Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (27 page)

At once Solace accepted the tacit surrender.
 
“Several weeks later, the boss says, ‘Pat, how come you and your brother can only install two poles a day, and the rest of me crew are installing twenty-four a day each?’
 
‘Ah,’ says Pat, ‘but you should see how much they leave stickin’ out the ground…’”

When the laughter had died away, I said, “Excuse me, Solace.
 
You called me over, and before I knew it we were off and punning.
 
What was it you wanted?”

“I have a revised time estimate for the arrival of the Lizard,” she said.
 
“Better data have just come in.”

That sobered us.
 
“How long have we got?” Tesla asked her.

“Call it an hour and a half.
 
And it seems to know just where we are.
 
At least, it appears to be heading directly for this precise spot on the Earth’s surface.”

“Jesus!” the Doc exploded.
 
“And you took time to make puns?”

“Pardon me,” she said drily.
 
“Was there some better use to which those thirty seconds could have been put?”

The Doc opened his mouth and closed it again.
 
“My apologies,” he said finally.
 
“I guess not.
 
Sorry, Solace—it’s been a long night, you know?”

“I know,” she said.

“Nothing important has changed,” I said.
 
“Having a good time is still the most intelligent thing I can think of to do.
 
Who knows?
 
Maybe we’ll get telepathic yet.
 
The one thing I’m sure of is that now is not a good—”

“Nikky?” Zoey asked.

“Just a sec, darling,” I said.
 
“I was just telling the Doc now is not a good time to—”

“Nikky?” she repeated.

“Yes, Zoey?” Tesla replied.

“You can repair stuff other people can’t, right?”

He nodded gravely.
 
“Often, yes.
 
Why do you ask?”

Her voice was funny.
 
“Do you think you could fix my water?
 
I’m afraid I broke it…”

A stain was spreading down the front of her dress.

“Doc, I’m sorry,” I said.
 
“I was wrong.
 
On reflection, this seems like an
excellent
time to panic—”

10

ER… "OM" MORE!

“—or it would be if I could spare the goddam time, which I can’t, sit down, spice, don’t worry about a thing, everything’s fine, everything is just totally copacetic, you’re in good hands, the best hands in the world, Doc, what do you need, boiling water, right?”

“Sit down, hell,” she said.
 
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to birth my first baby on a bar-room floor.
 
Take me in the back, Jake.”

I will lighten the tension with a little joke.
 
“If you’d only thought of that ten months ago, you wouldn’t in this mess—”

“Take me in the bedroom, God damn it!”

What tension?
 
“Yes, dear.”
 
I took her arm and started steering her toward our quarters in the back.
 
“Doc?
 
Boiling water?”

“Only if you feel the need for a soothing cup of tea,” he said.
 
“Lacking friend Acayib’s metabolic improvements, I rarely wash my hands in boiling water.
 
Plain old hot water and soap will do fine.
 
But put clean sheets on that bed before you let her lie down.”

“I got her, Jake,” Callahan said in my ear.
 
“Go ahead.”

“Thanks, Mike,” I blurted, and ran.

I set a new international indoor record in sheet-changing.
 
Tossing the old sheets on the floor seemed inadequate, so I flung open the window and tossed them outside into the night—then slammed it down again, suddenly terrified of a draft.
 
As I did so, Mike got Zoey in the door, looking rather like a man trying to waltz with a zeppelin.
 
Halfway to the bed she let out a bellow and started to go down.
 
Callahan is a strong man, but it took both of us to keep her from falling and get her safely horizontal.
 
Doc Webster was at his heels, and—astonishingly enough—nobody else followed him to gawk.
 

“Okay, honey,” I said, “cleansing breath, now—”

“Fuck you,” she explained, so I shut up.
 

So much for Lamaze.
 
How many babies did
he
ever have?

The Doc headed for the biffy.
 
Once Zoey’s contraction was over and she was breathing easy again, I helped her out of her clothes and followed him in.
 
He was stripped to his shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled as high as they would go, and he was washing his hands in that peculiar, insect-like way doctors have.
 
I joined him and began doing the same thing.

“What do you think, Sam?” I asked him.
 
“Get her down to Smithtown General, right?”

I had never, even when Long-Drink McGonnigle was punning, seen him look so pained.
 
“Jake, I am conflicted.
 
I can’t recall a time in forty years of practicing medicine when I’ve been more conflicted.”

“Sam, she’s more than three weeks late—”

“Jake, slow down.
 
Breathe.
 
First in, then out.
 
Okay, are you listening?
 
From a purely medical point of view, you’re right: any forty-one-year-old primpara this far past her due date ought to birth in a hospital, just on general principles.
 
On the other hand, the lateness is the
only
negative sign I’ve picked up, and I’ve been watching her real close, and her family history is excellent, and she has a fantastic pelvis.
 
Still, if I had my druthers I’d prefer to have her down at the shop, with fetal heart monitors and pitocin and a crash cart standing by, just—are you listening?—just to be on the safe side.
 
And up until this evening, I’d have said that a pregnant woman’s needs took precedence over
anything
else.
 
Much less my best friend’s woman.

“But Jake, if I understand it, the fate of reality—of all pregnant women everywhere and everywhen—is going to be decided in this bar in the next couple of hours.
 
And you’re the CO.
 
And if I bring her down to Smithtown General you
will
come along—”

“Fuck it, let Callahan handle it,” I said.
 
“He’s better qualified for the job anyway.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said.
 
“But it’s
your
job.”

“Dammit, so is Zoey!”

“That’s right.
 
So the time has come for you to decide whether you’re a moral husband, or an ethical human.
 
Look at it this way: I know you want to get your wife off the battlefield—but how much are you protecting her if you let Armageddon come because you weren’t on the battlefield when the smoke rose?”

I must have looked haunted.

“Let me get more data while you’re thinking it over, okay?
 
Look on the bright side: maybe I’ll find something so horrible we’ll
have
to put her in a car, and then all you’ll have to decide is where
you’re
going to be…”

So we went back out to the bedroom…and I started to feel better nearly at once.

Our bed—our big beloved king-size bed—was gone.
 
In its place was a natal bed more sophisticated than any I had ever seen, with Zoey comfortably arranged thereon.
 
It folded at at least four places.
 
It had padded handgrips, and raised contoured stirrups for her feet.
 
It tilted down to let gravity help her.
 
I saw that it could be opened out into the shape of an inverted Y.
 
It seemed to have built-in monitors for both fetal and maternal heart, as well as other functions I did not grok, displayed on a screen above the patient’s head and out of her line-of-sight.
 
The only part she could follow was the fetal heart monitor, which had an audio hookup.
 
As we came in, Mike Callahan was just affixing a wireless sensor on Zoey’s belly: it looked like the littlest round Band-Aid, but as he placed it on her, another column of data appeared on the display.
 
He glanced at it, nodded, closed his eyes briefly, and a contemporary crash cart materialized in a near corner, right where our TV and VCR used to be.
 
I wanted to kiss him.

Lub-dup, lub-dup
,
said our baby’s heart.

“Hi, hon,” Zoey said cheerily.
 
“Neat workbench, huh?”

“Excuse me,” I said, and kissed Callahan.
 
“Thanks, Mike.”

“You may always leave the little things to me,” he said.
 
“Doctor, this isn’t the best rig there is, but—well, pardon me, but it’s the best one you could understand well enough to use it without a manual and a help menu.
 
And that crash-cart was the emergency spare down at Smithtown General until just a second ago.”

“I recognize it,” Doc Webster agreed.
 
“Nice work, Mike.
 
Okay, Zoey, your first decision: who is privileged to be present while I examine you?”

“Only the people in this building,” she said.
 
“You know, just family.”

He nodded, and waddled over to her bedside, where Callahan had thoughtfully left his medical bag, opened wide; a chair appeared for him and he sank into it gratefully.

Less than a minute later he stripped off his glove and grinned hugely.
 
“Young lady,” he said, “you are go for separation.
 
I say again, you are go.”

“Copy that,” she said, grinning back.
 
And then she paled, and acquired a look of comical astonishment and consternation, and then she screamed “—i—” very loud.
 
If you took the word “birth” and dropped the “b” and the “rth,” that’s the syllable.

I had never heard Zoey scream before.
 
I didn’t like it much.
 
It was suddenly necessary to be doing something constructive.
 
I looked at my watch.
 
How long had it been since the last contraction?
 
I had failed to note the time, then.
 
Okay, note the duration of this one.
 
Damn, the watch has stopped.
 
Isn’t that typical, isn’t that fucking typical?
 
You carry the damn thing around like a prisoner’s cuff for years on end, feeding it batteries and buying it new straps every few years, and the first time you actually
need
the sonofabitching thing, it won’t even give you the time of—oh.
 
No, it’s still working: the little two just turned into a three.
 
How can she scream that long without running out of air?
 
Maybe didgeridu players learn their chops by studying women in labor.
 
What an aboriginal idea.
 
E above high C, that sounds like.
 
With a demiquaver.
 
Maybe a semihemidemiquaver.
 
I didn’t think Zoey could reach that note.
 
Well, she’s screaming for two, now.
 
Having trouble hitting that high note in concert?
 
Birth a baby on stage, and just wait for those reviews.
 
God damn it, the watch has stopped again—no, there it goes now: three into a four.
 
Shit, what was the time when I started counting?
 
What the hell is the difference, I don’t have a pen anyway.
 
Something constructive, something constructive, your lady is in pain and it’s time for you to do something useful, Jake.

I harmonized with her.
 
G sharp below middle C.

Even in her extremity, she half-opened one eye to squint at me.
 
Somehow she could tell that for once in my life I wasn’t trying to be funny, and nodded approval.
 
We sang out the contraction together.

“Jake,” she said quietly when the storm had passed, “would you mind very much if I didn’t have this baby after all?”

“Very much,” I said.

“Selfish bastard.
 
It’s been perfectly fine right where it is, for
months
.
 
Oh, all right.
 
Jam around me, next time.
 
Blues riffs.”

“Got you covered,” I said, and checked my watch.
 
The four was now a thirty-four.
 
“End of contraction at seventeen minutes, thirty-four seconds past the hour, Sam.”

“Thank you, Jake,” he said.
 
“But you needn’t trouble yourself.”
 
He pointed, and sure enough, the display had added a column charting time, duration and magnitude of contractions.

“Uh…what about our discussion?”

He opened his mouth to reply, and Zoey cut him off.
 
“Jacob Stonebender, if you think I’m going to have a baby and
move
at the same time, you better do a cold reboot.
 
Besides, I’m not doing this without you, and you’ve got a war to fight here.”

I started to argue.
 
“But I—”

“Don’t call
me
‘Butt-Eye,’” she snapped.
 
“This is a partnership.
 
Our agreement is very clear.
 
I birth the babies.
 
You kill the space monsters.
 
You tend to your knitting and I’ll tend to mine.
 
You can sing with me until it gets busy, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
 
Now shut up and soldier.”