CALLAHAN'S SECRET.

by Spider Robinson.

FOREWORD.

There's something we have to get absolutely clear right at the outset, and if you think you detect a dangerous gleam in my eye, you are perfectly right.

Ordinarily I am rather a hard man to insult. This is partly because I am blessed with a self-confidence so pervasive that it is frequently mistaken for smugness by less fortunate souls, and partly because I am abnormally lazy even for a writer-if you're insulted, you're supposed to do something about it, so I usually decline to take offence even when offered some.

I'm especially hard to insult professionally, as I am willing to shamelessly admit, having practiced many of the most disgusting and heinous vices in literature-I freely confess here and now that in the twelve years since I gave up honest work I have committed editorship (twice!), agentry (also twice), and book reviewing (multiple counts), and at least one grand jury is still considering allegations of literary criticism which I have given up denying.

To my own mild surprise, however, I discover that I do have some small shreds of literary pride left, and I wish to preserve them ... so there's something we've got to get straight. No kidding around, now, G.o.d d.a.m.n it; I'm serious. Pay attention: Yes, this is a book of stories set in the tavern known as Callahan's Place.

Yes, it is the last such book.

Yes, there were others.

Okay, there were two such others.

All right, dammit, yes, Berkley is packaging all of them as a unit, with coordinated covers and so forth.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, and we'd better be straight on this or there's gonna be blood in the scuppers: I have not written a trilogy.

Repeat: not. It just so happens, by chemically pure chance, that this series of stories has reached its conclusion coincidental with the completion of the volume immediately following the one that succeeded the first one. That does not make it a trilogy.

In the first place it is not b.o.o.by-trapped like most trilogies are. Neither of those first two volumes ended in the middle of a story, leaving you in midair in plot terms (although the first one, admittedly, did leave Mike Callahan literally in midair). If you have never read a Callahan's Place book before, you should find this as good a place to start as any since these yarns were designed for magazine publication, each is self-contained, and you should feel no need for any wordy What-Has-Gone-Before synopsis. If you have the first book but missed the second, it won't cripple your appreciation of this one. If you feel you want to own all three volumes, who am I to tell you what to do with your money?-but I didn't plan this whole thing to sucker you into laying out extra dollars, like Chico Marx with his "tootsie-frootsie ice-a cream" routine.

In the second place, it was not my idea to end this series or cycle or saga or whatever you want to call it (and I don't care what you call it as long as you don't call it a trilogy). That was, done for me, by events beyond my control, and believe me, n.o.body is sadder about it than I am-no, not even my publishers, my editor, my agent, the people who currently own the TV and film options, or my more substantial creditors, all of whom have been heard to express dismay.

Of course it's a financial disaster for me, but I don't care about that. (I also don't much mind having red-hot bobbypins rammed up underneath my fingernails.) It's a professional disaster as well, since now I'll have to think up all my own plots rather than simply dramatizing the yarns that Jake tells me-but after all, I have published seven books in which Callahan's Place is never mentioned, so the increased creative demand shouldn't prove too arduous. (I'll simply give up eating on days ending in "y".). There's even a vague feeling of something like relief in leaving the nest of Callahan's and going out into the world to make my own way; twelve years is a long time to spend in any bar.

And still a part of me wishes fervently that it didn't have to end this way.

I'm going to miss Mike a lot.

a.s.sociation with Callahan's Place has certainly made life interesting this past dozen years-and usually pleasantly so. It got me out of the sewer, for one thing (see the Foreword to CALLAHAN'S CROSSTIME SALOON). It has made me a great many friends I might not otherwise have met, and one or two enemies I'd have acquired sooner or later anyway. And it has been responsible for some memorable moments. (Catch me at a convention sometime, and ask me about the reader who invited me aboard his nuclear submarine-or the one who called at 5 AM. threatening to commit suicide if I didn't tell him how to get to Callahan's, right now.) But fate has taken a hand, as they say, and the Callahan's Place saga/series/cycle (just don't use that "T" word) seems to have reached its conclusion with this volume.

Docs that mean, necessarily, that it has reached its completion? Will there never be another story set in that splendid fiction?

Well, in a way, from a certain perspective, I hope so. I know I've always been rather glad that Giovanni Guareschi stopped writing about Don Camillo when he did, and the recent explosion of tourism has ruined the planet Arrakis for me forever. You can work a good thing to death, and beyond. It may be time for Callahan's Place to tumble over the Reichenbach Falls ...

