Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  “What’s that?”

  She looked very unhappy. “I wish to Christ I knew. And the clock is ticking.”

  I was surprised. “Can that matter to you?”

  “It certainly can. Joe, there are few ‘Laws of Nature’ that my contemporaries and I have not learned to rewrite to suit our convenience—but one of them is this: as far as we know, no one can inhabit the same space/time twice. My time-travel gear will take me only to loci in which I do not already exist. If I miss my window of opportunity this time, someone else must hit it for me…and there are no other candidates known to me.”

  “Doesn’t mean no one will come along after you and get it right,” I pointed out.

  “No—but as I mentioned earlier, any such person would be someone I trust less than I do myself. So I’m still working on it.”

  “Mike too, I assume.”

  “No, actually,” she said. “Mike’s specific project is different.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  She hesitated, debating with herself. “Well, in for a penny, in for another penny. It could conceivably become relevant. Do I have your word that you will not divulge this information to anyone else—including members of my own task force?”

  I thought about it. Curiosity won. “Okay.”

  “Mike is here to forestall alien invasion.”

  I could feel the blood leaving my head. I clutched at a straw. “By whom, the Chinese?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m afraid. I mean the science-fiction sort of aliens. Creatures from another star. Powerful and paranoid.”

  “I was pretty sure that was what you meant,” I said sadly. Only a few days ago, I had thought sassing a mayor was exciting…

  “They should have arrived here by this decade and exterminated the human race without effort…but history doesn’t record any such contact for several centuries yet. Mike intends to find out why, and make sure things turn out that way.”

  “What kind of operation does he have out there on the Island?” I pictured something like the stupendous Wardenclyffe power tower that Nikola Tesla—the discoverer of alternating current—built out at Shoreham back in 1901, ready to hurl fire at the heavens. They’d torn Wardenclyffe down before it was finished. But maybe Mike Callahan had hopped in his time machine and gotten the demolition-and-salvage contract…

  “A tavern,” she said.

  “A…”

  “A bar, out in Suffolk County. Callahan’s Place, it’s called.”

  Jesus Christ. I’d heard about that joint all the way in Manhattan. A guy told me once if you couldn’t have a good time at Callahan’s Place it was your own damned fault. But I couldn’t recall him mentioning anything about power towers or banks of laser cannon.

  I swallowed with some difficulty. Was I sure this was not all a Demerol dream?

  Yes. My side hurt. And my head was starting to. “How’s he doing?”

  “Rather well,” she said. “He managed to place himself in the kharmic path of the first scout to reach us—a slave of the creatures we’re worried about—and has manumitted him. Meanwhile he’s been training combat troops. Things look promising on that front2…but only provided we humans don’t blow ourselves up before the aliens arrive.”

  “Look,” I said, “if you don’t mind, let’s just put this whole space monster subplot on the back burner for now, okay?”

  “You asked,” she pointed out.

  “My mistake. Let’s return to the comparatively trivial problem of World War Three. Here’s what I want to know: given your level of technology…why can’t you just whomp up a magic thingamajig that keeps us dumb primitives from lobbing ICBMs at each other? A planet-wide Star Wars, that doesn’t answer to the Pentagon?”

  “If by ‘Star Wars’ you ignorantly refer to the Strategic Defense Initiative,” she said without quite sniffing, “I could design, build, and install such a shield without difficulty. But it would solve nothing.”

  “I see what you mean—” I began.

  “Perhaps not,” Lady Sally said. “If you’re thinking that such a shield would be noticed, that’s not true. I could easily put one in place without anyone else on Earth being the wiser. And I could turn it off on a moment’s notice if Mike turns out to need assistance from NORAD. But don’t you see: if, as we believe they must, the forces of history will shortly cause a general or a politician to push his figurative red button, he is bound to notice when nothing happens. And the consequences of that could scarcely help but leave their mark on history—perhaps in the form of an all-out conventional war almost as destructive as a nuclear exchange. What we must do is so manipulate the forces of history that the politician I’ve postulated never triggers his missiles. And that is an infinitely more complex task than simply disarming the world. I’m having difficulty at the moment defusing Russian paranoia fast enough. Through off-the-record diplomacy, I’ve managed to keep the United States propping up the Soviet Union for a long time now, but very shortly the USSR is simply going to collapse of terminal rot, and then there’ll be a—what’s the matter, Joe, are you in pain?”

