Callahan's Place 02 - Time Travelers Strictly Cash (v5.0) Read online

  TIME TRAVELERS

  STRICTLY CASH

  Spider Robinson

  www.spiderrobinson.com

  www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/robinson.htm

  CALLAHAN'S LAW:

  Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased

  It was inconceivable that I could have sat next to her for five minutes without noticing her—anywhere in the world, let alone at Callahan's Place.

  I suppose it could have been cancer or some such, but somehow I knew her pain was not physical. I was just as sure that it might be fatal. I was so shocked I violated the prime rule of Callahan's Place without even thinking about it. "Good god, lady," I blurted, "What's the matter?"

  "Is it to me you are referring?"

  She was not especially pretty, not particularly well dressed, her hair cut wrong for her face and in need of brushing. She was a normal person, in other words, save that her face was uninhabited, and somehow I could not take my eyes off her. It was not the pain—I wanted to take my eyes from that—it was something else.

  It was necessary to get her attention. "Just wanted to tell you your hair's on fire."

  She nodded. "Think nothing of it."

  Copyright © 1979, 2001 by Spider Robinson

  Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.

  Cover image: Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Books by Spider Robinson

  Callahan’s Place books:

  Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Callahan’s Secret

  Off The Wall at Callahan’s

  Lady Sally’s House books:

  Callahan’s Lady

  Lady Slings the Booze

  Mary’s Place books:

  The Callahan Touch

  Callahan’s Legacy

  Callahan’s Key

  Callahan’s Con

  Stardance books:

  Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Deathkiller books:

  Time Pressure, Mindkiller (published together as Deathkiller)

  Lifehouse

  Very books:

  Very Bad Deaths

  Very Hard Choices

  Other books:

  Variable Star (Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson)

  God Is An Iron and Other Stories (collection)

  The Free Lunch

  By Any Other Name (collection)

  User Friendly (collection)

  Night of Power

  Melancholy Elephants (collection)

  The Best of All Possible Worlds (anthology)

  Antinomy (collection)

  Telempath

  This one's for Jim Baen, of course.

  -FOREWORDS-

  TO NEW READERS:

  If you have never heard of Callahan's Place before, a brief word of introduction should be offered—since four stories in this book take place there.

  Don't worry! You're not late, nothing has started without you, there is no lengthy What-Has-Gone-Before to digest before you can begin. The Callahan stories have appeared in several different magazines, and so I've done my best to make each individual story self-contained. All you need to know going in is that Callahan's bar has a fireplace, and a chalk line on the floor about ten meters away, and that patrons who are willing to give up the change from their drink are welcome to toe that line, propose a toast, and eighty-six their empty glass in that fireplace. (Callahan gets a bulk discount on glasses.) As a result of this custom, a great many strange stories end up getting told in Callahan's Place, and you may, if you wish, skip now directly to the first one, "Fivesight."

  TO FRIENDS OF CALLAHAN'S PLACE:

  All right, I give up.

  I tried; God knows I tried; you'd think a professional liar could have pulled it off. But you people are just too clever for me. My cover is blown; time to face the music and confess.

  In the first collection of Callahan's bar stories, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, I maintained flatly that there is no such tavern. "Callahan's Place," I said at that time, "exists only between a) my ears, b) assorted Analog and Vertex covers, and of course c) the covers of this book. If there is in fact a Callahan's Place out there in the so-called real world, and you know where it is, I sincerely hope you'll tell me."

  In a fit of craftiness, I even went so far as to insert a few subtle contradictions in the stories themselves. For example, on page 130 I stated that the Place is always crowded on holidays; on page 162 I said it is usually empty on holidays. By this brilliant ploy I hoped I could discredit myself, and appear to be an absent-minded fictioneer. Such details get noticed! I have a hundred letters from readers who spotted that discrepancy, each convinced that they are smarter than me.

  Since it seemed to work so well, I continued the custom. To each of the Callahan yarns Jake has told me since that first book was closed up I have added a tiny inconsistency with the rest of the series (and an autographed cigar butt to the first reader who correctly names them all). By this means I believed I could maintain the hoax forever.

  But there are five letters on my desk that say that the jig is up.

  The first four are from people who found Callahan 's Place. All four had needed to believe so badly that they ignored my disclaimer: they simply kept searching for the Place until they found it. I should have known it would happen. The Place is like that. But those letters caused me to reconsider the ethics of concealing the truth. How many people needed Callahan's, but gave up because I told them the quest was hopeless?

  Look: there is no restaurant so good that it can survive Being Discovered. If you know a real nice place to hang out, the best thing you can do—for yourself and for the place—is to keep your mouth shut about it, at least publicly. Close friends can sometimes be tipped off—but even here care is required, as every friend has other close friends. It sounds selfish, but it's just pragmatic. If five hundred people try to share an apple, nobody benefits. Especially not the apple. So my inclination has been to play Callahan's Place close to the vest.

  But there's that fifth letter I mentioned.

  It is from Mike Callahan. Handwritten, of course; his pinkies are a typewriter-key-and-a-half in width. The penmanship is superb; some long-ago nun's stern discipline has triumphed over broken fingers and popped knuckles and a natural disposition to be easygoing in all things. The ink is green. The paper is wrinkled and beer-stained, and smells faintly of cigar smoke—very cheap cigar smoke.

  Mike writes, in part:

  I appreciate your trying to keep the tourists and voyeurs out of our hair—if this Place gets too crowded, I can't let people smash their glasses in the fireplace. By all means keep our location under your hat, and keep your hat in a safe-deposit box. But I think you've gone just a bit too far in that direction. If folks think your stories are fiction, they're liable to get the idea that this Place is only imaginary, that a Place like this couldn't 'really' exist. They'll miss the point that any bar can be Callahan's Place, as soon as responsible people start hanging out there together. You'd be surprised how many sad sons of bitches believe people only care about each other in books.

  I don't think you've given too many clues to our location. 'Somewhere off Route 25A in Suffolk County, N.Y.' covers a lot of territory—anybody who can track us from that is either hurting bad enough to belong here, or resourceful enough to buy a round for the house.
<
br />   So let's go public.

  P.S.: When are you coming down for a visit? The Doc has a new stinker for you, and Jake and Eddie want to jam.

  Which last brings me to a second confession:

  This is NOT "just" a collection of Callahan's Place stories, and so it is not, strictly speaking, a sequel to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.

  It was supposed to be; that's how the contract reads. Yet Callahan stories occupy a little less than half the total wordage, just over 60% of the fiction content. Why? Well, now that I've revealed the truth—that Callahan's Place really exists—I can explain. It's absurdly simple, really.

  I don't live in Suffolk County any more.

  I had so much success transcribing Jake's yarns about Callahan's Place (somehow that way-out stuff never seems to happen while I'm there) that I was encouraged to try writing real science fiction on my own. It worked out rather well, and soon I decided I wanted to do it for a living. But the year I went freelance my annual income went from around ten thousand to around one thousand, and the next year it took a sharp drop—it speedily became apparent that I would have to live somewhere much less expensive than Suffolk County, Long Island. I chose the woods of Nova Scotia's great North Mountain, and eventually made that province my home. I haven't been back to Long Island but three or four quick visits since the first book of Callahan's stories was closed up. Each time I wormed another yarn out of Jake; each time I sold the results to a magazine (and my financial agreement with Jake is none of your business, thanks)—but the total wordage as of last week was only 28,000, somewhat less than half a book.

  That's where matters stood when Jim Baen, then editor of Ace Books and my old chum, called up to remind me that it has been a long time since I contracted to supply a second Callahan's book.

  (Hell; it's been a long time since the deadline.)

  I had failed, you see, to anticipate just how popular Callahan's Place would become. Crosstime Saloon was published almost four years ago; here I sit at my desk wearing a Callahan's Place t-shirt (not my doing—an Ann Arbor entrepreneur saw a profit in them). On the desk is a Callahan's Christmas card (again, private enterprise), three different lyric sheets for songs written about the Place, and cassettes containing two more. Also on the desk is a copy of the new hardcover edition of Saloon, which exists because the paperback was named a Best Book For Young Adults in 1977 by the American Library Association. Funny stories almost never get nominated for Hugos, but "Dog Day Evening," herein reprinted, is one of about five to make it in the last ten years. In 1978 The Sydney (Australia) Science Fiction Foundation awarded me the Pat Terry Memorial Award for Humorous Writing, for the Callahan stories. (It is one of the most practical awards I know: a silver-plated beer mug.) Television and movie rights to the book have been optioned, radio rights are being negotiated, I understand a tunnel in Boston has been named after Callahan…

  In short, Baen had reason to believe he could sell another Callahan book. Furthermore, in law, he owned one, half paid for. "Where," he inquired politely, "is it?"

  I explained the situation, and assured him that a trip to Long Island was simply not possible any time in the forseeable future.

  He assured me that a trip to Sing Sing was inevitable if I didn't deliver.

  So we compromised.

  Herein be four stories from Callahan's Place. Herein also be four non-Callahan stories, all written within the last year (NOT, in other words, out-takes from my other story collection, Antinomy, but newer, even better stuff.). Finally, this book contains three non-fiction pieces, two at the request of Jim Baen and one on my own initiative. The two Baen insisted on were the very first book review column I ever wrote (for reasons to be discussed later) and an essay I wrote for his superb bookazine Destinies concerning Robert A. Heinlein. The one I threw in is a speech I made at the 1978 Minneapolis Science Fiction Convention concerning the nature and value of fandom.

  Put it all together, wrap it up with commentary, and it approaches 80,000 words, a pretty good-sized book, of which I find that I am inordinately proud.

  Now: there will, some day, be a "second Callahan book," composed exclusively of Jake's yarns. Those contained in this book will form less than half of it. If you want to wait for it, by all means do so.

  But one thing that would hasten the day of its arrival would be for this book to make a bundle of money.

  —Spider Robinson

  Halifax, 1980

  TIME TRAVELERS

  STRICTLY CASH

  Spider Robinson

  FIVESIGHT

  I know what the exact date was, of course, but I can't see that it would matter to you. Say it was just another Saturday night at Callahan's Place.

