Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (9 page)

He took his time answering.
 
“Jake?
 
Uh, not that I mind, but…we’re through the looking glass here, right?”

“Well, not literally,” I said.
 
“The only one of us to do that was a guy named Bob Trebor…and we busted the glass behind him.
 
Long story.
 
But metaphorically speaking, you’re not far wrong.
 
I think we’re aiming for somewhere more like Oz…or maybe Strawberry Fields.”

He took a deep breath, finished his Irish coffee and took another deep breath.
 
“Okay, go ahead.
 
I dare you: tell me something
else
astonishing about you folks.”

“Well, we’ve been telepathic.
 
Twice, for short periods.
 
It was so good we’ve been trying to find our way back to it ever since.
 
That’s why we’re here, basically.”

“Uh huh.
 
Anything else?”

“Well, I don’t expect it to come up, but all of us here are bulletproof, and immune to blast forces and hard radiation.
 
We were all in a room with an exploding atom bomb once.
 
It blew us a couple miles, but it didn’t hurt us any.”

He didn’t flinch.
 
“Oh.
 
How did you all come to be immune to shock and radiation, just then?”

“Aw, it’s a long story, probably take me three books to tell you all of it, but basically there was this old friend of ours, a seven-foot-tall alien cyborg named Mickey Finn.
 
Finn saved the human race three times that I know of, and he sure saved our butts that night.
 
See, what happened—”

Acayib held up a hand.
 
“Never mind.
 
I probably don’t need to know…and I think you may indeed have just exceeded my weirdness quotient.
 
Or at least maxed it out.”

“Sorry.
 
It’s best to feed it to you in small doses, I guess.
 
We’ve been accumulating a backlog of weird for over twenty years, now.”

“I believe that,” he said solemnly.
 
“Is it safe for me to ask one more thing?
 
Why you were all throwing paper airplanes made out of stage money into the fire when I came in?”

Buck had been doing a little jaw-dropping of his own, ever since Ralph had spoken—but now he snapped out of his trance.
 
“Uh, that was my doing.
 
I just got here a little while before you did.
 
But…well, I’m afraid that wasn’t stage money we were burning.”
 
He opened up the guitar case.
 
“It’s an inheritance.
 
I’m doing my best to lower the money supply.”

Acayib stared.
 
“To fight inflation,” he suggested.

“Right,” Buck said, delighted.

Acayib reached out tentatively, took a bill from the case, and examined it closely.
 
He began to smile.

“Could I—?” he began, and stopped.

“Be my guest,” Buck said.
 
“And if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to it myself.
 
The rest of these rummies, too, if they’re still willing—there’s a lot of hard work ahead of us.”

A number of voices declared willingness to resume burning cash.

Acayib was smiling broadly now.
 
“By God,” he said happily, “I’ve been waiting all my life for this night.”

“Not to bring you down or anything,” Buck said, “but so has
everybody
.
 
Everybody, ever.
 
In fact, I’d like to propose a toast.”
 
He left his chair, walked to the chalk line, and finished his beer.
 
“To all the ones who weren’t as lucky,” he said, and flung his empty glass into the hearth.

“To all the ones who weren’t as lucky,” we all chorused, and those of us not holding coffee mugs followed his example.

And then, blind to our doom, we went back to torching hundred dollar bills.

***

But we had made little progress in emptying that guitar case when the dead man walked in.

4

I, MADAM, I MADE RADIO!

SO I DARED! AM I MAD?

AM I?

And not just
any
dead man…

He was unreasonably tall and thin, with jet black hair brushed straight back, a ferocious but sanitary mustache, and the kind of brows on which pencils could be balanced.
 
He was dressed in the height of fashion for the 1920s, but every item looked new and the overall effect earned the word “impeccable.”
 
He appeared to be in his mid-forties—but to my certain knowledge he was at least twice that old.
 
And dead.

“Nikky!” I called out when I saw him.
 
“Come on in, pal—I didn’t know you were now.”

That’s not a typo.
 
That’s what I meant to say to him: that I hadn’t known, until then, that he was now.
 
By which I meant, then.
 

You see, Nikky is well into his second lifetime, and completely unstuck from time…

No, there’s just no way to nutshell this one.
 
A major digression is called for.
 
But where to
start?

***

I’ll make it as brief as I can.
 
Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 (hang on, now), in a place called Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, and came to America to work for Tom Edison in 1884.
 
Between then and 1943, he basically invented the twentieth century.
 

No exaggeration.
 
His astonishing 112 patents—on such things as alternating current, the condenser, the transformer, the electric motor, the remote control, five different propulsion systems, radio (Marconi was kind of like Amerigo Vespucci: got his name on something he didn’t actually discover), the “and-gate” logic circuit, and all the essential components of a transistor—underlie most of what we now laughingly call civilization…and you’ll no doubt be stunned to hear that he got screwed out of most of the money and a lot of the credit.
 

He was also notoriously crazy as a fruit bat, the original template for the cliché of the wacky genius.
 
He loved to hold lightning in his hands.
 
He was terrified of spherical objects, always ate alone, had a pathological dread of hair which many (incorrectly) believe caused him to die a virgin.
 
He
liked pigeons.
 
One of his sober ambitions—one of his few unachieved ambitions—was to stand on the earth and write legibly on the face of Mars.
 
Another was to create a permanent planetwide aurora borealis, so it’d never get dark again, anywhere.
 
He lived a remarkable and zany and brilliant life for eighty-six years, and then he died, in a New York hotel room spattered with pigeon shit, in 1943.
 
