Robinson, Spider - Callahan 01 - Callahan' s Crosstime Saloon

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Callahan's
Crosstime
Saloon
By
Spider Robinson
©1977
Spider Robinson:
The SF Writer As Empath
By Ben Bova
When Analog magazine was housed over at Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue,
our offices were far from plush. In fact, they were grimy. Years worth of
Manhattan soot clung to the walls. The windows were opaque with grime. (What has
this to do with Spider Robinson? Patience, friend.)
Many times young science fiction fans would come to Manhattan and phone me
from Grand Central Station, which connected underground with the good old
Graybar. "I've just come to New York and I read every issue of Analog and I'd
like to come up and see what a science fiction magazine office looks like," they
would invariably say.
I'd tell them to come on up, but not to expect too much. My advice was always
ignored. The poor kid would come in and gape at the piles of manuscripts, the
battered old metal desks, and mountains of magazines and stacks of artwork, the
ramshackle filing cabinets and bookshelves. His eyes would fill with tears. His
mouth would sag open.
He had, of course, expected whirring computers, telephones with TV
attachments, smoothly efficient robots humming away, ultramodern furniture, and
a general appearance reminiscent of a NASA clean room. (Our present offices, in
the spanking new Conde Nast Building on Madison Avenue, are a little closer to
that dream.)
The kid would shamble away, heartsick, the beautiful rainbow-hued bobble of
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his imagination burst by the sharp prick of reality.
Still, despite the cramped quarters and the general dinginess, we managed to
put out an issue of Analog each month, and more readers bought it than any other
science fiction book, magazine, pamphlet, or cuniform tablet ever published.
And then came Spider Robinson.
Truth to tell, I don't remember if he sent in a manuscript through the mail
first, or telephoned for an appointment to visit the office. No matter. And now
he's off in Nova Scotia, living among the stunted trees and frost heaves, where
nobody-not even short-memoried editors-can reach him easily.
Anyway, in comes Spider. I look up from my desk and see this lank, almost-
cadaverous young man, bearded, long of hair, slightly owlish behind his
eyeglasses, sort of grinning quizzically, as if he didn't know what to expect.
Neither did I.
But I .thought, At least he won't be put off by the interiordecor.
You have to understand that those same kids who expected Analog's office to
look like an out-take from 2001: A Space Odyssey also had a firm idea of what an
Analog writer should look like: a tall, broadshouldered, jutjawed, steelyeyed
hero who can repair a starship's inertial drive with one hand, make friends with
the fourteen-legged green aliens of Arcturus, and bring the warring nations of
Earth together under a benignly scientific world government-all at the same
time, while wearing a metallic mesh jumpsuit and a cool smile.
Never mind that no SF writer ever looked like that. Well, maybe Robert A.
Heinlein comes close, and he could certainly do all of those things if he'd just
stop writing for a while. But Asimov is a bit less than heroic in stature;
Silverberg shuns politics; Bradbury doesn't even drive a car, much less a
starship.
Nevertheless, this was the popular conception of a typical Analog writer.
Spider Robinson was rather wider of that mark than most.
He had a story with him, called "The Guy with the Eyes." There wasn't much
science fiction in it. But it was one helluva good story. About a crazy bunch of
guys who get together at a truly unique place called Callahan's.
We went to lunch, and Spider began telling me how he worked nights guarding a
sewer 'way out on Long Island. Far from being a drop-out, he was writing stories
and songs, as well as sewer-sitting. He's a worker, and he knows science fiction
very well, a fact that surprised a lot of people when he started reviewing books
for Galaxy magazine. He's also a guitar-strummin' singer, and I found out how
good he is at many a party. But that was later.
I bought "The Guy with the Eyes." When it came out in Analog, it caused a mild
ripple among our readers. I had expected some of them to complain because it
wasn't galaxy-spanning superheroic science fiction. Instead, they wrote to tell
me that they got a kick out of Callahan's Place. How about more of the same?