  I was slow in answering. When I did, my voice sounded funny. The whole Universe had just clicked into place, a degree to the left of where it had been, and I was reeling from the dislocation. “No. That was the expression of a man having the revelation of his life.” I took a deep breath. “God damn. That was like a five-second acid trip.”

  Lady Sally sat up straight. Straighter, I mean. She looked alarmed. “Jesus Christ on a bicycle,” she breathed. “You have just had the revelation of your life? Yes, I see you have. Wait just one moment, please.” She got up from her chair, opened one of Kate’s cabinets, took out a flask labeled Disinfectant, and removed the stopper. At once I could smell the whiskey the flask contained. She took a long pull, replaced the stopper, and put the flask away. “All right,” she said, sitting down again. “In the words of a dear departed friend of mine, Dick Buckley, ‘Straighten me—’cause I’m ready.’”

  SO she’d known Lord Buckley, eh? It figured. “I think I may have just figured out what’s perturbing history. And why history doesn’t record it. And why a secret Star W…a secret SDI shield would be worse than useless. And I’ve even got a couple of ideas about what you might be able to do about all of this. It all depends on how much technological magic you have up your sleeve.”

  She looked as awed as I felt. “Joe, if you can answer those questions, you can have anything that is within my power to grant. As to the limits of my technology…well, perhaps it will help to say that I could with some strain turn off the nearest dozen stars, or create a few new ones. Not that I would—but I have the capability, and more.”

  “Then we may be okay,” I said. I shook my head slightly. “Christ, for a while there I thought we had a problem.”

  “I will not throttle information out of a convalescent,” Lady Sally said. “I will not. Arethusa would be annoyed with me.”

  “Like many flashes of insight, it began in a misunderstanding,” I said. “You said an SDI shield would solve nothing, and I started to say I understood your reasoning, and you interrupted and explained your reasoning. But it wasn’t the reason I’d been thinking about. I was thinking about something else. Something that’s been on my mind since I was about fifteen years old, something I’ve never told anyone about before. The gods have such a twisted sense of humor I didn’t want to give them any ideas.”

  “But you do want to give me your idea, because you don’t want me to forget myself and throttle you,” she suggested softly.

  “Sorry. Okay, simple question and answer. Question: what’s the basic flaw in even a perfect SDI shield? Answer: it only works on missiles.”

  She blinked.

  “And other satellites, I guess.”

  She thought. As I saw her starting to get it, I went on:

  “Question: so what’s wrong with that? Answer: missiles and satellites are not the only way to deliver nuclear weapons.”

  �
�You mean nuclear cannon? But they—”

  “Not cannon either. Why does everybody always think hi tech? What’s wrong with air freight? Or a cigarette boat?”

  It was as if her puppeteer had cut all the strings. She slumped all over, went as limp as she could get without falling out of her chair. Her eyes were wide and staring at nothing. She murmured something in a language unknown to me. I had no trouble at all translating it as, “Holy shit!”

  “MISSILES are a lousy delivery system, when you think about it,” I went on. “There are only three good things about building ICBMs to place your warheads. It can be done quickly, it makes jobs for a lot of voters, and it’s gaudy as hell. But if you’re not in a hurry, and you’re not in a race, and you don’t want to spend money like water, and you don’t care whether the results are phallic and photogenic or not, there’s a much better way.”

  “Nuclear mines,” she whispered. “Triggered by radio.”

