Lady Slings the Booze Page 25

  “It’s better than the laser pistol that got Raffalli?”

  “Much better.”

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  “Stun, blind, or drill holes through anything, from a millimeter to two meters in diameter, in well under a nanosecond. Range is line of sight. Ammo effectively infinite. Battlefield failure rate, zero, over the course of a busy century. A mirror won’t deflect it like a laser beam.”

  I liked it. It was like those silly guns Buster Crabbe used to use when he was Flash Gordon, only upside down it wasn’t silly any more. It was the ultimate quick-draw weapon: you could fire from the hip without so much as torquing your wrist upward to bring a barrel to bear. It would be more awkward than a pistol to bring up to eye level for a dead bead—but that firehose cone-of-effectiveness made precise aim less important. Best of all, it didn’t look much like a weapon, even in firing position. At least, not to anyone who didn’t know you were a time traveler. “Issue one to everyone that’s ever fired one before. The rest of us will drill on it as time allows, and stick to weapons we know until then—with the proviso that no one packs less than thirty-eight caliber. You’ve got something equally good in body armor?”

  “Yes. It’ll stop small arms fire. A direct hit to the head from a heavy enough gun might knock you out. Well, not you, but someone with a normal skull.”

  “That we’ll all use right away.”

  “How soon do you want us to assemble?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “Give me an hour,” she said, and was gone.

  “What about me?” Arethusa said dangerously.

  I blinked, and nearly said, “What about you?” But it was not possible to say those words to Arethusa, so I said, “You are the most beautiful, intelligent, and captivating woman in the world and I love you with all my heart. What else about you?”

  “I’m in, aren’t I?”

  “Good God, yes! You doubted it?”

  She was mollified. “Well…you’re an unusual private eye, my love. I was a little afraid you might get all macho about not exposing your wife to danger.”

  “I am. I wouldn’t want you to accidentally suffer any harm while beating the shit out of me for trying to keep you out of the party. You could forget and hit me on the head, and hurt your knuckles.”

  “I wouldn’t have hit you on the head,” she assured me.

  “Something else to worry about,” I agreed. “But the issue doesn’t arise. You’re in. On my shift. And I’m afraid your clients are going to have to be understanding again. I’m only bringing one of you—but I want the other to be lying down alone in a quiet dark room, undistracted. I need your full attention.”

  “The clients will survive if we do,” she said. “About ten minutes ago, by the way.”

  “Eh?”

  “‘Now!’” she explained. “Well, ‘then,’ I mean. When it happened, the conversation here was at a point where I might have started a panic if I’d said, ‘Now!’”

  “Oh. Sorry I missed it.”

  “How much of the next hour do you need?” she asked. “I could give you a sort of instant replay…”

  Well, we were going to be on short rations for as much as a week. A practical woman, my wife.

  “Uh, Nikola?” I said. “Would you excuse us?”

  He stood, beaming, and placed a hand on top of each of our heads. “Go in peace, my children.”

  ON our way from basement level up to the second floor, we passed through the Parlor. It had been too long since I’d been in that splendid room; I tried to absorb everything I could as I went through.

  It wasn’t easy. It was a little after nine o’clock: the place was packed. There was a contingent of Japanese at the bar, grinning and photographing everything in sight. Willard’s wife Sherry was apparently leading a pun contest over by the fireplace; I heard her raise an appreciative groan with something about a junkies’ hamburger stand, where every order comes with the works. The two smoke-artists were working at the other end of the room. She blew a naked woman with streaming hair; her partner studied it a moment, blew a naked man that approached the smoke-woman, grew an erection, moved forward to mingle with her—and a dozen flashbulbs went off at once. Near the room was a short blonde in a gold sari, leading an ocelot on a leash. Male of course. A paper airplane sailed past me and landed where I could see it: it was a traffic ticket. Near the spiral staircase, a slender gent with a goatee and the look of a kindly faun seemed to be giving hugging lessons to a group of attentive ladies. Seated near him was one of the indoor ice-skaters, only he wasn’t skating tonight: he was talking sternly to a cat.

