Callahan's Secret (16 page)

*~ “Two Heads Are Better Than One,” in CALLAHAN’S CROSSTIME SALOON (Berkley).

time in every day, none of them rationally designed. Yet in the den you’ll probably find a computer that’s a masterpiece of skullsweat and micromachining,-and overhead there are satellites beeping in high orbit and footprints on the Moon. Right now Paul and I are planning to spend over a thousand dollars on a hard-disk drive for our Macintosh, because it drives us crazy having to wait more than seven seconds to boot in, ai2d it never occurred to either of us to spend fifty dollars on a thermocouple to save us hours a week of adjusting hot and cold water taps. Humans seem to have the idea that it’s okay to devote thought and money and energy to our jobs, but not to our selves.”

He paused courteously to let Doe Webster say aloud, “I don’t know; we indulge ourselves pretty good in some ways. They make some pretty fancy entertainment gear, stereo and video and computer games and so forth.”

“Nothing near as fancy as the stuff people use for work. Ii! our Mac Buyer’
Guide, business applications programs outnwnber software games ten or twenty to one. All the stuff you mention was used for work for years before they made home consumer versions. And you can’t sit in anything near as comfortable as a dentist’s c
iair to enjoy them all. Holdover of the Puritan ethic: work can be noble, but the self is not worth attention. Considering that useful work is getting harder to come by, it’s an attitude we’re going to have to change eventually.”

“I dunno,” Dcc Webster said. “I think we put in plenty of time on enjoyin’ ourselves; maybe too much.”

“Maybe. But I think we enjoy ourselves-in inappropriate ways, at inappropriate times, to inappropriate degrees, just because we’re so unused to doing it, so uncomfortable with wanting to, so reluctant to put thought into it. Paul and I find that most of our patients don’t love themselves enough, so they treat themselves so badly it’s hard for them to love themselves enough-it can be a literally vicious circle.”

Finn glanced at Mary on that one, and she smiled fondly. “See, kid? It’s not just a human problem, is it?” He smiled shçepishly back. “Don’t worry, you’re making progress.”

She turned back to the MacDonald brothers. “I’m glad to meet you fellows, and you’ve got a mighty insight going there, which come to think of it is no surprise, but… can we tell it now? You know I’m. dying to.”

Jim and Paul both smiled, and this time it was Paul who did their talking. “Of course, dear. I don’t know how you’ve held it in this long. Go ahead.”

She turned to the rest of us. “You folks know what’s been keeping Mick awake nights since he got to this planet, right-?”

“Sure,” ibmmy Janssen said. “Same thing that keeps a lot of us human type beings awake nights too.”

“And I don’t know about the rest of you,” the Dcc insisted on saying, “but Armageddon awful tired of it.”

Mary ignored him magnificently. “That’s right: nuclear holocaust. It wouldn’t bother him any, physically, of course-and by the way, it wouldn’t bother me or any of you physically either. You know how raindrops ignore friends of Mick’s? Well, ionizing radiation and blast forces behave the same way, now.” She reached over the bar, took out Callahan’s riot-baton, and brought it down on my head as hard as she could. A microinstant after it struck, the top of my head turned hard as titanium alloy.

“That’s fantastic,” I said as soon as I could get my breath. “I felt a little sting, as though you slapped me with your open palm.”

“That’s the most pain you’d feel even if I shot you with Pop’s 12-gauge,” she said, grinning broadly. “However you die, Jake, it won’t be by violence-. But that’s beside the point. Nuclear devastation would be a sad thing even for us who survived. We’d miss the rest of the human race-“

“Speak for yourself,” the Doe interjected.

“-and as for Mick, without ‘a high-tech civilization, he’d die in a few hundred years for lack of maintenance. So he and 1 have been working on the problem ever since we got married, kind of putting our heads together, and the reason we came here tonight is-“

“To kick around some ideas, sure,” Tommy said. “Great. As long as we’re all brainstorming the Unanswerable Ques

dons, we might as well tackle the Big One.”

“Well, no, actually,” Mary said. “I mean, we’d be glad to kick around ideas on some other topics with you later, if you likç. But this one we’ve sort of… uh… solved.”

“WHAT?”

