Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (32 page)

The house was empty.
 
Just as I’d feared, the storage closet door stood open.
 
The Meddler’s Belt was not in the closet.
 
I stumbled back outside, reeling as if I’d just been punched hard in the face, and headed for Doc’s yard again, trying to make it all make sense.
 
Halfway there,
 
I heard my watch give its little hourly chirp and knew it was midnight.
 
I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and looked over toward the distant pool in time to see naked two-year-old Erin materialize at the end of the diving board and cry, “HI, EVERYB—gee, where
is
everybody?”

“Here,” I croaked, and kept going, and she and I arrived together.

Everyone in Doc’s yard was on their feet, all still talking at once, and their volume rose sharply when they saw Erin pop into view.
 
It took several more minutes of talking at cross-purposes before everyone understood the misunderstandings that had occurred, and their terrible consequences.

I had believed that Erin was going to zip home from Miami to Key West immediately—that is, as straight teleportation, with no time-hopping involved—so I’d concluded that there was no need to find a working pay phone and call Zoey collect: Erin would give her mom the good news faster than I could dial my phone number.
 
Erin, on the other hand, hadn’t known I’d ruined the cellphone,
 
and believed I was going to phone home at once—so she had decided to time-shift forward a little on the way, and arrive at the same instant I did, so we could all share the joy.

So nobody had phoned, for longer than was reasonable, and then nobody would answer Doc’s phone, because I’d broken it, and finally Zoey had just snapped.
 
She had strapped on the Meddler’s Belt, set the time dial for some near-future time by which she figured the situation would have to have resolved itself one way or another, and pushed the go-button.

When the mutual explanations had gotten that far, my vision blurred, and I’d have gone down if Jim Omar hadn’t caught me.

“She doesn’t know, does she, Daddy?” Erin asked me.

“No, honey, I don’t think she does.
 
We never discussed it.
 
It never came up.”

“Oh…my…
God
.”

The man who called himself The Meddler had stumbled (will stumble) upon the historically first of three different methods of time travel, and used it only twice, and his discovery had died with him.
 
Then later, I’d heard, there had been an interim method developed, about which I knew nothing except that it had seen limited use for a few centuries after its discovery, and involved much more esoteric technology than the Meddler’s Belt.
 
And finally, the
far
-distant-future ficton from which the Callahans hailed had developed the ultimate, no-moving-parts kind.

Only the second and third methods automatically compensated for the inconvenient nature of the universe.

“What’s wrong, Erin?” Mei-Ling asked.
 
“Why are you so upset?
 
Your mom got her arrival time off by a little, that’s—”

“No,” Erin interrupted.
 
“I don’t think so.
 
There are
two
dials on that belt, and I’ll bet Mom only used one of them.
 
Isn’t that right, Uncle Eddie?”

Eddie thought hard.
 
“I seen her twist one ting, an push a button.
 
I didn’t see her do nuttin else.”

Erin groaned.
 

“That tears it, then,” I heard my own voice say from a long way off.

“What’s the second file door?” Doc Webster asked with gentle patience.
 
“Excuse me.
 
What is the…dial…for?”

“Space,” Erin told him.
 
“The first dial is for time, and the second is for space.
 
You use it to compensate for the fact that everything in the universe is always in motion.”

“Oh my God,” Doc said, turning pale.
 
“Oh no.”

“Jesus Christ!” Omar shouted.

“Hell,” the Professor said.

“Oh dear,” Mei-Ling murmured.

I could not get enough air into my chest to make a squeak.

“I don’t geddit,” Fast Eddie said mournfully.

“Everything moves, Uncle Eddie.
 
Always.
 
The earth rotates at nine hundred miles an hour.
 
It revolves around the sun at nineteen miles a second—which is itself moving through space, revolving around the center of the galaxy.
 
The galaxy is rotating at half a million miles an hour, and it’s in motion itself, presently on a collision course with the Andromeda Nebula at about six million miles a day.
 
Meanwhile the whole universe is expanding.
 
Everything moves relative to everything else, and nothing stands still—
ever
.”

“Okay—so?”

Erin closed her eyes, and Mei-Ling took up the stick.
 
“So let’s say Zoey decided to set the time dial on that belt to this very second now, Eddie.
 
She pushes the button, and
zip
, she’s now.
 
But she’s not
here
and now…because she didn’t make any compensating settings to the space dial.
 
Instead, she’s…well, she’s at the point in space where this particular portion of the earth’s surface happened to be when she pushed the button.
 
And we’re…well, not.
 
We’ve moved.
 
A
long
way.”

“Hully Christ,” Eddie whispered.
 
“You’re tellin me right this minute she might be somewhere in outer fuckin space?”

“Without a pressure suit,” Omar said dully.

“Ah geeze,” Eddie said, and fainted dead away.

*
 
*
 
*

I was terribly afraid I might do the same thing, and I didn’t have the time.
 
Usually when you can’t seem to inhale it’s because you failed to exhale enough.
 
I put both hands on my ribs and pushed hard, emptying my lungs, while trying to blow out an imaginary candle.
 
Automatically they took a deep breath to refill.
 
I did it again, and it worked even better.
 
Blood reoxygenated, I found the nearest lawn chair, sat down, and put my head down between my knees.
 
The dizzy feeling and greying vision receded.
 
By the time I straightened up again I was only nauseous with terror.

There’s a trick about nausea many people don’t know.
 
If you can’t get medicine, or the medicine isn’t working, it can sometimes help to holler at a bunch of innocent bystanders.
 
The less they deserve it, the more it seems to help.
 
It’s a derivative of what Valentine Michael Smith learned in the monkey house, I think.
 
Everyone was obliging me by all talking at once, so it was at the top of my lungs that I bellowed, “SHADDAP!”

Silence.
 
Sure enough, the nausea receded one step.

A hundred things to think about at once—which one was
first
?
 
Already a dozen people were opening their mouths to start talking again.

Erin had already managed to bring Eddie around; he was sitting up and shaking his head.
 
“Uncle Eddie,” Erin said, “Exactly what time did Mom leave?”
 
She was using the same voice her mother uses to end arguments with me, half an octave higher in pitch, and recognizing that brought the nausea back a half step closer again. But I knew she had asked the right question.

“Just after sunset is da closest I can tell youse,” Eddie said.
 
“It was de dark got to her.”

“Nobody felt like putting the house lights on,” Long-Drink said.
 
“I guess we shoulda.”

“Assign blame later, Phil,” Erin snapped.
 
“Can anyone else pin the time down any closer?
 
Anybody remember what was on the radio?”

“I wuz playin,” Eddie mourned.

Pixel the cat was suddenly in my face.
 
By which I mean he materialized on my lap without warning, sublimely confident that I would instinctively cup my hands under him and make a lap in time to keep him from falling, like I always do—but then, most unusually, he leaned forward and poked his face right up against mine.
 
The item he had in his mouth shielded me from tuna breath—and made me draw in a deep breath of my own.
 
Back when I first opened The Place, if I had to leave during business hours for some reason, I’d leave a sign telling potential customers when we would reopen.
 
Almost at once I came to realize that my clientele were perfectly capable of running The Place without me, for limited periods of time at least, and put the sign in storage.
 
Here it was after all these years: the words “We’ll be back at:,” and a yellow clockface with two movable hands.
 

Pixel actually poked me in the nose with it twice.
 
“I get it, I get it,” I said, and he backed off and turned it so Erin could see too.
 
It read 7:03.

“That’s it
exactly
?” Erin said.
 
“You’re
sure
, Pixel?”

He turned his massive head back, dropped the thing on my chest and held it there with one paw, moved the other with exquisite care.
 
When he was done the minute hand was, by my estimation, just over a third of the way between the three and the four.
 
“
Bwrrrrtt!
” he said.

“Thank God!”
 
Erin took in a deep breath, and let it out.
 
Her exhale was a little shivery. “Okay,” she said, “that’s a good start.
 
That’s a very good start.
 
That helps a lot.
 
Next question…wait—”
 
She closed her eyes tight for a few moments, then opened them again.
 
“Okay, I presume Mom did not tell any of you how far ahead she intended to hop, or you’d have spoken up by now.
 
No—don’t tell me your guess, Phil.
 
Nobody speak—especially you, Daddy!”
 
I shut up.
 
“I want everybody to
write down
their guess.
 
People tend to agree with whoever sounds the most positive, but that doesn’t mean he’s right.
 
I want your subjective impressions.”
 
Eddie and Omar were passing out bar napkins, and just about everybody turned out to have a writing implement on them.
 
“You all know my Mom pretty well, you had a sense of her mood, just how frightened and impatient she was, maybe you got a look at her just before she disappeared.
 
How far forward do you think she would have gone?
 
Don’t say it, write it down.”

Everybody did, and all the napkins were collected by Pixel and brought to Erin.
 
She riffled through them quickly, and lifted her eyes.
 
“Most of you agree she would have hopped to the same time tomorrow night.”

“She’d want to go far forward enough to be
sure
of getting an answer, one way or another,” Long-Drink said.

Omar, the only other one of us present who had studied the Meddler’s Belt at any length, said, “And twenty-four hours is an especially easy setting to make on that dingus.”

“I think she would have picked midnight,” said Mei-Ling, sounding fairly sure about it.

“I hope to God you’re wrong,” Erin said.
 
“Why do you think so?”

“We were talking, about ten minutes before she did it…and I said to her, ‘Don’t worry, I guarantee by midnight you’ll know the good news.’
 
I’m pretty sure she heard me.”

Erin groaned.
 
“Doc, check me:
what’s the maximum amount of time she could survive in hard vacuum
?”

“I’m not sure.
 
Twenty seconds, would be my guess.
 
Thirty at the outside.”

She slumped and sat down hard on the grass, just like an ordinary two-year-old would.
 
For her the effect was comical…until she pooched out her lower lips just like an ordinary two-year-old who was thinking of bursting into tears.

“If Mom picked midnight,” she said, “she’s dead.”
 
Just about everybody gasped or groaned or said
no
or spoke some sort of obscenity.
 
“
I
picked midnight—and I’ve been here for at least five minutes, nearly six.”
 
She has an excellent sense of time, and we knew it; still I checked, and so did others.
 
My watch, an uncommonly accurate one, said it was 12:05:47.

“So ya time-hop back a few minutes—what’sa problem?” Fast Eddie said.

“I
can’t
, Uncle Eddie!” she cried, and did burst into tears.
 
“Don’t you get it?
 
There was a me here in the universe from midnight on.
 
There can’t be two-hoo-hoo
—”
 
She was crying too hard to form words now.

I had never seen my daughter cry as a baby—not once.
 
Maybe she made it a point of pride, I don’t know.
 
I
had
seen her cry, twice by that point, but only after age seven.
 
Seeing my superbaby, theoretically the most competent of us to deal with this emergency, sobbing like an ordinary infant now…well, it came close to unhinging me.