  The same old guy was playing piano tonight. He still looked like Hoagy Carmichael, and he was playing “New Orleans.” But all the singing was being done by his accompanist: a tall skinny galoot with long brown hair and a beard, playing an acoustic guitar. And he had changed the lyrics, so strikingly that Arethusa and I actually stopped to listen. Hoagy had written that song something like fifty years ago; this guy was updating it:

  If you’ve ever seen a shithole Southern city,

  One-time pretty,

  That’s New Orleans…

  And if you have to live there, that’s a pity:

  Man, it’s shitty

  In New Orleans…

  It will remind you Of old tarnished slums

  For a glass of wine They’ll eat it till it comes

  See that little Creole whore? She is nine years old…

  Goin’ down, in New Orleans

  So if you’re passin’ through, I think you oughta

  Stay in the Quarter:

  Bag New Orleans.

  And don’t you wander far away from Bourbon;

  Man, it’s disturbin’,

  The real Orleans…

  It will depress you, Like your mother’s grave;

  If you stay long, You’re either dumb or brave.

  See that Old Man River there? He is tryin’ and tryin’

  To get out

  Of New Orleans…

  Some people made approving sounds when he was done, and some were silent. Whoever that was at the ivories clapped his hands harder than a piano player ought to. “There y’are, Jake,” he said happily.

  Maybe you’re from New Orleans, and think a guy from New York had no business criticizing any city. I won’t argue. I’d made my first visit to the Big Easy a year before. I’d gone to pay my respects to the famous statue of Satchelmouth in Armstrong Park. What is it, four blocks from Bourbon Street? An abandoned area, filthy and unkempt, the pond a cesspool of stagnant water. A New York crackhead wouldn’t have gone there to cop. I got mugged in broad daylight. Lost two hundred bucks, my watch, and a gun I was fond of. Louie smiled down at me sheepishly. At least New York doesn’t claim to be quaint and charming.

  I shook off my stasis—what a fine, melancholy voice that Jake had!—dropped a twenty into the ten-gallon hat he had upright on the floor, and led Arethusa to the staircase.

  An attractive brunette in her fifties was just coming down; she paused as she passed us, said to me, with the most infectious smile I ever saw, “Keep that one,” and was gone.

  “I will,” I said to her back. Arethusa smiled at me. “Do you know her?” I asked.

  “No, but here’s to her.”

  As we were ascending, we heard a man say, “Aw come on, Sherry…you know I can do it like a bunny.”

  “That’s the problem,” she told him. “I just washed my thing, and I can’t do a hare with it.”

  Arethusa folded up with the giggles.

  “A more appropriate note to leave on,” I said, chuckling myself.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into Sherry tonight,” she said. “She hates puns.”

  “I’m more interested in what’s gotten into you tonight.”

  “I could get into that,” she agreed. “Let’s go join me and we’ll tell you all about it.”

  One of these days I was going to have to walk up that staircase with Ar
ethusa slowly…

  THERE’S nothing like the prospect of impending combat to et cetera. And so forth. You know what two people do when they’re in love—don’t you?—so I’ll say only that once again I felt a taste of that telepathic union that had startled me on our last encounter. Not as strong, maybe, but unmistakable. God, it’s so different for women! I began dimly to grasp why they put up with us.

  I could not decide whether the phenomenon was specific to Arethusa, related to her own peculiar self-telepathy…or whether perhaps this was simply the first time in my life I’d ever really been in love. Others suffering from that condition have reported similar symptoms…

  What I finally decided was, what the hell difference does it make?

  We barely made it on time to the war council I had called.

  WE’D left enough time—but on our way back down through the Parlor, we had to pull up short to avoid a collision. That hippie again. The one with the carpenter’s tool belt. Riding a bicycle, this time.

  “Easy, Nazz,” Arethusa said, smiling across the handlebars at him. He smiled back at her.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I knew not what I did.”

