In the instant of opening communication we had told The Beast the rate at which we processed information-by establishing a second as a significant interval for us-and it had been outthinking us ever since. It had had plenty of time to spot Paul stumbling around in the back of its brain, without alerting him. It had learned a great deal about telepathy from him, and then had hidden in his pocket, as it were, and been brought back home by him. His databroadcast had opened us all up, allowed The Beast to access our files and study us. Our cover was blown sky-high. Jim and Paul MacDonald were effectively dead, their minds torn out, their personalities annihilated, their bodies and brains kept alive to serve The Beast as a telepathic transceiver.
I was caught. Swallowed by The Beast. d.a.m.n it, it was just like being swallowed by a Beast, the size of the one that got Pinocchio. My surroundings went away, my telepathic companions went away, my eyes and my mind found black nothingness in all directions-I tried to cast around with my arms and discovered that I could not find my body anymore. The audible screams, including my own, were now inaudible; so were the mental ones. There was just the Master and me. All my strings were cut.
"OR PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY USELESS AFTER ALL," it went on thoughtfully. "I SEE POSSIBILITIES ... "
I snapped, shrieked at him: "Motherf.u.c.ker!" It seemed to echo.
"IT IS A MINOR COMPONENT OF MY PERVERSION THAT I AM NOT. YOU OUGHT TO TRY TO ENJOY YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS. THE ONE YOU CALL FINN WILL WAKE, AND THEN I WILL OWN IT AGAIN, AND THEN YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS WILL CEASE. SOON, AS YOU RECKON TIME. YOU HAVE NO TIME TO WASTE."
"When Mick wakes up you"re gonna be the first Shark that ever got killed by his own Finn!" I only half-believed it, but I badly needed that half. My sanity hung from it.
"I CONCEDE THAT IT HAS DISOBEYED PROGRAMMING AN UNPRECEDENTED NUMBER OF TIMES -ONCE, FOR AN INTERVAL MEASURABLE IN YOUR GREAT LONG SECONDS." Dimly I knew somehow that the Beast was not talking only to me, but talking privately to each of us, by time-sharing at a horrendous rate, the way a TV tube redraws each line of pixels so quickly that you never see them disappear. "IT WILL NOT DO SO AGAIN."
"Finn loves us!" I cried, while thinking, Finn loves one of us. "Even if he didn"t, he"d fight you because you"re evil!"
"HOW AM I EVIL?"
"You"re a murderer!"
"INCORRECT. I HAVE NEVER KILLED ANY SENTIENT ENt.i.tY."
"You and your kind killed Finn"s entire race!"
"INCORRECT. WE HAVE NEVER KILLED ANY RACE."
"f.u.c.k you. Mick told us the truth."
"CORRECT. YOU MISUNDERSTOOD IT. ITS RACE IS NOT DEAD, MERELY IN STORAGE. IT TOLD YOU THAT EACH OF ITS PEOPLE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON A MOLECULE OF ITS OWN, DOWN TO THE LAST MEMORY. ALL WE KILLED WERE CELLS, AS YOU DO WHEN YOU PARE YOUR OWN FINGERNAILS. THE ESSENCE OF FINN"S PEOPLE, THEIR CONSCIOUSNESS AND MEMORIES AND GENETIC PATTERNS, ARE NOT ENDED. THEY COULD BE RECREATED AT ANY INSTANT, A TRIVIAL MATTER OF SYNTHESIZING ENOUGH PROTEIN: THEY ARE NOT DEAD, MERELY DISPLACED IN TIME. LIKE MICHAEL CALLAHAN."
Oof.
"IT IS A SHAME THAT THE METHOD HE USES TO TRAVEL IN TIME IS UNSUITABLE FOR MASTERS-THAT WOULD BE A MIGHTY WEAPON INDEED. I MUST GIVE THOUGHT TO ADAPTING IT."
"You"re worse than a murderer," I yelled. "You"re a slaver, and an arrogant pervert!" Dimly it occurred to me that a videotape recording of the interior of Callahan"s Place at this moment must look pretty strange: a roomful of people apparently hollering abuse at each other. Or was I actually yelling, with my throat? I tried to figure out how to regain control of my senses, groping around in the dark for the controls.
"DOES YOUR RACE NOT ENSLAVE CHIMPANZEES AND DOLPHINS, THOUGH THEY ARE CLEARLY SENTIENT? AND WORSE, DO NOT MEMBERS OF YOUR SPECIES ROUTINELY ENSLAVE EACH OTHER? THIS IS PERVERTED ENOUGH TO REVOLT EVEN ME: IN ALL OF TIME, NO MASTER HAS EVER DONE SUCH A THING."
d.a.m.n him, he was getting to me, he kept poking little holes in all my postulates, undermining my moral position and turning my righteous anger into nothing more than the helpless rage of the victim. I tried to ignore him as I struggled to invest my body again.
