Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (10 page)

“You think so?”

“Even in this place, I would call it a notable eccentricity.”

He shook his head.
 
“All I can say is, I’m humbled.
 
Five minutes ago I wouldn’t have believed anything could upstage me tonight.
 
Now I feel like the warmup act.
 
I mean, any asshole can burn a few million dollars—anybody who’s got ’em, and thousands of assholes do—but that’s
Nikola Tesla
.
 
No contest.”
 
He looked thoughtfully at that guitar case.
 
“I think maybe I’ll just dump the rest of this stuff into the fire in fistfuls,” he said.
 
“We had a lot of fun; maybe it’s better to quit before it becomes a chore.”

“There’s wisdom in that,” I said.
 
“But as a new friend, I feel required to ask: are you still sure you want to go through with this?
 
You can’t think of any better use for the better part of a megabuck?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.
 
Feed hungry people?
 
Endow a hospital?
 
Reprint good novels, in quality editions?
 
Build coffee-houses and hire acoustic musicians to play in them?
 
Subsidize the local library?
 
Find a woman and give it to her?
 
You know: enlightened self-interest kind of stuff.
 
One of the things we do with our own excess money around here is to track down deserving candidates and put them through med school, or law school, or business school, or trade school.
 
Marty over there handles the paperwork.
 
We look for the kids who
just
missed winning the big scholarships.
 
They’ll repay us down the line, when they’re established and practicing—and the only interest we charge is lifetime free professional services from them in their field: medical care, legal services, accounting, plumbing repair, whatever.
 
We’re slowly working our way through all the professions we expect to need free help from in the future.
 
It’s a lot of work, which is to say a lot of fun, and keeps us harmlessly occupied.
 

“With what you’ve got there in that case you could grow yourself a good GP, a specialist or two in whatever you expect to die of, a lawyer, a shrink
and
a tax man.
 
Of course, it’s legal and tax deductible, and you’d be in grave peril of making a profit.
 
But you could always burn that.”

He blinked.
 
“Yours is an interesting mind, sir,” he said.
 
“What would
you
do with, say, a hundred thousand dollars?”

I answered without hesitation.
 
“I’d find out who owns the rights and the master tapes for the album running jumping standing still by Spider John Koerner and Willie Murphy, and I’d pay to have it digitally remastered and re-released on compact disc, and I’d buy the entire first pressing myself, and I’d spend the next year giving copies away on streetcorners and in malls and at toll-booths.
 
I believe if more people knew that record, the world would be a better place.
 
I’ve purchased twenty-seven copies, over the last twenty-odd years, and given away twenty-three of them, and played holes through three, and now I’m down to my last one, and I want to own it in CD format so bad I’d pay to get it done, if I could.”

“I don’t know the album,” he said, and Acayib too shook his head and shrugged.

“Boy, are you guys lucky,” I said, “to have that ahead of you.”
 
I have headphone jacks installed about every four feet along the bar; I got a set of headphones apiece for them, the kind that allows in ambient room noise but muffles it.
 
(Real headphones: none of those stupid newfangled stick-it-in-your-ear beads.)
 
As they put the phones on I signaled Fast Eddie to take his break, and bent to switch on the house sound system under the bar.
 
The cassette I wanted was in a position of honor; I popped it in, told the Kenwood deck to rewind to the beginning and put itself into play mode, and stood back to savor the warm pleasure of watching their reactions.

From the opening bars of “The Red Palace,” both began to smile.
 
The smiles got slowly wider for the next forty-five seconds, and then they both began to sway in place with the music as the band kicked in.
 
Even in the rest of the room, where the house speakers were delivering it at background-music level, people began unconsciously moving in rhythmic response.
 
It is one of those rare albums that repays close attention, but works perfectly well as background music too, and is not in the least demeaned thereby.
 
Even Tesla began snapping his fingers—and
sparks
flew from
his
snapping fingers.
 
Fast Eddie got back from the can in time to stand still and dig Willie Murphy’s extended piano solo in the middle of the song, nodding with his eyes closed.
 
And several of the regulars dropped out of whatever conversations they were in to sing along with the part that comes right after that solo, when Koerner sings, “When in danger, when in doubt/run in circles, scream and shout/A-HEY!” and then went back to what they were doing.
 
(I don’t believe I have any regulars I haven’t played Koerner’s masterpiece for, at one time or another.)

Around the end of the second verse of the second track, “I Ain’t Blue,” Buck reached into his guitar case and handed me several stacks of bills.
 
“Do it,” he said, with the overloud voice of one wearing headphones, and I nodded back.

(I’m happy to report, now in 1995, that the project eventually succeeded: Red House Records released running jumping standing still on CD on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its original vinyl release on Elektra, and they haven’t the faintest idea that they got any help from me and Buck Rogers.
 
Don’t tell them, okay?
 
Let them think it was all their idea.
 
They deserve to.
 

(But I digress…)

By the time Spider John had worked his way around to the title track—the first one on side two of the vinyl version—Nikola Tesla had managed to work his way down the bar to where I was standing.
 
His eyes flashed under those craggy brows as he shook my hand.
 
(In this second incarnation, he’s no longer afraid of shaking hands with people.)
 
“Hello, Jake,” he said merrily.
 
“No see long time.”

“What brings you here, Nikky?
 
I haven’t seen you in…awhile.”

“To be perfectly honest, I am not sure.
 
I felt a sudden strong urge to come here and look you up.
 
As you know, I am in the habit of indulging unexplained urges; it has worked out well for me a number of times.”

I nodded.
 
“You can say that again.”
 
(The first historically recorded instance was an irresistible impulse to draw a geometric figure that came to Nikky in a vision…and became the basis for the first-ever electric motor.)
 
