Lady Slings the Booze Page 20

  All at once Lady Sally managed to look happy and dismayed at the same time. “God’s golden gonads! Could it really be? Oh, even for the Universe this is excessive irony!”

  I knew she’d get it. “As Mycroft’s brother once said, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains…’”

  “Do you mean to stand there—lie there—with your bare face hanging out and tell me that all of reality has been placed in mortal jeopardy by—”

  “Pacifists,” I agreed. “Peace terrorists. That’s the way I’d bet, anyway. It can’t be anarchists—they’d never get organized enough.”

  THE better she absorbed the idea, the less she liked it. “You’ve hit it, I think. It makes psychological sense, at least. There are still a lot of physicists alive from the Manhattan Project days—on both sides of the Iron Curtain—and some of them may well repent. But what rotten luck. Cowards make the deadliest opponents—and pacifists never fight fair: they can’t. I was hoping for some sort of warriors.”

  “That’s the worst thing about any kind of terrorist,” I said. “They’re so weak, they have to be monstrous to accomplish anything. And who could be weaker than a pacifist?”

  “Hey,” Arethusa said from my right, just past Sally. “What’s wrong with pacifists? Look at Buddhists: they’re nice people.”

  I gave her my best smile, and got a much better one in trade. Arethusa can smile like a long-distance kiss. I poured her two plastic cups of peach juice from the flask on my bedside table. Lady Sally started to adjust her chair so she could see us both…then left it as it was and spoke past me, to Arethusa’s other body, which opened its eyes politely.

  “They’re different,” Lady Sally conceded. “They’re honest pacifists. You don’t have to worry about them fighting dirty, because they never fight: they don’t have Jihads or Crusades. The strongest weapon they use is reason; the strongest protest they allow themselves is suicide, and they’re always careful not to let the flames spread. Pacifism of that sort is no more objectionable than belief in astrology or membership in the Flat Earth Society. I was speaking of the kind of pacifists we grew like hothouse flowers in this country fifteen or twenty years ago, and still have all too many of. Pacifist terrorists. The kind who want all wars everywhere to cease and everyone to live in peace…and are prepared to keep blowing up wealthier and less enlightened fellow citizens until that day comes. There’s nothing wrong with wanting wars to stop—but the moment a pacifist uses any weapon but calm speech, he’s a hypocrite. If he’s willing to kill, he’s a psychotic. The only good thing about them as opponents is that it isn’t murder to kill one.”

  She hadn’t said it like a joke or hyperbole. “In this country it is,” Arethusa replied seriously, and reached to take the peach juice I gave her, one of her after the other. She smiled at me.

  “I don’t see why,” Lady Sally said. “Pacifists—and anarchists, and libertarians—specifically repudiate the right of the state to employ armed agents—to protect them from murder, for instance. So shooting one ought to be no worse than a misdemeanor. ‘Disturbing the peace,’ say, or ‘frivolous discharge of a firearm.’”

  “‘Unlicensed hunting,’ maybe,” I suggested.

  “They’re not restricted,” she pointed out. “As long as you eat the meat, and clean up after…”

  “I’m particular about what I eat,” I said. “But I will kill this bunch. If you can help me track ’em.”

  “Joseph,” Arethusa said plaintively, “when I decided to love you, I had no idea you were so bloodthirsty. Do you realize we’ve never gone an entire day without you announcing your intention to murder someone?”

  “People who plant nuclear mines in major population centers?” I said. “You bet I’ll kill them if I get a chance.”

  “No allowances for good intentions?”

  “None,” I said firmly. “Even if I stipulate that a world of enforced peace run by something like Weathermen with nukes is a good intention—and I don’t—nobody elected these clowns to do the job. They don’t have the right. Even a tyrant rules by consent of his people, no matter how difficult he makes it for them to withhold it. He rules openly, a fair target for any assassin. But these vermin are worse than a well-poisoner.”

  She bit her lip. Then she shrugged. “You’re right,” she said, “but I want you to promise me that you’ll give up murdering people once we’re married.”

