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  Nobody blends good science with bad puns as brilliantly as Spider Robinson, as his legion of devoted fans will attest. Now from the creator of the Callahan series comes an improbable tale of impending doom, a road trip, space, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.

  CALLAHAN’S KEY

  The universe is in desperate peril. The United States’ own defense system, orbiting above an unknowing populace, is more vulnerable than its creators could have envisioned. Now, bombarded by a freakish cluster of natural phenomena, the ultimate protection has become a perfect doomsday machine. Its target: not just the U.S., not just Earth, but the entire universe. And only one man can stop the devastation this unholy weapon will wreak.

  Unfortunately, he’s not available.

  So the job falls instead to bar owner Jake Stonebender. And his wife, Zoey, and superintelligent toddler, Erin. Not to mention two dozen busloads of ex-hippies and freaks, Robert Heinlein’s wandering cat, a whorehouse parrot, and misunderstood genius-inventor Nikola Tesla, who is in fact alive and well.

  It’ll take a move to Key West, an experiment in mass telepathy, and hundreds of gallons of Irish coffee to save everything-as-we-know-it from annihilation. But it’s nothing Jake Stonebender hasn’t done before…

  Callahan’s Key is the story of a group of humans—more or less—who band together in a cosmic adventure—more or less—to make the universe safe for…well, probably more of the same.

  BOOKS BY SPIDER ROBINSON

  Telempath

  Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Antinomy

  The Best of All Possible Worlds

  Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Mindkiller

  Melancholy Elephants

  Night of Power

  Callahan’s Secret

  Callahan and Company (omnibus)

  Time Pressure

  Callahan’s Lady

  Copyright Violation

  True Minds

  Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Kill the Editor

  Lady Slings the Booze

  The Callahan Touch

  Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Off the Wall at Callahan’s

  Callahan’s Legacy

  Death killer (omnibus)

  Lifehouse

  The Callahan Chronicals (omnibus)

  The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)

  User Friendly

  The Free Lunch

  Callahan’s Key

  CALLAHAN’S KEY

  A Bantam Spectra Book / July 2000

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2000 by Spider Robinson.

  BOOK DESIGN BY CAROL MALCOLM RUSSO / SIGNET M DESIGN, INC.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Spider.

  Callahan’s Key / Spider Robinson.

  p. cm. — (A Bantam spectra book)

  ISBN 0-553-11163-9

  1. Callahan, Mike (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Bars (Drinking establishments)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.O3156 C34 2000

  813'.54—dc21

  99-051311

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  * * *

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  * * *

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  BVG 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This one is for

  Guy Immega

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THIS BOOK WOULD NOT

  have been possible without certain key speculations by cosmologists Alan Guth, Sidney Coleman, and Sir Martin Rees, which I encountered in John Brockman’s splendid book THE THIRD CULTURE; my thanks to them for their unwitting assistance.

  Possible or not, this book would have been much less plausible without the witting assistance of the following friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and kindly strangers: Guy Immega (roboticist), Douglas Beder (physicist), David Sloan (physicist), Jaymie Matthews (astrophysicist), Jef Raskin (interface expert; chief designer for the Macintosh), Douglas Scott (cosmologist), Michael Spencer (blacksmith; philosopher), Bill McCutcheon (astrophysicist), David Measday (astrophysicist), Joseph Green (writer; NASA alumnus), the uncredited creators of the NASA website, Dean Ing (writer; auto designer/builder; military aviation expert) Laurence M. Janifer (writer; polymath), Ben Bova (writer; space travel expert), Douglas Girling (systems analyst; aerospace expert), Ed Thelen (Internet Nike expert), and Ted Powell (programmer; cyberhistorian; skeptic).

  And those are just the people who helped with the science component of this story! (Any errors arising from my misunderstanding of what they told me are, of course, all their fault, for not explaining it better.)

  Other invaluable assistance, advice, inspiration, or permission to quote was provided by Spider John Koerner (musician), Don Ross (musician), the Beatles (the Beatles), David Gerrold (writer; cat servant), Stephen Gaskin (hippie; writer; Head Judge for the first and second annual International Cannabis Cup competitions in Amsterdam), Virginia Heinlein (retired naval officer; biochemist; widow of Robert A. Heinlein), Lord Buckley (saint), Will Soto (tightrope-walking juggler), the Key West Cultural Preservation Society and just about every Key West local I’ve ever met. Special thanks must go to the superb Key West writer Laurence Shames, whose contribution to this story (like those of Rees, Guth, and Coleman, above) was crucial, although quite unwitting. And my ongoing gratitude goes to the alt.callahans Usenet newsgroup, for keeping me grounded.

  All their efforts—and any efforts of my own—would have come to naught without the massive ongoing love and support of my cherished wife Jeanne…or the acumen of my agent Eleanor Wood…or the sagacity and kindness of my editor Patrick LoBrutto, who found several structural defects and showed me how to fix them. And my friend Ted Powell deserves a second mention here, for his work as volunteer creator and keeper of my website (which can be found at http://psg.com/~ted/spider/).