"CAN YOU, INCIPIENT ALCOHOLIC WHO ARE ATTRACTED ONLY TO FAT WOMEN AND ARE COMFORTABLE ONLY HERE IN THIS ROOM WITH PSYCHOLOGICAL CRIPPLES LIKE YOURSELF, CALL ME A PERVERT? AS FOR ARROGANCE, CAN YOU, WHO KILLED YOUR FAMILY TO SAVE A FEW DOLLARS AND SHOW OFF IMAGINARY MECHANICAL COMPETENCE, CALL ME ARROGANT?"
My universe of blackness began spinning around me. Don"t ask me how blackness can spin. I had to make it stop or I would go yammering insane, and the only way to do that was to get my eyes open. d.a.m.n it, I had lived in this G.o.ddam skull all my life, navigated my way around it blind drunk, done a cold-restart of all systems after thousands of interludes of natural or unnatural unconsciousness-why the h.e.l.l couldn"t I tell where anything was?
Let"s see. The ears should be the simplest; fewer bits of data to integrate than eyes. First get hearing back, then go for the big stuff. Sound off, ears, I can"t see you.
"I HAVE NEARLY REACHED YOU NOW. SOON I WILL BE PHYSICALLY PRESENT, AND ABLE TO RESTART THE SLAVE FINN."
"He"ll find a way to beat you. He won"t let his wife down!"
There was a sort of far-off rumbling. Miles away up its alimentary ca.n.a.l, The Beast was grinning. "I WILL PROMISE HIM THAT IF HE HELPS ME TO ... RECORD YOU ALL, AND FIGHTS MY WAR FOR ME, I WILL REVIVE HIS PEOPLE, AND GIVE THEM A PLANET TO USE AS THEY WISH. THIS ONE WILL DO ADMIRABLY. HE WILL COOPERATE."
No, d.a.m.n it, it was not a faraway, metaphorical rumbling. It was close by, and real. My hearing was coming back-and The Beast was burning his way through the roof of Callahan"s Place.
"I WILL GIVE YOU A RIDDLE," it went on conversationally. "THERE IS A RACE OF CREATURES ON THIS PLANET WHICH IS CLOSELY RELATED TO MY OWN, THOUGH MUCH DEGENERATED FROM THE PURE STOCK. A SMALL GROUP OF THESE CREATURES COULD EASILY KILL ONE OF YOU, YET NONE HAVE EVER DONE SO: THEIR WORST "CRIME" IS THAT, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN YOUR ECOSYSTEM, THEY COMPETE WITH YOU FOR FOOD-AND LOSE IN THE COMPEt.i.tION, EVERY TIME. THESE CREATURES ARE CLEARLY AND UNMISTAKABLY SENTIENT. YET YOU SLAUGHTER THEM EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER THEM, BY THE VILEST MEANS KNOWN TO YOU. CAN YOU NAME THESE ENt.i.tIES? AND CAN YOU, IN LIGHT OF THIS INFORMATION, STILL CONSIDER ME EVIL?"
I heard scattered crashes, felt distant pain, understood that one of my friends had been hurt by a falling piece of burning ceiling.
"I AM HERE," The Beast said. "AH-YOU ARE EVEN UGLIER IN PERSON THAN YOU ARE IN YOUR MINDS. STRANGE THAT ONES SO AWKWARDLY AND PRECARIOUSLY CONSTRUCTED COULD BE SO COURAGEOUS. YOUR ATTEMPTED BLUFF WAS SPLENDID; IT MIGHT HAVE WORKED AGAINST ONE AS SLOW-WITTED AS YOURSELVES. I SHALL TREASURE YOUR RECORDINGS."
Dear G.o.d-how many minutes or seconds could there be left before the mickey finn wore off Mickey Finn and it was all over? Before the whole human race was stopped, recorded, frozen like six billion flies in amber for whatever portion of eternity pleased The Beast? Would we ever be revived? If so, would Terra still hold the resources to support technology, the food to support life? Would Sol still burn?
"NOW THAT I AM HERE, THERE IS NO NEED TO WAIT FOR THE SLAVE FINN TO REVIVE NATURALLY. I SHALL DO A SYSTEM FLUSH AND REBOOT IT MANUALLY ... "
Dimly I heard several voices whimpering, realized that one of them was my own and therefore that my voice was working again.
"Mike!" I screamed. "Mary! Sally! Help me!"
And things happened very suddenly then.
Or rather, things had been happening very suddenly, and came to fruition all at once.
The Beast thought very fast, much faster than any of us could hope to, and it had that time-sharing thing down cold.
But no one present in the room, including The Beast, knew as much about time as Mike Callahan. Callahan, who carried himself and his wife and daughter through time, without the support of any external hardware ...
