Calahan's Con Part 17

It suddenly dawned on me and Bill that this Erin had not met him yet. For her, home was still Long Island. But she knew about Key West. She must have come from a point after we'd decided to move, but before we got there-because we'd all met Bill the hour we arrived. "I'm sorry-Erin, let me present my good friend and yours-to-be, William B. Williams. Bill, this is my daughter, Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz."

She was delighted. "What a great name! 'Double Bill' .. . pleased to meet you. Do people call you Bbiillll?"

He flashed his pirate grin and took his hand off the gearshift long enough to pat the top of her head. "Only you, sugarbush-n.o.body else can say it."

"Cool sarong."

"Thanks. I can't understand why anybody in Florida wears pants."

"Me either. So did you guys fly here or what?"

I explained about the Flat Rock. "I don't intend to push her on the way home, if that's all right," Bill said. "We really strained her on the way up here."

"And ourselves," I agreed. "I'm gonna need a week of chiropracty to put some s.p.a.ce between my a.s.s and my shoulder blades again. It's all right with me if we just let the d.a.m.n boat drift south. Once I call your mother from the marina and let her know you're okay and we're on our way home, I'm not in a hurry anymore." I'd tried to call her already on the borrowed cell phone; unfortunately, when that bullet had smacked into the fence and croquet-balled my head into the street, I'd landed on the phone.

"It's a two-man boat?" Erin asked.

"The only reason your Mom isn't here. But h.e.l.l, you don't take up any more room than the beer we drank."

She grimaced. "Thanks, but I'm not crazy about open boats. Especially cramped ones, especially for hours and hours. Especially in the dark." The sun was indeed just about to set. "You guys go ahead: I'm just gonna hop home, okay, Daddy?"

"Sure, why not?" I said. "Wish I could do it myself. We'll see you there, pumpkin."

Pop. She was gone.

"Man," said Bill, shaking his head. "Once in a while I think I can imagine what it must be like to teleport. But I can't picture myself attempting it from a moving car."

"She's done it from a moving s.p.a.ce Shuttle. Uh-she will real soon, anyway."

We reached the marina just after the last trace of light left the sky. While Bill prepared the boat for departure, I wandered off to find a pay phone. When I came back, Bill read my expression. "No luck?"

I shook my head. "Two pay phones in this place, both vandalized. And the little putz behind the counter is a redneck who hates all men with beards; he wouldn't let me use the house phone even when I offered him cash. I think he saw our boat and pegged us for dope runners."

"I'll go reason with him," said Bill. He happened to have a heavy wrench in his hand.

"No, forget it," I said, and stepped aboard. "It doesn't matter. By now Erin's long since home, and Zoey knows she's safe. Let's just gas up and go-I'm tired of Miami, and darkness doesn't improve it."

I'm not a boat guy. The trip back home was more pleasant than the mad race north had been. But not a h.e.l.l of a lot more pleasant. Apparently a boat designed for ultrahigh speed handles poorly at low speed-I believe the technical phrase is, "wallows like a pig"-and the compromise speed Bill settled on was not enough help. I'm always scared on a small boat, and adding in darkness and great distance from sh.o.r.e didn't help a bit. At one point a dolphin broke the surface nearby, for all I know just to say h.e.l.lo, and nearly gave me a heart attack. I never actually became officially seasick, quite, but I was very glad when the lights of Key West came into view, and gladder still when Houseboat Row loomed up out of the darkness.

