Callahan's Secret Part 15

"Oh, Mary, you don't understand! I could stand losing you. I can survive-somehow-without Lady Macbeth. I could even stand a world without Mike Callahan in it. But a world that doesn't have Callahan's Place in it is a world I don't want to live in. I can't."

"Yes, you can."

"No, I can't!"

"Jake, listen to me now. Stop crying and listen! I know it's dark, but try to watch my lips."

I tried to stop crying, and watched her lips. "Jake, dear Jake, you don't need Callahan's Place anymore. And I'll tell you why. I couldn't tell you before, or you might have stopped coming to the Place and Mom and Pop a.s.sured me you were going to be necessary. Jake, a lot of things about the past can't be changed, even by us timetravelers. I can't explain why in any terms you'd understand, so you'll just have to take my word for it. But many things we can at least see-see them happening, see them have happened, call it what you like-" She paused and bit her lip.

"So what are you telling me?"

She hesitated, and blurted it out. "Jake, I've seen Barbara and Jessica die!"

"What?"

"I thought there was just-I wanted to see if I couldn't find some way to save them for you. I knew there wasn't any way, but I just had to try-"

In my mind's eye I saw it all again, the little piece of film that I've rerun in my head a million times, the way it must have looked to an outside observer on the scene. The last minutes before the crash are gone from my memory, forever if G.o.d is kind, but I have read the police reconstruction and I have a very good imagination.

The car approaches the intersection at slightly higher than legal speed. The light is just going yellow, and the driver decides to beat it. Barely in time, he sees the sixteen-wheeler approaching the intersection from the left, realizes the trucker has decided to gamble too, and slams on his brakes. He has an instant to congratulate himself on his excellent peripheral vision and superb reflexes, before he realizes that the rear brakes he installed himself the day before are failing and he will nor stop in time after all. Then the vehicles collide, and the engine block enters the pa.s.senger compartment at an angle, trapping the woman and child who sit beside the driver, drenching them in gasoline. The car spins crazily, trips itself and rolls end over end, comes to rest upright. All three occupants are unconscious, and two of them are on fire ...

Mary was shaking me by the shoulders, hard enough to crack my neck, shouting something that ended with, "-by the crash, you skinny stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

"Huh?"

"I said, the springs the accident report says were found hanging loose in the rear brakes were snapped loose by the crash. It was the front brakes that failed-I saw it with my own eyes! Did you hear me that time?"

I was baffled. "But I didn't put in front brakes, Mary," I said mildly.

"Ah, you did hear me. That's right, dopey, you didn't! The front brakes were done by the dealer who sold you the car."

I snorted. "Come on, Mary-the insurance investigator could never have missed something like that-"

"He missed it for two reasons. One, you were so d.a.m.ned insistent on hogging any guilt there was to be had. And two, he is related by marriage to the car dealer. That's something you can check on, if you don't believe me."

Enough is enough. Even a certified hero such as myself has limitations. I did the only sensible thing: I fainted.

When I woke, all my friends were gathered around me, and I was snug and warm beneath a scavenged tarp. It was still dark, but I made out Doc Webster, and Long-Drink McGonnigle, and Tommy Janssen and Tom Hauptmann and the three Masers and Fast Eddie and the Cheerful Charlies and Ralph Von Wau Wau and all the rest of my family. For a moment there I swear I thought I saw Tom Flannery's ghost.

I felt more peaceful than I ever had in my life.

"It's time, Jake," Fast Eddie said. "Dey're leavin'."

"Sure thing, Eddie," I said. "Help me up."

Callahan and Sally and Mary and Finn were standing by the base of the tower. Josie Bauer was with them.

"Hi, Josie," I said. "You going too?"

"h.e.l.l yes," she said. "Us time-travelers have to stick together. I can't wait to find out how Mike's people do it without hardware."

Callahan cleared his throat. "Time to go," he rumbled. "If we get started on hugs and good-byes we'll all still be here when the universe winds down. There's no way, even in my time, to thank you all for all the good times. You know I love you, so let's just-"

"Just a second, Mike," I said.

"Sure, Jake. What is it?"

"Am I correct in guessing that Michael Callahan is not your real name?"

"Of course it is."

"Well, in this s.p.a.ce-time, sure-but I mean, it isn't the name you were born with, is it?"

"Naw. My folks named me after a remote ancestor they admired-except that we don't use last names when I come from, so only got half his name. But what's the difference, Jake? You told me once you never look at the corpse during a wake, because you prefer remembering folks the way they were when they were alive. This is like that~ why would you want to remember me as anything but 'Mike Callahan'?"

