Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (33 page)

So I got out my mental power-screwdriver, and tightened those fucking hinges down machine-tight, and I got up from my chair and I picked my baby up in my arms and I held her as tight as I could.
 
And said in her perfect little ear, with my very best imitation of serene confidence, “So we will assume that Mom did
not
pick midnight, since that assumption gives us things we can do besides go apeshit.
 
Okay, princess?”
 

She hugged me back, harder than I would have believed possible, and in five or ten long seconds she had stopped crying.
 
“Okay, Daddy.”

“Attagirl.
 
What are the other possible times she could have picked?”

She squirmed in my arms, and Mei-Ling handed her a tissue just before she would have wiped her face on my shirt.
 
“Well, like I said, most of us voted for twenty-four hours.”

“Who didn’t?
 
Besides Mei-Ling.”

“You and me, Daddy.
 
We both guessed one hour.”

“Huh!” I said.
 
“Why did you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.
 
“Just everything I know about Mom.
 
She takes small steps until she’s sure it’s safe.
 
Then
she takes a big stride.
 
Why did you pick an hour?”

“Because I was the moron who put the whole idea in her head,” I said bitterly.
 
“Just before I left to come after you, as we were getting ready to go, half-kidding I said I was tempted to use the Meddler’s Belt to cheat, and peak ahead to the back of the book.
 
And Zoey said something about what’s so bad about cheating, not kidding at all.
 
I talked her out of it—I thought I had anyway, damn it.
 
I pointed out what she already knew: that every act of time travel threatens paradox, imperils the whole universe.
 
I said that was just too much risk to take for a case of nerves, and she agreed, God damn it, she
agreed
it was—oh, shit.”
 
I sat back down heavily in my chair.

“What, Daddy?”

“I just realized: that was just before she found out she wasn’t coming with me and Bill.
 
Before she realized she was going to be sitting here by herself with nothing to do but go out of her mind with worry for an unknown number of hours.”

“She wasn’t by herself, Jake,” Mei-Ling said.

“Whatever.
 
The point I was making was, Zoey had recently had it impressed on her what a dangerous thing using that belt would be.
 
I think even if she got worried enough to use it anyway, she would
 
have tried a short hop, first, and if that didn’t k…if that was successful,
then
maybe she’d have leaped ahead as far as midnight, or even tomorrow.”

“Why an hour?” the Professor said.
 
“Why not a minute?
 
Or even a few seconds?

I thought hard.
 
Why was I sure of an hour?
 
“Because,” I said, thinking the words as I heard myself speak them, “if she jumped forward one minute, or two, or five, then she’d have taken all the risk, with virtually no chance of reward.
 
If she’d believed the news she wanted would be available within minutes, she’d have just waited for it.
 
One hour feels to me like the compromise she would have picked: the largest increment she would think of as ‘small’…but that might actually be enough to learn something.”

Doc Webster the diagnostician was shaking his head gently.
 
“Jesus, Jake…that’s awful thin.”

“It sounds right to me,” Erin said.
 
“We were talking once, about how terrible it must be to be clairvoyant, and never have a surprise in your life.
 
And she said, ‘Yes, but sometimes I think it’d be nice if every now and then you could peek ahead for just an hour, just to get your bearings.’
 
I remember I agreed with her.”

“An hour
or so
,” Long-Drink repeated thoughtfully.

“You can’t dial an ‘or so,’ Drink,” Omar argued.
 
“She’d probably have picked one hour.
 
The two people who know her best both share that intuition—that’s good enough for me.”

My heart was hammering so loud I could barely follow the discussion, much less contribute any more.
 
It was dawning on me that, under the scenario I was proposing, my beloved had been dead for hours by now…boiled and burst and terribly cold…

Unless we did something about that.

*
 
*
 
*

“Okay, Erin,” I said, loud enough to get the floor.
 
“Let’s start with those two assumptions.
 
Zoey left at 7:03 and—”
 
I glanced at Pixel’s clock again to confirm my memory.
 
“—and twenty-two seconds.
 
And her intent was to hop forward exactly one hour.
 
Is that enough information for you to figure out exactly where she ended up, and rescue her?”

Her face twisted up so bad that for a moment I thought she was going to cry again.
 
I guess she wanted to.
 
“Oh God, Daddy,
I don’t
 
know.
 
Let me think—”
 
She closed her eyes, bit down hard on her left thumbtip, and with her right hand tugged rhythmically at the hair at the back of her neck.
 
I hadn’t seen the mannerism in years; it meant she was concentrating very hard.
 
Ten seconds went by.
 
When she opened her eyes I could see dismay in them.
 
“I doubt it,” she said.
 
“It’s a
really
hairy problem.
 
I don’t think the NSA could handle it.
 
And our window, our margin of error is so incredibly miniscule—we can’t be off by more than a few thousand yards or we’ll never find her in time.
 
So everything has to be calculated out to a humungous number of decimal places—”

Her voice was rising in pitch, speed and volume; time to interrupt.
 
“Yeah, but didn’t you tell me you had some way to steal as much computer power as you’d ever need, honey?
 
Something about word processors on bicycles?”

The feeble attempt at humor did not go down well.
 
“Jesus, Daddy!
 
Yes, Solace taught me a way to access just about all the unused processor cycles of nearly any computer that’s connected to the net, without being caught at it: that’s basically what she did to live.
 
Yes, in theory that’s more computing power than the US federal government has, or anyway knows it has—”

Again I tried to interrupt her climb toward panic.
 
