clothes, faded

jeans, denim-shut, boots, sized to fit only one man I knew. That solved the mystery of Callahan's

whereabouts. He must be a secret naked-in-the-rain nut, too. He was going to jump a foot in the

air when I came around the dumbwaiter. This would be good for laughs-and it might cost him a

couple of drinks to keep the story to myself...

It was just possible that my fellow nudist was not Callahan-in which case I was properly

dressed to meet him. Onward.

I should have lifted up the jeans. The underwear might have warned me. I piled my clothes

on top of the others. walked around the dumbwaiter, and became one myself. Waiting, dumb, one foot

in the air. She was very beautiful, and in the instant I saw her I wanted urgently to do this

right, to not make any mistakes. It was not going to be easy.

I am sorry to say that you would probably not have thought she was beautiful-unless you,

too, are a pervert. I mean, going naked in the rain is one, thing, but I'm talking major league

perversion here. (From my point of view, I am the only sane man in a perverted culture. Perverts

always feel that way.)

I will state the perversion: I like women who look like women. That is, my ideal of

feminine beauty adheres closely to that which has been the generally accepted consensus from the

dawn of time until quite recently and quite locally.

What you would probably have said if you'd seen her, naked or clothed, is, "Handsome

woman; she could be beautiful if she lost the weight." You would probably have gallantly tried to

avoid looking at, let alone commenting on her body-you almost certainly would not have drunk the

sight of it the way I did.

She did not, in other words, look the way North America thinks women should look. She did

not look like a thirteenyear-old boy with plums in his shirt pockets. Those were her clothes in

the dumbwaiter. Amid I do not even mean that she was a Jayne Mansfield/Loni Anderson type, with

one of those big bodies that seem packed tight, compressed snugly by invisible plastic, firm as a

weightlifter's shOulder. She had big glorious saggy tits, and what are sometimes affectionately

called "love handles," (that is, the people who use the term sometimes mean it affectionately) and

a round belly and thighs-that would jiggle when she walked.

She looked, in short, much like half the mature women in this sorry culture, and she would

have opened the nose of most of the heterosexual males who ever lived. Praxiteles, Titian, Rubens,

Rodin, any of the great ones would have reached for their tools, if not their work utensils, at

the sight of her.

You know: a whale. A hippo. I'm telling ya, Morty, this broad was a hunnert' eighty,

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (5 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

hun'ninety pounds if she was a friggin' ounce, no shit. One of America's millions of rejects,

forever barred from The Good Life, too sunk in sloth or genetic degeneracy to torture herself into

the semblance of an undernourished adolescent male. A pig. No character, no willpower, no self-

discipline, no self-respect, certainly no sex appeal. A lifelong figure of fun, doomed to be

jolly, member of the only minority group that "comedians" like Joan Rivers can still get away with

viciously assaulting.

I could tell I was beginning to get an erection.

So I used the second I bad left to study her face. A socially difficult moment was

imminent, and I wanted it to go well, so I needed to know as much about her as possible,

immediately.

Big lush women and small slight men in our society go through life wrapped around a

softball-sized chunk of pain; it breaks some of them and makes others magnificent. She was

magnificent. Clearly visible on her face, written plain for any fool to see, were the character,

will power, selfdiscipline, self-respeCt and warm sexiness which common wisdom said she could not

possibly have without automatically becoming skinny. She had lots of laugher's wrinkles and a

'couple of thinker's wrinkles and no other kinds. She wore her hair in a big bush of curls that

made no futile attempt to downplay her size; rain-sparkle made it a halo. The split-second glance

I got of her eyes, glistening in the light from the all-night deli across the road, focused on the

far distance, made them seem serene, self-confident.

I went on computer time. And a very good computer it must have been, too, because I was

able to run several very complex subprograms in the second or so allotted to me, One routine

sorted through the several hundred thousand Opening Lines in storage for something suitable to

Unexpected Encounter With Nude Stranger, but since it expected to come up empty, a more ambitious

program attempted to create something new, something witty and engaging and reassuring, out of the

materials of the situation. In hopes that one or the other would succeed, a simple and well-used

program began selecting the tone and pitch of voice and the manner of delivery-soft enough not to

startle, but not so soft as to seem wimpy; humorous but not clownish; urbane but not smug;

admiring but not lecherous-prepared, in short, to begin lying through its/my teeth. Meanwhile, an

almost unconscious algorithm had me keep my hands firmly at my sides and stand up a little

straighter. And all of this together took up, at most, 20 pereent of the available bytes-the rest

was fully occupied in an urgent priority task.