  I forgot all about thermonuclear mines and alien invasion and the collapse of space and time through failure of the logic of history. My side stopped hurting. Everything in the Universe stopped hurting for a moment. You must have noticed it.

  “You’ll marry me, Arethusa?”

  She cocked her head and smiled at me. “What else do you give a man who saves the world?”

  Lady Sally obligingly got up and moved out of the way, stepping back out of the pool of light until all I could see of her was Cheshire grin and sparkling eyes. “Don’t mind me, children,” she murmured.

  I sighed. “Darling? Have you ever heard about the mule who was placed equidistant between two piles of hay—and starved? I’m too sore to get up off this bed more than once—”

  Bedsprings creaked on either side of me, “Brace yourself, my love,” she said in stereo. “You’re about to become a hero sandwich.”

  ONE disadvantage of having a stereo lover: morning breath from two directions is more than doubled, more like squared. A small thing…but I cherished that small imperfection.

  1 Editor’s note: see CALLAHAN’S SECRET (Ace Books, 1986).

  2 Editor’s note: see CALLAHAN’S SECRET.

  12. The Wonderful Wizard

  “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it’s lightning that does the work.”

  —MARK TWAIN to Nikola Tesla

  “THE only part I still don’t understand,” Arethusa said fifteen minutes later, when order had been restored and we’d agreed to postpone our engagement celebration and Lady Sally and I had filled her in on the parts she’d slept through, “is how come the existence of secret atom bombs scattered around the US and Russia is supposed to alter history—so as to prevent nuclear holocaust from happening—when nobody is ever going to find out about them. I mean, if they get discovered, they surely go into history in a big way…and if they just sit there and never go off, they have no effect at all on history…and if they go off, there is no history. I don’t see how any of those three alternatives prevents the US and Russia from lobbing missiles at each other on schedule. Or how we can make it come out that way.”

  I looked toward Lady Sally as if I didn’t know the answer myself. She had just put the phone down after checking in with Mary, this room’s surveillance from the Snoop Room being presently disconnected.

  “The details will have to be worked out,” she told us, “but the broad outlines are clear to me. We are going to locate each and every one of those devices, learn how they are triggered and protected, and disarm them—leaving them just where they are. At the same time we will hunt down every one of the lice who built and planted them, and kill them—preserving one of them long enough to talk into a tape recorder if feasible. Then we need only see that two copies of that tape, two maps of all the mines in both countries, and a short, anonymous letter, go to just the right addresses in Washington and Moscow.”

  I nodded. “We’ll scare the living shit out of the people who control the big red buttons. It’s demoralizing to wake up and find you just walked a tightrope over the abyss in your sleep. And they’ll have to compare notes, to make sure each side got the same information. It’ll be a long time before they’re quite so ready to push their buttons again.”

  “Long enough for the Soviet Union to collapse of its own weight,” Lady Sally agreed, “ending the Cold War. And demonstrating conclusively, thereafter, that the United States never did want to conquer the world, which eventually will…well, there’s no point going off into second- and third-order resultants at this juncture.”

  “For God
’s sake, let’s make sure we’ve really got the right addresses in both countries, though,” I said. “If the President and Premier ever find out about this, they’re liable to get in the way and make things worse than ever.”

  “No responsible person would trust them with information of this caliber,” Lady Sally assured me.

  “The Soviet Union is truly on the verge of collapse?” Arethusa asked.

  Lady Sally nodded firmly. “I know it must be hard to believe now, halfway through the Eighties…but just wait a few years. The cancer is inoperable. If it hadn’t been for the US and Canada, they’d all have starved long ago. That’s precisely why they’re so dangerous at the moment: they’re paranoids, and they depend on their enemy to live, and they know that, and it’s driving them crazy.”

  “Huh!” I said, struck by an idea. “How about this? Suppose it was someone in the CIA—not the Director, of course, but someone known to the Soviets as sane and reliable—who quietly slipped that tape and map to his opposite number in Moscow?”