Now, an editor spends most of his time reading lousy stories. John Campbell,
who ran Analog (nee Astounding) for some thirty-five years, often claimed to
hold the Guinness Book of Records championship for reading more rotten SF
stories than anyone else on Earth. (Most likely he could have expanded his claim
to take in the entire solar system, but John was a conservative man in some
ways.)
So when you spend your days and nights-especially the nights-reading poor
stories, it's a pleasure to run across somebody like Spider: a new writer who
has a good story to tell. It makes all those lousy stories worthwhile. Almost.
It's a thrill to get a good story out of the week's slushpile-that mountain of
manuscripts sent in by the unknowns, the hopefuls, the ones who want to be
writers but haven't written anything publishable yet.
But the real thrill comes when a new writer sends in his second story and it's
even better than the first one. That happens most rarely of all. It happened
with Spider. He brought in the manuscript of "The Time Traveler," and I knew I
was dealing with a pro, not merely a one-time amateur.
We talked over the story before he completed the writing of it. He warned me
that he couldn't really find a science fiction gimmick to put into the story. I
fretted over that (Analog is, after all, a science fiction magazine), but then I
realized that the protagonist was indeed a time traveller; his "time machine" ,
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was a prison.
Just about the time the story was published, thousands of similar time
travelers returned to the U.S. from North Vietnamese prisons. Spider's story
should have been required reading for all of them, and their families.
Sure enough, we got a few grumbles from some of our older readers. One sent a
stiff note, saying that since the story wasn't science fiction atall, and he was
paying for science fiction stories, would we please cancel his subscription. I
wrote him back pointing out that we had published the best science fiction
stories in the world for more than forty years, and for one single story he's
cancelling his subscription? He never responded, and I presume that he's been
happy with Analog and Spider ever since.
Callahan's Place grew to be an institution among Analog's readers, and you can
see it-and the zanies who frequent Callahan's-in all their glory in this
collection of stories. What you're reading is something truly unique, because
the man who wrote these stories is an unique writer. It's been my privilege to
publish most of these stories in Analog. Several others are brand new and
haven't been published anywhere else before.
It's also been a privilege, and a helluva lot of fun, to get to know Spider
personally. To watch him develop as a writer and as a man.
He went from guarding sewers to working for a Long Island newspaper. When that
job brought him to a crisis of conscience-work for the paper and slant the news
the way the publisher demanded, or get out-his conscience won. He took the big,
big step of depending on nothing but his writing talent for an income. But
Spider writes; he doesn't talk about writing, he works at it.
It wasn't all that easy. He had personal problems, just like everybody else
does. Not every story he put on paper sold immediately. Money was always short.
One summer afternoon he met a girlfriend who was coming into town from Nova
Scotia. She had never been to New York before. Spider greeted her at Penn
Station with the news that his lung had just collapsed and he had to get to a
hospital right away, he hoped she didn't mind. The young lady (her name is
Jeanne) not only got him to a hospital; she ended up marrying him. Now they both
live in Nova Scotia, where city-born Spider has found that he loves the rural
splendor of farm life. (Me, I stay in the wilds of Manhattan, where all you've
got to worry about is strikes, default, muggings and equipment failure. Nova
Scotia? In winter? Ugh!)
Meanwhile, Spider's stories kept getting better. He branched out from
Callahan's. He turned a ludicrous incident on a Greyhound bus into a fine and
funny science fiction story. He wrote a novel with so many unlikely angles to it
that if I gave you the outline of it, it would probably drive you temporarily
insane. But he made it work. It's a damned good novel, with bite as well as
humanity in it. We'll publish a big slice of it in Analog, and it will come out
both in hardcover and paperback later on.
And his stories were being noticed, appreciated, enjoyed by the science
fiction fans. At the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 he received the
John Campbell Award as Best New Writer of the Year. At that time-he had only
published three or four stories, but they were not the kind that could be
overlooked.
