Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (18 page)

7

PARTY TRAP

The loudest sound in the room was Solace’s fan.
 
I could hear myself think.
 
It sounded like a distant little car revving in neutral.

I looked at Callahan.

He looked back at me.
 
“Your place, son,” he said.

I tried to remember what had ever made me want to give up the joyous carefree life of a starving musician.
 
Surely there was going to be another Folk Music Scare, any decade now…

“Have you got an ETA, Solace?” I asked.

“Not an accurate one.
 
Insufficient data.
 
I have only a single frame—and the next shot of that portion of the sky is not due to be uploaded for another eight hours.
 
My best estimate, based on doppler inference, is…call it dawn, plus or minus three hours.”

I nodded.
 
“So we have three to nine hours to cobble up something that can take out another Mickey Finn?”

“Essentially correct.”

Now it was so quiet I could hear
other
people thinking.

Okay.
 
First step: take inventory of assets.
 
“Nikky,” I called out, “can your death-ray do the job?”

“No,” he and Finn answered together.
 
“I could write on the face of Mars with it,” he went on, “…but Mr. Finn could do as much with his smallest finger.
 
I am not certain I could construct a weapon of the requisite power…and I am certain I cannot do it in nine hours.
 
And if I could, we could not use it.”

I didn’t get that last part, but was too busy to pursue it.
 
“Mick?
 
How are your repairs coming?”

“Life support: now nominal.
 
Perceptual: ninety percent functional.
 
Motive power: seventy-five percent.
 
Defensive: fifty percent.
 
Offensive: twenty percent.
 
I will not be able to enhance the last two systems more than five percentage points each within the deadline stated.”

I sighed.
 
“Mary?
 
How are
your
mojos holding out?”

“Just about the same as Mick’s,” she said bitterly.
 
“I’ve lost about half my defensive capability and three quarters of my offense.
 
But it doesn’t even matter, Jake—”

“Just a second.”
 
Buck had his hand up, like a kid in class.
 
“Yes, Buck?”

His eyes were very bright.
 
“Look, I’ve given up, okay?
 
I am prepared to swallow any
premise
whatsoever, no matter how preposterous.
 
But I insist that the logic parse, after that.
 
What is this crap about a deadline?
”

I blinked.
 
“I don’t think I get your question.”

He turned to face Callahan.
 
“Mr. Callahan,” he said, “my name is Buck Rogers.”

Callahan didn’t bat an eye.
 
“Nice to meet you, Buck.
 
How’s Wilma?”

Apparently—perhaps understandably—Buck had never read Nowlan’s original stories; he batted both eyes, several times.
 
“To the best of my knowledge,” he said finally, “she’s still living in Bedrock with Fred.
 
What I wanted to ask you was…correct me if I have this wrong, but you are a time traveler, are you not?”

Mike nodded.
 
“For my sins.”

“You come from the future?”

Mike nodded again.
 
“From a planet called Harmony.”
 
He pointed down and to his right.
 
“Thataway a couple of light-centuries, although it isn’t inhabited at the moment.”

Buck’s turn to nod.
 
“Where there doubtless will one day exist a sophisticated and mighty civilization, with powers I can only dimly imagine.”

“Right.”

They were nodding at each other like two novelty mannikins, and then Buck yelled, big, “
So why the hell can’t you just pop back home and bring back the Harmonian Marines?
”

Mike sighed and spread his arms.
 
“Because I didn’t,” he said.

Suddenly I got it.
 
Now I understood why Tesla had said that even if he had a big enough weapon, he couldn’t use it, and Mary had said that her own firepower and Mick’s didn’t matter.

The problem was Time Traveler’s Dilemma.

“He doesn’t dare change history, Buck,” I explained.

He may not have read Nowlan, but he had read some sf, or at least watched
Star Trek
; his face fell as he took my meaning.
 
“But…but isn’t he changing the past right now, just by being here?”

Callahan shook his head.
 
“Not unless my presence here and now enters the historical record.
 
Time can heal itself around little discontinuities, son—but history is the main thread.
 
Individual memories fade, but the collective memory of a culture endures.
 
Poke one hole in history, and the fabric of Time comes apart.
 
I can put my hands on weapons you can’t imagine, easily powerful enough to beat another Mickey Finn.
 
But they’re all
gaudy
.
 
Bright.
 
Noisy in several spectrums.
 
Their use would cause talk.
 
History says that no such weapons were employed in this ficton—so I can’t use ’em.”

Acayib spoke up.
 
“As I understand it, the last time you people had alien trouble, you used a goddam atom bomb!”

Mike nodded.
 
“Local technology.
 
And we were lucky.
 
For what seemed to them good and sufficient reason, the powers that be decided to suppress the news.
 
In historical terms, they made it didn’t happen.
 
If a second nuke went off in the same county within a few years, we might not be so lucky.
 
And consider this: Mickey Finn was standing at ground zero when that bomb went off—and managed to protect not only himself, but every one of his friends.
 
The Beast, all gods be thanked, was not as heavily shielded as his scouts.
 
It would take something a lot splashier to make the nut this time…and history says it didn’t happen, so it can’t.”

Buck was aghast.
 
“So what the hell are you saying?” He shouted.
 
“We just sit here and wait for the damned Lizard to get here and destroy the Earth, and
that
won’t make the papers?”

Mike shrugged.
 
“Of course not.
 
What I’m saying is, whatever we do can’t involve anachronistic weapons.
 
Or conventional ones beyond a certain strength.
 
And if we lose, all of reality goes away.”

***

“Mike,” Doc Webster boomed, “why can’t you go back home, check a couple of planet-crackers out of inventory, fetch them back to this moment—and go take the Lizard
out there
, in deep space, before he gets any closer?
 
So maybe a couple of odd plates appear in some astronomer’s data; so what?
 
Solace ought to be able to do a little judicious image-enhancing in the Net…”

Mike shook his head sadly.
 
“Nice try, Sam—but the energy required would be naked-eyeball-visible from Terra.
 
A hole too big to mend, having a supernova occur where no star was.
 
Not to mention the fact that a display like that could draw the whole Cockroach race down on us: they’d extrapolate his course and find Earth.
 
We need something brilliant…and I haven’t got any more of that back home than we have right here.”

Buck did something I’ve read about but never seen before: he actually reached up and tore a couple of handfuls of hair from his head.
 
“This is all three of George Carlin’s categories of dumbness: Stupid, Full of Shit, and Fuckin’ Nuts!” he cried.
 
“We’re supposed to take out a space monster who blows up stars for a living—only we’re not supposed to attract any attention doing it?
 
That’s as crazy as—”

“—tossing money on the fire?” I suggested.

“Burning money isn’t in the same league!” he insisted.
 
“This is…is…hell, there’s no way
anybody
could do it.”

The Lucky Duck walked up to him out of the crowd and held out his hand over a nearby table, palm up.
 
There were three quarters in it.
 
I could guess what was coming.
 
As Buck watched, confused, the Duck flipped them high in the air.
 
They landed on the table simultaneously—

clack!

—all three on edge.
 

They poised there momentarily, but the tabletop was ever so slightly out of true; as one they rolled to the edge and over, bouncing high off the floor and into the Duck’s waiting hand.
 
He wasn’t even watching; he was holding Buck’s gaze.

“I’ll bet you a million dollars
we
can,” the Duck said.

***

Slowly all the fear drained out of Buck, and thus the anger, and he seemed to shrink slightly.
 
“What the hell,” he said weakly.
 
“What do I know?”
 
He shook his head.
 
“Okay, let’s see the color of your money.”

The Duck sneered.
 
“What for?
 
If you win, you ain’t gonna be around to collect.”

“True,” Buck conceded.
 
He thought for a minute.
 
“In that case, I insist on one condition.
 
If you win…
you
have to pitch the dough into the fireplace.”

“Just what I had in mind,” the Duck agreed.

A cheer went up, full of whistles and hoots and clapping and foot-stomping.

As I listened to it, I felt an emotion I could not name—and still cannot—sweep over me.
 
If you can imagine a combination of terror and pride and fierce joy that add up to serenity, you’re in the neighborhood.
 
This was where I wanted to spend Armageddon.
 
This was the place to be, come Ragnarok.
 
This was the company of glory I wanted to muster with on Judgment Day.
 
These were the people I—

All at once I heard the ending crescendo-crash! of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life,” saw the wormhole sequence from Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
, and had a rush of brains to the head…

“I have a plan,” I said softly, wonderingly.

The cheer was still going on, and starting to devolve into general conversation; nobody heard me except Zoey.
 
And what she murmured in reply floored me.

“I knew you would, stringbean.”

The she downshifted vocal gears, to something more like a stevedore’s bellow.
 
“HEY, EVERYBODY! JAKE’S GOT A PLAN!”

In the sudden stillness, I blinked and blushed and finished my Irish coffee.
 
“Uh…well, not exactly what I’d call the
main
plan, exactly.
 
But I think I have a very promising Step One.
 
And God knows it’s right up our alley.
 
Hell, we were born for the job.”

“Lay it on us, Jake,” Callahan said.

“Tell it, cousin,” Isham Latimer called.

“Whip it out,” Long-Drink said.

“You put it down, Nazz—we’ll pick it up,” Doc Webster rasped in a fair imitation of Lord Buckley.

“What’s de plan, boss?” Fast Eddie summed up.

I stared around at all of them, flabbergasted by the twisted, goofy
rightness
of it.
 
How come nobody else had figured it out?
 

“We get drunk and have fun,” I said.
 
“And maybe shoot the shit a little.”

***

Amazing how many different ways there are to grunt.
 
Everybody made some sort of
huh
noise at once, and I swear no two were alike.
 
Some were in descending mode, and meant something like, I can’t think of a better idea but I was rather hoping for more from yours.
 
Some were in ascending mode, and meant, are you out of your cotton-picking mind?
 
But a slight majority rose and then fell, meaning, now that is really one hell of a good idea there.
 
And a couple of those repeated, as the implications sank in.

Buck, however, was of the ascending school of thought.
 
“That’s your plan?
 
We turn off our brains?”

“
Au contraire
,” I said.
 
“We switch ’em on.”

A few ascenders switched their ballot to up and down.

“Of course,” Doc Webster said.
 
“We play to our strengths.”

“Exactly, Doc,” I said.
 

Long-Drink McGonnigle raised his stein.
 
“My life has not been wasted,” he said solemnly.

Buck was still looking baffled.
 

“Look,” I said, “the last time this happened…well, that atom bomb
was
useful, sure…but it wasn’t what saved our asses.
 
Just about any other group of people on Earth could have had ten atom bombs, and a Mickey Finn to shield ’em from the blast forces, and still gone down.”
 

More ascenders were coming over to my side.