No mistake: Hugo Gernsback commissioned a death-mask, which apparently still exists.

Only Tesla
didn’t
die.
 
The corpse the FBI robbed so hastily that day was an artifically-aged clone that had never been sentient, left behind to cover his disappearance.

For Nikky had, in the eighth decade of his life, had the great good fortune to make the acquaintance of a woman known as Lady Sally McGee.
 
Their relationship was at first professional, she then being the owner and operator of (and part-time artist in) a legendary brothel in Brooklyn called Lady Sally’s House.
 
She took a personal interest in Nikky, and was apparently able to restore his flagging zest for living, figuratively rejuvenating him.
 
(Don’t ask
me
how she cured him of his fear of hair.
 
She certainly didn’t shave it when I knew her.)

And then, one night in bed, when she had him feeling, for the first time in weary decades, as though it might not be so bad to be young again, Lady Sally gently offered to
literally
rejuvenate him.

She was, she told him and proved to him, a time-traveler from a distant future ficton (“ficton” is, as I understand it, time-travelerese for a place-and-time, a given here-and-now), using her fabulous bordello as cover for an urgent ongoing mission.
 
She told him that a…a consensus of minds in the future had decided the human race needed more of Nikola Tesla than a measly eight-six years.
 
He could, if he chose, be made young again—and given freedom to roam all of Time at will, the power to visit the stars, the resources to build and test anything he could dream.
 
In return, he would be required to enjoy himself.
 
The offer was, she said, intended as a sort of apology, on behalf of mankind, for all he had suffered at the hands of backers like Edison and J.P. Morgan, friends like Westinghouse, and assistants like Marconi.
 
Oh, and one more thing: he would be required to pretend to die, on schedule, to avoid temporal paradox.

As far as anyone knows, the mind of Nikola Tesla has
never
been boggled.
 
Nor had he ever lacked for audacity; he accepted her offer on the spot.
 
(And a very pretty spot it was, too…)
 
And ever since, he has been wandering through space and time, making magic, amusing himself—I can’t imagine it any clearer than that.

How I came to meet Nikky and Lady Sally is a whole other book; I despair of summarizing it.
 
Let’s just say we were all once involved (along with Slippery Joe Maser and both his wives) in a series of events that led to the closing of Lady Sally’s House, and were lucky enough to survive them.
 
I was surprised to see him, now: this is not an era which holds a lot of interest for him.
 
(He won’t tell me much of anything about the future, quite properly—but he did once, in my hearing, refer to this particular era as The Last Bad Times, for whatever that’s worth.)
 
But I wasn’t
especially
surprised, because you kind of
expect
Nikky to surprise you.

Nor did he disappoint me.
 
At my greeting he smiled, waved, then reached his right hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a ball of lightning.
 

***

It shimmered and crackled, a luminous sphere of visible energy about the size of a softball, and it drew general and respectful attention.
 
He passed it to his left hand.
 

The smell of ozone slowly filled the room.

He produced another fireball from the same pocket, transferred it to the hand that held the first.
 
He went back into the pocket again and came up with one more ball of snarling fire—

—and began to juggle.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll stop burning hundred dollar bills long enough to watch the greatest genius that ever lived juggle lightning.
 
Even Zoey, who had quickly acquired a vast enthusiasm for the project, shut down production at the sight, clapping her hands with delight.
 
Soon Nikky had passed beyond simple juggling: the glowing balls of force left his hands and began to dance with each other in mid-air, moving and changing orbit at his will and gesture.
 
They hissed and spit and came together briefly in a ring of fire; broke apart and chased each other like drunken fighter pilots; bobbed up and down like yo-yos on invisible strings.
 
Shadows danced attendance around the room, visual backup singers; we all watched in awe and wonder—

Nikky waved his hand grandly, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the three balls came together into one, that
writhed
, and dropped to the floor, and rolled in a shower of sparks through the sawdust to his feet, and climbed up his leg and into his pocket, from which there emerged one final flatulent little
zap
sound.

“Ladies and gents,” I said in the ensuing stillness, “meet my friend, Nikola Tesla.”

Thunderous applause.
 
Man knows how to make an entrance.
 
Within minutes what had already been a spirited party had become a full-scale jamboree, and people were fighting to buy Nikky a drink.

***

Busy as I was, I noticed both Buck and Acayib looking a bit shell-shocked, and drifted over their way.
 
“Ready for another, gents?”

“Jake,” Acayib said mildly, “that is Tesla.
 
The
Tesla.
 
Father of alternating current.
 
And the induction motor.”
 
It was not quite a question.
 
It was thinking about becoming a question, but hadn’t committed itself yet.

“Do you doubt it?” I asked.

“Alive, and no older than forty-five.”

“It’s kind of a long story—” I began.

He held up his hands.
 
“No, no—I can see you’re busy.
 
I just wanted to make sure I had it straight.
 
Thank you very much.
 
I can hear about it later.
 
Yes, I am absolutely ready for another.”

“Myself also,” Buck said.
 
“I feel strangely lightheaded.
 
And I
like
it.
 
It was a fair wind blew me in here this night.
 
I think I would like to meet Nikola Tesla.”

I gestured to the knot of smiling people surrounding Nikky.
 
“Get on line,” I suggested.
 
“Or just relax, and it’ll happen in its own time.
 
The night is yet before us.
 
Look, you’ve still got a lot of emolument to immolate there.
 
Just go on back to what you were doing, and maybe it’ll draw his eye.”