Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (13 page)

“Jake,” Zoey said, her voice dangerous, “don’t tell me, let me guess.
 
That’s your old flame, Mary, right?
 
The one this place is named after?
 
And that Mickey Finn character she ran off with?”
 
She glared at the Lucky Duck.

“Mickey Finn-Callahan,” I corrected absently.
 
“—and Mary Callahan-Finn.
 
Those are indeed they.”

***

Again I have some explaining to do.

Before I knew Zoey, years before Zoey came into my life and started singing harmony, Mary Callahan—Mike’s daughter—was the only woman I’d been head over heels in love with since the death of my wife fifteen years earlier.
 
One of those “thunderbolt” things.
 
We had a glorious affair, Mary and I—one of the great ones of my life.
 
It lasted just long enough to be measured in minutes, and then Mickey Finn showed up, and
Mary
went head over heels.
 
She has a thing for tall skinny weird guys—the way I have a thing for large, voluptuous women—and Finn is just plain taller, skinnier and weirder than I’ll ever be on my best day.
 

He’s not even partly human, and only partly organic.
 
What he is, he’s a cyborg zombie who managed to wake himself up.
 

He started out as a reasonably humanoid alien, a member of an old and wise race in a star system far from Sol.
 
Then a much nastier race, the Cockroaches, happened onto Finn’s people, and…well, they didn’t destroy them, exactly, quite.
 
They…
recorded
them: reduced them, one and all, to patterns of frozen data representing their physical and mental descriptions, and filed these patterns away for possible future study in a kind of database of souls.
 
And what was left—the protein—well, they ate that.
 

Finn alone they kept corporeal—his body “enhanced” with cyborg machinery that made him both mighty enough to rupture a star and loyal enough to be trusted utterly—so that he could serve as a kind of star-scout, going before the Cockroaches (the Masters, he was taught to call them), seeing that their path was kept smooth, by exterminating any local vermin that seemed intelligent enough to be a potential nuisance.
 

Finn’s own will still existed, somewhere in his brain—but it was quite helpless, just along for the ride.
 
He could not form the wish to disobey his Master’s least whim: he was counterprogrammed.
 
His resulting shame and frustration found their only expression as rage, giving him a capacity for violence that made him an excellent interstellar hatchetman.

He had been practicing that trade for centuries, and had a lot of notches on his belt, when he happened across Earth, back in 1972.
 
He recognized humanity at once as fitting his programmed parameters for “vermin.”
 
But they chanced to be so much like his own lost race in so many physical ways, and so many emotional ways as well, that, despite his iron programming, Finn found himself regretting the necessity of their destruction.
 
To steel himself for the task, he walked into a bar called Callahan’s Place and ordered ten whiskies…

Fortunately for the human race, under their influence he was able to give us just enough hint to figure out how he could be deprogrammed, prevented from automatically alerting his Masters to humanity’s existence.
 
(The solution is implicit in the human name he took.)
 
Because he had been able to disobey that single order, the structure of his conditioning collapsed, and he became a free agent again.
 
Like many a scout before him, he basically faked his own death and deserted, and some years later married a local: Callahan’s (and Lady Sally’s) daughter Mary.
 
Hours after I had just finished falling in love with her.

Anyway, one day one of the Cockroaches—Finn’s personal Master, a renegade we ended up calling The Beast—got to wondering what had happened to him, and came to find out, and that’s how Callahan’s Place turned into a bright hot mushroom cloud, and as a kind of…fallout from that event, Finn and Mary decided to leave together.
 
All this happened a few years ago, and ever since, to the best of my knowledge, the two of them had been off somewhere in space and time, on a quixotic quest.
 

Armed with the sole clue that Mary and Finn were both unconscious face up on my barroom floor, I deduced that the mission was not going well.

***

“SHADDAP,” I bellowed, and the hubbub chopped off at once.
 
“Thank you.
 
Everybody stay back!”
 
Everyone obeyed, except Doc Webster, who cannot be kept from a patient in need.

Since I could see they were both alive—it was nice, with my pregnant Zoey in the room, to have a legitimate reason for closely observing the rise and fall of Mary’s splendid breasts under that mylar—the most pressing question seemed to be,
is anyone or anything in hot pursuit?
 
And the only way to get an answer was to try and restore one or both of them to consciousness.
 
Waking a seven-foot-tall Cray who weighs over six hundred pounds and has been known to annihilate whole stars would seem the more challenging of the two on the face of it—but I knew a trick for waking Finn, one that I had seen Mary use
in extremis
, and I decided to try him first.
 
I walked over to where he and Mary lay, surrounded by a ring of sawdust ash that looked eerily like a photo negative of the chalk outline the cops draw around corpses.

I bent over to put my mouth near Finn’s ear.
 
“Wake up, Finn,” I said loudly.
 
“Mary needs you!”

No response.
 
So much for that trick…

Well, maybe it needed to be in her voice.
 
The hell with it.
 
I stepped over Finn and joined Doc Webster at Mary’s side.
 
I placed the back of my hand against Mary’s forehead.
 
Skin temperature.
 
We could both see a pulse at her temple.
 
The Doc pried open an eyelid; nobody home.
 
“MARY!
 
WAKE UP,” I shouted experimentally, but was unsurprised when it didn’t work.
 
Neither did a slap.
 

I was starting to get a bit frantic.
 
I had once met a Cockroach—
one
Cockroach, an outcast, with only its own personal resources to draw on—and I had needed an atom bomb and the intercession of both Mike Callahan and Mickey Finn to live through the experience.
 
For all I knew, the entire Cockroach race, or their equivalent of Marines, was about to come through the ceiling of my bar at any moment.
 