On the other hand, I'm certain that there are Callahan's Place stories Jake has never told me, things that happened in the past that he hasn't gotten around to reporting-he hints at a couple in the pages that follow. Right now, however, for reasons that will probably become clear before you've finished this book, he doesn't much want to talk about Callahan's-and besides, for reasons that should also shortly become clear, he's too busy. But I'm at least intuitively certain that there are still a few stories he could tell if he felt like it.

Just don't look to see them any time soon-if ever.

Last thoughts, before I go: In the final chapter of this book, Jake reveals more than one "Callahan's Secret." One of them-you'll know it when you get to it is, rather literally, I'm afraid, potential dynamite. Consequently I must ask you to keep the secret, and above all to try and ensure that your copy of this book does not fall into the hands of anyone above the rank of corporal in any military establishment on Earth. Perhaps I should have suppressed the story altogether. But I've been sleeping a lot easier since Jake told me, and so I'm going to take a chance and trust you. We should be safe-if anyone in military planning circles read science fiction, we probably wouldn't all have gotten into this fix in the first place. But keep it to yourself, okay?

And remember: no matter what anybody says, this is NOT a trilogy ...

So long, Michael. It's been a privilege to know you. Thanks for the laughs. And, come to think of it, for the tears, too. "Shared pain is diminished; shared joy is increased"-you taught me that a long time ago.

I'll miss you, I will.

Halifax, April 8, 1985

CHAPTER 1 The Blacksmith's Tale.

ONCE I BOUGHT a watch whose battery was rated for one year. The next time I gave it a thought was when it failed- four years later. Something familiar cannot be odd, until it stops.

Similarly there is no set opening time at Callahan's Place.

Once I came by at three in the afternoon, to talk to Callahan about something, and found that the place had been open for over an hour; another time I arrived at 7 P.M. and Mike was just opening the door. But somehow, for the better part of a decade, it never struck me that the Place was always open when I arrived-until the night it wasn't.

Nearly nine o'clock of a warm wet summer evening, and the door was shut tight. Only dim light came through the windows, nothing like the warm cheery glow the Place has when it's open, and the only thing in the parking lot besides my own car was a big beat-up van I didn't recognize.

The rain complicated things. I don't mind rain a lot, and I like it when it's warm-as it was that night-but it had been coming down hard for the last fifteen minutes, and so the note posted on the door was only partly legible, I could translate "empor rily losed f r enovat tins," and "doo pens at," but the time at which the doo' would open was three blurs, all rounded at the top. Perhaps "900," perhaps "9:20" or "9:30." Or perhaps it read "8:30," and the job, whatever it was, was running overtime. Worst, there was a big long blur after the time. It might have said "9:00 sharp," but it could just as easily have been "3:00 Friday."

When that watch battery I mentioned earlier finally failed, I buried it in my backyard, respectful of its magnificent achievement. But that was after reflection. My first reaction was acute annoyance. I thought my watch had failed me.

So it was now. I could think of several ways to go kill some time-but how much time? Meanwhile I was getting soaked. So I did what I don't think I would have done under other circ.u.mstances.

I opened the door and walked in.

I knew it wouldn't be locked, because there is no lock on that door. In the dozen years I've been coming to Callahan's, there've been four attempted afterhours burglaries that I know of. None of them used the front door; none bothered to try. (Callahan dealt with them situationally. One is now a regular customer, and never mind which one; another, a hard-guy type, got two broken elbows.) But I should have knocked first, and waited for Mike to open the door or holler "Come in," and gone away if he didn't.

Which he wouldn't have-there was no sign of him when I had closed the door behind me. But I failed to notice; once I'd wiped my gla.s.ses dry, I was too busy being thunderstruck.

Do you remember that time I told you about once, when I walked into Callahan's to find a mirror behind the bar, where no mirror had ever been before? And it disoriented me so much that I mistook my reflection for an approaching demon, with "horns" that were really the brim of my Stetson hat? This was like that. Something as familiar as Callahan's Place is not supposed to change. The watch battery is supposed to last forever. I may have actually twitched and squeaked, I don't know.

The light was as bad as it had been that other time, with the mirror, and so once again my brain, trying to resolve unexpected data into a pattern, made a first approximation that vaguely matched something in its files and served me up a trial hallucination. For a predator such as man, a wrong guess can be preferable to a slow one.

What I thought I saw, off to my left, a few yards away, was a giant ebony snake, maybe three feet in diameter, coiled around a tree, scales shimmering in the semidarkness. Tree and snake appeared to extend up through the ceiling without rupturing it.