I let go of my drink; Long-Drink started so sharply his watchman’s cap flew from his head; Tommy spit a cigarette across the room; Fast Eddie the piano player had what musicians call a “train wreck”; the Doe was caught without a wisecrack of any kind; and Callahan-imperturbable Callahan-poured coffee on his hand and let out a bellow, It is worth mentioning that my drink didn’t go anywhere, the Drink’s cap returned to its perch, Tommy’s cigarette landed in wet sawdust and extinguished itself, the Dcc’s flabby old heart did not stop, and the coffee failed to bum Callahan’s wrist. The MacDonald Brothers were grinning a mile a minute, and even Finn had a happy expression pasted on his long gaunt face. Mary looked more embarrassed than anything else, like someone who’s solved the whole crossword in two minutes and spoiled everyone’s fun. fake, 1 thought to myself, taking hold of my glass again, you sure can pick ‘em. It seemed astonishing that I had ever thought myself this woman’s equal, imagined us living together… (It’s stupid to be jealous of someone with Mickey Finn’s unique advantages, especially when he’s such a good friend. But I had learned lately that I’m easily that stupid.)

None of us doubted her for a moment, of course. In the first place this was Callahan’s Bar, where anything can happen-and frequently does; in the second place, she was Mike Callahan’s daughter, and therefore capable of anything she put her mind to; in the last place, she was Finn’s wife. Me, I gave up using the word “impossible” after the time I watched Fast Eddie win a large bet by successfully skiing through a revolving door. If Mary Callahan Finn said nuclear war wasn’t a problem anymore, then it was time to start converting my fallout shelter back into a root cellar again, that was all…

The tone of Callahan’s voice, now there was something genuinely startling. “Darlin’,~’ he said darkly, “I would like to know, if you wouldn’t mind telling me. exactly how you and Mick solved this little problem.”

“No, Mike, no,” Jim or Paul hastened to assure him. “Nothing like that.”

Mary apparently knew her old man well enough to read him as well as two professional telepaths. “You ought to know me better than that, Pop. No–to answer your question out loud for everyone e se’s benefit - we did not solve the problem of nuclear war by making any changes in human nature. I’m not saying Mick couldn’t pull it off if he tried.

with enough lead time, but he wouldn’t. Besides, I wouldn’t let him. The very aggressiveness that makes the human race dangerous to itself is what’s going to take us to the stars one of these days-you couldn’t filter it out without changing humanity for the worse, maybe destroying it.”

“My own race lacked tha~. sort of aggressiveness,” Finn put in. “I am its last living member, and it has not escaped me that there may be a connection. I am more advanced, more knowledgeable than any of you –- and even I am not competent to alter a psyche. individual or collective, Michael.”

Callahan relaxed. “Well, that’s okay then. I misgive my misgivings. Irish Coffee, anybody?”

Long-Drink exploded. “How did you fucking do it?”

“Well,” Mary said, “you all have to promise not to tell a soul-anybody that isn’t a regular, I mean..

She was cut off by the sound of the blender as Callahan whipped cream for the Irish coffee. The big red-headed son of a bitch made us wait on eleventerhooks until he was done, had Mary hold off until he had Blessed everyone in the room, then waved her to go ahead. Jim and Paul were smiling their faces off. I took a deep gulp of my own black magic healing potion, and decided that Callahan had good instincts and a mce judgment.

“You all know,” she said. “that Mick and I have been spending our honeymoon traveling. I’d always wanted to

see the world, and what with one thing and another I’d never managed to find the time to visit more than a dozen countries or so. So Mick indulged me. You know, it’s funny how fast you can use up the tourist attractions of this planet when none of your time is wasted in the fiddle-faddle of getting there, and hauling and storing your stuff, and eating and drinking, and all of that chaff. On top of that, I hardly ever sleep since I took up with Mick-I don’t need to anymore, and it makes me feel a little silly and selfish to go off and leave him for eight hours at a time like that. So in an astonishingly short time I discovered I was bored and there was nothing left to see.

“Well, you all know how polite this big cyborg is, but eventually he broke down and managed to diffidently suggest that Terra is not the only or even the most beautiful tourist attraction in this solar system.

“You want to know the truth, people? It’s not even in the Top Ten…

“So lately we’ve been doing some real traveling, having a wonderful time. One day we were hanging out in The Rings-“

“Saturn?” I burst out.