What does it all add up to? Here we have a young writer who looks, at first
glance, like the archetypical hippie dropout, winning respect and admiration in
a field that's supposed to admire nobody but the Heinleins and Asimovs.
It just might be that Spider Robinson represents the newest and strongest
trend in science fiction today. He's a humanist, by damn. An empath. He's
sensitive to human emotions: pain, fear, joy, love. He can get them down on
paper as few writers can. -
The SF field began with gadgeteers and pseudoscience. It developed in the
Thirties and Forties with writers such as Heinlein and Asimov, who knew and
understood real science and engineering, and could write strong stories about
believable people who were scientists and engineers. In the Fifties and Sixties
we began to get voices such as Ted Sturgeon, Fred Pohl, Harlan Ellison-writers
who warned that not everything coming from the laboratory was Good, True and
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Beautiful.
Now here's Spider Robinson, writing stories that are-well, they're about
people. People in pain, people having fun, people with problems, people helping
each other to solve their problems. Spider is a guy who can feel other people's
emotions and help to deal with them. He's like a character out of an early
Sturgeon story-kind, down-to-earth; very empathic. Literarily, he is Sturgeon's
heir.
That's the good news. He is also an inveterate punster. You'll see his puns
scattered all through the Callahan stories. In fact, there are whole evenings at
Callahan's devoted to punning contests. Nobody's perfect.
I remember getting a newspaper clipping from Spider which showed a NASA
drawing of the design for a toilet to be used under zero gravity conditions in
the Skylab satellite. (NASA has problems that thee and me can't even guess at.)
The cutaway drawing of this engineering marvel showed that there was a rotating
blade inside the toilet bowl, to "separate the liquid from the solid wastes," as
NASA's engineers euphemistically put it.
Spider, in his scrawly handwriting, had scribbled across the top of the
clipping a brief note, followed by an arrow that pointed unerringly to the bowl
and the separator blade. The note said, "Ben: Near as I can figure, the shit is
supposed to hit the fan!"
As I said, nobody's perfect. But Spider comes pretty damned close. Read about
him and his friends at Callahan's Place. Enjoy.
April, 1976
New York City
Foreword
by Spider Robinson
Books get written for the damndest reasons. Some are written to pay off a
mortgage, some to save the world, some simply for lack of anything better to do.
One of my favorite anecdotes concerns a writer who bet a friend that it was
literally impossible to write a book so B*A*D that no one could be found to
publish it. As the story goes, this writer proceeded to write the worst, most
hackneyed novel of which he was capable-and not only did he succeed in selling
it, the public demanded better than two dozen sequels (I can't tell you his
name: his estate might sue, and I have no documentation. Ask around at any SF
convention; it's a reasonably famous anecdote).
This book, as it happens, was begun for the single purpose of getting me out
of the sewer.
I mean that literally. In 1971, after seven years in college, with that Magic
Piece of Paper clutched triumphantly in my fist, the best job I was able to get
was night watchman on a sewer project in Babylon, New York--guarding a hole in
the ground to prevent anyone from stealing it. God bless the American
educational system.
What with one thing and another, I seemed to have a lot of time on my hands.
So I read a lot of science fiction, a custom I have practiced assiduously since,
at the age of five, I was introduced to Robert A. Heinlein's Rocket Ship
Galileo. One evening, halfway through a particularly wretched example of
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Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of science fiction-of anything-is crap"), I sat
up straight in my chair and said for perhaps the ten thousandth time in my life,
"By Jesus, I can write better than this turnip."
And a lightbulb of about two hundred watts appeared in the air over my head.
I had written a couple of stories already, acquiring just enough rejection
slips to impress friends with, and had actually had one printed in a now-defunct
fanzine called Xrymph. (Hilariously enough, one of the crazies who produced
Xrymph was the editor who bought this book that you hold in your hands: Jim
Frenkel.) But my entire output at that time could have been fit into a business
envelope, and its quality might be most charitably described as shitful. On the
other hand, I had never before had the motivation I now possessed: I Wanted Out
Of The Sewer.
It was time to become a Pro.