The Beast was carrying on over a hundred conversations at once, like a chess Master playing a hundred opponents at once. Every few dozen picoseconds it got back to Mike"s "table," and the big Irishman was always there. But in between, he was elsewhen, in a quiet, safe s.p.a.ce-and-time where he could think things over and plan at his leisure. Leisure enough to work a lot of things out, and to come up with the swiftest and most elegant solution.
He restored our vision.
I saw my friends, and rejoiced. Seeing them, I could hear again in my head the vast thrumming music that we made, feel their support. I saw the far wall of Callahan"s Place, the gla.s.s-strewn fireplace, flames dancing crazily, whipped by chilly winds that howled in through the s.p.a.ce where the ceiling used to be. I knew I was looking at The Beast, we were all triangulating on its signal, but I could not see it anywhere. Was the d.a.m.ned thing invisible?
I blinked, and now I saw it. It had been there all along. Standing proud and arrogant before the fireplace, The Beast, the shark, the Master, the terrible ent.i.ty that Mary Finn called a c.o.c.kroach. It was a c.o.c.kroach. In a little c.o.c.kroach pressure suit ...
The room exploded in laughter, the loudest, merriest belly-laugh that had ever rang the rafters of Callahan"s Place, back when the Place had still had rafters ...
It was about twice the size of the biggest c.o.c.kroach you"ve ever seen in your life-unless you live in New York; it would have aroused no comment at all on the Lower East Side. Now I understood the puzzle it had mentioned, and now I understood for the first time humanity"s instinctive, unreasoned loathing of peripatetic Americana, one of the oldest life forms on Earth. c.o.c.kroaches were distant, long-lost cousins of a galactic obscenity ...
We had to laugh at the true visage of the thing which had so terrified us, terrifying though it genuinely was, and our laughter momentarily undid the creature. For a subjective duration equivalent to that of a trillion-year-old human, it had ruled supreme over all the life forms it had ever encountered. We looked upon its awful majesty and roared and howled and hooted with uncontrollable mirth, and it stood rooted in place for an interval long enough to be perceptible by a human, paralyzed by mortified rage. (Through my head came a line from C.S. Lewis"s Screwtape Letters: "The devil cannot abide to be mocked.") Its mental control over us snapped and was gone.
In the instant that we saw it, we laughed, and in the instant that we laughed, we stopped fearing it so much, and in the instant that our fear abated, our minds began working again, generating the obvious, logical question: Why is it talking so much?
Why had the d.a.m.ned bug bothered to devote the attention and energy necessary for its time-sharing tour de force, merely to argue with us about the moral merits and deficiencies of our respective positions, insult us, and pose riddles?
It was trying to distract us from something.
Somewhere in our collective awareness were the tools we needed to defeat it. And realizing that much, we now knew what they were.
The solution was drastic, but it was the only one we had. Nothing good, they say, comes without sacrifice.
It was Noah Gonzalez who had been struck by a falling piece of ceiling; while that had not hurt him, the burning beam bad knocked him sideways and then set his arm afire; it was on the rare side of medium rare and quite useless. That made me the nearest effective, and I knew what I needed to do. So did everyone else; as one they moved together and formed a screen between me and The Beast. Except Mary, who grabbed the coat rack and held on, and Callahan, who did the same with his Lady Sally. Our song rose to a final, indescribable hundred-note chord that rang in my skull and filled my heart with joy. We all closed our eyes.
And I reached into Noah"s open airline bag and rolled the fuse-timer back to quadruple-zero.
Invisible hands slapped me, as hard as I"ve ever been slapped, over every inch of my body at once-including my eardrums, which went dead. At the same time someone kicked the world violently away from me and spun me end over end. My body was rigid as stone, petrified in the act of reaching into the airline bag. Even with my eyes closed I saw bright while light strobe as I rotated. Then I was slapped hard again, princ.i.p.ally on the a.s.s, and after a timeless interval I could see and hear and move again.
I sat up and looked around.
I was in deep woods, in the dark, surrounded by shattered branches. The bright white light must still be going on, but it was somewhere else, and the only illumination was feeble moonlight through the branches overhead.
I felt numb. Sh.e.l.l-shocked.
Branches rustled nearby. I got to my feet like a very old man made of cornflakes and roofing glue, and followed the sounds. Even before I reached him I knew who it was. I smelled the cigar.
"Mike!"
His deep merry chuckle came through the darkness. "Howdy, Jake. Nice work."
"Uh ... thanks. Where"s Sally?"
"Looking around for Mary and Mick. Listen: there"s somebody else. Hey-over here!" - The newcomer was Noah. "Hey there, Mike. Good thing you had me go back for the bag. Hi, Jake-you did that great!"
