Callahan's Secret (15 page)

YOU TELL ME.

NOW I KNOW WHY ThEY CALL IT A CURSOR.

Well, we all took turns chatting with Billy while we worked on his riddles, and it took us several hours to work out that the topic was “SF Writers” and that the answers were, in order,

“Ben; bow, aver” = Ben Bova

“Rabid; eh?; high ‘n’ lyin” = Robert A. Heinlein

“Eyes, ech!; ass (mauve)” = Isaac Asimov

“Stan Lee; (shh!), mitt” = Stanley Schmidt

“John; double you; cam, bull” = John W. Campbell, and by that time Doc Webster had come up with the idea of Billy applying for a grant to start up a computer network for shut-ins, and we were all on the way to becoming good friends. Oh, once in a while I’d get a mental picture of the man on the other end of the hookup and giggle in spite of myself. But he never knew it. I’ve always hated that hairy old nonsense about high technology being inherently dehumanizing. -

And as Doe Webster said, Billy’s barks were much worse than his bytes.

The Mick of lime

NEW Year’s Eve at Callahan’s Place, and I was feeling about as much contentment as an unmarried man can know, thinking of how many New Year’s Eves I’d spent in this warm, well-lit, cozy room with the best friends I’d ever known, thinking happily of how many more there would be to come. You’d think that would have warned me.

Somehow or other the conversation had turned to Conundra-the kind of questions that are good for keeping you entertained on an insomniac night, and not a whole lot else. They’re sort of like test programs for the mind, and I guess New Year’s Eve is a natural time for such things.

It was early on, not gone eight o’clock and only a handful of the regulars in attendance yet. Tommy Janssen had asked Long-Drink McGonnigle something, I forget what, and the Drink replied something along the lines of, -“Son, that’s one of those great Questions That Will Never Be Answered.”

Doe Webster snorted. “Flapdoodle. Any meaningful question can be answered-and will be, sooner or later.

Questions just never go away until they are.”

Callahan finished reloading the coffeepot and came over to join us. “Doe,” he mmbled, “if any question can be answered, maybe you can help me with one that’s been occupyin’ my mind-for a long time now. How many angels can dance on the head of a beer?” There was a general giggle.

“I said, ‘meaningful questions,’” the Doe replied. “Your question has no meaning because one of its cnicial terms is undefined. Tell me-specifically-what you mean by an ‘angel,’ and I’ll answer your question. Or rather, you’ll have answered it yourself.”

“Aw hell, Doc,” Long-Drink said, “you know what an angel is.” “If I did, I wouldn’t je paying alimony. My point is, it’s easy to make up questions that don’t have answers because they don’t really ask anything. Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it? Where was Moses when the lights went out?”

“We’re certainly into a theological vein here,” said Torn Hauptmann, the former minister. “There’s one that’s always puzzled me, Doe, and I think it has meaning. Water is a clear, colorless fluid. So how come when you splash it on a towel, the towel gets darker?”

The Doc was silent for a moment, chewing on that, and Tommy and Long-Drink began to chuckle. “There’s. an answer,” the Doc insisted. “I never-said I knew all the answers-but if the question has meaning, the answer is knowable.”

I thought of one that’s kept my own mind harmlessly occupied for hours at a time. “Hey, Doe, I’ve got one. A thought-experiment, and a humdinger: It’s one of those that causes a system-crash in the brain. The beauty of it is that one day soon it will be possible to try it out in the real world and see what the answer is-but right now, even though all the components of the question are meaningful and known, I’ll bet a case of Anchor Steam Beer nobody here can come up with an answer and peove it.”

“Hey,” Susie Maser (Slippery Joe’s senior wife) said, “for a case of all-barley beer, I’ll take on Zeno’s Paradox with -one hand tied halfway behind my back. Whip it out, Jake.” Several others leaned forward attentively.

“I’ve put this question to about thirty scientists in ten different disciplines,” I said, “and to educators, and science fiction writers and editors I met at conventions, and the funny thing is that they all reacted the exact same way. I’d lay out the question, and they’d all start to answer right away… and then they’d catch themselves, and fall silent,

andgetafarlook…and a minute or so later, they’d change the subject.”

“Come on, come on,” the Drink said. “Lay it on us.”

“You’re tight,” I said mournfully. “I’m taking too long to get to it. A man’ll do that sometimes, when he’s dehydrated-“

Long-Drink sighed and reached into his pants pocket.

“Give the bastard a beer, Mike.”

“Okay,” I said when I’d blown the foam off and taken a sip, “this experiment could actually be done in sloppy form right now-but it purifies it a great deal if we imagine it taking place in space, in a microgravity environment. Lot’s say that somewhere up in orbit, there’s a perfectly spherical object whose inner surface is mirrored: a spherical mirror, all right? Naturally, it’s dark in there. Floating with his eyes at dead center is an astronaut-never mind how he got there,” I said hastily as Susie began to object. “Maybe the mirror was blown around him; anyway, he’s there. He’s scared of the dark, so he takes a flashlight out of his pocket and turns it on. What does he see?”

Everyone in the roOm started to answer at once- “Well, he-“

“The back of-“

“All of him at-“

“Nothing but pure white-“

-.—and then they all caught themselves. And fell silent. And got a far look.

After about ten seconds, Susie started to open her mouth. “Does it make any difference,” I asked, “which way he poInts the flashlight? How would what he see change if he pointed the thing at himself? Or if he put it in his mouth and made Monster-Cheeks?” and Susie closed her mouth again.

When the silence had lasted for nearly a minute, Doe Webster said, “Another classic question I’ve always wanted to know the answer to is how and why evolution designed the human taste buds to love a poison like sugar.”

I looked questioningly at Callahan, and he nodded. “Subject change,” he agreed. “Appears to tue that these birds owe you a case of Anchor Steam, Jake.” He counted heads. “I make it a beer apiece; ante up, folks.”

Grumbling, everybody did reach into their pockets, but they brightened considerably when Mike handed across my case and I started passing out the beers.

About that time Mick and Mary Finn came in, by the wrought’iron staircase from the roof. (Fmn could just have easily landed on the ground, of course; the parking lot was still empty enough to make an excellent 12-but he’s had a sentimental attachment to that roof ever since the night he met his wife up there~ and to the staircase since he married her on it, and he always comes in that way now.) There was a time when if Mickey came in, in the middle of a conversation, it had to sort of pause for a few minutes while we all helped him work his way into it. But marriage has, among the many other ways it’~s been good for the big alien, tended to humanize him a little, to make it easier for him to plug into things smoothly.

“Wells what do you know, it’s a sawbuck!” I called out, and did not have to patiently explain to Finn that a sawbuck is two fins; he either got it or let it go. “Howdy, folks. Welcome to the feast of reason. The topic is Ponderable Questions-and the fine line between them and the imponderables. You two got any good ones?” I gave him a beer, and then I gave his wife a beer, and I don’t even know why I bother mentioning that Mary smiled when I gave it to her, because the smile didn’t do anything more than flay the skin off my body, sandblast every nerve and ligament, Osterize a few major organs and fry my eyeballs in their own grease; I made no visible sign that could possibly have been detected by anyone except the people preinnt in the room. I’m over her completely.

“Certainly,” Mickey said. “The more I live with humans,. the more questions I have, and the more imponderable they become. Mary -is better than any human I have ever known at explaining them-even better than you, Michael,” he said to Callahan, “-but even she has no more than a sixty percent success rate.”

“An, now we’ve hit pay-dirt,” Doe Webster said. “What does an intelligent nonhuman think of the human race? We’re such vain creatures it’s one of the-most fascinating quč~tions we can imagine-spawned thousands of myths and books and movies.”

“Well, naturally,” Long-Drink agreed. “Man alone cannot know himself. The container can’t contain itself.”

Mickey Finn looked politely puzzled. “I do not understand what you mean. Do not all containers contain themselves? If not, what does contain them?”

The Drink got another far look. Finally the Doe said, “What puzzles you the most about humans, Mick? Politics? Sexual customs?: Art? Philosophy?”

“Bathrooms,” the big alien said at once.

“Jump back,” Long-Drink said incredulously.

“I am serious, Drink, my friend,” Fmn told him. “I don’t understand why humans are not puzzled by their bathrooms. I have wondered about this since before I quit working for my former Masters. I understand the concept of a blindspot, but it is hard to comprehend one of this size.”

“There’s usually something substantial kinds blocking the view in that direction, Mickey,” Callahan said dryly. “What exactly is it that puzzles you about bathrooms?”

“Everything, Michael. The first item one finds in a typical bathroom is the sink. I have made tests: half of the time and energy spent at a sink are used in adjusting water temperature. Your technology makes cheaply available thermocouples which will reliably deliver water of any specified temperature-yet in every single bathroom in the world the job is done by hand, with every use. Unbelievable waste of time and water and heated water. -

“Next the medicine cabinet: I have never seen one dcsigned with the intelligence of the average spice rack. You have to spill everything into the sink to access the aspirins.

“The human bathtub could only have been invented to help weed out the elderly, careless and unlucky; it could be argued that this is laudable, but why must even the survivors be made so uncomfortable during what ought to be a delightful chore? Why are comfortable head supports not standard; why must tubs always be too short,~ too narrow, too hard and too difficult to keep clean; why build them of such preposterous materials; and above all, why is the single shOwer~~head almost invariably located where it cannot be brought to bear on the specific areas where it would be most useful and most pleasant?

“As for the commode… it would take a volume to simply list its gross deficiencies. Forget the insanity of throwing precious fecal matter into the ocean, along with gallonsper-bolus of drinking water-how couki-humans possibly have designed for daily use and accepted as a universal standard an artifact which is acutely physically painful to use, enforces an unnatural and inefficient posture, and has no facilities whatsoever for cleansing either its user or itself? And why do you persist in using them for male urinals though they are manifestly unsuitable for that purpose?

“To be fair, I must admit that given your level of technology there is not much to criticize in the towel rack-but my friends, from an engineering point of view it is the only pardonable object in a human bathroom.”

Well, a few of us said a few things, but there’s no sense kidding; Finn had us cold. It seemed strange that these things had never occurred to any of us before. Of course, we took bathrooms for granted, we’d grown up with them, but still…

About that time the door opened and a crisp breeze blew two men into the room; there was a glad shout as we recognized-them.

“By all the Saints in Leslie Charteris’s bookshelf,” boomed Callahan, “if it ain’t the MacDonald Brothers! About time you two bums showed up here. It’s been too damn many years.”

After a short merry interval of backslaps and handshakes and let-me-get-your-coats we got Jm and Paul seated at the bar-with God’s Blessings in front of them. “God, it’s good to be back here,” they chorused, and then Jim took over the vocalizing for both of them. “I make it three years,” he said to Callahan, and, “Yes, Jake, two years ago, and yes,

it is,” to me, and “Upstate in Plattsburgh-and it’s getting pretty sane-there,” to Long-Drink, and “Perfect, thanks; we’re learning some things about repairing ourselves,” to Doe Webster, and, “No, Eddie-we don’t need one,” to Fast Eddie, and, “No, Reverend, and don’t think we haven’t tried,” to Tom Hauptmann, and then, to all of us: “We’re sorry, we ought to let you vocalize the questions so you can all share the answers-but there were so many in the first round that we wanted to save a little time.”

Jim and Paul are telepaths, you see.* What I’d been wondering was if they’d finished getting certified as psychiatrists yet, and if so whether it was working out the way they’d hoped. Some of the others’ questions I could puzzle out. Callahan had been wondering how long it’s.been since their last visit; the Drink was going to ask where they were practicing; the Doe was going to ask after their health. Eddie’s and ibm’s questions eluded me.

“Hello, Mary,” Jim went on, “it’s good to meet you, too. God, what a lovely marriage you two have! No, really? But that’s wonderful! Don’t worry, we wouldn’t dream of it. Thanks. Finn, that’s really fascinating stuff about the human bathroom. Do you see a pattern? Do the rest of you?’ I’d been thinking of filling Jim and Paul in on the conversation that’d been in progress when they arrived, but of course they were a step ahead of me. “Consider: the same inherent stupidity Finn points out can be found in the typical kitchen.

Fridges that spill money on the floor when you access them; stoves and ovens that spill money on the ceiling; a heatmaker and a heat-waster side by side, unconnected; sinks with the ‘same problems he mentioned and others; wastemanagement techniques that belong in the Stone Age.

“In the typical bedroom you’ll find just as much inexplicable thoughtlessness. It’s only in the last year or two that anyone even thought of adapting hospital-bed technology to home beds. The three rooms all people must spend