I realized from previous failures that as a tyro, it behooved me to select a
subject I knew thoroughly, as I was not yet skillful enough to bluff
convincingly. Accordingly, I selected drink. Within a week I had completed the
first chapter of this book, "The Guy With The Eyes."
Looking in a library copy of Writer's Guide, I discovered that there were four
markets for my masterpiece. I noted that Ben Bova paid five cents a-word and
everyone else paid under three, and that's how my lifelong friendship with Ben
was begun. I mailed it and he bought it, and when I had recovered from the shock
of his letter of acceptance, I gathered my nerve and rang him up to timidly ask
if editors ever condescended to waste a few minutes answering the naive
questions of beginning writers. Ben pointed out that without writers, editors
couldn't exist, and invited me to lunch. And when I walked into the Analog
office (stumbling over the occasional Hugo), very nearly the first thing he said
was, "Say, does that Callahan's Place really exist? I'd love to go there."
Since that day I estimate I have been asked that question about 5,372 X 10'°
times, by virtually every fan I meet. One gentleman wrote to me complaining
bitterly because I had said in "The Guy With The Eyes" that Callahan's was in
Suffolk County, Long Island, and he wanted me to know that he had by God spent
six months combing every single bar on Long Island without finding the Place.
I seem to have struck a chord.
Well I'm sorry, but I'll have to tell you the same thing I told those 5,372 X
10'° other people: as far as I know, Callahan's Place exists only between a) my
ears, b) assorted Analog and Vertex covers, and of course c) the covers of this
book. If 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.
'Cause I'd really like to hang out there awhile.
February, 1976
Phinney's Cove, Nova Scotia
"There is nothing which has been
contrived by man by which so
much happiness has been produced
as by a good tavern or inn."
-Samuel Johnson
1
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THE GUY WITH THE EYES
Callahan's Place was pretty lively that night. Talk fought Budweiser for mouth
space all over the joint, and the beer nuts supply was critical. But this guy
managed to keep himself in a corner without being noticed for nearly an hour. I
only spotted him myself a few minutes before all the action started, and I make
a point of studying everybody at Callahan's Place.
First thing, I saw those eyes. You get used to some haunted eyes in
Callahan's-the newcomers have 'em -but these reminded me of a guy I knew once in
Topeka, who got four people with an antique revolver before they cut him down.
I hoped like hell he'd visit the fireplace before he left.
If you've never been to Callahan's Place, God's pity on you. Seek it in the
wilds of Suffolk County, but look not for neon. A simple, hand-lettered sign
illuminated by a single floodlight, and a heavy oaken door split in the center
(by the head of one Big Beef McCaffrey in 1947) and poorly repaired.
Inside, several-heresies.
First, the light is about as bright as you keep your living room. Callahan
maintains that people who like to drink in caves are unstable.
Second, there's a flat rate. Every drink in the house is half a buck, with the
option. The option operates as follows:
You place a one-dollar bill on the bar. If all you have on you is a fin, you
trot across the street to the all-night deli, get change, come back and put a
one-dollar bill on the bar. (Callahan maintains that nobody in his right mind
would counterfeit one-dollar bills; most of us figure he just likes to rub
fistfuls of them across his face after closing.)
You are served your poison-of-choice. You inhale this, and confront the
option. You may, as you leave, pick up two quarters from the always-full
cigarbox at the end of the bar and exit into the night. Or you may, upon
finishing your drink, stride up to the chalk line in the middle of the room,
announce a toast (this is mandatory) and hurl your glass into the huge,
oldfashioned fireplace which takes up most of the back wall. You then depart
without visiting the cigarbox. Or, pony up another buck and exercise your option
again.
Callahan seldom has to replenish the cigarbox. He orders glasses in such
quantities that they cost him next to nothing, and he sweeps out the fireplace
himself every morning.