  I nodded. “I’ve been waiting for that other shoe to drop for years now,” I agreed. “It just seemed to make too much sense not to happen, sooner or later. Every year millions of pounds of illegal drugs enter this country with no trouble at all: what’s so hard about a few hundred pounds of plutonium? Even in lead boxes?”

  “So you think the USSR has mined the United States?” Her eyes got even wider. “Or the other way ’round?” Her shoulders twitched. “Oh my God—or both of them! Oh, Joe, things are even worse than I’d imagined—”

  “Whoa,” I said. “You’re thinking like a cheap thriller writer. I don’t think either country has placed a single mine. I just told you why not, a couple of seconds ago.”

  “Why not?”

  “‘It makes too much sense,’ I said. Can you recall a time since Hiroshima when either the US or the Soviet Union has acted sensibly?”

  She frowned. “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “Think it through. The United States can’t undertake such a scheme for one simple reason: the Constitution. Specifically the First Amendment. There’s just too much openness in this country, and much too much freedom of the press, for something as elephantine as the US government to keep a scheme like that under wraps. Hell, if the government couldn’t get away with U-2 overflights, or even a simple thing like invading Cambodia, how long do you think they’d last sowing nukes around the world? Some clown would smear it across the front page of the Times in 72-point type, long before you had enough mines planted in the USSR to do more than enrage them.”

  “The Soviet Union does not share that weakness,” Lady Sally said. “This is exactly the sort of scheme that would appeal to them.”

  “And how do we know that?” I riposted. “Because they’ve screwed up so many of them! Secrecy they have plenty of. What they are crucially short of are competence and reliability. If a Soviet Premier were to order a nuclear mine built, he’d be delivered something the size of a Sherman tank, that worked one time out of four…and sure as God made little green horseflies, somebody on the very first penetration team would defect. That’s the problem they’ll never crack: if a man is intelligent enough to be worth sending abroad, they don’t dare let him out of the country.”

  “They build very good missiles,” she argued. “That suggests they can produce good technology if they want to badly enough.”

  “Says who? How often do they ever fire one at a target anyone else can monitor? I told you: esoteric weapons are one of my hobbies.”

  “Well, very good spaceships—that’s the same thing.”

  “They build shitty spaceships. Ever seen the inside of one? They look like something out of Flash Gordon, or the cab of a steam locomotive. Big knife-switches and levers and dials that’d look natural in a Nikola Tesla exhibit. No computers worth mentioning. After the Apollo-Soyuz linkup, our guys came back raving at the courage of anyone who would ride a piece of junk like that into space.”

  “The Soviet space program is much more substantial than America’s! It has been since long before Apollo.”

  “With shitty spaceships. It’s just that they don’t stop building them, the way this stupid country has. Did you ever hear the story about the first Soviet space station crew?”

  “Died on reentry, didn’t they? Something about an air leak?”

  “Leonov, the first man ever to walk in space, has been in the identical model reentry vehicle many times. He’s been quoted as saying that the crew of that mission had to have heard the air whistling out, and that any of the three of them could easily have reached out and plugged the leak with a finger. They died of a combination of bad technology and lousy education. You wait and see: if the Soviets ever open the books and let us compare duds and destructs, you’ll find out they had a failure rate much higher than ours. You know those rockets they’ve got now, that everybody admires so much, the ‘big dumb boosters’? They could have beat us to the Moon with those. But of the first eight to leave the launch pad, the most successful survived for seventeen seconds. So they used a different booster for the Moon project, and it didn’t make the nut.”

  Arethusa woke just then. Don’t ask me how I knew. She didn’t move, open any of her four eyes, or alter the rhythm of her breathing. But one minute she was asleep, and the next minute she was lying there with her eyes closed, listening to us, and I knew it when it happened. I didn’t say anything, because she liked to take her time waking up—and don’t ask me how I knew that either. She knew I knew she was awake; she’d join the conversation when she was ready.

  For decades I had wondered what it would feel like to fall in love. Some indeterminate time back, without discussing it with myself, I had given up waiting. Now I knew. Even if they didn’t open an eye or make a sound, everything was different when they were awake.