"You're right. I guess I was just being nosy."

Suddenly he grinned. "Well, I shouldn't indulge you- but I believe I will. Leave you jokers with one last pun, as bad as any you ever laid in my bar. Now I think about it, it's too good to pa.s.s up."

He spat his cigar onto the frozen ground, squared his big broad shoulders and looked slowly round at all of us. His twinkling gaze rested longest on me and the Doc and the Drink.

"When I was born," he said, "I was known as Justin."

I blinked. "You mean," I said, "you were-?" and then I was laughing too hard to speak.

"You-," Doc Webster began, and then he lost it, too.

Long-Drink McGonnigle never even got out the first syllable; his braying laugh reverberated in the chilly night air like the cackling of a lunatic.

And so it was left to Fast Eddie Costigan to say it.

"Jeez. You wuz Justin, de Mick o' Time."

And as the night rocked with laughter and cheers Mike Callahan and his family and Josie vanished. Gone to Harmony, somewhere up the line ...

Even the greatest rocking, hooting, side-splitting hundred-person goodbye-and-G.o.dspeed laugh has to end sometime, and when it did there was a silence that lasted nearly a full minute. We just stood there in the darkness, not ready to go yet, nothing to say, trying together to integrate the events of the evening. So much to encompa.s.s-too much.

Finally Doc Webster cleared his throat. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said in a more subdued voice than usual, "in the instant before the balloon went up, I did the best I could." He held up something that gurgled. "I clutched this here quart of Bushmill's to my belly, around on the side away from the blast, and held on. Fortunately, it seems I landed on my back." People started to work up a cheer, but the Doc silenced them with a raised hand and went on. "I estimate that we could clear a sip apiece, and so I am proposing a toast. I drink to Paul and James MacDonald." He took a small sip and pa.s.sed the bottle to me. "Their bodies died when The Beast did. I saw Mick cremate 'em."

I felt a pang. We all did, I guess. I had mourned the MacDonalds in the moment of their dying and had not thought of them since. I had come to know them impossibly well in an impossibly short time, and know I knew all there would ever be to know of them. They had been good men, had never once yielded to the temptation to exploit their freak gift for personal gain, had devoted their lives to healing hurt minds, and had fought valiantly on behalf of a race that would probably have torn them to pieces if it had known their secret. Now they were dead, and it had taken us the better part of half an hour to remember them.

"To Paul and Jim," I said, drank and gave the bottle to Eddie.

It went around the gathering, and every man and woman present toasted and drank, and by the time it reached the last man, Long-Drink McGonnigle, we pretty much all had tears frozen to our faces.

"To the MacDonalds," he said. Then he looked up past the drifting cloud of fallout to the stars and he said, solemnly and most respectfully, "Lord, they deserve a break today."

Those of us who were religious all chorused, "Amen," and those of us who weren't wished, for that moment, that we were.

A few moments of silence. Then a few more. Most of us were poorly dressed for the cold, but no one complained. No one even shivered.

We were all, I knew, thinking back to-Jesus, less than an hour ago!-to long ago and far away in another universe, when we had all, for a timeless -but all too short interval, been one. It didn't seem fair, somehow. We'd been on the trembling verge, at the threshold of something for which all the humans who ever lived have yearned in vain all their lives-it would have taken Armageddon to distract us, and sure enough that was what we had gotten.

So we had staved off Armageddon. Now the shining moment was past. The MacDonalds who had married us were dead. The Callahans who had raised us and given us away were gone. The nest, the brightly lit cave that had contained us, entertained us, and sustained us, was a radioactive hole in the ground.

We were still married. The thing we had forged while in telepathic rapport could not be undone-we knew each other too well, we had to be married. But like many newlyweds, we woke feeling oddly like strangers. Like many married people, we had gotten so close to one another that we had learned just how far apart we would always be.

I could no longer hear clearly in my head the music we had made ...

"There'll never be another night like that," Tommy Janssen said wistfully.

Deep inside me somewhere, something that had been under strain for many years suddenly snapped clean through.

"The h.e.l.l you say!"

"Jake," the Doc began, "all the boy means is-"

"I know what he means, Sam. I know what you mean. Do you know what I mean?"

I whirled and addressed the group, in a voice that may have been unnecessarily loud.