  Which is to say that the joint was merry as hell, as usual. Over in the corner Fast Eddie sat in joyous combat with Eubie Blake's old rag "Tricky Fingers," and a crowd had gathered around the piano to cheer him on. It is a demonically difficult rag, which Eubie wrote for the specific purpose of humiliating his competitors, and Eddie takes a crack at it maybe once or twice a year. He was playing it with his whole body, grinning like a murderer and spraying sweat in all directions. The onlookers fed him energy in the form of whoops and rebel yells, and one of the unlikely miracles about Callahan's Place is that no one claps along with Eddie's music who cannot keep time. All across the rest of the tavern people whirled and danced, laughing because they could not make their feet move one fourth as fast as Eddie's hands. Behind the bar Callahan danced with himself, and bottles danced with each other on the shelves behind him. I sat stock-still in front of the bar, clutched my third drink in fifteen minutes, and concentrated on not bursting into tears.

  Doc Webster caught me at it. You would not think that a man navigating that much mass around a crowded room could spare attention for anything else; furthermore, he was dancing with Josie Bauer, who is enough to hold anyone's attention. She is very pretty and limber enough to kick a man standing behind her in the eye. But the Doc has a built-in compass for pain; when his eyes fell on mine, they stayed there.

  His other professional gift is for tact and delicacy. He did not glance at the calendar, he did not pause in his dance, he did not so much as frown. But I knew that he knew.

  Then the dance whirled him away. I spun my chair around to the bar and gulped whiskey. Eddie brought "Tricky Fingers" to a triumphant conclusion, hammering that final chord home with both hands, and his howl of pure glee was audible even over the roar of applause that rose from the whole crew at once. Many glasses hit the fireplace together, and happy conversation began everywhere. I finished my drink. For the hundredth time I was grateful that Callahan keeps no mirror behind his bar: behind me, I knew, Doc Webster would be whispering in various ears, unobtrusively passing the word, and I didn't want to see it.

  "Hit me again, Mike," I called out.

  "Half a sec, Jake," Callahan boomed cheerily. He finished drawing a pitcher of beer, stuck a straw into it, and passed it across to Long-Drink McGonnigle, who ferried it to Eddie. The big barkeep ambled my way, running damp hands through his thinning red hair. "Beer?"

  I produced a very authentic-looking grin. "Irish again."

  Callahan looked ever so slightly pained and rubbed his big broken nose. "I'll have to have your keys, Jake."

  The expression one too many has only a limited meaning at Callahan's Place. Mike operates on the assumption that his customers are grown-ups—he'll keep on serving you for as long as you can stand up and order 'em intelligibly. But no one drunk drives home from Callahan's. When he decides you've reached your limit, you have to surrender your car keys to keep on drinking, then let Pyotr—who drinks only ginger ale—drive you home when you fold.

  "British constitution," I tried experimentally. "The lethal policeman dismisseth us. Peter Pepper packed his pipe with paraquat…"

  Mike kept his big hand out for the keys. "I've heard you sing 'Shiny Stockings' blind drunk without a single syllabobble, Jake."

  "Damn it," I began, and stopped. "Make i
t a beer, Mike."

  He nodded and brought me a Löwenbräu dark. "How about a toast?"

  I glanced at him sharply. There was a toast that I urgently wanted to make, to have behind me for another year. "Maybe later."

  "Sure. Hey, Drink! How about a toast around here?"

  Long-Drink looked up from across the room. "I'm your man." The conversation began to abate as he threaded his way through the crowd to the chalk line on the floor and stood facing the deep brick fireplace. He is considerably taller than somewhat, and he towered over everyone. He waited until he had our attention.

  "Ladies and gentlemen and regular customers," he said then, "you may find this difficult to believe, but in my youth I was known far and wide as a jackass." This brought a spirited response, which he endured stoically. "My only passion in life, back in my college days, was grossing people out. I considered it a holy mission, and I had a whole crew of other jackasses to tell me I was just terrific. I would type long letters onto a roll of toilet paper, smear mustard on the last square, then roll it back up and mail it in a box. I kept a dead mouse in my pocket at all times. I streaked Town Hall in 1952. I loved to see eyes glaze. And I regret to confess that I concentrated mostly on ladies, because they were the easiest to gross out. Foul Phil, they called me in them days. I'll tell you what cured me." He wet his whistle, confident of our attention.

  "The only trouble with a reputation for crudeness is that sooner or later you run short of unsuspecting victims. So you look for new faces. One day I'm at a party off campus, and I notice a young lady I've never seen before, a pretty little thing in an off-the-shoulder blouse. Oboy, I sez to myself, fresh blood! What'll I do? I've got the mouse in one pocket, the rectal-thermometer swizzle stick in the other, but she looks so virginal and innocent I decide the hell with subtlety, I'll try a direct approach. So I walk over to where she's sittin' talkin' to Petey LeFave on a little couch. I come up behind her, like, upzip me trousers, out with me instrument, and lay it across her shoulder."