Callahan's Secret (17 page)

“I have made a terrible mistake.”

What made it even more horrible was that Jim and Paul MacDonald, dumbstruck, were nodding along with him.

Mary’s face paled; I think if both her parents had been Caucasian she would have been white as a sheet. “What is it, Mick? What’s wrong, for Christ’s sake? I thought about it for weeks, you thought about it for hours, what did we miss?”

If anyone could have reached Finn it was Mary, but he didn’t seem to hear her. She shook him, kicked him in the shin, and beat a tattoo on his face with her fists, without attracting his attention; he was a tall thin juke-box with a stuck record, repeating over and over again. “I have made a terrible mistake.”

“Jim,” Callahan said sharply, “what’s wrong with him?”

But it was older brother Paul who answered. “The same thing that was wrong with me the first night my brother came in here, Mike. He’s mindblown.”

“Damn straight,” Tommy Janssen said. “But what by?” “We’ll get to that,” Callahan said. “First of all, how do we get him out of it before he wears a groove into his brain?” “It won’t be easy,” Paul said. “When something scares you shitless, you just go back up inside your head and hide. But when the thing that scares you comes from inside your head, you… well, you go to a place that isn’t a place, erasing your footsteps behind you. It’ll be hard to find him:

even he doesn’t know where he is right now.”

“I can get him back,” Mary said positively.

I halfway expected her to borrow Callahan’s scattergun and shoot Mink in the head-it seemed like a reasonable idea; it couldn’t hurt him or anything-but what she did was, if you think about it, even more dramatic.

She leaned close to him and said, quietly but clearly over the sound of his litany, “Mick, I need you.”

“Yes, Mary.” His eyeballs powered up, tracked her, and locked on.

“Standby mode, sweetheart. I’ll reboot you when it’s time.”

“Yes, dear.” His face smoothed over and he turned to stone.

“Nice job, Mary,” Paul said.

“Oh, ,shit,” she said, “the job hasn’t started yet. Before I start him up again, I’ve got to have his universe rebuilt for him, or he’ll just split again. So start talking: what’s his problem?”

“Oh, it’s ours, too,” he assured her, “and it’s a beaut. Finn’s Masters just entered the fringes of the cometary zone. They’re headed this way.”

“The fucking Cockroaches,” Mary whispered, and literally pissed her pants. She glanced down at the widening stain on her jeans, smiled, and Paul and Jim caught her as she started to fall. She’s so big it’s a good thing there were two of them, but they got her down gently. She was out cold. Neither Mike nor I had even started to move to help her.

“Oh, spiffing!” Jim said. “Two down, one dozen to go.”

He was paraphrasing a mordantly funny Fawily Towers episode known to every one of us in the room, in a very good imitation of John Cleese’s voice, and it may sound horrible but it was the most per(ect way I can imagine to reach all of us, keep us from going bugfuck, too. Nobody cracked up, but nobody cracked up either, if you follow.

“But it’s impossible!” I burst out. “He said they wouldn’t-they’re cowards-he said they’d write him off when he failed to report-“

“Wishful thinking, maybe,” Callahan said softly.

Paul and Jim shook their heads. “No, Mike,” Jim said. “To the best of Finn’s knowledge, what’s happening is unlikely to the point of impossibility. He can’t account for it. There’s got to be something he doesn’t know about the situation. My own suspicion is that he’s not as expendable as the Cockroaches told him he was, for some reason, but that’s just a hunch. In any case, they’re on the way.”

“Do they know that Mickey’s here?” Callahan asked.

Jesus-if they did, they were on their way to this room. “Not yet,” Jim replied. “But they will, soon. Finn’s expecting to hear the call any minute: ‘Report!’ When it comes, he’ll answer it. Nothing in the world he can do about it:”

“Not even in that condition?” Callahan asked, gesturing toward the catatonic Finn.

“He’s not capable of ignoring a direct command from a Master: he’s counterprogrammed. That’s why he needed you folks to help him, that first night he walked in here.”

“No sweat, then,” Callahan said, and reached under the bar for the chloral hydrate. “We’ll just slip him another shot of his namesake.” It happens that chioral hydrate is one of the very few things that affect Finn exactly the same way they do a human: it is about the only thing that can render him truly unconscious.

“It’s not that simple. Mary put him on standby-“

“So we pry his mouth open and pour the stuff down his throat-“

“Mike, in this mode, his stomach won’t uptake.”

“Oh. Well, can you power him back up again?”

“We’ll have to wake Mary up: she’s the only Authorized User inside, the orbit of Neptune. Give us some silence, people. She’s had a shock; it’s going to be hard to do this without damaging her. .

We shut up and let them work. After maybe five long silent seconds, Mary opened her eyes and sat up. “We’ll have to hurry,” she said, “the Roaches could jerk his chain any second now.” She got to her feet quickly enough to surprise even me, who have reason to know how limber she is. Obviously Jim and Paul had brought her up to date in the process of waking her. “It’s time to get up, darling.”

The statue of Finn came to life. The eyes started to smolder.

“Don’t worry, now,” she said quickly. “Open your mouth and drink what I give you.”

“Yes, Mary.”

Without taking her eyes from him she held up her hand, and the little bottle of chloral hydrate that Callahan tossed landed squarely in it. (I thought of my own father, and Mount Washington, and a hat.) “About thirty cc’s,” he called, and she beheaded the bottle and poured the dosage past her husband’s teeth. Fast Eddie and Long-Drink and I were alert; we readied Finn in time to help Mary and the MacDonalds break his fall. Finn’s more than six-eleven, but thinner than me; he looks and moves like he weighs less than his wife. But this was the second time I’d helped carry him, and I’d guess him at six hundred pounds or better. Lead in the alloy? A grain of neutronium? I’d always~meant to ask. We laid him out near where Mary had been a moment ago, straightened up and rubbed our kidneys.

“Well,” Long-Drink rumbled, “everything’s fine, now. Finn’s the most powerful critter that ever walked the earth, and the people who scare the crap out of him are on the way to exterminate us, and we’ve successfully put out the lights of the only guy who might have any ideas. Anybody feel like playing darts?”

“We’ve still got Finn, in a sense,” I said. “Jim-Paul, you took a reading on him.”

“All we’ve got is data,” Paul answered for them. “Not the metaprogrammer part, the part that generates ideas and thinks ten times faster than a human.” He looked helpless. “And not much of the data, either. We’ve never been able to read more than about fifty percent of Finn’s mind, and we only got maybe the surface five percent of that-a human brain just doesn’t have the storage capacity, Jake. Not even two human brains.”

“Mike,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said hollowly, “drinks for the house, on me.”

Do you know, I had room left in my brain to be startled by that? Of course, I realized at once, he was going to put it on his tab. .

“Did you get a reading on how soon the Cockroaches will get here?” Mary asked as Callahan began passing out fresh booze. “And what’ll happen when they do?”

“They’ll check Mars first, then come here; they should reach high orbit in an hour or so. Not having heard any response from Finn, the first thing they’ll do is to scan the planet for clues to his fate. If they don’t find any, they’ll sterilize Earth and go on to check out Venus-then when they don’t find him there either, I guess they’ll-“

Fast Eddie spoke up from his place on the piano bunch. “I don’t t’ink I give a shit what dey do after dey sterilize de Oyth, Paulie.”

He sighed. “I don’t suppose I do either, Ed.”

“What happens if they do fmd Finn?” Callahan asked.

“If he wakes up between now and then, you mean? Why, I guess they’d come here and look him over, find out what caused him to malfunction and see if he could be restored to service. Then they’d sterilize Earth-probably have Mickey do it for them, to make sure he ~as working properly again.

“How many of ‘em do you figure there are?”

Both MacDonalds shrugged. “Impossible to say, Mike. Finn couldn’t come up with a reason why any of them would come here.”

“Are they vulnerable to anything?” -

“Oh, yes. If they were as strong as Finn, they wouldn’t need scouts like Finn. That’s why he can’t imagine what would bring them here; he’s certain there are no.other scouts along with them. Anyway, all you’d have to do is detonate a small tactical nuke in their immediate vicinity and you’d

have Cockroach Soup.”

“Well, hell,” Doc Webster said, “NORAD can handle that! W1th Finn to spot for ‘em, maybe…” He trailed off as it dawned on him. “Aw, shit.”

“NORAD doesn’t have any H-bombs anymore,” Callahan rumbled. “Mick said he made a terrible mistake.”

Mary buried her face in her hands. “Oh, Pop! 1 made it, too!” She began to sob.

I wanted to rush to her and comfort her, take her in my arms and tell her everything was going to be all right. I never moved a muscle and I never said a mumbling word.

Her father came around the bar and put an arm around

her. “So did I, darlin’, so did I. Not your fault. We guessed wrong, that’s all.”

“Pop, what’ll we do now?”

“I’m not exactly certain, hon. but the first step is to blow our cover.”

Her head came up fast. “Are you sure?”

The big barkeep grinned at her, waggled his cigar. “Hell, no! Got a jetter idea?”

She frowned. “I guess not. Your privilege; they’re your family.”

Callahan turned to the rest of us. “Folks, I’m afraid it’s time for Mary and Ito face the music, and tell you people who we really are..

And having said that much, the big red-headed soirof a bitch stood there and looked at us for a while. He’s always had a pretty expressive face, but I’d never seen so many expressions chase themselves around it before. And while I’ve always known that Michael Callahan was a subtle and thoughtful man, I’d known it by his actions more than his face; his expressions had always been sort of carved out in broad strokes before. This was a change so sharp as to be perceptible. Somehow I knew that I was looking at a different man. No: at a different side of a man I knew. It was something like watching a brilliant actor step out of character after the lights have gone out.

It was exactly like that. I began to add up a number of things that I have always known but somehow had~never felt inclined to think about for very long. Not, say, for long enough to reach the inevitable conclusions.

I glanced toward the MacDonalds. Jim’s eyes were waiting for mine, and he was nodding. I opened my mouth… then shut up and let Callahan say it.

“Friends,” he said slowly, “this isn’t going to be easy. A lot of words I need, I don’t have. Not that they don’t exist, but none of you know ‘em-and I don’t have time for a language lesson. Uh… Mary and I aren’t from around here-“

“We know that, Mike,” Long-Drink said. “Brooklyn, right?”

“Dat’s where me and Mike hooked up,” agreed Eddie, the oldest denizen of Callahan’s Place. “At Sally’s joint.”

Callahan shook his head. “That ain’t where I’m from, boys.”

Eddie shrugged. “Well, you never said it was.”

“Thanks, Eddie.” Callahan smiled at the monkey-faced little piano man. “I’m pleased you noticed that.”

“All right,” Doc Webster said. “I’ll play. Where are you from?”

“A place that calls itself Harmony.”

“Isn’t that in New Zealand?” somebody asked.

“Nope. It’s about twenty billion miles further away, and quite a few years from now.”

There was silence for a time. Mary sat down at the nearest table and commandeered someone’s neglected drink. She

watched Finn snore while she sipped it. -

“Well,” Dcc Webster said finally in a conversational tone, “that explains a lot. Always said there was something weird about you, Callahan. Anyone who would permit puns like mine in his establishment is just not normal.”

“Time traveler, huh?” Tommy Janssen mused. “You must be from further up the line than The Meddler or Al Phee.”

“Or Josie Bauer and her Time~Police,*” Callahan agreed. “To my time, yours and theirs are pretty much indistinguishable.”

“How far is that, Mike?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “where I come from, the human race has got it together. Nobody’s hungry; nobody’s angry.”

That far!

“And we’re startin’ to learn a few things. Oh, we’ll be a long time learning-but at least we’re finally on the case.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said faintly, “I wish I had time to ask you about five hundred questions.”

“Me too, Jake,” he said. “But I’ll tell you right now, better’n half of them I’d never be able to answer, in any words that’d have meaning for you. Like, right now, most of you are probably wondering about time paradoxes and so forth, and the answers simply won’t mean much to you.”

“Let’s try anyway,” Dcc Webster said. “Did you know this showdown with Finn’s Masters was gonna happen? Is that why you’ve been running this bar all these years?”

“Yes and no,” Callahan said promptly. “See what I mean?”

“Dammit,” the Doc growled, “I started out this night saying that all questions have answers.”

“If they’re meaningful,” Callahan agreed. “Dcc, you just plain can’t frame a meaningful question about timetravel in English. The language itself hasn’t got the room: it’s based on the assumption that timetravel is not possible.”

The Dcc frowned. “So it is. Can you do any better than ‘yes and no’?”

“It is known in my time that some event takes place at this locus in space/time. Something so major, so crucial to the history that produced my time, that it makes Pearl Harbor seem no more important than yesterday’s hockey scores. What that event is, - is hidden from us. So is the certainty of its outcome. Some things in. our past we can’t affect. Some things we have to affect. We don’t always know the difference. And no, that’s not the only reason I set up this bar, although it would have been enough. I know all that doesn’t make sense, in English, but if you Want me to do even a little better than that, we’ll still be talking when the Cockroaches get here.”