And this time around I had a pregnant mate to protect.
 
Not to mention the
second
of the three great loves in my life—my best friend’s only daughter—and her husband, also a friend.
 
I got up from my crouch and headed for the bar.

It was my vague stupid intention to get the shotgun I keep behind that bar (a shotgun is
better
than a billy-club: you put a round of buckshot in the ceiling and you won’t
need
to break anybody’s head)—but halfway to the bar I started thinking clearly again.
 
I might as well try and shoot an incoming comet.
 
It shouldn’t be a total loss, once I was behind the bar I dialed myself an Irish coffee.
 
“Noah,” I called out, “you wouldn’t happen to have any more nukes in inventory, by any chance?”
 
It had been Noah Gonzalez who had supplied the bomb the last time around, a home-made terrorist job; he’d been working for the Bomb Squad then.

“Sorry, Jake,” Noah said.
 
“Fresh out.”

“Pity.
 
You were my best hope.
 
Anybody else here have any nuclear arms lying around the house?
 
Nikky?”
 
No response.
 
“Not even you, Duck?
 
It’s so implausible I’d expect it to be true.”

“You should have asked me
last
week,” he said, sarcastic to the end.
 
I think.

“Damn.
 
Well then, in that case there’s only one man in this room who can save us.”
 
I reached under the bar, and took out…my cordless phone.
 
I punched the “on” button, and flung the phone across the room.
 

Its recipient picked it out of the air like Willie Mays trapping a triple, and gaped at me uncomprehendingly.

“Call Mike!” I cried.
 
“Tell him we need him, now!”

His wrinkled monkey forehead relaxed.
 
“Sure ting, Boss,” Fast Eddie said, and began poking that phone in the ribs.

***

The last time we’d all seen Mike Callahan—several months earlier, when Mary’s Place had been open no more than a week—he had entrusted Eddie, just before he left to go back to his home in the future, with a folded piece of paper which held an emergency phone number for him.
 
“As far as the phone company’s concerned,” Mike had said, “That number doesn’t exist and never will.
 
I can’t promise I’ll hear it if it rings, and I can’t promise I’ll come if I do—but I will say that if I hear it, I’ll do my best for you.”
 
I’d seen Eddie memorize that number and then chew up and swallow the piece of paper.
 
Thank God he hadn’t forgotten it.

I hoped Mike happened to be near the phone…

I saw Fast Eddie start to speak, then pause to wait out an answering machine’s outgoing message.
 
It couldn’t have been more than a few words; shortly Eddie was saying, “Mike, it’s me.
 
It’s a little afta midnight on Novemba twenny-toid—no, twenny-fought, now, nineteen eighty-eight.
 
Getcher ass ovah heah: Mary and Finn are out cold, and we dunno who got ’em or when dey catch up, see?
 
Repeat: dis is Eddie Costigan, twenny-four No—”

—earsplitting sound, intolerable brightness, bare inches away—

Mike Callahan stood next to me, behind my bar, already scanning the room for his daughter.
 

***

Something appeared on the bar top before him.
   
I simply cannot describe it.
 
My eyes hurt trying to see it. Callahan snatched it up in one big hand, and vaulted over the bar.

I finished my Irish coffee in two great draughts.

He was naked, just as he’d been when he arrived the last time.
 
Had we caught him with his pants down twice, or did people routinely go naked in the future?
 
I made a mental note to ask him sometime.

The Doc had made room for him, and he was doing something to the side of Mary’s head, with his indescribable widget.
 

Mary opened her dear eyes and blinked several times.
 
“Hi, Pop.
 
Jake!
 
Hello, dear.
 
Sorry to drop in like this.”

I wanted to say something witty in reply, but I knew what the first words I said to her had better be.
 
“Mary, I’d like you to meet my fiancée Zoey Berkowitz, and a shortstop to be named later—our baby.
 
Zoey, Nameless, this is Mary Callahan-Finn.”

Mary looked where I pointed, and her eyes widened.
 
“At the last instant, when I was picking my arrival point, I grokked a pregnant woman in the room, and aimed to miss—but I didn’t know it was Jake’s baby.
 
You’re a lucky woman, Zoey.
 
Sorry if I startled you, crashing in like this.”

“That’s alright, ‘dear,’” Zoey said.
 
“Whenever I’m nine and a half months pregnant, the size of a parade float, I’m always hoping one of my lover’s old lovers will drop by, in silver lounging pajamas.
 
Welcome aboard.
 
Think of…well, I was going to say ‘think of this as your place,’ but by golly, it
is
.
 
He named it after you, did you know?”
 

The ancient Chinese ideogram for “trouble” is supposed to be “two women under one roof.”
 
I don’t know if it’s true, but if not it’s like that popular myth about the Inuit having dozens of words for different kinds of snow: a higher truth, beyond mere fact.
 
Maybe I would get lucky, and the world would be destroyed by fire in the next few minutes.

Callahan interrupted.
 
“Protocol later.
 
What’s the situation, Mary?
 
Report!”

“Situation grave but not yet critical, sir,” she said.
 
“The Cockroaches still don’t know humanity exists, and no attack is immiment here.”
 
Her face twisted.
 
“Oh, but Pop—
our mission failed
!
 
We screwed up somehow: they’re all
gone
, by now, they must be!
 
All those dead people, killed—and I don’t even know what we did
wrong
—”

“Easy now, baby,” he said soothingly, “Maybe we can still fix it.
 
First let’s make sure it’s safe for us to
try
.
 
Tell me everything that happened—tell everybody; maybe one of us’ll think of something.”

Oh, that made us proud!

She rubbed her eyes.
 
“Nikky, is that you?
 
What the hell are
you
doing here?”