Another heresy: no one watches you with accusing eyes to make sure you take no
snore quarters than you have coming to you. If Callahan ever happens to catch
someone cheating him, he personally ejects them forever. Sometimes he doesn't
open the door first. The last time he had to eject someone was in 1947, a
gentleman named Big Beef McCaffrey.
Not too surprisingly, it's a damned interesting place to be. It's the kind of
place you hear about only if you need to-and if you are very lucky. Because if a
patron, having proposed his toast and smithereened his glass, feels like talking
about the nature of his troubles, he receives the instant, undivided attention
of everyone in the room. (That's why the toast is obligatory. Many a man with a
hurt locked inside finds in the act of naming his hurt for the toast that he
wants very much to talk about it. Callahan is one smart hombre.) On the other
hand, even the most tantalizingly cryptic toast will bring no prying inquiries
if the guy displays no desire to uncork. Anyone attempting to flout this custom
is promptly blackjacked by Fast Eddie the piano player and dumped in the alley.
But somehow many do feel like spilling it in a place like Callahan's; and you
can get a deeper insight into human nature in a week there than in ten years
anywhere else I know. You can also quite likely find solace for most any kind of
trouble, from Callahan himself if no one else. It's a rare hurt that can stand
under the advice, help and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that
care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around
long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.
It's that kind of a bar.
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I don't want you to get a picture of Callahan's Place as an agonized,
Alcoholics Anonymous type of groupencounter session, with Callahan as some sort
of salty psychoanalyst-father-figure in the foreground. Hell, many's the toast
provokes roars of laughter, or a shouted chorus of agreement, or a unanimous
blitz of glasses from all over the room when the night is particularly spirited.
Callahan is tolerant of rannygazoo; he maintains that a bar should be "merry,"
so long as no bones are broken unintentionally. I mind the time he helped Spud
Flynn set fire to a seat cushion to settle a bet on which way the draft was
coming. Callahan exudes, at all times, 'a kind of monolithic calm; and u.s. 40
is shorter than his temper.
This night I'm telling you about, for instance, was nothing if not merry. When
I pulled in around ten o'clock, there was an unholy shambles of a square dance
going on in the middle of the floor. I laid a dollar on the bar, collected a
glass of Tullamore Dew and a hello-grin from Callahan, and settled back in a
tall chair-Callahan abhors barstools-to observe the goings-on. That's what I
mean about Callahan's Place: most bars, men only dance if there're ladies
around. Of one sex or another.
I picked some familiar faces out of the maelstrom of madmen weaving and
lurching over honest-to-God sawdust, and waved a few greetings. There was Tom
Flannery, who at that time had eight months to live, and knew it; he laughed a
lot at Callahan's Place. There was Slippery Joe Maser, who had two wives, and
Marty Matthias, who didn't gamble any more, and Noah Gonzalez, who worked on
Suffolk County's bomb squad. Calling for the square dance while performing a
creditable Irish jig was Doc Webster, fat and jovial as the day he pumped the
pills out of my stomach and ordered me to Callahan's. See, I used to have a wife
and daughter before I decided to install my own brakes. I saved thirty dollars,
easy . . .
The Doc left the square-dancers to their fate-their creative individuality
making a caller superfluous-and drifted over like a pink zeppelin to say Hello.
His stethoscope hung unnoticed from his ears, framing a smile like a sunlamp.
The end of the 'scope was in his drink.
"Howdy, Doc. Always wondered how you kept that damned thing so cold," I
greeted him.
He blinked like an owl with the staggers and looked down at the gently
bubbling pickup beneath two fingers of scotch. Emitting a bellow of laughter at
about force eight, he removed the gleaming think and shook it experimentally.
"My secret's out, Jake. Keep it under your hat, will you?" he boomed.
"Maybe you beter keep it under yours," I suggested. He appeared to consider
this idea for a time, while I speculated on one of life's greatest paradoxes:
Sam Webster, M.D. The Doc is good for a couple of quarts of Peter Dawson a
night, three or four nights a week. But you won't find a better sawbones
anywhere on Earth, and those sausage fingers of his can move like a tap-dancing
centipede when they have to, with nary a tremor. Ask Shorty Steinitz to tell you
about the time Doc Webster took out his appendix on top of Callahan's bar . . .
while Callahan calmly kept the Scotch coming.