Memorizing her...

Plenty of time! Computational capacity to spare! I knew that she was beginning to become

aware of me several hundred nanoseconds before she did, integrated all the subprograms, picked a

neutral Opening Line and pinned my hopes on delivery, ran a hundred full dress rehearsals to

derive best-and worst-case results, made the go decision, and bad time to admire her lower left-

eyelash and myself before I heard my very own voice say, with all the warmth and tone and clarity

I could reasonably have hoped for, "It certainly is a very nice tits."

My central processing unit melted down into slag.

It took her ten years to turn and look at me, and no thought of any kind took place inside

my skull; horror fused every circuit. She looked me square in the eye, absolutely

expressionlessly, for endless decades, while I marinated in failure and shame. Then her gaze left

my eyes, panned slowly downward. It rested on my mouth for many years, moved on down again, did

not pause until it reached my feet, then came back up again and paused where it was bound to

eventually-but I was centuries dead by then, only a cinder of consciousness remained in my brain

to be snuffed by the realization that my erection was now up to at least half mast, and so by the

time her gaze got back up to my eyes, I don't see how she could possibly have seen glowing

therefrom the slightest light of intelligence.

The animal who sleeps Under my computer woke up and tried its best. It tried for a smile,

doubtless produced a horrible grimace. It essayed a merry laugh, managed to generate a hideous

gargling sound. It gestured vaguely, attempting a Gallic shrug and failing to bring it off. To all

of this she displayed no visible reaction whatever. The old animal gave up.

The first plan I formed was to jump off the roof, but the problem with that was that it

could only be done once and might not hurt enough long enough, so I stepped closer to the

dumbwaiter housing and began battering my head against it to soften my skull up for the grand

finale, and I liked the way it felt and began to get a rhythm going, and then and only then did

she burst out into a magnificent bellow of laughter, a great trombone hoot of shocked merriment,

and big as she was she was up out of tailor's seat and holding me away from the dumbwaiter before

I could deliver it another blow, and then there was a great complicated rocking struggling hugging

stumbling confusion of laughter and tears and rain that somehow left us sitting on our asses on

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (6 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

that wet roof with our feet touching, both of us shuddering with mirth. We nearly got our breath

back a few minutes later, but when she tried to speak all she got out was "smooth" before

dissolving into hysterics again, and a little after that I managed to get out, "My Freudian slip

is-" before I lost it, and when the earthquake had well and truly passed I was lying flat on my

back with rain running up my nostrils and the soles of my feet pre~sed firmly against human

warmth. My hands hurt a little from beating them on the roof.

I sat up.

So did she. 'I must have looked forlorn. My erection was gone. "It's okay," she said,

pressing her toes gently against mine. "I've heard worse."

"You don't understand," I moaned.

"Admittedly-but I think I got the message."

"But-"

"It was, unquestionably, the most memorable meeting of my life, and nothing will ever top

it." Oh, if only she'd been right.

I was beginning slowly to realize that this situation was salvageable-that the disáster

was of such epic proportion as to be a kind of triumph. I had certainly made an impression on her.

Was this not Callahan's Place-albeit empty~- beneath my butt? Callahan's Place, focus of strange

and wonderful events, magical tavern in which nothing was impossible and few things even unlikely?

Could there be any better, more fitting place for a miracle to happen than here on Callahan's

roof?

But exactly where to go from here was hidden from me. "I'm Jake."

"I'm glad. I thought you might have really hurt yourself there."

"I meant that my name is Jake."

"Glad to hear it. What is your name?"

Better and better. I like them quick. "Damned if I know. What's yours? And please don't

say, 'Thanks, I'll have a beer."

"I'm Mary, Jake."

With what feeble wits I had left, I attempted a cunning investigation. "You must know the

guys who put in that splendid staircase, right?"

She went two degrees cooler. "I put in the staircase."

"Excuse me," I said faintly, and got to my feet. The dumbwaiter housing felt just as good

as it had before; there was just enough give to it to cause an energetic rebound, but not so much

as to soften the impact.

Unexpectedly my ears hurt, and the rhythm of my head was halted. "Stop that," she said,

twisting me by both ears to face her. "Damn it, I had nO business getting chilly at you that way.

I must be the first lady blacksmith you've ever run into, how the hell could you know? You did

good:

you didn't look disbelieving, just surprised."

I shook my head. It stayed on. "You're the second woman smith I've met. That's why I'm mad

at myself-I should have guessed."

She stepped back a pace and put her hands on her hips. "Jake," she said softly, "you're

trying too hard."