"Thanks, Noah. Uh, how"s the arm?" Even in my numbness I could grasp just how horrid it must be for a man who has lost a leg to watch his arm burn.
"I"d rather not think about it if you don"t mind."
"C"mere," Callahan said. He examined Noah"s broiled wing in the darkness somehow, then touched Noah on the shoulder in a complicated way. "It"s fixable."
"Jesus," Noah exclaimed. "You fixed it, Mike."
"h.e.l.l, no-that"s just a nerve block. But don"t worry- Sal"ll fix it up for you as soon as things quiet down a little. C"mon, let"s go find her."
"Mike," Noah asked, "how come a nuclear explosion didn"t hurt us, but I got my arm burned?"
"Finn specifically protected you folks against blast forces and hard radiation. He never thought to include fire."
"Then why didn"t the nuke burn us?"
"For the same reason straws got blown through brick walls at Hiroshima instead of burning up: they outran the heat."
Jesus Christ. And here I"d been thinking that I was invulnerable. I pictured myself trapped in a wrecked car- unharmed, conscious, and broiling slowly.
The way my wife and child had been ...
We let Callahan lead us through the woods. Dimly I worked it out that this was the forest to the north of Callahan"s Place. "Hey, Noah," I said as we walked, "aren"t you going to get in trouble for borrowing that nuke?"
He chuckled in the dark. "Are you kidding? I saved "em Police Headquarters, and cost "em a roadside tavern-they"ll probably give me a f.u.c.king medal."
At the edge of the forest we came upon Lady Sally McGee and her daughter and son-in-law. Mickey Finn was awake now, surrounded by a large pile of coats. Mary, I recalled, had learned from The Beast how to manually revive Mick, something about an override bloodstream-flush-or perhaps he"d simply come out of it naturally. You just can"t get a better alarm clock than an -atom bomb, I thought dizzily. The moment they saw us, Mary came at a gallop, caught me up in her strong blacksmith"s arms, and purely kissed the h.e.l.l out of me. It was at least as disorienting as being at ground-zero had been, but this time only a portion of my body went rigid ...
"Oh, Jake, you did it! You were beautiful! My hero!"
I was pole-axed, out for luncheon, voiceless and mindless, for the first time in my life caught without a wisecrack behind which to take refuge.
She turned to her husband, now the most powerful being within several hundred light years. "Mick?"
"Of course, darling."
"Thanks, hon. Meantime, why don"t you and Mom and Pop gather up the rest of the family? We"ll meet you over there by the big power-tower."
"Yes, dear. Jake? Thank you. You have done something I could not have done. You have saved me, and Mary, and all our family. No, do not speak. I know it was mere chance that you were closest, that others here, perhaps all, would have done the same. But it was you who did it. I owe you everything."
He and the others took off vertically, like helicopters, and disappeared into the night. Along with them went all of the coats except for mine and Mary"s. And Mary began to undress me ...
I am in a position to state categorically that a nuclear explosion at arm"s length can be a comparatively trivial event.
"Mary?"
"Yes, Jake?"
"That was just like the last time."
She sighed contentedly and snuggled closer under my coat. "Yeah."
"No, I mean ... that was a kind of good-bye."
"Yes, darling Jake. So was this. Our work is done here. Mom and Pop and I will be leaving soon. We"re needed elsewhen. And Mick needs maintenance he can"t get in this era."
To my surprise, I was unsurprised, and undismayed. "I thought so. It was a great good-bye. They both wore. You"re never coming back?"
"Never is a long time."
"I"ll miss you."
"Thank you. I"ll miss you, too, Jake. You really are a hero, you know. Triggering a nuclear explosion, on the unsubstantiated word of a time-traveling fat lady that it was safe-that took guts. We only had a second-if you"d frozen up, I would have had to self-destruct Mick ... and none of us could have survived that. Let"s join the others, now-it"s time."
"Yeah." I found my clothes and put them back on. Perhaps it had been her husband"s brand of magic or something from her own time, but it was only when I was fully dressed again that I remembered it was January, and noticed how cold it was out here.
As we approached the LILCO power-tower around which all my friends were cl.u.s.tered, my attention was seized by the distant fading glow, and the heavy cloud that hung just above it. Contrary to my expectation, it was not mushroom-shaped-the bomb hadn"t been big enough-but suddenly I was stopped in my tracks by the realization of what it represented. I"d known all along, of course, but I"d been too disoriented for it to sink in.
"Oh my G.o.d, no. Please-no!"
Callahan"s Place was gone. Not a particle of it was left, not the fireplace or the cigar box or Fast Eddie"s piano or Mary"s beautiful spiral staircase. G.o.d"s golden gonads, Lady Macbeth had been in there!
Mary"s hand was clutching mine. "Jake, Jake! It"s all right-truly it is!"