“I said it with a capital T, Jake. Hanging out in The Rings, just sort of digging, you know, and chewing the fat now and then. We talked about the Cockroaches” (the name Mary came up with for Finn’s former employers when she could not bring herself to call them The Masters) “and some of the other planets and civilizations he’s seen, and so forth.

And of course Topic A kept coming up-you just can’t look at a sterile planet for long without thinking about it-and all of a sudden Finn asked me a question.”

Just like a human husband, Finn interpreted her pause and took up the tale. She’s had a considerable effect on him. “The news had been full of the Disarmament Talks when we left; you will recall that the Russians refused to even discuss the subject unless Reagan promised to abort his plans for a defensive satellite network-“

“Oh,” said Long-Drink, “you mean the Star W-” Callahan hefted the big fifteen-cup coffee pot in one hand like a set of brass knuckles. “-the Strategic Defense Initiative, sure,” the Drink finished.

“Yes,” Finn agreed. “I asked Mary: why does not Reagan say to Gorbachev, ‘Let us mutually agree to found together, in a neutral country such as Switzerland or New Zealand, a single factory which manufactures defensive satellites; divide the inventory at random; and launch them two by two until each side feels safe. Until that time is reached, each of us shall have a button which will destroy the factory if he suspects the other is cheating in any way. In that way-.”

“If the Russians could build them things on their own, they’d be doing it,” Long-Drink said argumentatively. “The U.S.‘d contribute a lot more to the party than the Russians.”

“So what?” Finn said simply.

The Drink opened his mouth. After a moment he reached up and closed it with his fingers.

“So what’d you answer, darlin’?” Callahan asked his daughter.

“I told him that it wouldn’t work, but I couldn’t explain why not. He said that was his thinking, too; just checking.

But it gave me a honey of an idea-“

“-I am ashamed that I never thought of it myself,” Finn said. “It is so obvious-“

“My love,” she told him, “from a human’s perspective there are only two deficiencies in your character: aggressiveness, as we discussed before, and audacity.“And a sense of humor, I thought jealously, and suppressed the thought.

Funny how you start censoring yourself when there’s a couple of telepaths in the room. “But not imagination. Once I laid it down, you picked it up and ran with it.” She turned back to the rest of us. “Mick’s thoughts had been along the lines of figuring out some way to destroy nuclear warheads, and of course the problem was that even he couldn’t get all of them simultaneously-and anything less would probably trigger a nuclear exchange. Even if he managed it, he might have just kicked off a conventional war that’d be damn near as bad. Well, it occurred to me that a satellite umbrella system would make the nut just fine, except that neither side wants the other to have one firs:, and they’re too damn paranoid to coordinate or synchronize with each other.

“So Mick and I decided to do it for them.”

After a frozen second or two, people began to grin along with Jim and Paul.

“Wç ducked over to the Asteroid Belt for raw materials, Finn drew up the blueprints and I set up a smithy, and we started turning out defensive satellites, freelance. A little more sophisticated than the ones Reagan’s advisors have in mind. They’re in place now; we just hung the last one an hour or two ago.”

Callahan frowned. “You sure nobody caught you at it?”

“Relax, Mike,” she told him. “Nobody sees Mick, on any wavelength whatsoever, unless he wants them to. As for the hardware, the largest components, the four iystem brains, are the size of ghetto blasters-and as transparent as glass. You could tell NASA roughly where they are, and give them twenty years, and they’d never find ‘em.

“But for gosh sakes, don’t tell anybody,” Mary went on. “A general tends to freak out when he finds out his dick won’t shoot. Of course, if they’re dumb enough to let the situation, uh, come up, then the hell with their feelings-but for now, let’s leave them with the comforting illusion that they hold the fate of mammalian life in their hands-it’ll keep ‘em out of serious mischief.”

A rebel yell went up from someone, and like the first firecracker in a string it kicked off the loudest, and happiest, and most sincere cheer I had ever participated in or het~d of in my life. It started loud, and built to a crescendo, and then squared itself, and then sustained, and eventually, there being a limit to the capacity of human lungs, dwindled, dopplered down, attenuated and fmally was reduced to a single voice. And, astonishingly, the voice was very soft, very quiet, very flat, almost totally devoid of any emotion at all. It was an oddly chilling effect. Oh, for heaven’s sake, I told myself, it’s just that it’s Finn, and he forgets to put expression into his voice sometimes, and as my blood started to unchill it froze solid because I heard what he was murmuring so gently, over and over: