Callahan's Secret (20 page)

All this happened at the top of our minds, in the forefront of our combined consciousness. Along with that, we were simultaneously, but not separately, growing closer to one another, getting to know each other in even greater depth than we already did, sharing and cherishing. Tom, for instance, was discovering music for the first time in his life, and finding it both more and less than he had imagined it must be. Long-Drink and the Doe and I were discerning some interesting things at the root of our long-standing rivalry at punning. Tommy Janssen was understanding for the first time why heterosexual Bill Gerrity enjoyed wearing drag. Tom Hauptmann was learning things about eroticism from Josie Bauer that would have shocked him cockeyed an hour before, and she was learning equally unsettling things about chastity from him. All of us were learning things from the Callahans~ husband, wife and daughter, that I can’t put down here. It’s not that you don’t have the words. You don’t have the concepts to put words on.

At Callahan’s Place we were used to sharing, to letting down barriers, to opening up to and for one another. Callahan’s frequently proclaimed policy of violently discouraging snoopy questions had always been a sham, a custom honored more in the breach than in the observance, a prohibition which we now perceived was designed to teach us to learn how to circutuvent it-hell, the Cheerful Charlies had it down pat. Not to mention the MacDonalds. Or Callahan himself, who sucked secrets out of you with his twinkling eyes. We thought that we already knew what it meant to be one together; we had been students of sharing here for many years together.

This was more, deeper, stronger, better. A sizable fraction of the people there were folks I didn’t know well or at all, ex-regulars from before my time who had still been alive and around to hear The Call, and Walter the failed suicide: while devoting the bulk of our individual and collective attention to the thing that we were building, we became blood brothers and sisters without wasting time or words.

Words. It is interesting that none of us perceived the thing we built in terms of a structure o words. It was sheer pattern-recognition-images, gestalts, sensory impressions and emotional thythms, a nonstop cascade of data that reached even the subvocalized level only in scattered, fragmentary form, like verbal buckshot:

- (warm!/and so when she died I/Heavenly Father… I merry, by God!/roll ‘em baby! you’re beautiful/thank you/ you’re beautiful too/thank you/It’s beautiful/always wanted to tell you that I/do that again/ain’t it?/never thought it could be like/pulsing/steady nowlere do I remember thisfr/ fast//would have done the same thing my/take it/strong!! remember remember reMember ream ember/more treble, we’re losing the highs/hi!/hielhai!/never lose the/high!I/eye/ aye! ILOVE/Ul ewe! hue/yew/YOU! too
U2
to
two
whoo!/ who?/hew/Hugh/yoo hoo!/YOU!)

It went on forever, for whole seconds, repeating and changing and building like a series of choruses in jazz without any of us ever forming a coherent sentence in words. And yet when the time came to speak, we found that we could-although we were one, we retained our individual voices and the personalities they represented.

No, put quotes around “speak” and “voices.” If theec been a stranger in the room, he would not have heard

seen or felt a thing. To him we would have been a roomful of strange and twisted people, standing around a snoring basketball player, smiling dementedly at nothing at all, silence…

“All right, ladies and gents,” Callahan said, his voi clear and strong in my skull, “Let’s get this show on t

road. We need a plan. The floor is open.”

“There ain’t but the one plan,” I said. “We get the Roach on the phone and invite ‘em over for a beer.”

“Here?” two or three minds yelped.

“Sure. We badly lack data, and short of waking up Fii the only source is the Cockroaches themselves.”

(A funny little thing happened then, entirely below ti surface, that was over in an instant. I’m rather ashamed it-but it’s illustrative of something that was happening around the room, so I’ll tell it. A primitive ape who din, to my brainstorm still wanted Mary Callahan, still perceiv~ Finn as a rival-worse, a successful rival-worst, a s perior rival. That ape heard me calmly trying to cope wi a problem that had Finn catatonic with fear… and smile displaying the kind of teeth that apes only have on Frazel covers for Tarzan books. For an instant, it felt smug-I fi smug. For a picosecond or two, the ape fantasized outcom in which all of us survived except Finn, in which-just f once, oh, Lord!-I ended up with the girl I wanted.

And then I saw Mary looking at Finn, and I beat th ape to death with a club. Maybe Finn was paralyzed 1 fear, not because he was more of a coward than I, b because he knew more about the situation. Or faced mo stringent penalties than I did. My smugness rested on eg my courage on ignorance.