“There you go—we’ll take our best shot, and—”

She was shaking her head.
 
“You don’t get it.
 
Raw computer power isn’t enough, not nearly enough.
 
Every step of the way you have to make assumptions, that could introduce whopping errors if they’re wrong—”
 

“You’ll make the right assumptions. Your intuition has always been good; you’re good at this stuff.”

She shook her head harder.
 
“I’m
terrible
at it.
 
Mike or Lady Sally could do it, no sweat—they solve trickier problems all the time.
 
Uncle Nikky would probably just get the right answer in a flash of light, like always.
 
But my brain isn’t like theirs.”

“Come on—I saw you hop from an orbiting Shuttle to that pool over there—”

Her glare was withering.
 
“Daddy…I haven’t
done
that yet.
 
Not
 
from my point of view.”

Shit.
 
“Yeah, well, you will.”

She grimaced.
 
“Fine.
 
Okay, by now you’ve lived with me for, how long?
 
Eleven years?”

“Close enough,” I agreed.

“You tell me. In all that time, do you
ever
remember me Transiting any further away than High Earth Orbit?”

“Well…I remember one admittedly short visit to the Moon when you turned ten.”

“Big whoop.
 
Daddy, Mike and Uncle Nikky hop across the baryonic
universe
whenever they happen to feel like it! I’m out of my depth.
 
God, I wish one of them was around!”

For the millionth time in the last ten years I wondered where or when the hell Mike and Sally and Nikola and Mary and Finn all were, what they were up to, why we hadn’t heard from them, and above all, why they weren’t answering the emergency phone number Mike had once given me.
 
It is perilously easy, I’ve found, to come to depend on time-traveling immortals to solve your crises for you.
 
It suddenly made sense to me for the first time why Mike would leave us to our own devices.
 
Imagine being Superman…with more than a hundred pain in the ass Jimmy Olsens and Lois Lanes pulling on your coattail every other minute…

After a moment of depressed silence, big Jim Omar spoke up.
 
“Have I got this right?” he said.
 
“You’re saying we could maybe solve this, if we had only more computing power than the rest of the world put together?”

“Well…maybe, Uncle Omar,”
 
Erin said.
 
“Not for sure…but it would really really help a lot.”

“Hell, for a minute there I thought we had a problem.”

I saw where he was going, and started to get excited—and so did most of those present.
 
“He’s right, princess,” I said.
 
“We took this class once before.
 
Well, you haven’t, yet, but the rest of us have.
 
I won’t tell you why, but it doesn’t matter now.
 
What we need is a neural net.
 
No, excuse me, I mean we need an interconnected
bank
of dedicated neural nets.”

She blinked.
 
“Have they built any good ones by now?” she asked dubiously.
 
“Things weren’t looking promising back in my time.
 
And how can we get possibly access to some right away—by which I mean, in the next hour or two?”

“No problem,” Omar said.
 
“We roll our own.”

“Huh?”

“Out of real neurons.
 
The wet kind.”

“Oh,” she said, and then “
Oh
!”

Human brains, he meant.
 
Telepathically interconnected, and placed under the control of a single directing intelligence.
 

All it required was temporary group ego-death…

“Jesus, Jake,” Long-Drink said, “I don’t know.
 
I don’t want to rain on the parade, but we haven’t been telepathic in ten years—”

“—maybe we just haven’t needed to badly enough—”

“—and everybody’s scattered all over town—”

“—town my ass, it’s just barely big enough to be a neighborhood—”

“—in the middle of fucking Fantasy Fest!”

He had a point there.
 
At just about any other time, I could probably have stood at the corner of Duval and Flagler with a bullhorn and raised more than half the troops.
 
But tonight, and for the next week, everyone in downtown Key West was trying as hard as they possibly could to attract the attention of everyone else.
 
“We’ll just have to do the best we can,” I snapped back at Long-Drink, but even I knew it was a crummy answer.

Doc Webster’s voice was calm, sane and reasonable.
 
“Alright, friends, let’s be calm.
 
Our group has been in rapport several times now, over the years—and we’ve spent most of the intervening time loving one another.
 
We’re all sensitive to one another, psychically attuned.
 
I suggest we all shut up, close our eyes, join hands, and try to send out a Call—the way the MacDonald brothers did the night Finn’s Master showed up.”

On that memorable occasion, the MacDonalds had broadcast the telepathic message
Mike Callahan needs you
…and the response rate had been one hundred percent, even though it cost some of us dearly, and forced a couple of us into severe risk of life, limb or liberty.

“Can we pull that off?” I asked dubiously.
 
The MacDonalds had been Special Talents, mutants:
 
practicing full-time telepaths since adolescence.
 
For all I knew they’d had amplification assistance from Mike himself that night.
 
And they were both long dead now, their brains burned out by the monster they’d enabled us to destroy.

“Let’s find out,” Doc said.
 
He seemed to have tapped some inner vein of strength himself; he hadn’t made a Spoonerism in several sentences now.

So we all looked round at one another, and took deep breaths, and moved closer together and joined hands.

“What’s the message?” Long-Drink asked.
 
“Does ‘JAKE NEEDS YOU’ work for everybody?”

Half a dozen of us opened our mouths with some suggestion for a nit-picking change—looked at one another—and chorused “Fine,” together.

“Okay, on three,” Omar said.
 
“One…two…”

—JAKE NEEDS YOU—

11

Need in a haystack

To a mind that is still

the whole universe surrenders

—Chuang-Tzu