By the time we approached the gate of The Place, I was d.a.m.n near euphoric. The warrior returneth home to his lady, triumphant after a successful campaign. Tony Donuts Junior would not be back anytime soon: he had a lifetime of running to begin, and even he wasn't stupid enough to return to a cul-de-sac that was his last known address, where he would stand out like a target, and where any number of people would be happy to rat him out. As for Charlie Ponte and his friends, they had never heard of us and had no reason to. Even if they ever caught up with Tony, and even if they paid attention to a word he babbled, Tony himself wasn't aware of any connection between The Place and the person he thought of as Ida Alice Shourds except that she'd had a drink in there once. He would be more likely to a.s.sociate her with the p.o.r.no store where he'd seen her most recently-and that store had been closed, bankrupted by the Internet, for months. (The owner, an acquaintance of the Professor's, had simply tossed the p.o.r.n tapes themselves into the Dumpster and left town, the empty boxes still on the shelves.) On top of everything else, in order to get from Houseboat Row back to The Place, it had been necessary to pa.s.s through the first night of Fantasy Fest. Can you picture a party in Paradise, crashed by every benign weirdo in the world? Or have you ever been to the masquerade of a World Science Fiction Convention, and if so can you picture that event with everyone present loaded on mescaline? That's as far as I'm going to go in describing Fantasy Fest here; the job has been done too well too many times before, and you can find lengthy discussion, including streaming video and stills, with two minutes on any search engine. The point is that by the time I was close enough to read the small familiar sign above the gate that discreetly proclaims, THE PLACE ... BECAUSE IT'S TIME, I had been grinning like an idiot for so long my face hurt, and I didn't mind a bit. I can still remember that cotton candy feeling.

Things went sour real fast then.

First of all, just as I reached the open gateway, I remembered for the first time in hours that my friend Doc was dying. The knowledge just dropped unwanted back into my consciousness, and a large fraction of my good cheer got lopped off the top right there.

Then I stepped through the gate and found, instead of the hero's welcome I'd been imagining, a dead house. Even though it wasn't quite midnight yet, The Place was dark, the bar closed, the pool empty; the only action I could detect was lights and murmurs indicating a small quiet gathering on the patio around behind Doc's cottage.

I realized I should have been expecting it. Tom had only done what I'd have done if I'd been paying attention to my business-it was silly to stay open nights during Fantasy Fest, since nearly all my clientele would be out there partic.i.p.ating every night. Doubtless that was where most of them were now. Nonetheless, I felt a letdown: n.o.body was around to slap some fatted calf on the barbie for me.

"I guess I'm just going to head home," Double Bill said. "I'm wiped."

"I hear that," I told him. "But just come in for a cuppa, okay? Zoey's going to want to thank you."

My house was dark. I a.s.sumed Zoey would be with the group behind Doc's place, and I headed there. On the way I found myself thinking that people gathered to comfort a dying man weren't going to be a receptive audience for witty complaints about my boat-battered b.u.t.t, and caught myself resenting Doc. Sumb.i.t.c.h has been upstaging me since the day I met him. At my age you finally start to cut yourself a little slack when you notice your own monstrous selfishness emerging-it's not monstrous, it's hardwired, and the only thing that's really your fault is how much you indulge it-but it's still never fun to confront. By now my good mood was still in place-but constructed of cornflakes and library paste.

And then I rounded the corner into Doc's backyard, and the people facing my way saw me, and the people facing away from me saw their faces and spun around, and everybody started talking at once. At first all I could glean was that everybody was upset with me for some reason,, so there went the last of my good mood. But then I began to pick individual voices out of the wash of sound, and to sort out the questions they were asking me, and in a matter of seconds I went from being officially in a bad mood to being terrified.

The Doc's stentorian "Dammit Jake, whoa didn't you fine?" came through first, followed by Field Inspector Czrjghnczl's "Is your daughter all right, Mr. Stonebender?" and Long-Drink's, "Jesus, where's Zoey?" and Tom Hauptman's, "Oh, dear, aren't they with you?" and finally Fast Eddie's miserable, shamed, "I'm sorry, boss. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn't lissena me." As the combined meaning began to come through, I screamed an unspellable syllable, spun on my heel and sprinted as fast as I could to my own cottage next door, kicked the back door open, and raced inside.