  While I groped for a reply, he took a jug from the bike’s basket, gave it to me, and pedaled away, weaving in and out of Parlor traffic with easy grace. As he passed by the brunette with the infectious grin, I heard him say, “I love you more than you’ll know, Ev.” She smiled.

  I blinked down at the jug, pulled the stopper, sniffed. No one who’s ever been in the Orient will ever forget the smell. Rice liquor.

  “What’s the jug for?” Arethusa said.

  The answer hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. “It’s…it’s for Christ’s sâke,” I said weakly…and fell down laughing.

  The funniest part was that I wouldn’t have bet five cents he wasn’t…who he seemed to be.

  But eventually I pulled myself together. “Well,” I said, “I’ve got this jug, and thou beside me—now all I need is a loaf of bread.”

  “Yippee, I owe Khayyam,” she sang.

  So I had to tickle her, and we were nearly late for the meeting.

  It was just as I was entering Tesla’s lab that the penny dropped. When we’d left him an hour ago, he had touched us both on the head. On the head! His violent aversion to touching human hair seemed to finally be gone.

  Which implied—given his address and his smoldering good looks—that Nikola Tesla was no longer a virgin any more…

  That cheered me up even more…and I needed it.

  Everyone I’d asked for was present, including Mike Callahan. He lived more than an hour’s travel time away…but only if you were restricted to conventional transport. I introduced myself as “Ken Taggart” to Cynthia and Father Newman (there was no longer any need for that masquerade, but this seemed the wrong time to start confusing everyone), winked at the Professor, winked in a different way at Tim, scratched Ralph behind the ear, nodded to Pris, and shook hands with Mike, who was kind enough to return my hand afterward. If you still need any clues as to just what an extraordinary assemblage of people that was, try this: it took less than fifteen minutes by my watch to bring everybody there up to speed.

  Nikola’s Raincoat Five computer helped a lot: there’s nothing like visual aids to get a presentation over. But that was only part of it. Not one dumb question or extraneous issue was raised. Nobody wasted time on shock or disbelief or oratorical posturing. And nobody needed to be told anything twice. It reminded me a little of the Army, with one guy up front saying impossible and unspeakable things, and all the rest waiting in patient silence for their cue to salute. (Except that it was impossible to look at that motley crew and be reminded much of the Army. Mike was the only one who wasn’t hopelessly miscast: he’d have made a great DI or platoon sergeant. But Tim? Nikola Tesla? Father Newman? Mistress Cynthia? Ralph Von Wau Wau? Even during Nam they took few recruits that wonky.) The longer that briefing went on—no, the longer it didn’t go on—the better I felt about my squad.

  Nobody objected, as I had thought someone might, that we had made an awful lot of stew from one oyster—our sole fact being that civilization had inexplicably not yet been consumed in thermonuclear fire. They all found the circumstantial evidence for the existence of The Miner as compelling as Lady Sally had, and nobody knocked any holes in the logic structure, and when Nikola showed them some of the radio-equipped cylinders in municipal water pipes with his computer screen, nobody thought of anything they could be but private enterprise nuclear weapons.

  “Nikola,” I finished at last, “has persuaded me that the terrorist mastermind we’ve been calling The Miner either does regular systems checks on his mines, or is an idiot. We’re guessing that he checks about once a week, and we know the New York mine will fail. So we’re going to stake it out for a week or two, and try to tail whoever shows up to see what’s wrong. If he spots the tail, we capture him, or kill him, in that order of preference. If nothing happens by the second week, we’ll fall back and revise our plans on the assumption that we’re dealing with an idiot. I think this should be safe enough. If I’m wrong and the world comes to an end, I’ll accept any criticisms you have. We have no proof that his final target date is six August…but both Nikola and I have had strong intuitions about it.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Lady Sally and Mike said together.