I blinked and it wasn't a snake, it was an immense DNA double helix clinging to a bather pole, pulsing dully with life. So I blinked again.

(First the predator brain searches the file of Dangerous Things. If that doesn't work, it tries Nondangerous Living Things. Only then does it calm down and search all the other files. Two seconds, tops.) It was a spiral staircase up to the roof.

"Cushla machree," I said softly.

What had made it seem to be a double helix was the heavy railing which paralleled the stairs. The "scales" were the-s.p.a.ces between the railing supports. The apparent shimmering and/or pulsing was because one of the very few lights in the room, a small fluorescent behind the bar, was flickering rapidly.

I said (prophetically enough) that I would be dipped in s.h.i.t, but I relaxed. I was beginning to understand.

Mike Callahan lets his customers take their drinks up on the roof if the weather's agreeable. There's a dumbwaiter to ferry cash down and drinks up. But until now the only access for humans and most other customers had been a vertical ladder and hatch. Some of the regulars had trouble getting up the ladder due to age or infirmity. Certain others could get up just fine-but found that the added ballast of four or five drinks seriously disrupted their balance on the way down. Something about the center of gravity shifting, Doc Webster said. Just a few days before, Shorty Steinitz had broken an ankle-and here was Callahan's response.

"Hey, Mike," I called out, and got no answer. The curtain behind the bar was closed. I had gall enough to enter Callahan's bar uninvited, but not his living s.p.a.ce. I called his name once more and wandered over to inspect the new staircase.

It was a cast iron joy to behold. I'm totally ignorant about such things, but I could tell that it was old, and beautiful, and very well designed. You could not fall down that staircase,. You couldn't even bark your shin. It was so well installed that it looked like it'd been there for years - except for the odd bits of welding spatter in the sawdust on the floor-and indeed it fit right in with the atmosphere of Callahan's Place. Ornamented rather than starkly functional, subtly and ingeniously worked in ways I was not competent to appreciate even if the light had been adequate, it would not have looked out of place in a cellar jazz joint or a monastery, might have done time in both. It invited one to climb it.

So I did.

The footing was secure, the risers precisely the right height, the treads precisely the right depth. It had to be a modular a.s.sembly. A single giant staircase, even if it had happened to fit through the front door, would have required trucks, cranes, dollies, rollers, block and tackle and much time-whereas an a.s.sembly job this size could conceivably have been installed in a single day by two or three big skilled men. But it was so cunningly a.s.sembled that it was hard to be sure. This had to have cost Callahan a bundle.

I wound my way around and up until I stood in a sort of hut with a door opening onto the roof. I thought about rainwater spilling down into the bar below, but when I experimentally opened the door a crack, there was no flood. I pushed it open and the everpresent sound of rain went from ba.s.s rumble to treble hiss. It seemed to be easing up.

The rain did not spill indoors because the floor of the hut. was slightly higher than the roof. But you did not have to remember to step down; there was a short ramp. I know little more about carpentry than I do about iron work-but I know good design when I fail to trip over it. It figured that-Mike Callahan would hire the best man available to do surgery on his Place.

The door closed quickly; some unseen damping mechanism kept it from slamming; in the rain, it made no sound at all. I walked around the hut once, admiring it ... then walked around it again, admiring the countryside.

I'm sure you know the strange, special magic of high places. Have you ever been on one at night? In the warm rain?

To be sure, Callahan's roof is a wonderful place 'from which to view the world in nearly any' weather. The land falls sharply away to-the north and east, amid incredibly for Long Island (even for Suffolk County) it is largely undeveloped, raw trees as far as you can make out. To the south and west, beyond the parking lot, runs Route 25A, spa.r.s.ely lined with garishly lit sucker traps. (Fairly heavy traffic, but Callahan doesn't get a lot of transient trade. The parking lot is hid by tall hedges, the driveway is inconspicuous; the only sign is the one over the front door.) Beyond the highway you can -just make out one of the more expensive subdivisions, well zoned, landscaped and cared for; on Christmas Eve, with a couple of Irish coffees warming your belly and all the lights blazing in the distance, it locks ... well, Christmasy.

Tonight the roof was a warm flat rock on which many large somethings were peeing, from a great height. The highway looked glorious-people who wear gla.s.ses are lucky, we have stars on rainy nights-but my clothes were getting- wet. Wetter. I considered ducking back inside ... but as 1 said, I like warm rain. I particularly like to be naked in warm rain, and don't get a lot of opportunities. Mike wouldn't mind, and anyone else I would see drive up.