"At least then I could hear myself think," the Doc finally replied, and
several people seated within earshot groaned theatrically.
"Have a heart, Doc," one called out.
"What a re-pulse-ive idea," the Doc returned the serve.
"Well, I know when I'm beat," said the challenger, and made as if to turn
away.
"Why, you young whelp, aorta poke you one," roared the Doc, and the bar
exploded with laughter and cheers. Callahan picked up a beer bottle in his huge
hand and pegged it across the bar at the Doc's round skull. The beer bottle,
being made of foam rubber, bounced gracefully into the air and landed in the
piano, where Fast Eddie sat locked in mortal combat with the "C-Jam Blues."
Fast Eddie emitted a sound like an outraged transmission and kept right on
playing, though his upper register was shot. "Little beer never hoit a piano,"
he sang out as he reached the bridge, and went over it like he figured to burn
it behind him.
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All in all it looked like a cheerful night, but then I saw the Janssen kid
come in and I knew there was a trouble brewing.
This Janssen kid-look, I can't knock long hair, I wore mine long when it
wasn't fashionable. And I can't knock pot for the same reason. But nobody I know
ever had a good thing to say for heroin. Certainly not Joe Hennessy, who did two
weeks in the hospital last year after he surprised the Janssen kid scooping
junk-money out of his safe at four in the morning. Old Man Janssen paid Hennessy
back every dime and disowned the kid, and he'd been in and out of sight ever
since. Word was he was still using the stuff, but the cops never seemed to catch
him holding. They sure did try, though. I wondered what the hell he was doing in
Callahan's Place.
I should know better by now. He placed a tattered bill on the bar, took the
shot of bourbon which Callahan handed him silently, and walked to the chalk
line. He was quivering with repressed tension, and his boots squeaked on the
sawdust. The place quieted down some, and his toast--"To smack!"--rang out clear
and crisp. Then he downed the shot amid an expanding silence and flung his glass
so hard you could hear his shoulder crack just before the glass shattered on
unyielding brick.
Having created silence, he broke it. With a sob. Even as he let it out he
glared around to see what our reactions were.
Callahan's was immediate, an "Amen!" that sounded like an echo of the-smashing
glass. The kid made a face like he was somehow satisfied in spite of himself,
and looked at the rest of us. His gaze rested on Doc Webster, and the Doc
drifted over and gently began rolling up the kid's sleeves. The boy made no
effort to help or hinder him. When they were both rolled to the shoulder--
phosporescent purple I think they were--he silently held out his arms, palm-up.
They were absolutely unmarked. Skinny as hell and white as a piece of paper,
but unmarked. The kid was clean.
Everyone waited in silence, giving the kid their respectful attention. It was
a new feeling to him, and he didn't quite know how to handle it. Finally he
said, "I heard about this place," just a little too truculently.
"Then you must of needed to," Callahan told him quietly, and the kid nodded
slowly.
"I hear you get some answers in, from time to time," he half-asked.
"Now and again," Callahan admitted. "Some o' the damndest questions, too.
What's it like, for instance?"
"You mean smack?"
"I don't mean bourbon."
The kid's eyes got a funny, far-away look, and he almost smiled. "It's . . ."
He paused, considering. "It's like . . . being dead."
"Whooee!" came a voice from across the room. "That's a powerful good feeling
indeed." I looked and saw it was Chuck Samms talking, and watched to see how the
kid would take it.
He thought Chuck was being sarcastic and snapped back, "Well, what the hell do
you know about it anyway?" Chuck smiled. A lot of people ask him that question,
in a different tone of voice.
"Me?" he said, enjoying himself hugely. "Why, I've been dead is all."