  Lady Sally smiled. “Lovely. I can think of no better way to win a Russian’s trust than to bring him the head of an enemy he didn’t know he had.”

  “You have CIA contacts?”

  “CIA is wrong for this job, I think—even if the Director did not have a brain tumor. Their mandate is extranational. The DIA would be better: the Defense Intelligence Agency. Much larger, much quieter, less well known—and I have better contacts there. Excellent ones. And the FBI would have an interest; I have friends there, too. You know, you show a talent for this sort of work, Joe.”

  “Thank you, Your Ladyship,” I said soberly, “but I wish I could do as well with the real problem: how to find the goddam bombs and terrorists. If we find either one we can get the other…but where do we start? I don’t mind admitting it’s got me stumped so far. And I seem to hear the sound of a clock ticking.”

  “Loudly,” she agreed. “The moment the very last mine is installed according to their plan, the bastards will break cover and try to blackmail the world into disarmament. It would be irrational—even by the standards of a pacifist terrorist—to hesitate a single day. And if that day comes, history will have been radically, fatally altered…even if no bomb ever actually goes off.”

  “And all we know about them,” I said gloomily, “is that they’re so good neither CIA nor KGB has gotten even a whiff of them.”

  “We have certain advantages in counterespionage over both those agencies,” Lady Sally said.

  “I don’t see it,” I persisted. “Even if I credit you with all the sci-fi gizmos I can think of, this is the kind of problem they don’t work on very well. I mean, what’s the plan? Deep-radar the entire continent—both continents—and personally inspect everything that reads like it might be a lead box? A man could get old doing that. A battalion could. It might take years to stumble across the first bomb…and how much good would that do us? I’m sure you could find the damn things, Lady. But can you do it fast?”

  “Fortunately, I don’t think I’ll need to. I have a friend who should be able to deal with that aspect of the matter. He should be here any minute; I just called Mary a few moments ago, and asked her to send him up from his shop in the basement.”

  “Your maintenance man is going to find the nukes,” I said, trying for a little comic relief.

  “I think so,” she agreed. “Ah, here he is now—come in, Nikky!”

  Into the room stepped a tall thin handsome man in his thirties with a mane of dark hair, a proud nose and a sanitary-looking mustache. I could see these things clearly because the room lights brightened all by themselves as he came in. I recognized him instantly from photos. And all at once I understood why in Sally McGee’s clean, extremely well-lit place I had not been able to find a single light source, nor a single appliance with a power cord. By this point perhaps you can imagine what it means to say that he was the most astonishing thing I had yet seen in Lady Sally’s extraordinary House.

  I turned to look at her, and sure enough, she had removed the pearl necklace she’d been wearing. That tore it. I was looking at the one man in all history who might be able to help us.

  “Holy—” I began, and remembered that he disliked both obscenity and blasphemy. “—cow,” I finished, keeping my voice down to spare his hyperacute hearing.

  “Nikola Tesla,” Lady Sally said, “allow me to present my very dear friend Kenneth Taggart.”

  “Honored to meet you, my dear sir,” Tesla said, and bowed.

  NIKOLA Tesla was born in Smiljan, Croatia in 1856, precisely on the stroke of midnight between the ninth and tenth of July, and came to America during the Panic of 1884. He had invented the bladeless turbine at the start of the American Civil War, when he was five years old—by which time he could speak five languages fluently. Then he’d discovered the love of his life.

  The Fire of the Gods…

  He could do anything that can be done with electricity. Anything.