"All right. We're all locked back in our personal skulls again. We haven't got a pair of trained telepaths to make it easy for us this time. None of us has whatever genetic mutation made Jim and Paul's telepathic ability so powerful, made it so easy for them to access it-so easy that it nearly killed them before they got it under control, you may recall.

"But we know that we have telepathic potential too.

"We were one, d.a.m.n it! Even after the MacDonalds died, right up until the instant the bomb went up, we were one. That wasn't the roach doing that, or the inside of my head would feel slimy. Jim and Paul led us to that place, but we were able to stay there without them, for a time at least. Maybe Callahan helped us, maybe Sally and Mary helped us, but we were doing some of it ourselves. The d.a.m.ned roach wasn't a telepath when it got here, but it sure-G.o.d learned the trick in less than twenty seconds. I know twenty seconds to it was like twenty years to us-but I've got twenty years I'm not using. What about you people?"

"How do you learn to be a telepath, Jake?' Marty Matthias asked.

"h.e.l.l, Marty, Callahan's been training us for years! Now we've got to start figuring it out for ourselves, that's all. To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other's joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it's safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other's best, you work very hard at hosing all the bulls.h.i.t out of your head so that it's clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it's quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing."

"How do we do that, Jake?" Isham Latimer asked.

"Everybody here makes enough money to get boozed regular, and some of us are flush. I say we pa.s.s the hat. Tomorrow night at my place-no, the night after, the banks won't be open tomorrow. Then we take what's in the hat, and we hunt us up a building, a big one back off the road somewhere where you have to look hard to find it, with a good fireplace and an upright piano, and we find out who you bribe to get a liquor license around here, and-"

I'm happy to report that at this point I was drowned out by cheers. A happy pandemonium took place under the stars, people shouting 'suggestions about buildings they knew, about how to appraise a building, about how the place should be furnished and how to get it done most cheaply. Finally Tom Hauptmann shouted everybody down.

"Hold it, hold it! Brothers and sisters, we're going to need a place big enough to hold at least a hundred-I have the feeling we're going to have a full house pretty regularly from now on. Now, before we get to the logistical problems of all that, there's something I have to get straight. My feet hurt. Forty or fifty rummies a night, two or three nights a week, I could handle. But I am not going to take over fulltime barkeeping. Who is?"

There was no hesitation at all. To my absolute astonishment, at least thirty voices chorused, in perfect synch, "Jake, of course."

I turned bright red and stammered. "Why-why me? Why not-"

And paused. Who? The Doc had a practice to maintain. Long-Drink was a bit too slaphappy. Tommy was too young yet. Noah had responsibilities. Ralph couldn't reach the flicking bottles. Eddie was needed at the piano, and Bill Gerrity could never get around fast enough in heels ...

And while I was riffling the cards and coming up empty, Long-Drink answered the question I'd forgotten I'd asked.

"Because even in the times you were down, you were always the merriest of us, Jake."

And by G.o.d, there was a chorus of agreement.

I took a very deep breath, held it until my chest ached, then let it out all at once. "All right," I said. "I ain't a guitar player no more, I've got to do something with my hands. I'm in."

Cheers. "We'll call it 'Jake's Place'!" Tony Telasco yelled.

"h.e.l.l no," I yelled back. "We'll call it 'Mary's Place.'" More cheers-then suddenly silence, as we all heard sirens approaching from both ends of Route 25A in the distance.

"What do we tell them?" Doc Webster asked.

"We'll discuss that together on the way to the highway," I said. "If this crowd can't come up with a suitable Tall Tale, no one can."

The Doc chuckled. "I believe you're right." We all began picking our way across the rough terrain between us and the road.

"Hey, everybody?" Fast Eddie called out softly.

"Yes, Eddie7" I said.

"I know dere's a couple hours ta go yet-but Happy New Year."

Halifax, Easter 1985

AUTHOR'S FINAL NOTE.

Thanks to the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Apple Canada, and the sagacity of my friend Bob Atkinson, this book was written on an Apple 512K Macintosh computer named Anne (after Jubal Harsbaw's secretary), using MacWrite 2.2 and 4.2 software by Randy Wigginton, Ed Ruder, and Don Breuner of Encore Systems.

I'd like to thank editors Ben Bova, Don Pfeil and Stanley Schmidt, who bought the Callahan stories for magazines; editors Jim Frenkel, Ridley Enslow, Jim Baen and Susan Allison, who bought them in book form; agents Kirby McCauley, Eleanor Wood, and Ralph Vicinanza, who sold them in book form; Alfred Bester, who supplied the t.i.tles for all three books; and all of you who bought the books.