"S'truth," Callahan confirmed as the kid's jaw dropped. "Chuck there was
legally dead for five minutes before the
"Chuck got his pacemaker going again. The crumb died owing me money, and I
never had the heart to dun his widow."
"Sure was a nice feeling, too," Chuck said around a yawn. "More peaceful than
nap-time in a monastery. If it wasn't so pleasant I wouldn't be near so damned
scared of it." There was an edge to his voice as he finished, but it disappeared
as he added softly, "What the hell would you want to be dead for?"
The Janssen kid couldn't meet his eyes, and when he spoke his voice cracked.
"Like you said, pop, peace. A little peace of mind, a little quiet. Nobody
yammering at you all the time. I mean, if you're dead there's always the chance
somebody'll mourn, right? Make friends with the worms, dig their side of it,
maybe a little poltergeist action, who knows? I mean, what's the sense of
talking about it, anyway? Didn't any of you guys ever just want to nun away?"
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"Sure thing," said Callahan. "Sometimes I do it too. But I generally run
someplace I can find my way back from." It was said so gently that the kid
couldn't take offense, though he tried.
"Run away from what, son?" asked Slippery Joe.
The kid had been bottled up tight too long; he exploded. "From what?" he
yelled. "Jesus, where do I start? There was this war they wanted me to go and
fight, see? And there's this place called college, I mean they want you to care,
dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to
make it as attractive as the crap game across the street. There's this air I
hear is unfit to breathe, and water that ain't fit to drink, and food that
wouldn't nourish a vulture and a grand outlook for the future. You can't get to
a job without the car you couldn't afford to run even if you were working, and
if you found a job it'd pay five dollars less than the rent. The T. V .
advertises karate classes for four-year-olds and up, the President's New Clothes
didn't wear very well, the next depression's around the corner and you ask me
what in the name of God I'm running from?
"Man, I've been straight for seven months, what I mean, and in that seven god
damned months I have been over this island like a fungus and there is nothing
for me. No jobs, no friends, no place to live long enough to get the floor
dirty, no money and nobody that doesn't point and say "Junkie" when I go by for
seven months and you ask me what am I running from? Man, everything is all, just
everything."
It was right then that I noticed that guy in the corner, the one with the
eyes. Remember him? He was leaning forward in rapt attention, his mouth a black
slash in a face pulled tight as a drumhead. Those ghastly eyes of his never left
the Janssen kid, but somehow I was sure that his awareness included all of us,
everyone in the room.
And no one had an answer for the Janssen boy. I could see, all around the
room, men who had learned to listen Callahan's Place, men who had learned to
empathize, to want to understand and share the pain of another. And no one had a
word to say. They were thinking past the blurted words of a haunted boy,
wondering if this crazy world of confusion might not after all be one holy hell
of a place to grow up. Most of them already had reason to know damn well that
society never forgives the sinner, but they were realizing to their dismay how
thin and uncomforting the straight and narrow has become these last few years.
Sure, they'd heard these things before, often enough to make them into
clichés. But now I could see the boys reflecting that these were the clichés
that made a young man say he liked to feel dead, and the same thought was
mirrored on the face of each of them: My God, when did we let these things
become clichés? The Problems of Today's Youth were no longer a Sunday supplement
or a news broadcast or anything so remote and intangible, they were suddenly
become a dirty, shivering boy who told us that in this world we had built for
him with our sweat and our blood he was not only tired of living, but so
unscared of dying that he did it daily, sometimes, for recreation.
And silence held court in Callahan's Place. No one had a single thing to say,
and that guy with the eyes seemed to know it, and to derive some crazy kind of
bitter inner satisfaction from the knowledge. He started to settle back in his
chair, when Callahan broke the silence.
"So run," he said.
Just like that, flat, no expression, just, "So run." It hung there for about
ten seconds, while he and the kid locked eyes.
The kid's forehead started to bead with sweat. Slowly, with shaking fingers,
he reached under his leather vest to his shirt pocket. Knuckles white, he hauled
out a flat, shiny black case about four inches by two. His eyes never left
Callahan's as he opened it and held it up so that we could all see the gleaming
hypodermic. It didn't look like it had ever been used; he must have just stolen
it.