The house was empty. Just as I'd feared, the storage closet door stood open. The Meddler's Belt was not in the closet. I stumbled back outside, reeling as if I'd just been punched hard in the face, and headed for Doc's yard again, trying to make it all make sense. Halfway there, I heard my watch give its little hourly chirp and knew it was midnight. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and looked over toward the distant pool in time to see naked two-year-old Erin materialize at the end of the diving board and cry, "HI, EVERYB-! Gee, where is everybody?"

"Here," I croaked, and kept going, and she and I arrived together.

Everyone in Doc's yard was on their feet, all still talking at once, and their volume rose sharply when they saw Erin pop into view. It took several more minutes of talking at cross purposes before everyone understood the misunderstandings that had occurred, and their terrible consequences.

I had believed that Erin was going to zip home from Miami to Key West immediately that is, as straight teleportation, with no time-hopping involved-so I'd concluded that there was no need to find a working pay phone and call Zoey collect: Erin would give her mom the good news faster than I could dial my phone number. Erin, on the other hand, hadn't known I'd ruined the cell phone, and believed I was going to phone home at once-so she had decided to time-shift forward a little on the way and arrive at the same instant I did, so we could all share the joy.

So n.o.body had phoned, for longer than was reasonable, and then n.o.body would answer Doc's phone, because I'd broken it, and finally Zoey had just snapped. She had strapped on the Meddler's Belt, set the time dial for some near-future time by which she figured the situation would have to have resolved itself one way or another, and pushed the Go b.u.t.ton.

When the mutual explanations had gotten that far, my vision blurred, and I'd have gone down if Jim Omar hadn't caught me.

"She doesn't know, does she, Daddy?" Erin asked me. "No, honey, I don't think she does. We never discussed it. It never came up."

"Oh ... my ... G.o.d."

The man who called himself the Meddler had stumbled (will stumble) upon the historically first of three different methods of time travel, and used it only twice, and his discovery had died with him. Then later, I'd heard, there had been an interim method developed, about which I knew nothing except that it had seen limited use for a few centuries after its discovery, and involved much more esoteric technology than the Meddler's Belt. And finally, the far-distant-future ficton from which the Callahans hailed had developed the ultimate, no-moving-parts kind.

Only the second and third methods automatically compensated for the inconvenient nature of the universe.

"What's wrong, Erin?" Mei-Ling asked. "Why are you so upset? Your mom got her arrival time off by a little, that's-"

"No," Erin interrupted. "I don't think so. There are two dials on that belt, and I'll bet Mom used only one of them. Isn't that right, Uncle Eddie?"

Eddie thought hard. "I seen her twist one ting, an' push a b.u.t.ton. I didn't see her do nuttin' else."

Erin groaned.

"That tears it, then," I heard my own voice say from a long way off.

"What's the second file door?" Doc Webster asked with gentle patience. "Excuse me. What is the ... dial ... for?"

"s.p.a.ce," Erin told him. "The first dial is for time, and the second is for s.p.a.ce. You use it to compensate for the fact that everything in the universe is always in motion."

"Oh, my G.o.d," Doc said, turning pale. "Oh, no."

"Jesus Christ!" Omar shouted.

"h.e.l.l," the Professor said.

"Oh, dear," Mei-Ling murmured.

I could not get enough air into my chest to make a squeak. "I don't geddit," Fast Eddie said mournfully.

"Everything moves, Uncle Eddie. Always. The earth rotates at nine hundred miles an hour. It revolves around the sun at nineteen miles a second-which is itself moving through s.p.a.ce, revolving around the center of the galaxy. The galaxy is rotating at half a million miles an hour, and it's in motion itself, presently on a collision course with the Andromeda nebula at about six million miles a day. Meanwhile the whole universe is expanding. Everything moves relative to everything else, and nothing stands still-ever."

"Okay-so?"

Erin closed her eyes, and Mei-Ling took up the stick. "So let's say Zoey decided to set the time dial on that belt to this very second now, Eddie. She pushes the b.u.t.ton, and zip, she's now. But she's not here and now ... because she didn't make any compensating settings to the s.p.a.ce dial. Instead, she's ... well, she's at the point in s.p.a.ce where this particular portion of the earth's surface happened to be when she pushed the b.u.t.ton. And we're ... well, not. We've moved. A long way."