Why I mention it is this: There were no unburied hatche in Callahan’s Bar-there never had been for very’ long. B

now even the buried hatchets were starting to decompose underground, to rust away to nothing. I would always want Mary-but the best I could ever hope for would be to help her get what she wanted. I guess I was learning to live with that. Similar mini-epiphanies were happening all around the room.)

“But why should they give us any data?” Mary asked. “What’s qur leverage?”

“We’ve got data they want.”

“We do?”

“Locked up between Finn’s ears, I’m sure of it. I don’t know what it is he knows; apparently he doesn’t know either.

But the bugs came one Jesus long way to learn it. They’re a cowardly race; they don’t go in person to any place that a scout has failed to report back from without some powerful motivation; that’s why Finn is so baffled. Well, they can’t be that curious about us because they don’t know us from pond scum, so it has to be Finn. Something in his memory tapes is worth the risk. Maybe we can cut a deal.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” the Drink said.

“McGonnigle, you are going to have to. Right now.”

“Jake’s right,” Callahan said. “Unless anybody here knows how to disable a bunch of invisible satellites and convince NORM) to go to DEFCON ONE within the next half hour, we haven’t got much choice.” He frowned. A telepathic frown itches. “Another thing. ‘We have to call the Cockroaches right away, and get them to come directly here from Mars, as quietly as possible. If they just come look over the whole planet, NORAD is going to spot them-and find out that its ABMs don’t work anymore.”

“So what?” several people asked.

“Suppose we resolve this Cockroach situation somehow-but meanwhile the Joint Chiefs find out that all their warheads are worthless. So do the Soviets. Unstable situation. And it leaves the USSR dominating Europe. Finn was right: his scheme only works if the players don’t know about it. It’s too late to undo the scheme, so we’ve got to go with it. That means the defense of Earth has to be handled in this room.”

That brought a buzz of voices so sharp that it spille over into the thing that we were building with the othe ninety percent of our minds, sending a small ripple of dis cord through the sonic tapestry, as though there was a print er’s error in the sheet music. And then was felt the presenc~ of Lady Sally McGee, a warm, competent, reassuringl~ strong and calm voice in our heads.

“Lighten up, darlings! This is a party-we’re here t usher in the new year! It turns out we’ll have to actuall)

do something to accomplish that for a change, but there’~ no reason we can’t enjoy ourselves, is there? This could lx fun! Now, I think it would be a good idea if all those withoui concrete useful suggestions were to shut the hell up.”

Fast Eddie spoke up in the silence. “Dc foist t’ing w~ gotta do is hide Finn.”

Even Callahan blinked. “Hide Finn?”

“He’s de only card we got-so we slip it up our sleeve. Den we dummy up.”

In my head I saw (and therefore everybody saw) a littk cartoon, with word balloons and borders and crosshatchin~ and everything, in which a comic caricature of a cockroach in a pressure suit spoke to Callahan: “Where is Tffu Mp~?”

“Never heard of him.” “An extremely powerful and dangerous scout; he would have fought valiantly.” “Sorry, haven’t seen him.” “Then how is it that you seem to know who I am?” “Oh, I’ve made a study of lower lifc forms-“

It did seem like a gambit with some distinct possibilities.

“Eddie, you’re a genius,” I sai~l. “There’s one hitch. Jim, Paul-can you lie telepathically?”

They looked troubled. “We could lie to you; we’ve gol years more experience. To a mind as trained and experienced as ours-possibly. It would be like playing forty-two chess games at once: there’s so much to keep track of in a telepathic lie. To an alien critter that’s never touched a human mind before-,” their eyes met briefly, “-no sweat.”

“Maybe,” Tommy Janssen said, “we should tell the Roaches we spotted Finn before he got near us, and annihilated him-make us look more powerful, like.”

Callahan shook his head. “Just wrong, son. That would make us the equals of a Cockroach. We’re superior-we never even noticed Finn. Some little automatic system swept him up and we paid no mind, interstellar invasion didn’t even make the papers.” He grinned. “Yeah, I think maybe we could pull this off-for a few minutes, anyway. We might just put them enough off-balance to find out what we need to know.”

Doc Webster spoke for all of us. “You’re our spokesman, Mike.”