"I know. Is it flattering at least?"

Her laugh was a good hearty bray. "Yes, by damn. And not entirely ineffective: I can't

wait to fmd out what you're like when you're normal."

I felt my breathing begin to slow and my shoulders begin to relax. "I've always wondered

myself. But at my worst I should have known that you put in that staircase."

"Why?"

"Because you look like the person who did it. Everything it takes to do a job that good,

you've got, I could see that before you knew I was here, so I should have figured it out."

She dimpled. "There, you see? You finally got a compliment out straight-you're getting

better."

"Where did it come from?"

"It spent its early years in the library of a wealthy bishop. For the last thirty years it

was in the best whorehouse in Brooklyn, but the place closed down a few months back-"

I was stricken. "Lady Sally's is closed?"

She nodded sadly. "Too much cutrate competition. Changing fashions. Nowadays they seem to

want sleaze, and a place like Sally's is out of style."

"My God! I know that staircase! Do you mean to tell me that Lady Sally McGee's staircase

is here in Callahan's bar?" I began to smile through my sorrow. "Ah, God, Sally," I said to the

weeping heavens, "I'm sorry they closed you down, the world is a darker place-but at least all

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (7 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

your treasures haven't fallen among heathens. Mary, where is the grand-old lady, do you know?'

"Enjoying her retirement. This is a good home for-the staircase, then?"

"Only the very best. This is Callahan's Place, do you see? No, how could you see?'

"The way you could see that I was a good smith, maybe. There is something about the place.

But I-"

"Be sure. If the staircase had legs, it would have walked here. Miracles happen here-a

little like the ones that happened at Lady Sally's, come to think. Is Mike planning to open

tonight, do you know?"

"About half an hour from now, he said."

"Then you'll see. You'll like the gang-they're the best family lever had. Did Mike tell

you about the house rules?".

"House rules?"

"Every drink in the house costs half a buck. Mike accepts nothing but singles. On your way

out you collect whatever change you have coming from the cigar-box full of quarters on the end of

the bar-unless you've been visiting the fireplace-"

"Hold it. The drinks are half a buck?"

"Yeah, why?'

"These days a beer in most bars costs more than a dollar."

"Really? I don't go to any other bars."

"And nobody rips off the quarters? He must watch the box like a hawk-"

"Nope. Nobody watches the box. That's some of what I mean about Callahan's Place."

She shook her head gently. "Go on. Something about 'visiting the fireplace'-"

"If you feel the urge to, or the need to, you step up to the chalk line and face the

fireplace. You have to make a toast aloud, and everyone shuts up while you do. Then you deep-six

your glass, into the fireplace. It costs you your change for that drink, but it can really take a

load off your shoulders sometimes."

"My," she said softly.

"People tend to come here when they're In need of help, not always but pretty often. They

get it, most times. We help each other. These days, it's getting hard to find a bar where the

bartender will even pretend to listen to your troubles anymore; At Callahan's Place everybody will

listen to your problems. Respectfully. Carefully. You can't imagine the stories that get told

here, sometimes."

"Sounds like a depressing place to get drunk."

I grinned. "You'll see. Everyone else must have come by earlier and seen that sign down on

the front door before it got rained on, they~ll be here soon. A merry crew, one and all. I give

you fair warning: we are all paronomasiacs."

Her eyes widened- in horror. "God, no! Not punsters!" "But it's all right-tonight isn't

Punday."

"Punday."

"The night on which the worst punster gets his or her tab refunded."

She staggered. "Christ, that was close. Too close."

"No, tonight is Tall Tales Night-and I'll tell you, it takes a lot to qualify as a tall

tale in Callahan's. We've had a real-talking dog, for instance. And a whole slew of time

travelers. Two aliens.. . Say, there's one of them now." I waved. "Hi, Finn!"

She turned and saw him, and stood very still.

Well, how could I have prepared her? Callahan's Place is like that, you have to sink or

swim. It was her turn.

Mickey Finn had been decelerating sharply when I first caught sight of him; he came in the

last hundred yards like a seagull and landed with much more grace. Rain declined to fall on him-

one reason I'd spotted him in the darkness-and when he was standing beside us the rain ignored us

too.

"Hello, Jake my friend." He politely began to undress.

"Not necessary, Mickey. Real good to see you, man- it's been too long! Allow me to present

Mary. Mary, this is my friend Mickey Finn;"

Mary was transfixed. That surprised me. This woman had not been visibly fazed by

encountering a naked stranger of the opposite sex, while herself naked, in a remote place; I had

expected her to take Finn more or less in stride. I will admit that, considered dispassionately, a

naked man is less startling than a flying man, particularly a flying man who stands six-eleven-and-

a-half, has a magnificent craggy face and eyes like oxyacetylene blowtorches, and repels moisture.

But I was the naked man in question. I found myself mildly irritated.

Still, if Mary was having difficulty rising to this social challenge, the gallant thing to

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (8 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

do was to help. Finn was visibly wondering if he should offer his hand, so I offered him mine.

After a genuinely warm handshake-I like the big cyborg-I gently tugged his hand in the direction

of the new stairwell. "Mary put in the staircase over there. You ought to check it out, it's

special." I winked with the eye Mary couldn't see. "Why don't you see if you can find Callahan

while you're down there, see about getting this joint opened up for the night?"

Finn surprised me, too, a little-by taking his cue smoothly and without hesitation. He

gets more sophisticated in human ways (excuse me, in Terran ways) every time I see him.

"Certainly, Jake. We'll talk when you come down. It was very nice meeting you, Mary." He left

quickly on those long legs, and even after the stairwell door had closed behind him, the rain kept

failing to land on us. I would have loved to spend an hour trying to figure out how Finn d~d that-

before asking him-but I was busy.

Mary was still standing exactly as she had been when Finn first landed, pivoted slightly

to her left, looking even further left, smack through the spot where Finn had been. She hadn't

moved a muscle.

I cleared my throat.

"Aliens, okay," she said in a clear, calm voice, still not moving, "but I don't believe

you've had a talking dog."

I took it as a sign of recovery. "We didn't either, at first.. Fella came in trying to

cadge drinks with the old talking dog routine. Of course, we figured it was a ventriloquism scam-

and so it was. The guy was a mute, and the dog was a mutant-he was the ventriloquist. They

partnered up

because they were lonely-nobody would talk to either of them, alone. They hang out here a lot,

now."

She straightened from her pivot, worked her shoulders slightly, then relaxed. "He

certainly is."

"Who certainly is what?"

"He certainly is a Mickey Finn."

She still wasn't entirely back in the world. But the part that was, was out of this world.

Now that she was rainproof, droplets hung all over her body like facets on a precious stone, some

standing still, some, like my gaze, trying to migrate downward. I wrestled my gaze up as high as I

could manage, and thought of something that might reach her. "Those certainly are a very nice

night."

It worked. It took her a second to get it, and then she laughed, about Force Six. "Jake,"

she said, "you've got a nice-looking evening yourself. I think I'm going to like this bar. Do you

suppose this no-rain gimmick would work on our clothes if we took them out and put them on? Or is

it necessary to dress before going downstairs?"

"Not necessary, no, but clothes are customarily worn. But don't ask me how Finn's

technology works-the only way to find out is to try."

Sure enough, the rain avoided our clothing, too. "Of course," I said, "they'll get wet

when we put them-" and then stopped. I wasn't wet any more. Neither was she. Our hair was dry, and

I hadn't felt a breeze. My own clothes, which had been damp when! left them, were thy, and stayed

that way.

"Fascinating," she murmured, for all the world like Mr. Spock.

I nodded. "Finn's great to have around in winter." I tossed her clothes to her, and she

caught the stack. I began dressing myself. Do you think it silly that after having spent

consideralile time naked together, -we averted our eyes as we dressed? I'm sure we both thought so-

but we did it. I liked her just as well, dressed. That is to say: dressed, she made me want to

see her undressed again, as soon as possible. I wished the light wa~ better. I could faintly hear

sounds from below us, distant thuds and voices, one of them unmistakably Callahan's. Doc

V*~bster's Studebaker pulled into the parking lot, followed by Long-Drink McGonnigle'struck, and

way off down 25A I could hear Fast Eddie's Hideousmobile approaching. Callahan's Place was getting

ready for a late opening.

She gestured vaguely at the weepy heavens above (and I couldn't help wondering how the

raindrops knew enough not to Yall in the path of her moving arm) and said, "Finn's from. . . well,

out there, isn't he?'

"Yep. Way out."

"How long has he been here?"

"A little over ten years now, I make it."

"And he's spent the whole time hanging out in bars? What the hell was his mission?"

"The -extermination of human life."

"Damnit, Jake, that's not funny."

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (9 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt

"Don't panic-he defected. A long time ago, a couple of weeks after he arrived. His first

night at Callahan's Place."

She visibly relaxed, but her face had a funny expression. "I see. Say no more, by all

means. I think you've certainly covered all the high points of the story."