  “We’ll work three-man shifts,” I said, “so even when somebody has to pee we’ll have at least two in position at all times. We may well get ample warning: Nikola’s got widgets running that will sound an alarm the instant anyone broadcasts or narrowcasts anything on that frequency, worldwide, and locate the source. If the systems check should be initiated by The Miner from his end, we’ll know exactly when he gets his out-of-order message. Even so, we will fucking well stay alert at all times. The device may have been preset to report at regular or irregular intervals—which it no longer will—or, if The Miner has the manpower, he might even do his systems checks by eyeball, in corpus, and there’s no telling when.

  “Fortunately, Penn Station lends itself well to this kind of operation—we could probably all sleep there for a month without causing much talk. But do please try your best not to draw the attention of the local heat, hookers, hustlers, or heroin addicts. We can’t afford the distraction of being jugged, hugged, mugged or plugged just now.”

  Mike Callahan put up a hand the size of a first baseman’s mitt.

  “Yes, Mike?”

  “When we spot him…are you sure you want to fall back and go for a tail? He could always be a kamikaze, there to set off that particular bomb and radio-trigger the others from there. I know that’s stupid—but do you know that old one about, ‘Never attribute to evil what can be satisfactorily explained by stupidity’?”

  “True enough,” I admitted. “That’s why on every shift, one of us will be stationed within sight of the bomb at all times. I think it’s reasonable to assume that even if he walks in there intending to light the candle, he’ll pause to find out why his radio trigger has melted. That gives us time. If he then reaches for any other component of the bomb, the inside man drops him in his tracks with one of those magic trumpets, and we take him back here for an interview.

  “But for me the ideal outcome would be: he inspects the bomb, curses at the spoiled trigger, scratches his head, and makes a beeline for Bad Guy HQ to report, wagging his tails behind him. That way we’re sure of getting some information. One thing I learned in Nam about interrogating fanatics: they have this frustrating tendency to die too soon on you. Poison tooth, special ring, chew open an artery…I saw a guy do it by sheer willpower, once. Restrained so well all he could move were his eyes and his asshole, and he just plain made up his mind to die.

  “Please bear in mind at all times our ultimate objective, and make sure you’ve got it straight. It’s not simply to prevent any bombs going off. If someone were to wave a magic wand right now and make all thirty nukes disappear, we would have failed. What we mus
t do, if we are to safeguard the present and the future, is to disable those nukes, leave them in place, and then very quietly tell the DIA and KGB about them. That is what it will take to shock both sides into fixing that annoying rattle they have in their sabers these days, to nurse history through the next five critical years. Remember how the Cuban Missile Crisis sobered ’em all up for a while? The difference here will be that this one must not make the news. Ever—even after it’s over.

  “But this strategic situation presents us with a tactical problem. Lady Sally has appropriate contacts in both agencies—but we can’t simply give them the mines. We must also give them The Miner, and as many minor Miners as we can identify, and as much information on them and their operations as we can get. As a great man once said to Mary Astor, ‘Shumbody’s got to take the fall.’ If we don’t supply a whole lot of convincing fanatics, the spooks will take us—and even Lady Sally’s many years of goodwill won’t help us. She and Mike wouldn’t even be able to use future-magic to get us all clear and underground. They’d risk blowing their cover as time travelers—which would be precisely as bad as one or more of those atom bombs going off.”

  “Surely not to the people near to the bomb,” Father Newman said mildly. He was in his fifties, grizzled and grey but very fit, with that indefinable air of being ready to run up the side of a five-story building that Special Forces guys seldom seem to lose, even in retirement.

  “I’m afraid so, Father. And don’t call me Shirley. At least I think so. Mike, Your Ladyship, Nikola, check me out: there’s a point at the beginning of a nuclear explosion past which nothing could conceivably stop it, yes?”

  “Sure,” Mike said.

  “A very tiny slice of a second after the two subcritical masses meet, right?”

  “Take a right at the decimal point, and bring your hiking boots,” he agreed.

  “So at that instant, a historical paradox exists…and the universe goes away. A man standing next to the bomb wouldn’t have time to die before he ceased to ever have been.”