He kept grinning and quoted Lord Buckley again. “Well if I ain’t, I’m a great big fat groovy pole on a rough hill on the way there.’ Okay, while I’m planning the con, you boys hide Fipp somewheres.”

Gee, that sounds easy, doesn’t it? I mean, compared to trying to map out a strategy for outsmarting ahi~n monsters, hiding a guy doesn’t sound like a big deal.

A guy who stands damn near seven feet tall and weighs about the same as a Harley-Davidson…

The best thought we had was to lay him down on the floor behind the bar, but the Cockroaches might very well burn their way in from above-and besides,’ Finn snored. In three stages.

Then I happened to think of what Finn’s physique had always reminded me of. It was a chilly January night; we had plenty of coats. What cinched it was that his shirt had two breast pockets that snapped closed: coats hung from that low reached to the floor. When we were done, you could hardly hear the muffled snore; it sounded like a failing fridge compressor somewhere in the next room~

“How do we know the Roaches will hear a telepathic call?” Doc Webster asked worriedly.

“They will,” Jim and Paul assured him. “They’re not telepaths any more than you folks are, but they’ll hear just as you did. We got their ‘address-code’ from Finn before he went bye-bye.”

“Are you sure you can reach them? Last I heard your range was still pretty limited-“

“That was years ago, Doc. And this time we have twice as many minds around to help drive the signal. We’re within

uh… Roach’s Limit.”

The Doe glared at them. “Obviously you don’t understand the gravity of the situation.”

Telepathy has its drawbacks. Ordmarily most of us would have missed puns that esoteric.

“All right,” Mary said, “by now they’ve finished checking out Mars and they’re shaping orbit for Earth. How do we do this?”

“It breaks down into three parts,” her father told her. “Message, target location, and delivery. Me and Jim/Paul’ll do the talking. Mary, you and Josie and Joe and Ben and Stan savvy planetary ballistics: you folks aim the beam-you’re in charge, darlin’, you’re the only one of us that’s actually been off Earth. Jake, you and the rest of the gang push the message where it’s pointed-the way we did back when we first met Jim, get it? Any questions?”

There were none.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

Our music grew, built, swelled, gathered energy from nameless places and expanded in all directions, churned itself to a mighty crescendo, began to throb and pulse and crackle with contained power. As it did so, vision faded. Reality faded. Physically impossible though it was, suddenly we were all touching each other at the same timŕ. I had been to an orgy once, and found it disappointing; this was what I had wanted it to be. It felt like what the Sixties had tried, and failed, to be. Like my childhood conception of the Catholic Heaven. Like making love with God.

The ‘last time I’d been on this plane, helping Jim MacDonald to find and reach his lost, tormented, terrified brother Paul, it had been ~pleasurable, but not nearly this ecstatic. On that occasion, we had all perceived ourselves as standing behind an imaginary truck, stuck in an imaginary ditch, and had put our shoulders and backs into helping get it unstuck. There was no truck now, and whatever was in its place was not stuck-but in some fashion we strained now as we had strained then, put all our strength behind a massive, convulsive common effort.

We tried to hide that. Have you ever lifted a very heavy object in front of a stranger you wanted to impress, and, tried not merely to lift the crushing weight, but to make it look easy? In just that fashion, we drew figurative breath, fashioned a mighty Shout-and then tried to couch it in quiet, conversational tones, as though we could shout much louder than that if we wanted to.

This time period (*) Is a second, we bellowed calmly. You have thirty of them In which to bargain for your life.

In the instant that contact was established, we knew just how flimsy our bluff was.

There was only one Master. We didn’t even know then just what a break that was. The telepathic aspect of the creature was largely untranslatable, but you might think of it manifesting as a kind of giant space-going shark, a moving appetite, a vast, fast, terrible eating-machine which saw its purpose to be turning everything edible in the universe into shark shit. Like a shark it was implacable, remorseless, unreachable. What made it much more terrible than any shark was that it was highly intelligent and very learned.

This doesn’t begin to convey it. The thing was alien, and nothing on Terra is as old or cold or deadly as it was.’ If I’d been alone, I think I’d have snapped like a twig and begged it to kill me quickly. But Mike Callahan was with me, legs planted wide, thumbs hooked over his apron, jaw outthrust challengingly… I could see him through my eyelids…