"Hully Christ," Eddie whispered. "You're tellin' me right this minute she might be somewhere in outer f.u.c.kin' s.p.a.ce?"

"Without a pressure suit," Omar said dully.

"Ah, geeze," Eddie said, and fainted dead away.

I was terribly afraid I might do the same thing, and I didn't have the time. Usually when you can't seem to inhale it's because you failed to exhale enough. I put both hands on my ribs and pushed hard, emptying my lungs, while trying to blow out an imaginary candle. Automatically they took a deep breath to refill. I did it again, and it worked even better. Blood reoxygenated, I found the nearest lawn chair, sat down, and put my head down between my knees. The dizzy feeling and greying vision receded. By the time I straightened up again. I was only nauseous with terror.

There's a trick about nausea many people don't know. If you can't get medicine, or the medicine isn't working, it can sometimes help to holler at a bunch of innocent bystanders. The less they deserve it, the more it seems to help. It's a derivative of what Valentine Michael Smith learned in the monkey house, I think. Everyone was obliging me by all talking at once, so it was at the top of my lungs that I bellowed, "SHADDAP!"

Silence. Sure enough, the nausea receded one step.

A hundred things to think about at once-which one was first? Already a dozen people were, opening their mouths to start talking again.

Erin had already managed to bring Eddie around; he was sitting up and shaking his head. "Uncle Eddie," Erin said, "Exactly what time did Mom leave?" She was using the same voice her mother uses to end arguments with me, half an octave higher in pitch, and recognizing that brought the nausea back a half step closer again. But I knew she had asked the right question.

"Just after sunset is da closest I can tell youse," Eddie said. "It was de dark got to her."

"n.o.body felt like putting the house lights on," Long-Drink said. "I guess we shoulda."

"a.s.sign blame later, Phil," Erin snapped. "Can anyone else pin the time down any closer? Anybody remember what was on the radio?"

"I wuz playin'," Eddie mourned.

Pixel the cat was suddenly in my face. He materialized on my lap without warning, sublimely confident that I would instinctively cup my hands under him and make a lap in time to keep him from falling, like I always do-but then, most unusually, he leaned forward and poked his face right up against mine. The item he had in his mouth shielded me from tuna breath-and made me draw in a deep breath of my own. Back when I first opened The Place, if I had to leave during business hours for some reason, I'd leave a sign telling potential customers when we would reopen. Almost at once I came to realize that my clientele were perfectly capable of running The Place without me, for limited periods of time, at least, and put the sign in storage. Here it was after all these years-the words WE'LL BE BACK AT: and a yellow clockface with two movable hands.

Pixel actually poked me in the nose with it twice. "I get it, I get it," I said, and he backed off and turned it so Erin could see, too. It read 7:03.

"That's it exactly?" Erin said. "You're sure, Pixel?"

He turned his ma.s.sive head back, dropped the thing on my chest, and held it there with one paw, moved the other with exquisite care. When he was done the minute hand was, by my estimation, just over a third of the way between the three and the four. " Bwrrrtt!" he said.

"Thank G.o.d!" Erin took in a deep breath and let it out. Her exhale was a little shivery. "Okay," she said, "that's a good start. That's a very good start. That helps a lot. Next question ... Wait-" She closed her eyes tight for a few moments, then opened them again. "Okay, I presume Mom did not tell any of you how far ahead she intended to hop, or you'd have spoken up by now. No-don't tell me your guess, Phil. n.o.body speak-especially you, Daddy!" I shut up. "I want everybody to write down their guess. People tend to agree with whoever sounds the most positive, but that doesn't mean he's right. I want your subjective impressions." Eddie and Omar were pa.s.sing out bar napkins, and just about everybody turned out to have a writing implement on them. "You all know my Mom pretty well, you had a sense of her mood, just how frightened and impatient she was, maybe you got a look at her just before she disappeared. How far forward do you think she would have gone? Don't say it; write it down."