  Another second mention, and credit where it’s due: the new name that Doc Webster suggests for gamma-ray bursters, herein, is my own invention…but the exquisite topper Mei-Ling comes up with was coined not by me but by Dr. Jaymie Matthews (who also came up with the title for my triweekly Technology column in The Globe and Mail, “Past Imperfect, Future Tense”).

  Finally, my thanks to the late great madman Henry Morrison Flagler, without whom the whole enterprise would not have been necessary—and to you, without whom it would have been pointless.

  —Howe Sound, British Columbia

  9 June, 1999

  Reality is what doesn’t go away

  when you stop believing in it…

  —PHILIP K. DICK

  If it ain’t one thing, it’s two things.

  —GRANDFATHER STONEBENDER

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cold Reboot

  CHAPTER TWO

  Going South

  CHAPTER THREE

  Railroading Time

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bus Bar

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Drunkard’s Drive
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  CHAPTER SIX

  Capital Offense

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Cat Who Walks Through Windshields

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Static Test Site Road

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bus Turd Flush

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Goldbrick Road

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Hip Square

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Place

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Because It’s Time

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On the Case

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Devil’s Luck

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I Have a Plan…

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Big Bird

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Symphysis

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Great Balls of Fire

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cold Reboot

  “The future will be better tomorrow.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  IT’S ALWAYS COLDEST

  before the warm.

  Oh, it could have been colder that day, I guess—I hear there are places up north where fifty below is considered a balmy day. But it could be a lot hotter than where I am now, if it comes to that. This is just about as warm as I care to be—and the day the whole thing started, I was as cold as I ever hope to get again in my life.

  It was only twenty below, that day…but for Long Island, that’s unusually frosty, even in the dead of winter. Which that winter surely was: dead as folk music. Dead as Mary’s Place. Dead as Callahan’s Place. Dead as my life, or my hopes for the future. You’ve read Steinbeck’s THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT? Well, 1989 was the winter of our despair…

  It’s the little things you remember. You know how snow gets into your boots and makes you miserable? I had been forced to stagger through a drift of snow so deep it had gotten into my pants. A set of long underwear makes a wonderful wick. The damp patches from above and below had met at my knees almost at once.

  Not that snow of yesterday’s blizzard had fallen to a depth of waist height. Long Island isn’t Nova Scotia or anything. My long soggies were simply the result of my tax dollars at work.

  Just as I’d been in sight of my home—driving with extreme caution, and cursing the damned Town of Smithtown that should have plowed this stretch of Route 25A yesterday, for Chrissake—I had seen the town snowplow, coming toward me from the east. I’d experienced a microsecond of elation before the situation became clear to me, and then I had moaned and banged my forehead against the steering wheel.

  Sure enough, the plow sailed by my home at a stately twenty miles an hour, trailing a long line of cars and trucks nearly berserk with rage…and utterly buried my driveway with snow, to the aforementioned waist height.

  I knew perfectly well that there was nowhere else I could possibly park my car along that stretch of two-lane highway anywhere within even unreasonable walking distance of home in either direction—except the one driveway that I knew perfectly well the sonofabitching plow was about to stop and plow out, which it did. The one right next door to mine. The driveway of the Antichrist, where I would not have parked at gunpoint.

  Of course the traffic stacked up behind that big bastard surged forward the instant it fully entered Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi’s drive and got out of their way. Of course not one of them gave an instant’s thought to the fact that the road under their accelerating tires would now no longer be cleared of snow and ice. And there I was, big as life, right in their way, with my forehead on the steering wheel…

  So by the time I got that snow in my pants, trying to clamber over the new dirty-white ridge that separated my home from civilization, I no longer had to worry about parking the car. Or fixing the damn heater, or putting gas or oil in it, or any such chores. Just paying for the final tow—and, of course, the rest of the payments to the bank. Needless to say, the only car in the whole pileup that had been totaled was mine; all the people who’d caused the accident drove away from the scene. And of course they’d all agreed it had been my fault.

  On the bright side, I was reasonably unhurt. Indeed, the only wound I had to boast of was an extremely red face. Not from anger, or even from the cold. Those goddam air bags are not soft. They never mention that in the ads.

  So I was not looking forward to going through my front door. In the first place, I hated having to tell Zoey that we were pedestrians again. A nursing mother does not often receive such news gladly—and especially not when the temperature outside is twenty below and nothing useful lies within walking range. And in the second place—

  —in the second place I knew exactly what I was going to see when I walked—okay, hobbled—through that door. And I just didn’t know if I could take it one more time.

  Is there anything sadder in all the world than a great big comfy superbly appointed tavern…so unmistakably empty and abandoned that the cobwebs everywhere have dust on them?