  In fact, he did just about all the things that can be done with electricity, often decades before others “discovered” them. He conceived alternating current, and damned near ruined himself proving it was superior to Edison’s direct current. He made the first induction motor, and had to sign away the rights. He built the first robot, and the first Remote Piloted Vehicle—the first remote-controlled anything—in the 1890s, and couldn’t interest any government. Guglielmo Marconi stole the idea for radio from him, and got all the credit, even though the US Supreme Court later ruled that Tesla had patented the basic technology in 1897. He invented and patented the “AND gate”—a logic circuit crucial to all computers—in 1903, along with the principles of the transistor; neither could be built at that era’s state of the art. He could make lightning—real sky-filling, tree-shattering lightning—do any damn thing he wanted it to, including climb up on the palm of his hand for the amusement of friends of his, like Mark Twain and Paderewski. At one point he conceived a scheme that would have turned the entire planet Earth into something like a stupendous storage battery, so that anywhere on its surface you could draw all the power you wanted just by sinking a rod into the soil—and was forced to abandon it when he admitted to his backer, J. P. Morgan, that there would be no conceivable way to charge customers for the power.

  I’d gotten interested in him in the first place because you can’t study esoteric weapons for very long without hearing about the Wardenclyffe death-ray he said could score the surface of Mars…which of course he never got to build. Trying to read a little about Tesla is like trying to eat one peanut.

  I had always felt a terrible affinity with him. Like me, he was an intuitive genius…with the worst luck in the history of the world.

  But I had never expected to meet him. He died alone and broke in the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-six, in 1943. I’d seen a photo once of his death mask, commissioned by some guy named Hugo Gernsback the day after his body was discovered.

  SO it was disorienting, even to a man who had spent days in Lady Sally’s House, to find Nikola Tesla standing before me, alive and healthy-looking and in his late twenties…let alone to hear him say he was honored to meet me. Never had a conversational politeness been more absurd. You could make an excellent case for the proposition that he was the greatest man in history.

  Even before returning from the dead.

  I was glad I had read about him. I had sense enough not to offer him my hand.

  You see, Tesla was also probably the most eccentric man that ever lived. Wouldn’t shake hands with anyone—not even J. P. Morgan, from whom he was trying to borrow a million dollars when they met. He was terrified of spherical objects, like oranges or Lady Sally’s pearls. When he sat down to a meal, he had to polish all the silverware and china with eighteen linen napkins first (he had an inexplicable preference for numbers divisible by three). Then he had to calculate the cubic contents of the food on his plate before he could eat a bite. He never ordered anything that was on the menu, and the sp
ecially prepared meal had to be served by the maitre d’ and no one else. He could not bear to touch human hair, and in consequence is believed by all of his biographers to have died a virgin.

  No, I’ll tell you how weird he was: he liked pigeons. Fed the little feathered rats lavishly even when he was broke (often); cared for sick ones with his own hands even when he was a millionaire (equally often). If he walked through a park, they swarmed him like he was St. Francis of Assisi, perching on his shoulders.

  I suppose in retrospect I should have at least briefly doubted the evidence of my own eyes. But it never occurred to me to think he was a hallucination. I’ve got a pretty good imagination—but even on drugs, it isn’t that good.

  So you tell me: what do you say to Nikola Tesla?

  What I said was, “Mr. Tesla, I.”

  HE was neither surprised nor disturbed by someone gawping at him like that. The self-assurance looked out of place on features so young. Then again, I didn’t know for sure if he was really as young as he looked. Maybe Lady Sally had edited out a portion of the real youth of the real, historical Tesla, and I was meeting a man who had not yet experienced world fame. But it seemed just as likely that she had picked him up at the instant of his death, and simply revived and rejuvenated him. For all I knew, she’d cloned this Tesla from a tissue sample of the old one. These didn’t seem like polite questions to ask.

  In any case, he graciously ignored my awe, and responded conversationally. “I see that you are Irish, Mr. Taggart. Would I be correct in guessing that you are some sort of policeman?”

  Just what I needed: a tough question to start. “Well, Mr. Tesla…with all due respect, sir, suppose I didn’t know who you were, and I hazarded the guess that you were an inventor.”

  He blinked, cocked his head like a bird, and then nodded. “I think I see. As I pride myself on being a discoverer, and not a mere inventor like Edison—” That settled that: this Tesla was older than he looked. “—so too you practice a profession which the common man often confuses with that of policeman. A distinction which he considers trivial and which to you is paramount. Might you then be a private inquiries agent, like Mr. Sherlock Holmes?”