  Better…

  Lady Sally was looking confused. “If I’m not mistaken, we’ve returned to Go, and I don’t see my two hundred dollars anywhere. You seem to have proven that there are no nuclear mines after all. Oh my stars and garters, wait a half! China—”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. It’s just barely possible. China’s got the secrecy, and it’s got good technology when it decides to spend the money, and like Russia it’s got a history of mass murder of innocent civilians. Even more recently. Ask any one of a million Tibetans—and don’t hold your breath waiting for an answer. But China’s crucially short of one essential resource for a scam like this.”

  Lady Sally was nodding. “Caucasian agents they can trust absolutely. I see the problem. Chinese tend to stand out in both countries—especially in the Soviet Union, which is the first place they’d want to mine. China’s own xenophobia keeps it from getting friendly enough with barbarians to have any great number of barbarian friends. They can’t mine us because not enough of us love them. God’s teeth. Joe, is your head starting to hurt, or is it just me?”

  “Your Ladyship,” I said, “barring a few intervals of unconsciousness, orgasm, or drugged stupor, my head has hurt since an hour after I first walked into your House. I’m not complaining…but you asked.”

  “I’m not much surprised, considering the outlandish things that seem to go on inside there.” She held up a hand. “All right—take a break for a moment and let me see if I can work this out for myself. Without consulting my computer, or Mike. There’s a certain amount of pride involved. This is after all my life-work.” She stared down at her pearl necklace, and toyed with it as she thought aloud. I marveled as I watched her. She was old enough to be my mom, and she could make fingering a couple of pearls look lewd without even trying. “Let me see, now: significant nuclear capability dating back at least a decade…access to fissionable material…not saddled with either too much openness or too much tyranny…lots of Caucasian natives…major espionage skills…and an ability to hide fairly large expenditures somewhere in the national budget without attracting notice—that lets out Israel, they’re already pushing their limits in that direction…” Her fingers stopped moving. She was silent, still, frowning fiercely
to herself, for nearly half a minute. I passed the time by watching Arethusa’s chest rise and fall. At last Lady Sally looked up at me, still frowning. “Damn it!” she said. “I can’t make it work. Joe, there is no nation that answers that description.”

  There aren’t many things a man can do as noble as passing up a chance to show how smart he is. “No,” I agreed, and shut up.

  “Israelis would have major difficulty getting into, and especially out of, the USSR. India comes closest after Israel…and I just don’t buy them for it. Their fanatics tend to be the wrong kind of fanatics.”

  “Me either. And I hope it doesn’t turn out to be diehard Nazis trying for a Fourth Reich. I can just hear it now: ‘Throw another Ken on Klaus Barbie!’”

  A triple pun—this place was getting to me. She ignored me magnificently. “It can’t be time travelers from the future,” she mused. “Time travel was discovered and abandoned three separate times before my people perfected it…but those primitive methods all leave unmistakable tracks in the matrix, I’d have seen them. And none of the three was ever used by anyone stupid enough to meddle with history on a planetary scale—as conclusively proven by the fact that reality still exists. I am utterly certain that no one from my era could be capable of such a plan—just as I knew Raffalli could not be a contemporary of mine. I could be wrong, but I’m certain. So it has to be someone from this space/time…and I just can’t make myself believe in an extranational conspiracy of private individuals out to conquer the world. For one thing it’s difficult for me to imagine competent nuclear physicists being sufficiently tempted by power or money—and they aren’t prone to religious fanaticism as a rule. It would require patriotism…or something like it…”

  I waited, and let her worry at it. Arethusa looked edible. Watching her was better for my aching side than narcotics. And I saw her whichever direction I looked in. Did you ever have a woman who was so beautiful, it made you sad you could only see one side of her at a time? Arethusa solved that problem better than any mirror. I could tell somehow that she was nearly ready to admit she was awake.