  I’d tried to keep up a brave front, and sustained it maybe six months. Then I’d gradually slacked off on the mopping and dusting and vacuuming and polishing. By the end of a year, I wasn’t even fixing leaks. What was the point? No way in hell was Mary’s Place ever going to reopen. We—I, Jake Stonebender, its proprietor, and all of my highly irregular clientele—had made the single, fatal mistake of pissing off Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi. Our Ukrainian next-door neighbor—and the beloved only aunt of Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi.

  Town Inspector Grtozkzhnyi…

  Have you ever seen the total stack of paperwork required to legally operate a tavern in the Town of Smithtown in the County of Suffolk in the great State of New York in these United States of America? I don’t mean the liquor license: assume you have that. Let’s just say if I’d had that stack of paperwork—all of it six-point type, and consisting mostly of blanks for me to fill in—in the trunk of the car with me that day, I could have just climbed up on top of it and stepped over that goddam heap of snow left in my driveway by one of Inspector Grtozkzhnyi’s minions. In order to open Mary’s Place at all, back in ’88—in less than five years, for less than half a million dollars—I had been forced to run it outlaw, counting on its isolation and the fact that I made no effort at all to attract business to protect it from official attention.

  But as Bob Dylan forgot to say, “To live outside the law, you must be lucky.”

  So it killed me, every time I walked through those swinging doors and saw my dream, shrouded in spiderwebs. I always saw it, for a brief instant, as it had briefly been: full of warmth and life and laughter and music and love and magic. It re-broke my heart every time. It had been much more than just my livelihood, far more than simply the only thing my wife and I owned besides a Honda presently being dragged away for burial, two noble but battered musical instruments, and a small fortune in baby gear.

  It had been the home and the nucleus of an experiment so grand and important and urgent that I know of no parallel in human history, an experiment that, had it succeeded, might conceivably have brought an end to much human misery. And on the very verge of success, at the moment of its greatest triumph, the critical mass it had brought together and fanned to ignition temperature had been smashed, scattered like glowing gravel across the countryside by the most destructive force man has unleashed in the last two millennia: bureaucracy.

  So it was with maximum reluctance and a deep sense of failure that I entered my home and former workplace that day. I lurched through the outer door, stopped in the foyer, called, “Hi, Homey, I’m Hun,” to Zoey, and stomped my boots together to knock off a few shards of snow before pushing open the swinging doors to go inside. Unfortunately, someone had entered just before me and done the same thing, leaving a slick I had failed to notice.

  Which is why I lost my footing and slipped and fell flat on my ass.

  Now I had snow under my shirt, that had migrated up from my pants. (You see the little things you remember?) I said a few wo
rds that could have gotten me ejected from the cheapest brothel in Manila, and sat up. Thank heaven for the thick furry hat that had partially protected my skull when it whanged against the floor. I took it off and felt my head with my hand, was relieved to confirm that I probably wouldn’t raise a lump. My ass was a different matter. I got wearily to my feet—

  —well, I started to. I got just far enough to raise my entire, already inflamed face up in front of those swinging doors before they burst open.

  The Big Bang. The slow, slow expansion. The Heat Death. Empty cold eternity. Someone slapping my fucking face—

  “Jesus Christ, Duck, knock it off! What the hell are you doing back?”

  “Nap later,” the Lucky Duck said. “You’re working.”

  Ernie Shea is known to one and all as the Lucky Duck because around him the laws of probability turn to Silly Putty—which combined with his short stature explains and may even excuse an irascible sourpuss personality reminiscent of Daffy Duck. He is a mutant, the bastard offspring of a pookah and a Fir Darrig, two creatures commonly thought to be mythical (everywhere except Ireland), and strange things always happen around him. It’s sort of a paranormal power.

  I was too groggy to think through the implications of his presence.

  “The hell I am,” I snarled. “I haven’t worked in over a year. The goddam bar is as dead as Nutsy’s Kells…and the Folk Music Revival developed ice crystals in the brain from the defrosting process, they had to put it back to sleep again. There is no work, you dumb pookah!”

  “You’re working,” he repeated. “Nikky’s here. Come on.”

  “Huh?”

  I levitated, then looked down and stuck my feet firmly to the floor. This was too weird not to be true. At my gesture, the Lucky Duck went back inside, and I followed him. And there, standing at my bar, impeccably dressed as always and wiping drool from the chin of my baby daughter Erin, was indeed and in fact Nikola Tesla.

  Perhaps the name rings a bell? Forgotten Father of the Twentieth Century? Father of alternating current…the condenser…the transformer…the Tesla Coil…the very induction motor itself…the remote control…radio…the crucial “AND-gate” logic circuit…and all the essential components of the transistor? (Tesla held patents on all of these…and literally a hundred more.) Friend of Mark Twain and Paderewski, sworn enemy of the evil Edison and treacherous Marconi? Perhaps the single most outrageously shafted and dishonored man in the history of the human race, screwed out of more credit and money than anyone since the guy who invented sex? That Nikola Tesla?