“How’d you happen to know our coordinates?
 
Temporal
or
spatial?
 
Or even that we existed?
 
I don’t recall sending you a Change of Address notice after Callahan’s Place blew up…not having an address for you.”

“I was chatting with Michael when the impulse came to me; he had just been describing your opening night.
 
He gave me your ficton coordinates.”

(That explained it, for me.
 
If it doesn’t for you, here’s the briefest summary I can devise: Mike Callahan—husband to Lady Sally McGee—is, like her, a time traveler: the proverbial Mick of Time.
 
His own thirty-eight-year mission in this ficton, this time frame—saving humanity from alien enslavement—involved owning and operating a tavern, called Callahan’s Place…where nearly all of us who now hang out at Mary’s Place originally met and became friends.
 
Sadly, Callahan’s Place was eventually reduced to a radioactive hole in the ground, as a necessary side-effect of the successful completion of Mike’s mission…but we do our best to carry on its traditions and principles, in his merry memory.
 
He dropped in from the future to visit us on our Opening Night, and stayed for several days.
 
I hope that clears everything up.
 

(But I digress…)

“How is it with Zoey?” Nikola Tesla added.
 
She was down at the other end of the bar, at the time, schmoozing with Suzie and Susie Maser.

“Well, we’re kind of seriously into overtime,” I admitted, drawing him a second beer.
 
“Kid’s late to his zeroth birthday party.
 
A couple of weeks late.
 
I can’t say I blame him.
 
If I lived where he does, I wouldn’t want to move either.”

“And so she waits.”

I nodded.
 
“It’s getting to her, a little.”

“Well,” he said, “it is good that she laughs while she waits.
 
My lightning made her laugh.
 
And she was laughing when I came in.”

“What she was doing would make a cat laugh,” I told him.
 
“I’d like you to meet a couple of new friends of mine.
 
Buck Rogers and Acayib Pinsky, this is Nikola Tesla; Nikky: Buck and Acayib.
 
Buck was providing the entertainment until you showed up, Nikky.”

Nikky shook both their hands warmly.
 
“I apologize if I upstaged you, Buck.”

Buck shook his head, just a little dizzily.
 
“No, no—if you intend to make an entrance, you’re pretty much committed as soon as you clear the door.
 
It was an honor to yield the floor to you, sir.”

Nikky bowed.
 
“But what was the nature of your entertainment?”

Buck grinned sheepishly.
 
“Well…”
 
He indicated the guitar case on the bartop.
 
“…I was inviting people to make paper airplanes out of hundred dollar bills and skate ’em into the fire over there.
 
I’ve got a whole case-full there, and my intention is to be broke by closing.”

Nikky’s face split in a huge vulpine grin.
 
“Oh, splendid!
 
Oh, magnificent!
 
Whatever else may happen, I am repaid for the trouble of coming to visit Mary’s Place tonight.
 
Oh,
 
if J.P. Morgan were still alive, this would kill him: he must be generating high torque in his mausoleum!
 
May I…?”

Buck made way for him.
 
“You would honor me again, sir.”

Tesla stayed where he was, raised his right hand…and a stack of bills left the case and came to him.
 
Acayib paled, and swayed, but he didn’t go down.
 
Nikky took the top bill from the floating stack, leaving the rest hovering there, and folded it into a very rakish, oddly cantilevered paper airplane, which he threw in a conventional manner, actually touching it with his fingers.
 
Need I tell you that it sailed as majestically and elegantly as the Gossamer Condor, and came in for a smooth terminal landing in the exact center of the fire?
 
It drew scattered applause.

“Thank you, Buck,” Nikky said contentedly.
 
“That was most delightful.
 
But you must soon switch to mass destruction if you truly hope to be bankrupt by closing.
 
You appear to have on the close order of a million dollars left—that is, ten thousand-odd pieces of paper.
 
To complete the task in the—”
 
He glanced up briefly at the counterclock.
 
“—two hours and twelve minutes that remain until closing, you must average seventy-five point seven five seven five repeating bills per minute.
 
Assuming the assistance of every person here, each of us would have to throw an average of two point five two five two repeating airplanes per minute—which, considering the time required to fold each, is just feasible.”

Buck blinked and slowly nodded.
 
“I was just figuring that out when you arrived,” he said, in the tone of one who does not expect to be believed.
 
“Though I just rounded the total off to two and a half per minute apiece.
 
I’m careless with numbers.”

Nikky nodded back, oblivious to the irony.
 
“I am not fond of repeating decimals myself.
 
It is somehow more pleasant to imagine half of a bill than a more complex and counterintuitive fraction, which insists on requiring infinite significant figures to express itself.”
 
He glanced down at his beer.
 
“This glass, for instance, contains an amount of beer which calls for a repeating decimal if calculated in cubic centimeters—but I am soothed to note that it can be just as accurately and much more simply expressed as approximately half the container’s cubic capacity.”

“The question is,” Acayib said, “is it half empty?
 
Or half full?”

Nikky flashed that wolflike grin again, and tossed back the contents in one long swallow.
 
“Thus do I dispose of your question,” he said, and the three of us chuckled.

“I genuinely admire your project, sir,” he went on to Buck.
 
“I wish Morgan had shared your taste for burning money.
 
I went to him once for backing on a rather grandiose project: I proposed to pump energy into the planet Earth, in essence turning it into a colossal storage battery, so that anywhere on its surface, one could sink a rod into the soil and draw power.
 
Morgan thought in silence for perhaps a minute, and then said, ‘My dear Mr. Tesla—how am I to charge the customers for this power?’
 
I got up and left his office, knowing that my project was finished and my true education had just begun.”