So I stripped and looked about for the driest place to stash my clothes.

The dumbwaiter seemed like the best bet; I could wedge its door open with something to keep it up here at roof level. I padded barefoot toward its tall housing-and discovered that it was already ~so wedged, with a chisel. Inside was a pile of clothing. Big man's clothes, faded jeans, denim-shut, boots, sized to fit only one man I knew. That solved the mystery of Callahan's whereabouts. He must be a secret naked-in-the-rain nut, too. He was going to jump a foot in the air when I came around the dumbwaiter. This would be good for laughs-and it might cost him a couple of drinks to keep the story to myself ...

It was just possible that my fellow nudist was not Callahan-in which case I was properly dressed to meet him. Onward.

I should have lifted up the jeans. The underwear might have warned me. I piled my clothes on top of the others. walked around the dumbwaiter, and became one myself. Waiting, dumb, one foot in the air. She was very beautiful, and in the instant I saw her I wanted urgently to do this right, to not make any mistakes. It was not going to be easy.

I am sorry to say that you would probably not have thought she was beautiful-unless you, too, are a pervert. I mean, going naked in the rain is one, thing, but I'm talking major league perversion here. (From my point of view, I am the only sane man in a perverted culture. Perverts always feel that way.) I will state the perversion: I like women who look like women. That is, my ideal of feminine beauty adheres closely to that which has been the generally accepted consensus from the dawn of time until quite recently and quite locally.

What you would probably have said if you'd seen her, naked or clothed, is, "Handsome woman; she could be beautiful if she lost the weight." You would probably have gallantly tried to avoid looking at, let alone commenting on her body-you almost certainly would not have drunk the sight of it the way I did.

She did not, in other words, look the way North America thinks women should look. She did not look like a thirteen-year-old boy with plums in his shirt pockets. Those were her clothes in the dumbwaiter. Amid I do not even mean that she was a Jayne Mansfield/Loni Anderson type, with one of those big bodies that seem packed tight, compressed snugly by invisible plastic, firm as a weightlifter's shoulder. She had big glorious saggy t.i.ts, and what are sometimes affectionately called "love handles," (that is, the people who use the term sometimes mean it affectionately) and a round belly and thighs-that would jiggle when she walked.

She looked, in short, much like half the mature women in this sorry culture, and she would have opened the nose of most of the heteros.e.xual males who ever lived. Praxiteles, t.i.tian, Rubens, Rodin, any of the great ones would have reached for their tools, if not their work utensils, at the sight of her.

You know: a whale. A hippo. I'm telling ya, Morty, this broad was a hunnert' eighty, hun'ninety pounds if she was a friggin' ounce, no s.h.i.t. One of America's millions of rejects, forever barred from The Good Life, too sunk in sloth or genetic degeneracy to torture herself into the semblance of an undernourished adolescent male. A pig. No character, no willpower, no self-discipline, no self-respect, certainly no s.e.x appeal. A lifelong figure of fun, doomed to be jolly, member of the only minority group that "comedians" like Joan Rivers can still get away with viciously a.s.saulting.

I could tell I was beginning to get an erection.

So I used the second I bad left to study her face. A socially difficult moment was imminent, and I wanted it to go well, so I needed to know as much about her as possible, immediately.

Big lush women and small slight men in our society go through life wrapped around a softball-sized chunk of pain; it breaks some of them and makes others magnificent. She was magnificent. Clearly visible on her face, written plain for any fool to see, were the character, will power, self-discipline, self-respect and warm s.e.xiness which common wisdom said she could not possibly have without automatically becoming skinny. She had lots of laugher's wrinkles and a 'couple of thinker's wrinkles and no other kinds. She wore her hair in a big bush of curls that made no futile attempt to downplay her size; rain-sparkle made it a halo. The split-second glance I got of her eyes, glistening in the light from the all-night deli across the road, focused on the far distance, made them seem serene, self-confident.

I went on computer time. And a very good computer it must have been, too, because I was able to run several very complex subprograms in the second or so allotted to me, One routine sorted through the several hundred thousand Opening Lines in storage for something suitable to Unexpected Encounter With Nude Stranger, but since it expected to come up empty, a more ambitious program attempted to create something new, something witty and engaging and rea.s.suring, out of the materials of the situation. In hopes that one or the other would succeed, a simple and well-used program began selecting the tone and pitch of voice and the manner of delivery-soft enough not to startle, but not so soft as to seem wimpy; humorous but not clownish; urbane but not smug; admiring but not lecherous-prepared, in short, to begin lying through its/my teeth. Meanwhile, an almost unconscious algorithm had me keep my hands firmly at my sides and stand up a little straighter. And all of this together took up, at most, 20 percent of the available bytes-the rest was fully occupied in an urgent priority task.

Memorizing her ...

Plenty of time! Computational capacity to spare! I knew that she was beginning to become aware of me several hundred nanoseconds before she did, integrated all the subprograms, picked a neutral Opening Line and pinned my hopes on delivery, ran a hundred full dress rehearsals to derive best-and worst-case results, made the go decision, and bad time to admire her lower left- eyelash and myself before I heard my very own voice say, with all the warmth and tone and clarity I could reasonably have hoped for, "It certainly is a very nice t.i.ts."

My central processing unit melted down into slag.

It took her ten years to turn and look at me, and no thought of any kind took place inside my skull; horror fused every circuit. She looked me square in the eye, absolutely expressionlessly, for endless decades, while I marinated in failure and shame. Then her gaze left my eyes, panned slowly downward. It rested on my mouth for many years, moved on down again, did not pause until it reached my feet, then came back up again and paused where it was bound to eventually-but I was centuries dead by then, only a cinder of consciousness remained in my brain to be snuffed by the realization that my erection was now up to at least half mast, and so by the time her gaze got back up to my eyes, I don't see how she could possibly have seen glowing there from the slightest light of intelligence.

The animal who sleeps Under my computer woke up and tried its best. It tried for a smile, doubtless produced a horrible grimace. It essayed a merry laugh, managed to generate a hideous gargling sound. It gestured vaguely, attempting a Gallic shrug and failing to bring it off. To all of this she displayed no visible reaction whatever. The old animal gave up.

The first plan I formed was to jump off the roof, but the problem with that was that it could only be done once and might not hurt enough long enough, so I stepped closer to the dumbwaiter housing and began battering my head against it to soften my skull up for the grand finale, and I liked the way it felt and began to get a rhythm going, and then and only then did she burst out into a magnificent bellow of laughter, a great trombone hoot of shocked merriment, and big as she was she was up out of tailor's seat and holding me away from the dumbwaiter before I could deliver it another blow, and then there was a great complicated rocking struggling hugging stumbling confusion of laughter and tears and rain that somehow left us sitting on our a.s.ses on that wet roof with our feet touching, both of us shuddering with mirth. We nearly got our breath back a few minutes later, but when she tried to speak all she got out was "smooth" before dissolving into hysterics again, and a little after that I managed to get out, "My Freudian slip is-" before I lost it, and when the earthquake had well and truly pa.s.sed I was lying flat on my back with rain running up my nostrils and the soles of my feet pressed firmly against human warmth. My hands hurt a little from beating them on the roof.

I sat up.

So did she. 'I must have looked forlorn. My erection was gone. "It's okay," she said, pressing her toes gently against mine. "I've heard worse."

"You don't understand," I moaned.

"Admittedly-but I think I got the message."

"But-"

"It was, unquestionably, the most memorable meeting of my life, and nothing will ever top it." Oh, if only she'd been right.

I was beginning slowly to realize that this situation was salvageable-that the disaster was of such epic proportion as to be a kind of triumph. I had certainly made an impression on her. Was this not Callahan's Place-albeit empty~- beneath my b.u.t.t? Callahan's Place, focus of strange and wonderful events, magical tavern in which nothing was impossible and few things even unlikely? Could there be any better, more fitting place for a miracle to happen than here on Callahan's roof?

But exactly where to go from here was hidden from me. "I'm Jake."

"I'm glad. I thought you might have really hurt yourself there."

"I meant that my name is Jake."

"Glad to hear it. What is your name?"

Better and better. I like them quick. "d.a.m.ned if I know. What's yours? And please don't say, 'Thanks, I'll have a beer."

"I'm Mary, Jake."

With what feeble wits I had left, I attempted a cunning investigation. "You must know the guys who put in that splendid staircase, right?"

She went two degrees cooler. "I put in the staircase."

"Excuse me," I said faintly, and got to my feet. The dumbwaiter housing felt just as good as it had before; there was just enough give to it to cause an energetic rebound, but not so much as to soften the impact.

Unexpectedly my ears hurt, and the rhythm of my head was halted. "Stop that," she said, twisting me by both ears to face her. "d.a.m.n it, I had no business getting chilly at you that way. I must be the first lady blacksmith you've ever run into, how the h.e.l.l could you know? You did good: you didn't look disbelieving, just surprised."