Everybody did, and all the napkins were collected by Pixel and brought to Erin. She riffled through them quickly and lifted her eyes. "Most of you agree she would have hopped to the same time tomorrow night."

"She'd want to go far forward enough to be sure of getting an answer, one way or another," Long-Drink said.

Omar, the only other one of us present who had studied the Meddler's Belt at any length, said, "And twenty-four hours is an especially easy setting to make on that dingus."

"I think she would have picked midnight," said Mei-Ling, sounding fairly sure about it.

"I hope to G.o.d you're wrong," Erin said. "Why do you think so?"

"We were talking, about ten minutes before she did it ... and I said to her, 'Don't worry, I guarantee by midnight you'll know the good news.' I'm pretty sure she heard me."

Erin groaned. "Doc, check me: What's the maximum amount of time she could survive in hard vacuum?"

"I'm not sure. Twenty seconds, would be my guess. Thirty at the outside."

She slumped and sat down hard on the gra.s.s, just like an ordinary two-year-old would. For her, the effect was comical ... until she pooched out her lower lips just like an ordinary two-year-old who was thinking of bursting into tears.

"If Mom picked midnight," she said, "she's dead." Just about everybody gasped or groaned or said no or spoke some sort of obscenity. "I picked midnight-and I've been here for at least five minutes, nearly six." She has an excellent sense of time, and we knew it; still I checked, and so did others. My watch, an uncommonly accurate one, said it was 12:05:47.

"So ya time-hop back a few minutes-what'sa problem?" Fast Eddie said.

"I can't, Uncle Eddie!" she cried, and did burst into tears. "Don't you get it? There was a me here in the universe from midnight on. There can't be two-hoo-hoo-" She was crying too hard to form words now.

I had never seen my daughter cry as a baby-not once. Maybe she made it a point of pride, I don't know. I had seen her cry, twice by that point, but only after age seven. Seeing my superbaby, theoretically the most competent of us to deal with this emergency, sobbing like an ordinary infant now-well, it came close to unhinging me.

So I got out my mental power-screwdriver and tightened those f.u.c.king hinges down machine-tight, and I got up from my chair and I picked my baby up in my arms and I held her as tight as I could. And said in her perfect little ear, with my very best imitation of serene confidence, "So we will a.s.sume that Mom did not pick midnight, since that a.s.sumption gives us things we can do besides go apes.h.i.t. Okay, princess?"

She hugged me back, harder than I would have believed possible, and in five or ten long seconds she had stopped crying. "Okay, Daddy."

"Attagirl. What are the other possible times she could have picked?"

She squirmed in my arms, and Mei-Ling handed her a tissue just before she would have wiped her face on my shirt. "Well, like I said, most of us voted for twenty-four hours."

"Who didn't? Besides Mei-Ling."

"You and me, Daddy. We both guessed one hour." "Huh!" I said. "Why did you?"

"I don't know," she said. "Just everything I know about Mom. She takes small steps until she's sure it's safe. Then she takes a big stride. Why did you pick an hour?"

"Because I was the moron who put the whole idea in her head," I said bitterly. "Just before I left to come after you, as we were getting ready to go, half-kidding I said I was tempted to use the Meddler's Belt to cheat, and peak ahead to the back of the book. And Zoey said something about what's so bad about cheating, not kidding at all. I talked her out of it-I thought I had, anyway, d.a.m.n it. I pointed out what she already knew: every act of time travel threatens paradox, imperils the whole universe. I said that was just too much risk to take for a case of nerves, and she agreed, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, she agreed it was-oh, s.h.i.t." I sat back down heavily in my chair.

"What, Daddy?"

"I just realized-that was just before she found out she wasn't coming with me and Bill. Before she realized she was going to be sitting here by herself with nothing to do but go out of her mind with worry for an unknown number of hours."

"She wasn't by herself, Jake," Mei-Ling said.