So I told her all about Finn, about the night he came to Callahan's and acquired his name-

~just in the nick of time. I told her about the night he took on Adolph Hitler out in the parking

lot, and how big the resulting crater was, until be fixed it. I told her about his successive

careers as a farmer, a fisherman, a forest fire-watcher, and a lighthousekeeper, and by then I got

the idea that I was talking entirely too much about Finn and decided to try for a smooth segue to

some more rewarding topic.

"But enough about Finn. Let's talk about me. I am, in no particular order, a singer, a

songwriter, a guitar player, a nice person, and in no particular order. I play here some nights

with Fast Eddie the piano player, and we're very good. I have many of my original teeth and no ex-

wives or children living and I find you the most devastatingly attractive woman I've met in at

least a decade: I would very much like to know you better."

"Aie your intentions honorable?'

"Certainly. I want to sleep with you. Repeatedly if possible." My intentions went much

further than that, actually-but some instinct told me to keep my mouth shut.

"Well, I'm not especially sleepy at the moment-but would you like to fuck?'

"Yes!" Sudden thought. "Uh, I'm fertile."

"I'm covered."

"You're certainly about to be."

When Mickey Finn reprograms reality, he does so with thoughtfulness and subtlety. The heap

of clothes we made stayed dry, but now we could feel the warm rain on our bodies-except that

nothing could make it run up our noses even when they were upturned. I didn't notice until after;

I was preoccupied. She was warm and soft and limber and skilled- and very enthusiastic; somewhere

in there I started believing in God again just to have somebody to thank.

The distant sounds of my friends' voices came drifting up through the roof, and that

seemed correct. One of the greatest pleasures in my life is turning people I like on to Callahan's

Place; I get a big kick out of introducing a new friend to my old friends. I had never yet turned

someone I loved on to Callahan's, simply because in the last dozen years I hadn't come to love

anyone that I hadn't met in Callahan's, but I expected it to be at least twice as nice- and I

already knew that I loved Mary. I was beginning to be in love with her (if you get the

distinction), the first time I'd been in love since I killed my family, and the prospect of

introducing a lover to Mike and the gang sounded heavenly. Just a sliver of a thought, this, that

resonated every time the faint sound of a familiar laugh reached me, a warm certainty that there

could have been no finer place to fall in love, and to make love for the first time, than where I

was.

God, she was a sweet pillowy armful! I've had a few of the bony women everyone else claims

to like: nothing to squeeze, nothing to admire, I had to be careful with my weight, I was afraid

to let go for fear I might bruise something, and even so my pubic bone got sore. A woman like

Mary, now: you can roll around on a woman like that. You can let yourself go, secure in the

awareness that the system is roomy and cushioned, and you can explore forever without running out

of things to see and appreciate, and you find, time after time, so often that I'm tempted to say

always, that passion and compassion and sensuality each double for every pound above so-called

"optimum weight." Take your skinny women and stick them up the same receptacle with hard beds and

cold showers and red-line exercise and "natural" food and all the other things everyone earnestly

pursues in the belief that pleasure and pain are nature's diabolical attempts to trick us, that

the less you enjoy a thing the better it must be for you; take 'em and stick 'em, and give me

something a man can enjoy!

Our lovemaking was about as good as a first time can be. It was not the telepathic

experience it could become with practice and study, of course-pethaps even less so than a simple

sporting event might have been. I spent most of my time in my own head, startled by the unexpected

magnitude of my own need, and~then bemused by the discovery that hers was even greater.

Phe~ii~enèy vs. tenderness ratio definitely tilted to the left, and there seemed to be some

question as to who was raping whom. It got pretty athletic in spots. (Doubtless noisy as well,

though I'm sure the rain blanketed most of it.) Most of the information that we passed back and

forth came directly from the spinal column or just a little bit higher up.

But tenderness was in there too, and caring, and sharing, and something oddly like

nostalgia, and so all in all it was about as nice a last time as you could have asked for, -too.

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%20Callahan's%20Secret.txt (10 of 75) [8/28/03 12:04:13 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Spider%20Robinson/Robinson,%20Spider%20-%20Callahan%203%2\0Callahan's%20Secret.txtThise-textscanned,OCR'dandonceoveredbyGorgon776on19May2001.\Ididareasonablythroughproofreadingofthisscan,butifyoufinditneedssomemorecorrectio\n,thencorrectanyerrorsyoumayfind,updatetheversionnumberby.1,a...

展开>> 收起<<

Spider Robinson - C3 - Callahans Secret.pdf

共75页,预览15页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Spider Robinson - C3 - Callahans Secret

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: