Callahan's Secret (18 page)

Good point. “All right,” I said, “let’s cut to the chase. You’ve got to have some kind of futuristic wonder-gizmo you can zap the Cockroaches with, right?”

I don’t know when I’ve ever been sorrier to see a man shake his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Jake. You have to work with available materials. Whatever’s already in place in that space/time.”

“Mike-,” I hesitated. “If it was anybody but you, I’d say that was preposterous. How do you get your own time machine through?”

“We don’t use machines for timetravel.”

“Oh.” I would think about this another time. if there ever was one. “But in any case we can relax, no? At least a little? The fact that you’re here, from our future, means that the human race is no: going to be exterminated in the next hour, nicht wahr? But we could suffer heavy casualties or something?”

That was when I’ve been sorrier to see a man shake his head. “Again, Jake, what you’re saying sounds logical-because you’re saying it in English. Take my word for it: my home space/time is just as likely as yours to stop existing in the next hour or so. Worse, to stop ever having existed in this continuum, if the Cockroaches steam-clean this planet, there’ll be no way for my home to ever come to pass.” He frowned. “This whole era is a tinder-box; we’ve got agents spotted all through here/now, doing what we can to cool things out. But we always knew that there was going to be at least one really major something around about now. What we thought was that the crucial event in question would be a nuclear firestorm. The shape of history seemed to point that way. We thought we had it covered, thanks to Finn.” He looked sadly at his catatonic friend. “But it was us made the awful mistake, not him.”

Long-Drink McGonnigle summed it up very succinctly, I thought: “Aw, shit.”

“Don’t feel bad, Mike,” I said. “You bet with the odds-nobody can fault you for using Occam’s Razor.”

He shook his head ruefully. “Thanks, lake-but you’d be surprised how many chins William can’t shave. With the stakes this high, we should never have bet the farm.”

“William who?” Fast Eddie wanted to know. “And what’s dis about razors?”

That almost made me smile. Eddie must use an electric razor with an offset shim: at all times, he has exactly three days’ growth of beard. “William of Occam, Eddie. Stated the principle of Least Hypothesis-“

“Is dat, like, cheaper than a rented hypot’esis?”

Bless the runty little piano man, that did make me Smile, and simplify my explanation even further than I had planned.

“Occam’s Razor is a principle that says, if there’s more than one explanation for something, the simplest one is most likely to be true.”

“Not certain,” Callahan amplified. “Most likely.’”

Eddie looked thoughtful-not an easy trick with that face-and shook his head. “I dunno. Most o’ my life, de complicated explanation was de one to bet on. I don’t buy din William o’ Whatever-“

“Occam,” I said.

“-an’ de horse he rode in on,” Eddie agreed. “He sure got it wrong dis time.” He frowned slightly at our grins. “Well, what’s our next move, boss?”

The grins went away.

“Mike!” I said as an urgent thought struck me. “It’s New Year’s Eve! The rest of the gang are going to start showing up any second-all of ‘em, not just the regulars. Shouldn’t we try to head ‘em off? Go set up roadblocks? Something?’

He took One-of those foul cigars of his from a shirt pocket and sniffed it meditatively. What more proof did I need that he wasn’t a normal human being? “I don’t think so, lake. In the immortal words of Percy Mayfield-“

“‘The Danger Zone is everywhere,’ yeah, I understand that. They’re no safer at home than they would be here. But do we want ‘em all around underfoot; complicating the fight?” I felt my voice get hoarser. “There’s going to be a fight here, isn’t there?”

He lit his cigar. “Damn straight there is,” he rumbled. He dropped the dead match on the floor, trod it underfoot, and took Mary’s hand. “Damn straight.” Suddenly he grinned. “But who ever said a fight was complicated by reinforcements? Let ‘em come, by Christ. Let ‘em all come! if we have to, we can all go to Hell together-maybe there’s a group rate.”

“Callahan’s right, Jake,” Long-Drink said. “There ain’t a one of the gang wouldn’t rather be here on Judgment Day, and you know it.”

Dcc Webster nodded vigorous agreement, jowls flapping. “Damn well told, if the world is about to end, we can at

least have a drink on it together before we go!” There was a general chorus of agreement.

“All right,” Callahan boomed, “let’s get to it. There’s two phone lines in this joint, and the one for the computer is miked. I’ll boot the directory disk and get a printout by last name-I’ll take A through M; Doc, you take N through

“Mike,” Jim and Paul MacDonald said simultaneously.

He broke off and tried to look at both at once. “Yeah?”

“It’s not necessary to use the phone,” they chorused.

He looked startled-then broke into a big grin. ‘Why, no, it ain’t at that. What’s your range these days?’

“With family? Callahan’s People? We could find one of you on the Moon if we had to.”

“Go to it then, sons.”

Jim and Paul found a vacant table, sat down on opposite sides. They took each other’s hands and smiled at one another. Then their eyes rolled up and their mouths went slack and they seemed to slump slightly.

Can you remember the very first time you used stereo headphones, and heard a voice speaking or singing inside your head? Or were you too young at the time to find that remarkable? This was a little like that: perceiving “sound” where sound had never been before.

(Further: You know that with stereo headphones an aural image can seem to move, from left to right or the other way around. In the Decca, Georg Solti recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Niebelungen there’s a passage in which Fafnir roars-and on headphones the sound seems to move up from your throat to the crown of your head. An illusion, of course, and I’ve always wondered how Decca’s engineers managed it. Similarly-and just as impossibly-the combined “voice” of Jim and Paul MacDonald, which I heard now in my head, seemed to move from back to front, as though two tiny Paul Reveres entered the back of my skull, transited my brain at high speed, and left through my forehead.)

The double-tracked voice was quiet, calm-but so emphatically urgent that I was certain it would have waked me out of the soundest sleep.

“Mike Callahan needs you,” it said. “Hurry!”

The cold winter wind was choppy at this height, and the ledge was slippery; Walter clutched at the brick facade with slowly numbing fingers and at the pretty brunette’s gaze with tearing eyes. She was nice to look at, leaning out the window, the last pretty girl he ever expected to see-but he knew all the things she was likely to say, and knew that none of them would work. “You’re wasting your time,” he told her and her husband, whose head was visible beside hers. “I know all the cliches, and I just don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’ve got to come in soon, Walter,” she called from the window. “If you stay there much longer you’ll get Window-Washer’s VD.”

“What?’ To be surprised astonished him.

“It’s a terrible thing,” her husband said earnestly. “You get a watery blue discharge, with a funny smell.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Herpes windex,” she said.

He laughed long and hard, to a point just short of hysteria. “You two really are good at what you do, you know that? I was in a iousy mood. This is a better mood to die in.”

“That’s something, at least,” the husband called over the sound of the wind. “But-“

“I still don’t want to talk about it,” Walter yelled. “Why I’m doing this is none of your business.”

“Nobody asked you,” the wife said. “What Les and I want to know is why you’re doing it so badly.”

He blinked at them.

“Merry’s right. Some janitor has to mop up you and his breakfast; a bunch of cops and ambulance attendants ~get brought down; a whole street-full of passersby have a great dark demoralizing omen literally drop into their lives-see that little girl across the street down there? Her mother is the one who’s going to need to explain this, not us.”

“And what about usr Merry asked. “We’re professionals, with a reputation to protect. You hired us to come over here and try to cheer you up. You say we succeeded, and now you want to skip out without paying. Are we supposed to-” She broke off short.

“You don’t understand!” Walter shouted to the night sky. He closed his eyes, and sighed deeply. If he told them how it was, they would see that he really had no choice. “All right: I’ll explain ,it to you. You deserve that much.” He turned his face back to them, to see the empathy he knew he would find in Merry’s eyes, and she and Les were both gone from the window. “Hey! Do you want to hear this or not?’ There was no reply. “Hey!”

The Cheerful Charlies were gone.

Walter stood there on the ledge, confused, unready to jump, too stiff and cold to risk climbing back in the window unassisted, his scenario thrown completely off the rails. Anger came to him, bringing warmth to his fingers and strength to his limbs. He made it safely inside, and reached the street in time to see the Charlies driving away; furious, he flagged a cab and followed them.

Patrolman Jimmy Wyzniak trailed the Sergeant through the empty corridors of Suffolk County Police Headquarters; the only sounds were their footsteps and the occasional ringing of phones that no one was going to answer. Jimmy was young, and just barely experienced enough at his job to have some appreciation of the magnitude of his ignorance, but he had no fear: his Sergeant was with him, and the Sarge was the best there was. It had been bravery and not bad judgment that lost him a leg.

“People are sure funny, you know?’ Jimmy said plaintively. “I mean, Captain Whitfield is taking this like it was personal-like they put it here just for him. Never seen him so mad.”

The Sarge spoke over his shoulder. “You notice he didn’t try to do the damned thing himself first. He called for the experts.” His limp was barely perceptible.

Jimmy shifted~ his trunk-shield like an umpire looking for a fresh plug of tobacco and grinned. “Well, that just proves he’s smarter than we are.”

His mentor snorted. “Son, everyone is smarter than we are. Here we go: Storage Closet 5. The phone tip said it was in here.”

“Who claimed credit for this one?’

“Who cares?”

“Boobies on the door, you figure?”

“Never can tell-so we assume there are.” Jimmy set down the heavy backpack of equipment, and they spent a few minutes assuring themselves that the door was not boobytrapjed. “I hope they’re professionals,” the Sarge grunted. “Pros are tricky sometimes-but at least they use good equipment. An amateur job, who knows what the hell it’s gonna do?” Then, rank having its “privileges,” the Sarge sent Jimmy thirty feet down the hall and around a corner. The young patrolman waited anxiously, heard the sound of the sarge trying the knob.

“Zoroaster in lingerie,” he heard the Sarge say.

He ran back and looked through the door of Closet 5. “What the hell is it?” he asked. “That doesn’t look like anything we covered in training.”

“I saw one once,” the Sarge said very softly. “When I was in the Army. I’d guess it’s not especially powerful-nothing like the one that did that slum clearance on downtown Nagasaki. By today’s military standards it’s not even a cherry bomb.”

Jimmy regarded the object. “You’re saying that’s a nuke,” he said in a calm, conversational tone, as though confirming the time-then, big: “It looks like afucking miniature vacuum cleaner!”

“Sure does-probably doesn’t weigh more than thirty pounds all told. Now, the military could make one that size with some real bang onto it-but looky there at the airline bag they carried it in. Amateur job.”

It was not machismo that kept Jimmy’s cool for him-this was beyond even the machismo of a demolitions man.

But if the Sarge wasn’t worried, Jimmy wasn’t worried. Hell, the Sarge could probably disarm an ICBM in flight if he had to! “So it won’t do more than annihilate Riverhead if it goes off, huh?”

The Sarge shook his held. “Not even that bad, is my guess. This building, for sure. The block, possibly. This thing is just a pony nuke.”

A guess for Sarge was Gospel for Jimmy. “So what’s our first move?”

“Well, that time-fuse says it’s got almost two hours left. That should be plenty of time. I suppose we-” The Sarge broke off, stood as though listening to something. Jimmy smiled: The Sarge had done this several times before, with conventional but difficUlt bombs-explaining afterwaid that he was “trying to outthink the guy that built it”-so everything really was okay after all. Any minute now, the Sarge would-

-start running like a bastard, back the way they had come- “Sarge!” Jimmy cried, but his instincts were good: he

was already in motion. His legs were good too, and he had two of them: he was neck and neck with the Sarge within ten strides. Suddenly the Sarge put on the brakes and doubled back; Jimmy did not. As he cleared the door to the outside Jimmy could hear the Sarge’s uneven footsteps coming up fast behind him again. Captain Whitfield and the other cops waiting outside scattered in all directions when they saw both running men.

The Sarge made a beeline’ for the Bomb Squad truck, leaped behind, the wheel. He was carrying an airline bag.

“Sarge! Goddamn it-hey, Sarge!”

Sergeant Noah Gonzalez ignored him, started the truck and sped off.

Ralph spotted a likely-looking bitch, got close enough to smell her and growled deep in his throat. He had little difficulty in cutting her out of the pack she was with. He knew, as they did not, that in a matter of hours she would

be panting for it. Confusing an5l mesmerizing her with his deep, softly accented voice, he led her away from her friends and into the darkness.

Sound Beach is a seasonally schizophrenic area of Long Island. For Ralph it was a walk on the wild side-literally. In the summer the vacation cottages are, filled with the nearly-wealthy. In winter the region is sparsely populated by h~df-frozen college students from the nearby State University-and by packs offers! dogs. They are the watchdogs routinely abandoned by the nearly-wealthy at season’s end. Dobermans, Shepherds. They pack-up, and raid garbage cans, and kill and eat the pets of the college students, and it is usually February or March before the county cops have shot the last of them. As a general nile, by the time they are hungry enough to attack a human, they are too weak to pull it off-though there are occasional exceptions.