He held it up to the light for a moment, looking up his bare, unmarked arm at
it, and then he whirled and flung it case and all into the giant fireplace.
Almost as it shattered he sent a cellophane bag of white powder after it, and
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the powder burned green while the sudden stillness hung in the air. The guy with
the eyes looked oddly stricken in some interior way, and he sat absolutely rigid
in his seat.
And Callahan was around the bar in an instant, handing the Janssen kid a beer
that grew out of his fist and roaring, "Welcome home, Tommy!" and no one in the
place was very startled to realize that only Callahan of all of us knew the
kid's first name.
We all sort of swarmed around then and swatted the kid on the arm some and he
even cried a little until we poured some beer over his head and pretty soon it
began to look like the night was going to get merry again after all.
And that's when the guy with the eyes stood up, and everybody in the joint
shut up and turned to look at him. That sounds melodramatic, but it's the effect
he had on us. When he moved, he was the center of attention. He was tall,
unreasonably tall, near seven foot, and I'll never know why we hadn't all
noticed him right off. He was dressed in a black suit that fit worse than a
Joliet Special, and his shoes didn't look right either. After a moment you
realized that he had the left shoe on the right foot, and vice-versa, but it
didn't surprise you. He was thin and deeply tanned and his mouth was twisted up
tight but mostly he was eyes, and I still dream of those eyes and wake up
sweating now and again. They were like windows into hell, the very personal and
private hell of a man faced with a dilemma he cannot resolve. They did not
blink, not once.
He shambled to the bar, and something was wrong with his walk, too, like he
was walking sideways on the wall with magnetic shoes and hadn't quite caught the
knack yet. He took ten new singles out of his jacket pocket -which struck me as
an odd place to keep cash-and laid them on the bar.
Callahan seemed to come back from a far place, and hustled around behind the
bar again. He looked the stranger up and down and then placed ten shot glasses
on the counter. He filled each with rye and stood back silently, running a big
red hand through his thinning hair and regarding the stranger with clinical
interest.
The dark giant tossed off the first shot, shuffled to the chalk line, and said
in oddly-accented English, "To my profession," and hurled the glass into the
fireplace.
Then he walked back to the bar and repeated the entire procedure. Ten times.
By the last glass, brick was chipping in the fireplace.
When the last, "To my profession," echoed in empty air; he turned and faced
us. He waited, tensely, for question or challenge. There was none. He half
turned away, paused, then swung back and took a couple of deep breaths. When he
spoke his voice made you hurt to hear it.
"My profession, gentlemen," he said with that funny accent I couldn't place,
"is that of advance scout. For a race whose home is many light-years from here.
Many, many light-years from here." He paused, looking for our reactions.
Well, I thought, ten whiskeys and he's a Martian. Indeed. Pleased to meet you,
I'm Popeye the Sailor. I guess it was pretty obvious we were all thinking the
same way, because he looked tired and said, "it would take far more ethanol than
that to befuddle me, gentlemen." Nobody said a word to that, and he turned to
Callahan. "You know I am not intoxicated," he stated.
Callahan considered him professionally and said finally, "Nope. You're not
tight. I'll be a son of a bitch, but you're not tight."
The stranger nodded thanks, spoke thereafter directly to Callahan. "I am here
now three days. In two hours I shall be finished. When I am finished I shall go
home. After I have gone your planet will be vaporized. I have accumulated data
which will ensure the annihilation of your species when they are assimilated by
my Masters. To them, you will seem as cancerous cells, in danger of infecting
all you touch. You will not be permitted to exist. You will be cured. And I
repent me of my profession."
Maybe I wouldn't have believed it anywhere else. But at Callahan's Place
anything can happen. Hell, we all believed him. Fast Eddie sang out, "Anyt'ing
we can do about it?" and he was serious for sure. You can tell with Fast Eddie.
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